Breadmaking

“Because this is what happens when you try to run from the past. It just doesn’t catch up, it overtakes … blotting out the future.” 
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

 

I think my job will destroy me.

Perfect

“We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving…We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation…We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins…We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others…We are the daughters of the feminists who said “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters

And she falls

It feels like a final betrayal. The words are wrong. They have been wrong for some time but I haven’t seen, haven’t heard. They struggle to explain what should have been said and what wasn’t said and what we pretend isn’t happening. And they don’t work.

Place both hands in the sink, wrapped around each other like fists and feel the heat of the water washing over them. Why does that make you cry?

There are still some silent places. There are some places where the words have been forgotten or were not needed, barely breathed in the first place. The look in a hound’s eye, the misty breath of a horse in winter, the scent of fabric softener on old clothes. Here I hide and wish I understood.

Stillness.

Wait.

Silver Shadows

And so it comes, the stumble between badly cast words and true silence. The secrets blend into the early evening, slip under cloud cover and cull some of the warmth from the day. Will we ever be strong enough to talk?

Someday, I will tell you everything you need to know. It now is less of a promise and more of a question. The weight of it is disputed as the winter’s chill add layers of poorly formed ice to collect in the cracks. Too often wounded, the instinct is still to lash out and hurt; a behaviour barely held in check with fragile memories of something better. Even those have been lashed down, formed into words and carefully ordered to cherish, a reminder of where we started and how we hope to remain.

The truth hurts. Fire traces its beginnings in words and emotions too bright to carry. The empathy I once buried does not respond now I need it to and I shouldn’t be surprised. Instead the fire plunges into ice and both change but not enough. How can we find a way though this if even that is taken from us? The past transmutes the present when the truth seared to the bone and sanity was anchored by nothing more than constant motion and time’s demands. Secrets make the seasons tilt and the cold cuts just as deeply. Tears now always come easier than anger and I wish for a temper I once cursed.

We have shared secrets, dreams and more trivia than I care to consider. We carefully bound some dreams together and weaved others in daylight to reflect their scope to the other. Summer was easy. Gentleness, happiness and laughter were all parts of you. Winter brings different trials.

Talk to me. I wish you could talk to me. Because I have no idea how to be me when you lose sight of you. I just let go of the parts of me that hurt and wonder later at what is missing. Let me see everything, good and bad, closer than skin even if you don’t want me to help. I won’t run, nothing could induce me to.

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Anton Chekhov

Dark Words

And in the whispers of the dark I have gone. Lost, confused, the surface bafflement no surprise to anybody bar myself and I left my wonder at this disconnect so long ago. I forgot how to write. The ability to put pen to paper, fingers to keys and make those black letters march across the screen, like armies of old, vanished and I have not yet replaced it. What happens to the ash after a fire?

The language itself still exists. Legions of words stack up in tiers so high they defy all efforts to sway them. The ability to communicate doesn’t fade away, but it no longer makes sense. The humanity of it, the “flow”, has dried up like a misguided winter stream that struggles to find passage in summer’s heat. I have forgotten and cannot see.

The trees whisper their inspiration as leaves topple and storm clouds close in, but that is emotion not words and I have no way of translating it for the page. The whispers hover just outside the window and find no entry. I am no longer sure. The delete key is employed too often, words deleted in cascades. Paper consigned to flame because there is something lacking and no amount of holding and hoping can bring that lack to bear.

I have lost the skill of writing. What now?

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Repression

She sat for a moment more while the irritation shattered her calm afternoon. If only she’d brought her car, she could fix this before it even became an issue. Instead she would have to rely on someone else to run her back to the cafe and retrieve the bag she’d left.

“I’ve left my bag behind,” she announced in a rueful voice as she got out.
“Oh for God’s sake.” Her mother’s spiteful comments lodged themselves somewhere between her fourth and fifth vertebrate.
“Do you want to ring them?” He asked.
“No,” she muttered, “it’ll be fine.” As her embarrassment rose, so too did the ability to string a sentence together. It would take longer the find the phone number and call than it would to just go back. She wished once more that she’d had the foresight to bring her own vehicle or not to have left the damn bag in the first place.

“She won’t ring anyone.” The tone was snide and cut deeper than it should. Though it came from her mother and therefore should have been no surprise, the tone pulled up an old memory which she had worked so hard to forget.

Beneath the embarrassment, a shot of fear untangled itself and rose. She fought then to quell the nausea and not to lose the meal she’d just eaten. The memory was sharp and clear with another’s words and old pain.

‘You’ll pay for embarrassing me like that. You’re such a stupid bitch, I’ve no idea why I’m with you.’

She retreated quickly. Breathing grew difficult and her skin went pale. As he drove her back to the cafe, this man she loved, she could barely understand a word he said; the roaring in her head was too loud.

Slipping back into the defender with the bag in question was almost harder.

“Is everything there?”
She didn’t look. She didn’t care. She just wanted this to be over and forgotten. “Yes.”
“Really? Do you want to check?”

‘Everything better be there. If you’ve lost anything you can damn well walk back and get it and pay me for the inconvenience of bothering to come back.’ Hands turned into claws, digging in, aiming to hurt.

When he touched her she flinched, pulling back, unhinged for a moment. She had been somewhere else. It wasn’t until the moment that she saw his eyes that reality caught up. He frowned in concern as his fingers stroked reassuringly down her thigh. She swallowed hard against the memories she had repressed for so long. This was a different man and a different time. She curled her cold fingers around his hand and tried to find a smile.

“It’s all there.”

Dreams

There are always stories that you can’t tell. There are moments that never find voice, where your eyes trail off to a middle distance and I can’t find you to bring you back. There are places you vanish to that I have never seen.

I have always defended the lost. Those children whose eyes are haunted and whose souls sing with a forlorn kind of hope that echoes in tones you can’t quite hear. In the circles of shadows they fade into the dark as if they had never been and it takes all the strength you can bear to bring them back. And sometimes you don’t get it right and you can’t bring them all the way. Part of them stays and they go on with one foot planted securely in that shadowed land, host to a creeping darkness they can never shake.

The sound of his voice may as well have been real. It felt real. The hot breath of the hunt. The fear. The darkness. All of it felt real until the moment that real darkness came in and touch sliced its way across palms imprinted with finger nails and lips bitten deep. Who defines reality when ghosts still bleed through the night?

Throw back

She stood on rocky ground that had come to mean more than it probably should. Stood with fists clenched and darkened eyes biting back every reply that came to mind. A younger version would’ve thrown things and hurled insults, but time had tempered her to quiet fury that could be felt from ten paces away. Some things are best left undiscovered.

The ante had just been upped again. The objective seemed to be to get her to fail or give up; neither of which was an option. Hatred spilled, staining everything an inky black. The sharp scent of frustration ebbed through the warm evening air.

The only worthwhile lesson learned at her father’s knee was how to land a punch. It was a lesson she had not applied for some time but today triggered the urge to go hunting for trouble. A port town on a Friday evening should supply it in spades. Fists and blood could outweigh all the emotion in the world.

Whispers

He defeats ghosts everyday although he doesn’t know it yet.

There was the boy who offered shelter to a girl with an attitude bigger than the town she lived in. A man whose laugh was as loud and arrogant as she was. He was part of the crowd she ran with: a little rougher round the edges than some, a little darker in places than others. He taught her about fear and self-hatred, despair and the capacity of a human body for pain. A different girl fled away from him; she refused to look back.

There was the man who offered companionship to a broken woman. A gentle man with a stubborn streak a mile wide and a curiosity about her past that he couldn’t give up. He loved her the way she loves now, all or nothing, vulnerabilities piled high and she could not seek to return it. He bound her together with compassion and promises and he lit a spark of hope in her shadowed psyche to help drive the demons away. The fragile love she felt for him was not enough for either of them and yet they both hurt when she walked away. When he died, she broke apart; she never found all the pieces.

There was the guy who offered his body and a sterile acquaintance to an ice queen. Both of them were tougher than they first appeared and the use ran both ways. There was no emotion, no passion, just physical attraction and the illusion of security. The end, when it came, was less dramatic than closing a book and more amicable than they’d expected. At the last, they parted close to friends.

And before all of them there was the dark lad whose melancholy possession frightened them both.

And now there is him. And everything she feels for him is too big to explain, stirred up with fear and hope and longing. Because this time she is the one that is lost. No control. Exposed. Loving like that is an easy way to go insane, one day at a time especially if it isn’t reciprocated. She walks with ghosts everyday; fragments of herself that don’t fit easily into this incarnation. And he competes with ghosts; memories of men shrouded in pain and heartache that she has failed to erase.

Somewhere in the darkness we can hope they find each other.

Courage

“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, ‘I don’t know’?”
She looked at him then. She hadn’t yet looked when he had wandered out into the garden and sat down beside her. There was a vague and fleeting puzzlement that passed across her features, but then she turned her face away once more and he didn’t know what to think.
“I’m just thinking I guess.”
“Watcha thinking about?”
“Life, in general.”

He sighed then and she could’ve kicked herself for that.

His patience wasn’t infinite. He would eventually get up and walk away and she would still sit here staring into space, too consumed by her own confusion to understand what he wanted from her. She could picture that and it hurt like hell.

What could she say? Everything seemed too big to explain and too confused to pull apart into neat sentences where everything made sense. How ungrateful would she sound if she told him what it felt like to be part of a family that didn’t seem to want you, with whom you were belittled to stop you becoming arrogant and intimidated to stop you getting above your station? How destructive would she sound if she admitted that she still wanted her parents approval long after she realised she would never have it?

How could she explain that she was damaged from her past – distrustful and uncertain? How could she explain that the happiness, hope and security he brought her felt both at once incredibly strong and entirely fragile and that she was afraid that one false step would take it from her? How could she explain, without sounding painfully insecure, that she believed he deserved better – someone whole and unhurt and beautiful in all the ways that counted. Some days she felt like that person. Some days she didn’t.

Often his perception baffled her. She’d blended so often into the background that to have someone who not only saw her but who actually saw her was unbalancing. He just seemed to know when she was upset, when she was happy, when something had happened. For someone who had always believed she could pull off being okay or being invisible – finding out that someone knew she wasn’t was both gratifying and unsettling.

She watched him defend the people he cared about. She listened to him talk about anything and everything; friends, family, work, life – he shared so easily. She watched him, the mobility of his expressions, the way he didn’t need to say anything some days because how he felt was right there on the surface. She worried about him when he pushed himself too hard; he was driven, strong and often fearless. She resolved to have the courage to match him.

She tried telling him once, tried to explain that just spending time with him made her happier but the sentences crackled with tears. Present and past collided: fear and loss – her mother’s lessons about men, her father’s belief in never admitting vulnerabilities, her own past of violence and cruelty. And she couldn’t continue. After all, she was supposed to be strong. Instead he’d held her while she cried, entirely baffled at her tears while she fought her way back to flippancy and surface dialogue that explained some and hurt less.

He was never going to be a man who would accept all her explanations from touch alone. She would have to find the words. Sooner rather than later.