blending in with bones

Monday, August 13, 2007

When I was five-years-old I lost a doll made out of sawdust.  My mom had bought it for me in the backwoods of southeast Missouri, down a dusty forgotten road from a woman who was surrounded by her dolls…all made out of sawdust.  I didn’t really like the doll much; I didn’t really like dolls much at all at any time in my life.  But it was expensive, and I liked it because my mom liked it and because both my sisters had one.  Then I lost it.  It was the first time in my life I wasn’t just missing something, but losing it:  a strange mixture of embarrassment, regret, disappointment, irresponsibility, apathy. 

When I was eight I left my beloved Michael Jordan wallet in a hotel room with a $5 bill proudly nestled within.  His signature and the number twenty-three were signed in red on the front; a photo of Mike driving to the basket with his signature tongue and sweat resting on the left corner of his mouth was the wallet’s back decoration.  A few years later I was leaning over a boardwalk in Biloxi, Mississippi.  Because I was cool, a pair of flip sunglasses made popular by Dwayne Wayne on A Different World were a regular addition to my early 90s fashion.  However, that day as I was looking for turtles and fish, maybe hermit crabs and jellyfish, my Dwayne Wayne’s cultural influence became a permanent fixture of the Gulf of Mexico. 

Along with learning that words can hurt and boys are cute and girls are mean, I saw that things beyond material possessions and iconic paraphernalia could leave your life.  One of my oldest friends lost her dad to cancer when we were 12; I lost my 6^th grade best friend because I didn’t wear black nail polish, smoke cigarettes, listen to Nirvana, or make out with those cute boys; my coach that had already promised me a #23 jersey cut me from the basketball team.  It is heartbreaking when you first realize that people will disappoint you. 

But perhaps it’s even more tragic when you first realize that you will disappoint yourself.  In the past nine months I have lost composure, integrity, convictions, love, my mind, my grandfather, faith in healing, any sense of direction, a friend, a mother of a friend, trust in my emotions.  And just like the sawdust doll, the embarrassment, regret, disappointment, irresponsibility, and apathy reign…a more mature palpability.

Unlike the sawdust doll, however, the sensibility of loss becomes far more complex, sometimes less profound, sometimes more, with more corners, more surprises.  The feeling of absence is at times not so permanent.  Faith and truth and disappointment wax and wane with only one absolute promise:  you will change.  You won’t be able to help it.  It will come so naturally but feel so unnatural, so uninvited, so desired, so misunderstood. 

In the midst of drought, doubt, debt, death, deprivation, you will have moments of hope, comprehension, a revival of faith and trust.  It happens when you least expect it, in small seconds most frequently overlooked…in sunflowers twenty feet tall, grins, the silence that comes when you're reading someone's mind, slushies and conversation, remission, a beer, the moment a giggle turns into a cackle, the way cream mixes with coffee, a dead bird no bigger than the size of my palm, twenty flying birds whose wings are too desperate to ever be quelled and swallowed. 

I have come to believe that the chest is filled with vignettes of possibility:  emotional hallows.   We lose heroes to strokes and confidence to self-consciousness.  We gain vision from prayer and understanding from humility. Moments of time and life are these small illustrations of joy and pain, loss and apathy, failure and success, love and betrayal.  Their sacred and secular natures are threaded together with no definable border, masking muscles, outlining organs, blending in with bones.  And these vignettes, these hallows, are the great nine muses for the mind, the heart, the tongue, the eye, ear, pore, breath, touch.

__________________________________________

I am looking forward

Toward the shadows tracing bones

Our faces stitched and sewing

Our houses hemmed into homes

Trying to be thankful

Our stories fit into phones

And our voices lift so easily

A gift given accidentally

When we’re not sure

We’re not alone.

 

“You Are My Face”

Wilco