#losses
Early reviews are in and … Wowowoowow!!!! … What’s your review ( so far ) and how far into it are you? And are you listening or reading ?? ….
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I was cleaning out the linen closet last week, looking for something, and I came across an old tin of buttons. Its faded, gold-and-black patterned paint is peeling off and the tin itself is rusting in places. It’s ancient - dating back to as long as I can remember. A childhood spent in another world, on the other side of the ocean. I opened the tin and took a deep inhale. Smell is so primal, so exquisite in its ability to transport us back in time. And there I was, over thirty years in the past.
She’s in the kitchen, and she’s making us lunch. She’s got something cooking in the frying pan. I’m outside, playing in the garden, in my own make-believe world. There is comfort here; safety, and warmth, and love. Summer days that stretch endlessly into the horizon and I am so certain that I am safe, that I do not pause even for a moment to contemplate it ever coming to an end.
There are no endings in my world, only bright, hopeful mornings and lazy afternoons and cozy twilights spent listening to French music on the enormous old Russian-model radio and getting lost in a book of fairy tales.
She’s sitting at her sewing table and I can hear the clack-clack, clack-clack of the old pedal going, going. I shuffle closer to her, and I can smell the fabric she’s working with. She’s wearing her old house coat, has her big glasses on and on her left arm she has that old pin cushion bracelet with the blue fabric. She’s sewing carefully, but she pauses to see what I’m doing, peering at me over her glasses, her eyes alive with that sparkle she always had.
I’m so deliriously, stupidly happy. So content, in this moment. I wish I could stay there forever, in this memory. flooded with love, with joy, with the innocence of being four years old and endlessly, beautifully safe.
If they ever invent a time machine, this is where I’m going. No hesitation. I’m rushing decades into the past and holding on to it with everything I’ve got, for as long as I’m allowed to. I was never ready to leave. I never am. Time rushes forward and drags me along with it, battered and bruised. I was never ready, and I’m still not – the words, “Wait a minute..” always poised on my lips, in the end.
You break me
A little bit more each day.
I want to be close to you
But you deny me,
Your body so rarely next to mine
That I forget what you feel like.
I forget
What it feels like to love.
Still I make an effort
Trying to hold the pieces together
(for him)
for you
for us.
All the while,
I know:
You’re fucking somebody else.
Thrive in the deep waters
“Life changes force us into the deep water. Death forces us into deeper waters. Call the roll of lossesin your own family. I salute both my stalwart grandmothers and both my sisters, who as widows grew to be at home in and, eventually, through grace and strength, to thrive in the deep waters. My cousin Patsy and her daughters still reel from the shock of the accident that killed husband and father Charles McGee on a balmy April evening, just before dusk. None of us can believe it yet. [My daughter] Jennifer reshapes her life as she copes with her father’s illness and death. I feel twice-widowed. I lost him to divorce. I lost him to death. My father is dead. My mother died last spring. This is drama, but this is not a play. There is no dress rehearsal. We have no script. We don’t know the lines. We have to make them up as we go. We have to perform them live, on the spot, no chance to go back and start from the top. What will we do? How will we stand? The questions haunt us as we bear the unbearable, and lead us, unbidden, often dragging our feet, to new depths—to new chaptersof life.”
—Penelope Niven,Swimming Lessons
(Photograph by John Lockwood. Thank you, Mr. Lockwood and Unsplash.)
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Remember, the best lessons in life are taught to us by the worst people. Liars and cheaters won’t hesitate to impede on what you have worked so hard for. Learn your lessons quick and evolve. #losses #are #wins #depending #on #the #angle #you #are #looking #from — #paintedreptile (at Los Angeles, California)
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It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes– and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)
In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores–
And turned into replacements and woke up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn’t different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
We read our mail and counted up our missions–
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school–
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, ‘Our casualties were low.’
They said, ‘Here are the maps’; we burned the cities.
It was not dying –no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: 'Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?’“Losses” by Randall Jarrell (May 6, 1914 – October 14, 1965)
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It’s not that I can’t be ok alone, cause I can. It’s that I know now what it feels like to have someone truly there. And continuing on alone knowing what that’s like is torture.
