Returning...

“like a child passing through, never knowing the reason. I am home, I know the way. I am home, feeling oh, so far away.”


I slept non-stop through the flight from Newark to London. This was partially because I refused to sleep the night before, opting instead to fiddle with minute details at the last moment. I also washed, dried and curled my hair and spoke to Rico* via phone and webcam.

Rico was an easy choice as a final conversation. He’s easy to talk to and happens to be in my same position. Talking to Rico also meant I didn’t have to talk to my friends whom I was lamentably sorry to bid adieu. Rico meant I didn’t have to hear my best friends voice only a short ride away for the last time in a long time, or explain to my other bfbf why I’d been so unbearably distant lately.

Sleep is like my own personal morphine. In the comfort of one’s own personal abyss, sadness doesn’t exist except in dreams and even then it doesn’t seem real, but detached and floating. The night before, I always forcefully ensure I can achieve a blissfully unaware state of relaxation. On the first leg of any journey that I am apprehensive about, sleep is my security blanket, blotting out the anxiety, the dread and the uncertainty.

In the airport at Newark, while I passed my passport to the ticketing agent, my mother walked up behind me and placed a hand on my shoulder and another hand on my dad’s shoulder.

“Don’t look now,” she whispered, “But Phylicia Rashad is standing right there about to check in.”

Unfortunately, as soon as we heard ‘don’t look now’ my dad and I proceeded to crane our necks in her general direction. Sure enough, in a red sweater and blue jeans standing about 5’5”, there she was. Her face was paler than I remembered and surrounded by fluffy black hair. She smiled. She knew and so did we.

As I stood there, the ticketing agent next to me beckoned to her. There I was thinking about how quickly I could self-administer my sleep-morphine with Madame Rashad standing right next to me. Claire Huxtable would be so disappointed with my particular brand of cowardice.

Once I landed at Heathrow airport, (I awoke during the final descent and became cognizant just in time to hear the plane’s wheels hit the tarmac) I became expectant. Usually, at this point and juncture I get happy. Duty-free window-shopping is my last and final retail binge. Its’ a shameless free-for-all. This time I stock up on pharmacy lotion and liquid eyeliner. I also claw my way through the crowd to reach the much-sought-after Starbucks counter and order my last caramel macchiato (skim) and it was good. Fantastic.

What I did not expect to feel rolling over my tongue along with the espresso and caramel syrup was the same apprehension I nursed while placing my bags on the scale at the check in counter at Newark. Something about this trip was not like the others. I had a sense of excitement before, a constantly occurring new beginning, my chance to start over.

I stayed awake between London and Lagos. I had run out of sleep-morphine and like any addict going through withdrawl, I broke out in a cold sweat, had chills and forcibly stifled the urge to rock back and forth.

I ordered two glasses of wine during the meal which I did not eat. My father stared at me, his eyes inquiring. I quickly turned from him and up-ended the last of the house white into my mouth. There I held it and contemplated asking for more when I noticed the small old woman sitting beside me staring at my two already emptied glasses. I decided against another but pondered revisiting the first two for those last droplets that settle at the bottom, waiting.

Lagos was exactly how I remembered it, but that ‘home’ feeling was not-so-mysteriously absent. I wondered if it was my attitude, or my feeling toward what and who I’d left behind there, situations changed or dissolved, or if this place simply no longer welcomed me. For the first time since I moved here, I entered this city feeling like a stranger.

Failure

I eliminated failure from of my personal dictionary a very long time ago.

Oddly enough, it was the first time I was accosted by a crack head outside my Aunt Betty’s building on 125th way back in the day. I had always heard my mom and the others talking about who was on “that stuff” now and what they looked like with their skinny necks, uneven gaits and yellowish eyes.

Even as they described this and talked in hushed tones, I was on the verge of telling the entire room that cousin Lina* looked like that, so she must be on “that stuff” too. Fortunately, my 10 year old mind quickly stifled the urge to verbalize that thought, but it did remain in the back of my mind to be confirmed years later when I saw Lina* again.

My cousin J and I went downstairs to play, then get ice pops and candy from a store on the corner. On our way there, a very tall, slim man with skin that looked like caramel rolled in the ashes of firewood shuffled toward us. He wore a two-layer coat that hung haphazardly off one shoulder and a dusty black ski hat in the dog days of summer. I stared askance at his coat and long pants and thought about how glad I was I wore shorts.

We tried to walk wide to avoid him, my older and more street-smart cousin grabbing my hand and pulling me out of his path. To her obvious chagrin, he simply wobbled slightly to change the trajectory of his shuffle. He stopped right in front of us and a lump formed in my throat as he fixed jaundiced eyes on our faces.

“Ya’ll got a dollar? I need me a dollar.”

“Nah, man.” My cousin replied, staring directly into his buttery eyes, “We ain’t got no money.”

I froze as I suddenly felt the weight of the two dollars my mother had given us inside the pocket of my cotton shorts. I never was a good liar and felt with some degree of certainty he would detect the bills in my pocket and seize them. My cousin must have felt me go rigid because she jerked me abruptly forward around the man on “that stuff” and toward the end of the block.

He paused, then eventually decided it wasn’t worth lifting a dollar off two pre-teens that probably didn’t have it anyway.

“Them crack heads betta leave us alone!” she said fiercely as we entered the bodega with the bells on the doors.

What kind of person gets hooked on “that stuff” and wears winter clothes in the summertime? And on top of that, what kind of adult tries to bum a dollar off little kids? A FAILURE, that’s who. It was on that day while enjoying Now n’ Laters and Fruitella that I mentally burned the word “failure” and all its cohorts out of my personal dictionary. “That stuff” also became a non-option.

The tricky part is how to measure success now? Am I living my dream, doing what I was born and tasked to do? How to know is the thing. How do I know?

*- Names changed to protect the ‘users’

UPDATE: I just found this... I don't actually even remember where I got it from but....

As your faith is strengthened you will find that there is no longer the need to have a sense of control, that things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit.

Food for Thought.

Dread

I’m back again. The crossroads. Yet another fork in my path, and allow me to express how tiring and repetitive it all seems. I don’t want to say yes to one road and no to another. So, for the past couple of weeks I haven’t.

Over a month has passed by with me staring at this new fork and throwing mental tantrums, complete with foot-stomping and flailing limbs. I have donned the solemn uniform of the exhausted and fed up: white t-shirt, yoga pants, baggy sweatshirt, comfortable socks. Every once in a while (and far too frequently say my favorite pair of jeans) I have employed Tiramisu and/or hot cocoa with marshmallows to keep me company on my shallow pallet of misery.

One great, saving thing about me is that I can not under any circumstances lie to myself. I’m in the habit of delivering the truth to myself with unrelenting swiftness and accuracy. Sometimes the truth bites.

This time, the truth went something like this:

This fork is going nowhere, it will not budge. No matter how many times you squeeze your eyes shut and wish it away, when you reopen them, this fork in the road will be right where you left it. Either you choose, or you stay here, in this very spot you stand now, staring at this fork in the road.

If you choose a path, you’ll have to say “au revoir” to one path and “yes, please” to the chosen one. That is the way it is. If you do not choose, you will remain exactly where you are while life, love and friends pass you by. You will rot in your lamentable ensemble and your socks will grow holy. At least you’ll continue to enjoy Italian desserts and hot cocoa and marshmallows with abandon. When you eventually decide to move, the only two speeds that function will be STOP and SLOW WADDLE (thanks mostly to the marshmallows. Tiramisu shall remain blameless). Regrets will take the place of your dreams.

I realize that I now know what it is to be completely paralyzed by fear, uncertainty. This doesn’t jibe with my “I can do it all” attitude or my “I always win” mentality. I’m probably the sorest loser I know. Defeat doesn’t exist to me, and when it does rear its ugly, misshapen head I find a quiet place of solitude to vent my frustrations. I imagine insanity looks a lot like me venting my frustrations.

I believe....

I believe…


1) that serendipity(luck, coincidence) like most things are God in action
2) in the healing powers of laughter
3) that strong friendships with other good women are sustaining
4) in my inner child never being far away from my outer adult
5) in the ability of a good home-cooked meal and a magnificent bottle of wine to bring people together
6) that you can’t hurry love

The weather outside my window

It’s raining soft rain, diagonal crystalline streams

Washing away today’s regrets and yesterday’s sorrows

a crisp, cold breeze blowing through the sky caressing each movable thing, playfully engaging

a multitude of lush, green trees, dancing on the wind right outside my window

they are so very alive, the young ones are jaunty the older ones sway

against a light gray sky, not so cheerfully pretentious as a blue one, and nowhere near as tempestuous as one filled with storm clouds

fat raindrops affix themselves to my window, they cannot miss the show

Visual pictures that lay troubled souls to rest, gentle imagery that soothes even the rawest wounds

The wind whispers through the sound of soft rain,

Healing begins as I watch the weather outside my window.

Part 1: Indecision

She lies on the ‘cool’ side of the bed. The fan seems to blow hardest there, and after he lifts himself off her, it’s good to feel the soft breeze over her skin.

She turns her head slightly on the pillow, used to the point that it lies flat, like a deflated balloon. Even the pillow case covering it is due for change. At once she notices how the beaded fabric irritates her cheeks as she turns to lay on her left side, then her right. But for now, even as irritation spikes and tickles her throat, like a persistent cough , the roughness scrubbing her face becomes secondary. There is only the irritated feeling and him.

Studying his profile she notices the slowing of his breath, the long eyelashes laying delicately on his cheeks, offering humble shade to closed eyes. Her fingers move to trace the shallow slope of his nose over the rounded tip onto his lips. She sighs and pulls her hand away… reluctantly.
His impossibly wide hand lays on his chest, palms down just below his pecs. She notices the fingers drumming to a beat only he hears. A small smile curves the corners of his mouth ever so slightly. He’s reliving the last twenty minutes, she knows.

She loves him, dearly; desperately at times. But she doesn’t want to love him anymore and that in itself makes some of the difference and explains the irritation rippling upwards at the back of her throat. Her thoughts echo in her head competing with the steady, precise oscillation of the fan. Her hand grazes the top of her right thigh as she thinks of the moments before, an unconscious motion which startles her. After all, she had foolishly hoped to be above thinking of him that way: Intimately.

A litany runs through her head. He is a kind man. The way he gives to homeless children proves this; she admires his compassion. He is malleable; he has an uncanny ability to find his way out of sticky situations. His urge to protect her as if she were made of the finest porcelain, his desperate need to marry her and procreate, his easy smile, the rambunctious laughter, so bawdy it causes people to stare when it erupts in public places.

She remembers just last week, before the bottom fell out of things, that they were in a restaurant, an Italian restaurant. He had laughed so loudly that several patrons stifled the next few words pouring out of their fountains of conversation to stare. She remembers too that he hates Italian food, and suffering through sweetened tomato sauce and pasta (which he doesn’t really understand) must have been then, a kind of self-inflicted penance.

She remembers coming home then and being snatched into an uncharacteristically zealous hug. His arms usually wrap slowly, not unlike the way one folds arms into a heavy wool coat or button-down sweater; inserting them slowly into the openings, careful not to snag a thread on the sides.

“Lets go out to dinner!” he said, “How about that new Italian place?” He raises his eyebrows enticingly.

She, being so tired from yet another day that looked exactly like the one before and the one before that, and also being so wrapped up in the zeal of his hug, giggled like a teenager and happily accepted.

Since the restaurant, she’d noticed several more penances, instances of him doing things that used to make him cringe and run for cover. Washing dishes, willingly picking up after himself, grocery shopping. Maybe he felt that somewhere along the way these small sacrifices would soften the blow, make her feel more important, more validated, less residual when things finally revealed themselves.

And at that moment she hates him with surprising intensity, while thinking of how she loved him at times with a blinding and stupid devotion. It was as if her emotions were lost, looking for a direction, a destination, a place to rest. They seemed to make sharp and sudden u-turns, skidding across slick roads and stopping with too much pressure on the brake pedal. Her chest aches. This must be what insanity feels like, she tells herself.

She eases herself off the bed slowly and nudges him with her elbow. Its past 6am and a days work lay ahead of both of them. In the shower, she sings softy, a slow and lilting song. What should sound delicate and lovely sounds mournful, even in her own ears. She stops as he appears at the bathroom door, clearly intent on joining her.

She shuts off the water quickly and hops out of the shower with the agility of a woman half her age. She smiles apologetically at him, wrapping her right arm around his middle, her fingers massaging reassurance into his skin while her left hand clenches her towel ever more closely around her body and struggles not to tremble.

He smiles back, blithely unaware of the tightened corners of her mouth as her smile droops into a scowl, and the narrowing of her eyes. He wonders what she was singing about.

She readies herself for the day laboriously, the mere task of rubbing cream into her skin seemed akin to a 10 mile hike with a hundred pounds of dead weight on her back. Bending to rub moisture into her calves, onerous and more keenly felt in her lower back than the day before.

She feels anger at the things that once punctuated their mornings, making them theirs. She feels a heat in her belly when she thinks of the things that they strung together to create their own routine, the fringes of their life, the carefully woven rituals framing the larger parts.

He asks to rub the cream into her back, give her hands a mini-massage; one of those fringes. She quickly closes the cap on the jar of cream and tries not to burst into tears she would end up having to explain.

He hums as he dresses and has a sway to his step. It is a happy jaunting sway that makes him look like he’s dancing in a ballroom. Ritualistically, he pulls clean underwear and socks from the top drawer and shakes out the folds vigorously before donning them.

Then, he glides to the closet to choose a shirt, a tie.

“How does this look hon? What do you think? Blue or Purple?”

“Purple, yellow striped shirt” she replies automatically. She often put his outfits together in her head during her weekly ironing. Purple Tie, Yellow Striped Shirt was always one of her favorite combinations.

He smiles. His eyes are full of affection. She wonders if this is what they looked like too when he decided to end everything she knew to be true. She stares back at him, knowing her eyes look bare, vacant and slightly red.

He leaves, bending to kiss her tenderly on the cheek. He strokes the sides of her face and subtly inhales the scent of her hair.

He leaves her then, his absence as arresting and as consuming as his presence.

As she listens to his car reverse out of the driveway, she moves toward her dressing table. She lifts her two favorite crystal perfume decanters and places them on the floor, out of the way. One, she’d had for years already. It was gifted to her when she still dreamt of a life well lived with the man of her dreams ; when she’d sat in front of a makeshift cardboard box with a sliver of plastic mirror resting between it and the wall, envisioning a proper dressing table, staring into her own eyes and dreaming her future.

He had bought her the dressing table she now sat in front of. One just like she’d envisioned. Just like she’d dreamed before that bit of plastic mirror that distorted her image so much she couldn’t be sure at times she was staring at her own reflection.

The beautiful antique delicateness of this dressing table pleased her. The carvings on the curved ebony feet were exactly what she had envisioned, as if he’d searched her memories for the exact match. When he’d moved the table into the house, she had wondered how it was that he knew so exactly what she yearned for.

Her second favorite crystal decanter had been a birthday gift. At the time, she’d considered it a bribe, a persuasion, an incentive. That had been before she’d disabused him of the notion of having children right away. He was still chasing a dream she had long stifled into a more convenient place in her plan.

She sighed heavily, opening the drawer. Her hands knew where to find the item she sought, although the journey, the memory was wearying and difficult. She carefully unfolded a note, written in a dainty hand on faded pink lined paper.

“I miss you. When will you see me again? Would it be greedy to request it be soon? Kisses, K ”


Tucked carefully inside the note, there had been a snapshot. A picture that had once been large, perhaps included other people, faces, lives and stories. It had been cut down to a small box, framing only the top of a head, a face and the top of a well-endowed milky-colored chest. It was an ordinary face at best. Roundish doe-like eyes, a nose she’d seen a million times on a thousand faces and a toothy enthusiastic grin, exposing a bit too much gum to be considered pretty, or even cute.

Who was K? Did she have a history? When was the note written? A week ago? A month, year? So many questions sprang from one line; a carelessly thoughtful note, scribbled on a ripped sheet of paper, and a snapshot.

She thought it strange that she wondered the first time she saw the snapshot, amidst roiling anger, that K must not have many pictures of herself, if she’d taken to cutting down group shots to isolate her own face.

And now, despite everything K was, is, might have been, K is only one person now, in her story, she thinks, K is the end of things.

From a Time Long, Long Ago...

I don't know how many will read this and remember when "Crying in the Streets" actually happened... but I found this on my old computer not too long ago. All I have to say is THANK GOD I can laugh about this now!!! Enjoy... or not.

Should I mind that I didn’t feel anything in my chest, when you had your breakdown?

Should I feel guilt? Remorse? Should I think anything other than “Is the sky blue or gray or both?” or “I wonder if that pizza they’re eating is good?...looks good.”

This is how I know that I don’t love you, or maybe don’t even like you that much. While you sobbed your guts onto the street, I stood there watching; a little annoyed that I was inevitably going to clean up this mess, because there was no one else. The tears poured down your face… the face that I am alaways startled to see for some strange reason, and I could muster nothing but mild annoyance.

When you hurt, I should hurt for you, or feel sympathy, or at the very least, tell you I can empathize. I should rub your humble back because I feel that way. Or wipe the tears away with my bare hands, and perhaps touch them to my lips and taste them; let the salt roll over my tongue and know the significance of that.

I should be crying tears of my own because it tears me apart that you’re hurt so badly. I should have offered to talk to you because you needed counsel, not try to drop you off at the nearest friend’s house, thinking, “I don’t want to deal with this. Your friend had better be home.”

I did feel bad…about the things I should have done and didn’t. But then, I thought, as I drove towards your friends house, carrying you in the passenger seat , that I should be happy, although I wasn't.

At least I know that I’m cured of anything, if there was ever anything that I ever felt for you and I felt bad about thinking that. But then all I could hear was you talking to your ex… the one that had you crying (like a newborn with colic) in the first place, because my radio was turned off and I left my CDs at home, and I realized just how inconsequential I was to you at that very moment.

And then, just like that, you absolved my guilt…everything I felt bad about, or should have done was gone, just like that.

So, I guess, what I really should say is Thanks. Thank you. Muchas Gracias.