This is the story I haven't told. I've told parts of it, but not the most important part, which was the moment I leaned my head against the window of the car and let trust slip out of my loosened fist.
I was thirty one, and my baby was two months old. We, my new husband and I, had been in Sacramento visiting his family, and we had the most wonderful, happy, beautiful time together. He was the one; I was madly in love, and couldn't believe that after all the struggle and all the disappointment and bad choices, I could finally be so lucky. We had made love the night before, and it had been amazing. I was, for the first time in my life that I can remember being, happy. Not just situationally happy, experiencing joy in the moment, but truly, deeply content.
We were driving home, just starting the long drive North, and he said it. "You know, I've been thinking. I'd really like to open our marriage".
I don't think about it much. I'd rather not. But that was the moment I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would never trust anyone again. Not as a partner. My stomach turned cold and I leaned my head against the glass and let the tears drip silently off the end of my nose, as the road, like my happiness, unraveled underneath the car.
That's the story of why you never stood a chance.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
My dad
My dad comes over every Saturday and... well, I kind of just wish that
there was someone here besides the kids to listen to this shit. It's a
recap of the same things he's told me every week for the last 5 years,
intermixed with horrifyingly personal reminiscence and personal
information. This is a very different dad from the one I remember from
just a few years ago... no less long-winded, but more scattered and less
filtered. I have been getting (and trying to hide from) the feeling
that this is the last wind of a man who is on the decline into dementia.
He corners me in a room while I clean furiously, and tells me deeply
personal stories, stories that often make me uncomfortable, but I can
sense that he feels like they are important, and that I am one of the
few people... or maybe the only person... he can tell them to. I am, he
likes to remind me, his baby girl. His littlest daughter.
I'm not sure if this is better or worse than what we used to do on Saturdays, which is argue about politics. He said that I was the spitting image of his mother, Ida Bea, in personality as well as looks, and so Ida Bea is the name he calls me when I'm being obstinate or argumentative or opinionated. My dad used to love to get me riled up, because he said that everyone else is scared of him and I'm the only one who will get in his face and argue. God fucking damn, that man could piss me off. He would come over and almost before he was in the door he would posit some ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY BULLSHIT premise, and I would tear it apart while he defended it and I became increasingly enraged and frustrated, pulling myself as tall as I could and glaring up at this big smug motherfucker in his fucking green beret and yelling "THAT IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!".
Eventually I would defeat him and he would ruffle my hair and say "OK, Ida Bea, you win." After years of this, when he revealed to me that he was just messing with me because he liked that I would argue, I was a combination of angry, proud, and relieved... because it always dismayed me that this man I knew was brilliant (Well, he's also a medic and a chaplain, commander of a ranger base, and has a Master's degree in education) would come to me with arguments that it seemed to me only the mentally defective (such as Tea Partiers) could support. My dad is--or was--a troll. Most of the time I thought he was full of shit until he started taking me to his council meetings and dinners and events, but I realized one night when he left me alone at a table with two generals who laughed at the fact that I bossed my dad and he meekly said "yes, dear" and went to do my bidding... oh. Oh... my dad, Daddy, he is the real deal, even though he's just a sergeant. They said "In all these years I've never seen him take orders from anyone... little girl, you don't know your power!" and they laughed and laughed, making large of it. Years later, another dinner at a table with other generals, and one of them said "You don't really know who your father is, yet". It was a statement, not a question. So I know that in addition to the pages of documents of things that I know, some of which were declassified the year I turned 30 (That's when I found out why he was gone during my infancy, for which my mother never forgave him) there is a great deal more to come. Probably among them things that I don't want to know.
In addition, of course, to the things he tells me that I already don't want to know. I won't go into details but my father's romantic history has more shocking, more tawdry, and more tragic than anything I've ever seen in a movie or read in Henry Miller. Fucking hell, dad.
A year or so ago my dad was convicted of voter fraud. Voter fraud. What the shit, dad? For voting under my dead brother's name and the name of my missing-presumed-dead uncle (allegedly a mercenary; also allegedly a crossdressing burlesque performer who, in his youth, went by the stage name of "April"). Local news and a random "debunking" website latched onto the story and attempted to debunk my father's military record, accusing him of fraud based on the inconsistency of his stories with public military records. During the trial I learned two things; one, that my father has been diagnosed with Alzheimers, and two, which the judge said while looking me straight in the eye, that my father's military record is exactly what he has claimed, and more. The judge said in court, on record, that my father is a bona-fide hero. So, while I know he has also been a wily old bastard, and fuck-all knows what kinds of schemes he's planned up and what I have yet to learn, I also know that all the crazy tales he has told me are true. That he has taken part in incredible, historical POW rescues. That he is a remarkable, and honorable, man.
He talks a lot, recently, about how everyone will come out of the woodwork when he dies, looking for a slice of the pie. They don't know that there is no pie, that he has put all of his properties into other people's names, that there is no inheritance to be had there. That his inheritance is the act of having put up with him over the years, his trolling and stories and bigness and loudness and sharp, sharp eyes. That his inheritance is him putting his big brown hand on my head and saying, "OK, Ida Bea".
I'm not sure if this is better or worse than what we used to do on Saturdays, which is argue about politics. He said that I was the spitting image of his mother, Ida Bea, in personality as well as looks, and so Ida Bea is the name he calls me when I'm being obstinate or argumentative or opinionated. My dad used to love to get me riled up, because he said that everyone else is scared of him and I'm the only one who will get in his face and argue. God fucking damn, that man could piss me off. He would come over and almost before he was in the door he would posit some ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY BULLSHIT premise, and I would tear it apart while he defended it and I became increasingly enraged and frustrated, pulling myself as tall as I could and glaring up at this big smug motherfucker in his fucking green beret and yelling "THAT IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!".
Eventually I would defeat him and he would ruffle my hair and say "OK, Ida Bea, you win." After years of this, when he revealed to me that he was just messing with me because he liked that I would argue, I was a combination of angry, proud, and relieved... because it always dismayed me that this man I knew was brilliant (Well, he's also a medic and a chaplain, commander of a ranger base, and has a Master's degree in education) would come to me with arguments that it seemed to me only the mentally defective (such as Tea Partiers) could support. My dad is--or was--a troll. Most of the time I thought he was full of shit until he started taking me to his council meetings and dinners and events, but I realized one night when he left me alone at a table with two generals who laughed at the fact that I bossed my dad and he meekly said "yes, dear" and went to do my bidding... oh. Oh... my dad, Daddy, he is the real deal, even though he's just a sergeant. They said "In all these years I've never seen him take orders from anyone... little girl, you don't know your power!" and they laughed and laughed, making large of it. Years later, another dinner at a table with other generals, and one of them said "You don't really know who your father is, yet". It was a statement, not a question. So I know that in addition to the pages of documents of things that I know, some of which were declassified the year I turned 30 (That's when I found out why he was gone during my infancy, for which my mother never forgave him) there is a great deal more to come. Probably among them things that I don't want to know.
In addition, of course, to the things he tells me that I already don't want to know. I won't go into details but my father's romantic history has more shocking, more tawdry, and more tragic than anything I've ever seen in a movie or read in Henry Miller. Fucking hell, dad.
A year or so ago my dad was convicted of voter fraud. Voter fraud. What the shit, dad? For voting under my dead brother's name and the name of my missing-presumed-dead uncle (allegedly a mercenary; also allegedly a crossdressing burlesque performer who, in his youth, went by the stage name of "April"). Local news and a random "debunking" website latched onto the story and attempted to debunk my father's military record, accusing him of fraud based on the inconsistency of his stories with public military records. During the trial I learned two things; one, that my father has been diagnosed with Alzheimers, and two, which the judge said while looking me straight in the eye, that my father's military record is exactly what he has claimed, and more. The judge said in court, on record, that my father is a bona-fide hero. So, while I know he has also been a wily old bastard, and fuck-all knows what kinds of schemes he's planned up and what I have yet to learn, I also know that all the crazy tales he has told me are true. That he has taken part in incredible, historical POW rescues. That he is a remarkable, and honorable, man.
He talks a lot, recently, about how everyone will come out of the woodwork when he dies, looking for a slice of the pie. They don't know that there is no pie, that he has put all of his properties into other people's names, that there is no inheritance to be had there. That his inheritance is the act of having put up with him over the years, his trolling and stories and bigness and loudness and sharp, sharp eyes. That his inheritance is him putting his big brown hand on my head and saying, "OK, Ida Bea".
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Quality of loneliness
The quality of the loneliness is different now,
because I had a kind of understanding with him.
It's like speaking a language nobody else speaks,
that has words for different ideas; even though
you learn the language of people around you,
you always feel a little foreign. You get used to it,
so that it doesn't seem bad or even, usually,
all that alone. But then you meet someone
who speaks your native language, and you feel
like you can fully communicate for the first time.
It's not until they go away that you discover
what it really feels like to be lonely.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
"That's not nice".
Someone I am acquainted with was trying to explain why they don't like someone. They said "He's a really nice guy and everything..."
But here's the thing.
"Nice" is usually, on some level, a euphemism with "OK with the world as it is".
In other words, they may be "nice" but they aren't GOOD.
Because NO FUCKING DECENT HUMAN BEING could look around at this shit and what we're doing to ourselves and everyone else without wanting to cleanse it with fire. That doesn't mean lacking sympathy or kindness or human decency. It means understanding that nice people have the wrong priorities. Nice people support genocide and war and poverty and cruelty by default, and that's the worst part, because they don't even have the decency to be malicious. They're banal, and that is perhaps a worse evil than malice.
Rather than being nice, try being good. It's a lot harder, and damn if you might not find that it's almost impossible to do in a world where our shoes are made by child slaves overseas, but it's worth a shot.
But here's the thing.
"Nice" is usually, on some level, a euphemism with "OK with the world as it is".
In other words, they may be "nice" but they aren't GOOD.
Because NO FUCKING DECENT HUMAN BEING could look around at this shit and what we're doing to ourselves and everyone else without wanting to cleanse it with fire. That doesn't mean lacking sympathy or kindness or human decency. It means understanding that nice people have the wrong priorities. Nice people support genocide and war and poverty and cruelty by default, and that's the worst part, because they don't even have the decency to be malicious. They're banal, and that is perhaps a worse evil than malice.
Rather than being nice, try being good. It's a lot harder, and damn if you might not find that it's almost impossible to do in a world where our shoes are made by child slaves overseas, but it's worth a shot.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
A story for the soul eater
A very long time ago, in a forested area that is just to the southeast of what was once the continent’s largest city, a young woman lived in the outskirts of a village. It was an unimportant village, and people there mostly avoided the war and politicking that went on in more populated areas, living their lives as they had for many generations, hunting, farming, loving, worshipping, weaving, and having the same petty intrigues and gossip and fallings-out that people have always had; raising their children, tending their elders, and growing close to friends, spending hours in the evenings talking with each other. This is when people still knew how to talk and how to listen, and how to not mind the silences that fell when everyone was beginning to get tired and reflect on what had been said.
The woman was brown and strong and healthy, with dark brown eyes and thick black hair and a strong high nose like the eyes and hair and noses of the other women in the village, and she lived on the outskirts because she was a priestess. She had large white teeth and smiled often. Her primary job was to perform the duties associated with the transfer of souls from death to underworld and from underworld to birth. Her altar was no more than a pale stone slab that lay on the ground, and her temple was a simple arch. Her position as priestess was hereditary, and her father, also a priest, taught her the rites of death and birth. The village was healthy, and she was happy. She became pregnant, and this was a blessing which made her even happier.
Her son was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen, with her same wavy thick black hair and curly eyelashes, and his eyes were like obsidian mirrors. She loved him fiercely, with every part of her being, and as he grew, and his eyes lightened to a deep brown, they spent many hours playing together in the forest near the altar, where she taught him to be as observant and fluent of the language of the plants and small wildlife as she had been taught by her own father and mother. She taught him about the frogs and the insects, the pronghorns and the wrens. Life was right and good for the young woman with her village and beloved villagers, her parents, and her beautiful son.
I don’t know how she died; possibly of infection from a wound, possibly of complications from another pregnancy. It seemed important at the time, but it really isn’t. Her grieving father performed the rites of death, showing her son for the first time how to prepare the dark-green leaves from a certain small tree into a drink that would help him to channel the god who carries souls from the dead to the underworld in his belly, to wait to be assigned by the wife of Death to a newborn body.
The young priest had few friends; he had needed none, because he was still at an age where his best friend was his mother. He was small and slight and had not yet developed an interest in girls. Despite the attention of his grandparents, he was now alone, and profoundly lonely.
Some months after his mother’s death, among the other births, a baby girl was born in the village, and not long after she was born, he looked past her curly lashes into her obsidian mirror eyes.
After that, they were inseparable. They had an arrangement. How fortunate that their Goddess was the Goddess of assigning souls! Usually they would be husband and wife. Sometimes she would precede him into death and he would be her grandfather for a while, laughing at her toddler antics as she played around his feet. Sometimes he would be the teacher and she the student, sometimes they would be siblings, but they were always together. It wasn’t always a kind life; there was pain and strife and suffering. But in the village, it was mostly a clean and straightforward life. They were together this way for over three hundred years.
Until the last time. I don’t know what happened; perhaps he was bound or killed or taken away. Perhaps the magic that allowed them to find each other was broken. Perhaps he was protecting her from something, because often the most painful mistakes men make are the ones that are meant to be for the good of the ones they love. But whatever happened, the last time, he did not call the soul-eater god to carry her into the underworld in his belly. He was not waiting for her, and he did not come back. She waited for him, and waited until the waiting became despair and the despair became bitterness. Lost in confusion and sorrow, she didn’t notice at first that around her the happy village that she loved faded and died away. The old rites were no longer practiced, and her altar and arch became forgotten and overgrown. The gold and blue paint that once represented the wings of the goddess of rebirth was long gone. When the time came that no more babies were born in the village, she couldn’t wait any longer.
After a while, no one would know there had ever been a village there, not even the builders when they came to put up row after row of blank red houses for the new civilization that had no priestesses at all.
The once-young-woman lived now in a world where true partnership between sexes was mostly forgotten, if not forbidden, and she knew that this world was poisonous. It had eaten her old world. She made herself forget her village and her mate, her abandonment and anger. She even, mostly, forgot that she had been a priestess. Far away from the happy days of playing among the trees, she found other loves, had children, and at times she was even content. Sometimes, though, the pain of loss and loneliness would bubble up from a place deeper than memory, strong enough to pin her to the ground.
There is a story that Death’s wife, her pride wounded over her husband’s infidelity, killed him and took his mantle, hiding her feathered wings beneath it and assuming his duties alongside her own, and that this is why men, afraid, stopped working together with women and forgot that the goddess had once been their mother.
The woman was brown and strong and healthy, with dark brown eyes and thick black hair and a strong high nose like the eyes and hair and noses of the other women in the village, and she lived on the outskirts because she was a priestess. She had large white teeth and smiled often. Her primary job was to perform the duties associated with the transfer of souls from death to underworld and from underworld to birth. Her altar was no more than a pale stone slab that lay on the ground, and her temple was a simple arch. Her position as priestess was hereditary, and her father, also a priest, taught her the rites of death and birth. The village was healthy, and she was happy. She became pregnant, and this was a blessing which made her even happier.
Her son was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen, with her same wavy thick black hair and curly eyelashes, and his eyes were like obsidian mirrors. She loved him fiercely, with every part of her being, and as he grew, and his eyes lightened to a deep brown, they spent many hours playing together in the forest near the altar, where she taught him to be as observant and fluent of the language of the plants and small wildlife as she had been taught by her own father and mother. She taught him about the frogs and the insects, the pronghorns and the wrens. Life was right and good for the young woman with her village and beloved villagers, her parents, and her beautiful son.
I don’t know how she died; possibly of infection from a wound, possibly of complications from another pregnancy. It seemed important at the time, but it really isn’t. Her grieving father performed the rites of death, showing her son for the first time how to prepare the dark-green leaves from a certain small tree into a drink that would help him to channel the god who carries souls from the dead to the underworld in his belly, to wait to be assigned by the wife of Death to a newborn body.
The young priest had few friends; he had needed none, because he was still at an age where his best friend was his mother. He was small and slight and had not yet developed an interest in girls. Despite the attention of his grandparents, he was now alone, and profoundly lonely.
Some months after his mother’s death, among the other births, a baby girl was born in the village, and not long after she was born, he looked past her curly lashes into her obsidian mirror eyes.
After that, they were inseparable. They had an arrangement. How fortunate that their Goddess was the Goddess of assigning souls! Usually they would be husband and wife. Sometimes she would precede him into death and he would be her grandfather for a while, laughing at her toddler antics as she played around his feet. Sometimes he would be the teacher and she the student, sometimes they would be siblings, but they were always together. It wasn’t always a kind life; there was pain and strife and suffering. But in the village, it was mostly a clean and straightforward life. They were together this way for over three hundred years.
Until the last time. I don’t know what happened; perhaps he was bound or killed or taken away. Perhaps the magic that allowed them to find each other was broken. Perhaps he was protecting her from something, because often the most painful mistakes men make are the ones that are meant to be for the good of the ones they love. But whatever happened, the last time, he did not call the soul-eater god to carry her into the underworld in his belly. He was not waiting for her, and he did not come back. She waited for him, and waited until the waiting became despair and the despair became bitterness. Lost in confusion and sorrow, she didn’t notice at first that around her the happy village that she loved faded and died away. The old rites were no longer practiced, and her altar and arch became forgotten and overgrown. The gold and blue paint that once represented the wings of the goddess of rebirth was long gone. When the time came that no more babies were born in the village, she couldn’t wait any longer.
After a while, no one would know there had ever been a village there, not even the builders when they came to put up row after row of blank red houses for the new civilization that had no priestesses at all.
The once-young-woman lived now in a world where true partnership between sexes was mostly forgotten, if not forbidden, and she knew that this world was poisonous. It had eaten her old world. She made herself forget her village and her mate, her abandonment and anger. She even, mostly, forgot that she had been a priestess. Far away from the happy days of playing among the trees, she found other loves, had children, and at times she was even content. Sometimes, though, the pain of loss and loneliness would bubble up from a place deeper than memory, strong enough to pin her to the ground.
There is a story that Death’s wife, her pride wounded over her husband’s infidelity, killed him and took his mantle, hiding her feathered wings beneath it and assuming his duties alongside her own, and that this is why men, afraid, stopped working together with women and forgot that the goddess had once been their mother.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Facebook symbolism
Today I blocked my Eater-of-Souls on Facebook. Again. Then I went for a two-mile run, trying to tire out the sorrow.
Blocking him seems childish in a way, but it is more than anything an admission that I'm not over him, not getting over him, and that there is no hope for us, now or ever, because the conditions of my exile require getting over him for there to be hope.
It's a double bind, a catch-22. There is nowhere to go with it. So I give up, and I give in to being hopelessly in love with him, and I give in to the permanence of being separated from him. I give in completely to his absence from my life. I admit my helplessness over the yawning void where it still feels his body and words should be.
Maybe someday my hands will stop shaking. And maybe someday, after hopelessness has worn its way through the soles of my running shoes, I'll be ready to move on and love someone else, someone completely different, completely unique, and completely wonderful in ways that could not possibly be any more unlike Eater-of-Souls.
Blocking him seems childish in a way, but it is more than anything an admission that I'm not over him, not getting over him, and that there is no hope for us, now or ever, because the conditions of my exile require getting over him for there to be hope.
It's a double bind, a catch-22. There is nowhere to go with it. So I give up, and I give in to being hopelessly in love with him, and I give in to the permanence of being separated from him. I give in completely to his absence from my life. I admit my helplessness over the yawning void where it still feels his body and words should be.
Maybe someday my hands will stop shaking. And maybe someday, after hopelessness has worn its way through the soles of my running shoes, I'll be ready to move on and love someone else, someone completely different, completely unique, and completely wonderful in ways that could not possibly be any more unlike Eater-of-Souls.
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