90 miles

he’s like my cuba, whitewashed
by my premature exile from his life.
time passes, but my obstinate devotion
keeps me longing for him, intangible
moments together redefined by my
overly romantic revisionist history.

like the salt air on the malecon,
the powdery sands of varadero and
the sway of a cubana's hips,
his touch is unparalleled,
(always remembered as soft, yet firm,
lingering much longer than it likely did).
buoyed by nostalgia, the whole of him
is sweeter in my memory;
that’s what the mind will do
when it fills in the blanks.

at 90 days the distance
feels like 90 miles, choppy waters
braved against my will for the promise
of something better, of something

wholy mine. you can’t help but take it with you,
when something seeps into you, becomes part
of your skin... or when you finger it lightly,
slipping it into your pocket witness free.

you can’t help but take him to bed with you,
for licking your lips and comparing
each new kiss and breath to that first taste of
what you never knew you really wanted.
you’ll live there, in that nostalgic neverland,
until you stop looking for a substitute
and exile yourself.

Our World

It’s 7:40pm.

I have at least another hour at the office before I take even more work home.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale.

Exhale.

iTunes is on random.

Turn the volume up.

Hit next, see what the universe chooses to serve up.

Give me something to work with... please.

The Beatles.

Grin.

“All You Need Is Love”

Sigh.

Seriously?

Smile.

“Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be…"

Close eyes.

Sing along: "It’s easy.”

Smile wider.

Open eyes.

Exhale.

Sit up straight.

Put it on repeat.

MJ & Me

other than a widely discussed shopping addiction and an affinity for chimps, i never thought michael jackson and i would have anything in common. i can’t dance all that well, am much more plump than he has ever been, i don’t have an unhealthy interest in young boys and have never been a global superstar or the king of anything. we both love the beatles, i guess (he bought the rights to their music library, while “with the beatles” was the first album i ever purchased ) but really, that’s really where i thought the overlaps ended.

in the wake of his recent death, not only have we been drowned in the overly-romanticized remembering of him, but we are receiving a detailed education on pharmaceuticals and the business of concierge medicine… and here i was thinking that my unhealthy addiction to usa’s “royal pains” was teaching me all i needed to know about the latter.

so, despite attempting to avoid the MJ coverage, part of the story that ran on last night’s news caught my attention. it seems MJ was on propofol. PROPOFOL, a drug that would not have registered on any level of my radar a year ago is now something that i will always remember as the escape hatch i shared with michael jackson.

as per wikipedia, propofol is “a short-acting, intravenous, nonbarbiturate sedative agent used for the induction of general anesthesia for adults and children, maintenance of general anesthesia, and sedation in medical contexts, such as intensive care unit (ICU) sedation for intubated, mechanically ventilated adults... recovery after propofol anesthesia is rapid and 'clear' when compared to thipentone sodium. these characteristics of rapid onset and recovery, along with its amnestic effects, have led to its widespread use for sedation and anesthesia.”

losing four days of my life to this “milk of amnesia” as an “intubated, mechanically ventilated adult” in ICU, i really can’t imagine using it recreationally. you lose yourself, inescapably, in a world of the forgettable, emerging only when rescued from the drip.

if it’s true, MJ dove in willingly and regularly, searching for that numbness and loss of self, for that purest of disconnects between mind and body. anesthetizing himself with forgetting, only to be rudely awakened again and again and again. i guess reports of his sleeping in a bubble were not so far from the truth, the bubble carrying him away from himself versus holding him in.

as a child, i was fascinated by stories where people could leave their bodies. they usually escaped thru their windows at bedtime, their parents sleeping innocently down the hall as the brave daughter rose into the night skies like one of the twelve dancing princesses. i would try to will myself to do that sometimes, imagining how it would feel to watch us from the corner of the room like a gargoyle – me, still, lost in my book on the couch as far as my novela-watching family could guage… but i knew better. i had perspective. i could leave… and come back.

in retrospect, only knowing that one, fragmented dimension of him perpetually filtered through the kaleidoscope of media, i can see MJ trying to do the same. first on his own, then, faced with losing the power of youth, via other vehicles of escape. he flung himself into propofol’s milky white river and swam upstream, hoping to find what he was looking for and forgot to find his way back.

for his sake, i hope it’s better for him in the world of forgetting. for me, it’s continued to be a challenge to stay rooted since i found my way back. there’s a whole new level of connecting to remembering, a choosing when it comes to forgetting, and a welcome surrender to staying while still letting go.

do unto others

she’s still there, despite his attempts
to cloak her in invisibility by mirroring
their intimacy with me
and failing to utter her name.
she sits passively on our would-be party-line,
listening to him whisper stories she has never heard,
weaving a secret life with the purloined passion
she doesn't even know she's entitled to,
bearing witness to the spark of something tangible in him
that still escapes her. uncomfortable, she lies
beneath us, between us, watching silently
from the foot of the bed as i knowingly perpetuate
the cycle of girl-on-girl violence. she fights back
when and how she can, dirty but weak,
staking her claim in extended silences –
minutes, hours, days sometimes – between
a call, text or email. she gets the kodak moments:
family vacations, grocery shopping, holidays, lazy sunday afternoons.
to hear him tell it, i get the whole of him, she just a part. i own him body and soul; she owns his heart.

missing

i’m sad today. it’s been 2 and a half years, our third christmas without him, and the pain is new. why is it that pain can remain as fresh, as raw, as shiny new as day one?? not all of the time, not every day, but on some days… on special days… it’s like bringing out the good china, the best silver, the most heart-wrenching ache, the strongest missing.

it’s natural, at the holidays – the inevitable yin of pain to the yang of the joy of sharing and celebrating with loved ones. we bring him with us wherever we go, in personal memories and shared anecdotes; he is conspicuous in his absence, the void left larger than his physical self. i know what jokes he would laugh at, and i hear his heartfelt laughter whispered in my ear, letting me know he got the joke. i know when he would roll his eyes, and i search for him when there are seconds to be had, half expecting to find him in the yard, scratching the dog’s belly.

and then there’s her, shoulders heavy with the weight of his absent arm. she looks for him every day, everywhere, her life on pause, shredded like a paper snowflake since he left. i want to be a better daughter, but it’s hard to help her without getting sucked into the void… it’s a strong void, as strong as their love was. i wish she could sit in the light, in the warmth of him, at least on most days, without being consumed by the sadness, by the wanting, the solitude. i wish she could replace her mourning with morning – with new beginnings, with dawn and light and hope -- knowing that it doesn’t mean she loves him any less or that she could have done anything more. i wish she wasn’t consumed with the guilt of surviving and allowed herself to live as he would have wanted her to.

i always have the love, and the longing, the moments when you forget that he’s not here and you pick up the phone because no one would appreciate this specific nugget of news like he would. on most days i share it with him anyway, keeping him close. but today i can’t help it, today i give in to the missing…

lip service

it was his lips that distracted me most. not because of their fullness, or the peachy hue they had (a color that would be called “lips” in a crayola 64 pack).

not because i loved to watch them expand into the gorgeous fringed smile that anchored his face for most of the night, a smile i wanted to wake-up to.

it was the stories, the conversation, the laughter and questions that poured forth from them. he spoke so much that he left me without words -- not that i minded. it was refreshing and exciting, to let myself be carried by his words, to go wherever he wanted to take me.

even at rest his lips spoke, asking his eyes to relieve them. and they did, probing softly, laughing loudly, listening, seeing, pulling you in. they are nice eyes – thoughtful, open, wise, mischievous – but it was the lips for me. it will always be the lips.

cardiac (house) arrest

my heart hurts today. it hurts with that aching that comes from missing something, someone, so deeply that the roots they left in you seem to pulse with recognition.

i fill in the blanks with what i think it is, who it could be, hoping that by sitting with it, with them, i can make it better. but i can’t, it doesn’t pass. pain is an unwelcome houseguest that leaves at its own time. if you’re lucky it leaves you a hostess gift, something you can learn from and use to heal.

i’m not sad though, just pensive. it’s hard not to be, when your heart feels heavy. it’s like a magnet, pulling all of your thought and feeling to the core of you, fusing it all together so that neither one is clear. it anchors you, insists on getting attention, invites you to dive into the fuzzy abyss, promising both answers and additional questions.

so i’ll be mulling it over today, whatever “it” is… because my heart is full. because my heart is heavy. because my heart is insistent and ripe.

Linger

It’s pouring today, one of those steamy August afternoons where you almost welcome the rain. It falls in cumbersome sloppy dollops, not the meticulous linear sheets that are generated on film, and pounds frenetically on every surface, aching to get in.

It doesn’t make things cleaner, doesn’t wash away the dirt that has been piling up around you… but it lingers, wet pools a reminder of what could have been, allowing you to reflect on what opportunities a puddle used to bring, on what dancing in the rain felt like.

But you don’t want to dance in the rain. You don’t want to ride your bike through a puddle, or jump into one all galoshes-clad. You don’t want to drive thru it, or tune it out. And you’re not sure what you’d do with your day if it stopped.

The city sits cloaked in a dewey film, but you ache to crawl into your unmade bed, sheets still fresh enough to welcome you back. You want the skies to open up and engulf you, send you floating aimlessly under still gray skies in a cloud of cotton and clutching that eclipses your present afternoon. You want your skin to yield to the relentless pounding, glistening without washing clean.

You want, and the skies keep giving.

an egg at rest

Not that many people know about this blog, and that was intentional. I wanted to be able to write freely, without a client or employee knowing who I am, without consequences. I curse and dabble in some self-indulgent rambling... I talk about sex, write about sex and, on occasion, actually get to have sex that I'll want to talk/write/think about… but most of you who read this already know all of this (and more) about me, and love me anyway.

At any rate, I was flattered to have folks ask me why I wasn’t blogging, asking me to update the blog because they liked to read it. Like I told a couple of people, I had started a couple of entries, but I wanted it to be real, to be good; for me, at this time, “good” requires real, and real, in this case, isn't so easy.

But the more I thought about it all, and struggled to put it down in just the right way, the less real this would be. So here it is, rough but real… unfinished – like me.

Thank you for being there... always.

*************************

i almost died on may 21st. and on may 22nd. and on may 23rd.

i guess we can all say that we “almost died” on any given day – leave 5 minutes late and avoid that car accident, chew thoroughly and fail to choke, take the same flight but a day early to surprise your mom and twist your fate… but i mean it. i almost died.

something was wrong and i knew it, knew it in my core, the way that you know what your name is. and i felt my body take it to the next level, i felt it fight back against my attempts to mold it into what i wanted and take control once and for all.

i had signed all of the papers, the plethora of pages that detail how they are not liable, how they should let you rest when there is nothing left to do because that's what you want, that's how you'd like it to be. it makes you feel empowered and merciful, to a degree – i choose to go peacefully, with dignity. my mom won’t have to decide, my friends won’t have to tell her that this is what i would have wanted. i've said it, in writing. i'm a responsible person. i've made plans.

but you don’t think it will actually be relevant. not now. not for you. not when you are finally getting everything together to take the next step, to take care of yourself. that’s not how stories work – i’m a reader, a writer, i know these things. this is not the part of the story where the living will is relevant. this is not the part where the heroine dies.

but i felt it all. i felt my body fight back against my attempts at a new beginning. i felt my stomach – the old/big one, not the new/baby one – tear open. i felt it rip, like someone had stabbed me from the inside out. i felt that bile, overflowing, hot and heavy with fear and unhappiness, gush into the rest of my body in an attempt to penetrate me. it seeped into parts of me i didn’t know existed, fiercely staking its claim.

i had to step outside of myself to gain some perspective on it… i had started to write that “i had to leave myself” but, for the first time in my life i didn’t leave myself, i didn’t want to. i wanted to fight back, to claim myself and be present in a way i never had been before. but to do that i had to give myself room, i had to work on bigger things from the inside out while everything from eating and peeing to breathing was being done for me.

in my version of pygmalion, everything gets worse before it gets better. i am told that i was monstrous, swollen beyond recognition. it was days before they washed the blood from my hair, days before i was allowed to realize that i was still alive. so much work had been done – to me, for me – in so many ways, by my doctors, my angels, the pillars in my life that i am lucky to call my family and friends. when they opened me up a second time and evicted the bile within me, i was washed clean with the love and good wishes of the people in my life; that is what bloated me, what healed me, what i had to accept and digest.

it may be hard to understand but, having come out of the ordeal happy and healthy, i am almost grateful that it happened. i can be somewhat stubborn and, when it comes to my personal issues/work i tend to stay in my head and deconstruct it, trying to find “the” solution. my “solutions”, however, have traditionally started with a physical change: lose weight. in addition to being an incredible release (which, in my mind, was a proportional response that almost validates what a huge issue my weight is for me), my body’s response was a reminder: stop letting your body limit how you see yourself or define who you are. your body will still be your body, your questions your questions, your fears and desires yours alone, regardless of your weight. some would argue that my body shouldn’t have felt the need to speak so loudly… but, as i mentioned, i can be stubborn. this forced me to focus, it made me listen.

my stomach is now the size of an egg (or probably a baseball, if i’m full, but an egg at rest).

i am alive, and i am grateful.

i am present, and i am grateful.

i listen, and i breathe... and i am grateful.

i almost died on may 21st. but i didn’t.

i have too many things to do.

volume conversion (on the) table

my stomach is the size of a gallon.

in five days it will be the size of a thumb.

a thumb.

later an egg. but first, a thumb.

i’m hoping for a thumb like mine – long, thick, manicured. a substantial thumb. a thumb with purpose.

my stomach (and your stomach) is the size of a gallon. at least it can hold about a gallon of food and drink when it’s full. that’s not something you usually think about unless you’ve overeaten, unless you have that expanded, bloated, shouldn’t-have-had-those-last-three-bites feeling (because, of course, it was those last three bites that pushed you over the edge into the food coma that seized you last wednesday afternoon).

but when you choose to reduce your stomach to the size of an egg (a thumb, then an egg), you think about how big a gallon is. other things that come in a gallon: ice cream. juice. milk. water. cheap wine. gas.

i’m not afraid of the thumb, or the egg. i’m not afraid of the surgery or the changes, the pain, the scar, the (you can still) “haves” or the (you'd better) “have nots”. i'm not scared at all really, not in the conventional sense. i'm nervous. i'm anxious. i’m nervous about new beginnings, about being healthy and fit, and making myself comfortable in a new body half my size. i’m nervous about being naked and exposed even when i’m fully dressed, but eager to get to know myself. i'm nervous about my body speaking for me, although i feel it does that now (often more loudly than i'd like). i'm nervous about control -- gaining it, relinquishing it, acknowledging how little of it i really have -- and being able to just give myself over to something else driving my decisions.

in five days i will disconnect from 98% of a part of myself to make room for the rest of me.