pendulum
What I meant to say instead of, “Fine, and you?” is that I broke a promise. I tossed the rules aside momentarily while not knowing what else to say. Should I have said that my brain fog is so bad I can hardly trust myself to complete a sentence, let alone a conversation? Or that I’m worried about Fonz’s clinical trial in the face of a diabolical buffoon's whims? How I want more time alone and how bad that makes me feel as a mother, wife, friend, sister, and daughter. How a piece of rainbow shone through the clouds this morning. Just a piece. How Luna and I were the only two in the kitchen at the time, and how sometimes there are scientific explanations for something that is also magic. And how that piece of multicolored light reminds me that we live on a planet drifting through skies whose color is a reflection of the oceans below. How we’re fish and also aliens.
What I meant to say is that I was up after a dream of a black snake being thrown at my back nearly landed me on the floor. Or how I keep a journal beside my bed where I try to note findings from dreams and I often don’t open it in the middle of the night because I don’t want to raise my arms above the covers and into cold night air. But I did this week. I could have written until the sun came up over the backyard again. How it covers everything in pink until it all goes green.
What I meant to say is that I couldn’t begin to tell you what it all means, but we laughed at dinner. All four of us at once. And while all four of us have laughed many times before, I can’t remember when we last laughed all together at the same time. I watch it happen as though I’m not there, like I’m watching from the ceiling or the other side of the window, but then I will myself back into the room, back into my body. I laugh so hard that I cry. After eating and bringing their dishes to the sink, the girls rush off to their room, and Fonz and I stay at the table. I don’t remember what we talk about, but I remember how I used to feel when I’d bump into him outside of our lives or pass him on the freeway. I felt whatever the word is for not being able to get close enough.
What I meant to say is that we hear them joyfully up to something in their room. Soon, their door swings open, and the girls return to the kitchen with a giant piece of butcher paper with a list of things that “Daddy does.” They tape it to the cabinet and read through all the misspellings. They announce their observations from a scroll, barely containing their laughter, almost unable to speak. Practically choking on the loud sounds of Fonz coming down the hallway, “like a bear,” they write, reading it all aloud in hysterics. I think, wow, they put so much effort into this on a Wednesday night after dinner. But what I meant to say is that we are all five layers —the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere — under one roof. They must sometimes leave ours and go into theirs light years away, but we all return to the kitchen table eventually.
What I meant to say is that I am not at war with gratitude; that would be ridiculous, but I am actively reserving my right to be grateful and broken all at once. I write the words, “It was a privilege and a horror,” into a notebook, one of two where most of the disparate thoughts I attempt to capture are now trapped, lying in wait. How I listen to a man weave together “elders and dark wisdom” - as in those who have followed the path to the scariest places to find the gifts that facing darkness holds. Those long nights spent desperately trying to keep the door shut from whatever fears lay beyond them - he opens the door, and I understand why — it’s where light turns to gold. I’ll bet this takes a lot of practice in the alchemist's laboratory. It must also take a lot of patience. What I meant to say is the ordeal may be less rugged terrain than remaking a life beyond it. Just ask any butterfly: transformation is not a perfect science or easy. It’s a grind.
What I mean to say is that flames engulf entire neighborhoods, bringing about violent endings and new cycles of beginnings. I’m not rushing into this; it’s simply true. Lands and people are stolen and then returned, but the shape of everything has changed forever. A new president who is not new and should not be president is inaugurated and then empowered, and this, too, begins a new violent cycle that will also take us (or return us) to the spiral of our grief. Some of us might already know why and what’s there for us, and some will learn. What I meant to say is that I wish I knew what to say and for whatever those words are, for them to be helpful, true, or more than what I have already said. I wish I knew what to do or how to help. What I meant to say is that tragedy and hope are everywhere and are often woven together.
What I meant to say when we fought all morning is that I knew my hormones were on the mat with you. Unleashed. Indignant. I celebrated their fury, conjured their rise from the depths. How their hugeness doesn’t make sense, and it does. How it was Valentine’s Day, and I didn’t have the time for anything special. And though we hated each other for a few hours and even got divorced from about 9:30 am until noon, just before we loaded the last of our things into the car, you handed me something small wrapped in tissue. You told me you had a card you would give me later because you know I wait for you to tell me how much and why you love me in those cards you write, the stacks of them I’ve been hoarding since we were much younger than we are now. I unwrap a perfect little vase, the shape and size of an egg covered in messy, tiny, and lapis-colored blue spots - so delightful, sweet, and fragile - in my hands—a whole world for just one flower. On the road, I tell you about the small bud vase with its asymmetrical shape and late summer graduating grassy green hues that my dad gave me probably two decades ago. How I keep it on a high shelf above my office desk and look up at it every once in a while to make sure it’s still there. How it is on the shortlist of things I’d save in an emergency: the afterlife of a time he looked at that delightful, sweet, and fragile world and thought of me.
What I meant to say is that nothing is fine - or ever just one word at all - but you already know that.