Four Buddhas

The first Buddha was stolen from my front yard one night. Its stone face peeked through the yarrow and lavender I’d planted in the narrow run. My kids dropped the second one trying to take it from the back of my car. I didn’t say a word when I saw it in pieces on the concrete; only walked away, dejected. A few days later I walked into their clubhouse to find that they had commandeered my hot glue gun in an attempt to piece it back together. The sweetness (and futility) of that scene hit me straight in the chest.

The third Buddha is a heavy, stoic head I found at the Good Stuff thrift store on my 35th birthday. I drove it home strapped into the passenger’s seat, the neon orange price tag still irreverently stuck to its forehead. I thought very hard about never taking it off.

The fourth my daughter found for me. This one a fat-bellied, smiling Buddha. 

“Get it, mama! You have to get it!” she said. “To keep the head company!”

I did. Of course.

I’ve always been more than happy to appropriate the good parts of religion and leave the rest. At nine, I was captivated by the idea of being baptized. I had not been raised to consider my soul let alone to worry it might need saving. But church seemed like something irresistibly normal for a girl who could already tell she was anything but. A pretty white dress and a party in my honor didn’t seem half bad, either. At sixteen, I wore a cross I had cast in silver and set with a piece of jade. Being the godless little shit that I was, it delighted me to discover the necklace had the added effect of pissing off bible-thumping classmates.

Maybe the Buddhas started out as a gimmick, too. Just like the cross and the would-be baptism: an atheist’s shallow flirtations with the divine. But I think I’m starting to understand: they are a stand in for something I wish I could hold. Something I hesitate to even name. A name would feel so narrow for what I have slowly come to call mine. I’m not sure I can even call it a belief. Beliefs can be such hard, inflexible things. So hard they turn into weapons if you’re not careful. I only want to hold the things that soften me and remind me all separateness is just an illusion. I only want to stand at the intersection of chaos and karma and swim in the mystery of it all.

Snow

It’s 3am and I wake up in the dark, thinking of snow. My lungs feel heavier imagining it packed on the roof. I never knew I was claustrophobic until my first blizzard. Nothing holds me tighter by the throat than the idea of being trapped. The cold licks at the backs of my arms and I am wide awake.

I am not much of a painter but I know you don’t throw a layer of white paint on a canvas and call it snow. You paint around the white: in endlessly morphing shades of blue, shards of gray for shadow; even pinks and lilacs here and there to make it glow. White is what appears only when you step back to see the whole. 

A few nights later I will dream of him. My dreams are rarely vivid, more of an impression of color and shape and place.  But the feelings are always clear as day. Lately, I feel most alive in my dreams. I am in strange, looming cities. I am in Korea, Rome, a cartoon version of San Francisco. I am everywhere and I am with people that I don’t know but I can feel that they love me and that is all that matters. In this dream nothing else sticks other than the image of him seated, slowly turning his face towards me. And when I see him it’s like I’m feeling for the first time what it will mean to lose him. My dad is dying. My papa. This thing he’s been holding at bay for nearly five years is getting so close now. And I don’t know how I will do it. I don’t know how I will lose him and still be ok. When I wake up the clarity is gone.

The grief darts around my body. I only find it when I’m not looking. For months I jammed the tip of my tongue into the backs of my teeth until a callus formed. I didn’t even know tongues could callous. But it felt right to have a physical manifestation of the pain. And one day I just stopped doing it. The grief moved. I’ll find it again. When it’s ready. 

I keep stepping back, expecting to finally see the white. Ohh, there it is. There’s my heartache in all its blinding, painful hues. I keep expecting grief to park itself on my chest and stay. But it never does. 

So I keep waiting.

Ether

It feels prudent 

To distrust an anesthesiologist 

Imagine 

the gall of a human 

Who can obliterate pain

I couldn’t tell you

The name of the first

But I could tell

He was fucking everyone but his wife

Unclench your fist, he barked at me

Or I’ll get the board

The man would knock a cake pop 

From a toddler’s fist

(The nurses searched fruitlessly for

Coy veins buried beneath

Skin, pale as roots)

Get the goddamn board, I growled

The shine of civility

Wiped clean from me

Another’s eyes 

Roamed my body 

As my daughter sobbed in my arms

He looked past her, pointed at my tattoo

Harry Potter? he guessed, idiotically

I could feel the bizarre taffy pull of his flirtation

The absurdity of being sexualized while holding a crying child 

Rage and disbelief

Thrummed in my temple

Only the one

Whose medicine lived in her voice

laid velvet on my cheeks

Would cast light

In my darkest hour

She quietly peeled back

the thin layers of my perception

Until I was merely

Pattering heart

Trilling breath

Trembling,

I laid the marionette strings in her hands

And let her 

Sing my insides to sleep

Ellen

We never met, but I think of Ellen all the time. 

At 26, she lost her leg to bone cancer. In pictures I hardly notice the cane and missing limb. She was beatific, always elbow-deep in a project or adventure. In one home video she digs for abalone on Bodega Bay. In another she shows the camera an enormous amanita muscaria, silently gesturing a slice across the throat. Don’t eat it! The fucker will kill you, she warns. She taught my father, her grandson, pottery, cloisonné, and metalsmithing. She instilled in him a reverence for the forest, for conservation before the word had become a marketing gimmick. I am enchanted by her and the way her life took its shape through grit and fanatical creativity.

I had to dig for these details, of course. Because when you kill yourself, one moment of your life tends to sharpen and the rest become filler.

She asphyxiated herself in the garage. It’s not the violence that has always struck me but the level of planning. When did she decide? How long did she have to wait until everyone was out of the house? Did she not, for just a minute, think of taking a nap instead? 

I once asked why she did it. I’ve never heard of a note. Art was a hard man to live with, is all that was said. I have never really believed that one shitty man could smother all her light.

The truth, I suspect, is simple. And sobering. Ellen killed herself because that’s the cloth she was cut from, the kind that is equally and intensely present to the wonders and horrors of life. I bet the jolting green of lichen on wet bark made her catch her breath. And I bet she lost count of the hours spent feeling hollow and small; an endless, silent scream. I bet I know the feeling a little too well.

Suicide is that strange derealization that happens when you stare at your own face in the mirror for so long that it becomes unrecognizable. And the longer I stare, the less sense it makes. Frankly, it’s become funny to me that the greatest threat to my personal safety is my own flimsy will to live. Fucked up, but also funny. I’m not trying to shock or worry anyone by making light of it. It’s just that the shock has long since worn off for me. Now it’s just something to manage; more irritating than alarming. I have no lack of love for myself, and I know I am worthy of living without this, if only I could. I’ve never made plans or hurt myself. It’s just there, buzzing around, sometimes descending on me in urgent and disorienting ways.  

I know the feeling of slowly inching away from a precipice. I know it because I’ve taken those small but crucial steps so many times. It’s how I feel when I take the second pill. And every time this happens, it’s the same bittersweet realization. This is the real me. The one that lives beyond the shadow’s reach. And I’ve spent so little of my adult life as this real me.

I don’t want to live a tortured life. I doubt Ellen did either. It feels so needlessly tedious to sidestep the landmines that litter your own mind when all you really want to do is live your life, drink a few cocktails, enjoy a few sunsets. I wish I could write a different ending for her. I wish the lore of Ellen was something else entirely. But I think I’ve held so tightly to her story because I’m determined to move it in a different direction. I’m committed to saving my own life. Even if I have to do it over and over again.

This is the gig.

She wore a brand new sundress that day. As always, we met on her mom’s front porch; she chain-smoked while the feral cats roped around our feet. I can still see her leaning against the house, turning her head to blow the smoke away from my face. It was late May and the creek was already dry. She talked incessantly about nothing at all as I tried to prepare her for what would happen while I was gone. I still don’t know if she noticed that I could hardly stand up but that was the one thing she didn’t say a word about.

That day she showed me her new dentures and teased that she had finally grown an ass. She was a year clean and convinced she was getting her kids back. I was pretty sure she was, too. The judge presiding over her child welfare case had uncharacteristically wagged his finger at the mismanagement of it all. Everything pointed to reunification. I would be gone for her next court date but fully expected to return to good news.

There was no way to know the judge would have a near fatal heart attack the week before her court date. The new judge ruled in favor of Child Welfare. They ended her services and by the time I came back from surgery in mid-July, her phone had been shut off. When we knocked on her mom’s front door we were told she no longer lived there. I looked for her behind Safeway, where she had been living before she got clean. For more than a year, I was always waiting to see her.

Last August, I finally did. The sky was white with heat, cloudless. My coworker E and I had the AC cranked as we pulled into the Walmart parking lot. I hadn’t fully exited the van when I saw her making a beeline for me. She was wiry and tan, her skin leathered from living outside again. Her teeth were gone. She hugged me almost violently, as I tried to say hi. But we were skipping the pleasantries and she was sobbing in my arms instead. Because everything she once feared had come to pass. And the only thing to do was sit in the rubble with her.

“They really fucked her,” E said, as we drove the bypass back to the office. I nodded. The smell of her cigarettes and sweat still lingered on me. I waited for the familiar cascade of emotion to pull me under, drag me somewhere dark. But it never came.

I see her sometimes in the lines for free showers on Washington Street. E says it’s like a carwash for human bodies. I think of the words my therapist says that always make me laugh, and shift me forward: This is the gig. She means it in the Buddhist way. The gig: our soul’s assignment. This is the shit we signed up for. We agreed to crash into each other, and hold on for dear life. To try to tend each other’s wounds, but always risk inflicting even more pain. I don’t believe in endings, anymore. It’s all just another drop in the wet, inky middle. All of this.

We’re Adults Now

They sit in the coffee shop 

Against the artfully defaced concrete walls

The girls 

Hang on the shoulders of their ‘men’

“We’re adults now” 

One says 

Sardonically, I think 

Because who could really tell 

The way their limbs wild about 

Their voices swing in laughter 

The way they’ve barely stepped foot inside

Disappointment 

A place unto itself

I won’t be the one 

To suck warmth from their coffee,

Breathe despair into their mouths

***

Notes to Self

Watch the world like a scrupulous mother: with tenderness and awe, but always primed to scoop up any wayward morsel of truth. Be ready to feed it until it speaks its own name.

Scour your insides for every ugly thought, every cold judgment. Hold them out into the sun, let the light glint from their jagged edges. Wait until they shine just a little. Let them go.

Delight in the existence of those that let you love them. Find sea glass in their palms. 

Get very angry at the state of the world. Scream as you drive alone down the freeway. Then count the freckles on your daughter’s face when you get home.

Remember that you have a body but you are not a body. Check on all the parts that ache. Drink more water. Fix your hair as you glance affectionately into the mirror. Then try to forget you have a reflection at all. 

Stay out late and mix your liquors. Saunter into each and every bar downtown until you find the one that cheers as you sing songs you never hear on the radio anymore.

Wherever you are, be there. Stop thinking of the oaks while your feet sink into wet sand. 

Call your mother. You’ll both feel better having done so.

Keep your eyes closed just a little longer after you wake. Try to recall just a word or two murmured by your soul as you slept.

Collect trinkets and stories to go with them. Make sure both are exceedingly weird.

Write it all down. Every unflattering angle. Every avoidable mistake. Nobody likes a priss. 

Lost wax

It was a strange balm

To see his fingernails lined black

The perennial trenches of grease 

Left from days spent rooting in the guts of station wagons

A bad cold left him on the couch one winter 

Eating nothing but orange popsicles 

His hands turned pale

And worse: clean 

It was only then

My father became mortal

He taught me the dying language of setting stones 

Words I only speak with him

Sprue 

          Bevel

                   Cabochon 

And the pure alchemy of casting 

How to make a fuchsia blossom

From the brass of a garden faucet 

His hands, like the rest of him, have wasted 

Fingernails, unclipped 

And once again, hospital clean

The list of what his hands can do 

Dwindles, too

I worry about his colonized lungs

And, of course, his blood

leached of its metal

I worry about the questions mapped across his face

And equally about the ones on mine 

But mostly,

I worry about his hands

Saltwater

If crying were an Olympic sport

Surely, I would medal

I can weep over the Tule elk

Displaced from the grasslands

Their marshes siphoned to make way for cash crops

I think of them while driving through the valley

The stop motion blur of almond orchards tug at my vision

If only if only, on loop between my ears

It’s no great feat to cry at the news

But I will do that too

Mothers move around a pile of their dead children

Each of them wrapped in white cloth knotted at both ends

For a moment I think of trying to find my daughter

Could I tell it is her just by the shape of the cloth?

Or would my hands know better than my eyes, the contours of her small face?

The question itself splinters something in me

Something that will never fully mend

They say stay soft and I laugh

Oh, to have that choice

Salt water washes the silt,

Not away, but through my fingers

Back into the receding tide of this moment

Fool’s Errand

You, too, would grow tired of

Watching her try to cook an egg in tepid water

Picture the useless waiting:

So hopeful it hurts

The stubborn egg,

refusing to shake

Picture the guileless believer

Face hovering over the placid pot

Nose sinking closer to the water

Wetting the ends of her hair

Who knows how long she will stand there

Hunched

Patient

Utterly stupid

Watching it, still

Swearing on her life

She can see bubbles

Möbius Strip

It surprises me

To find

Everything adjacent to my pain

Still hot to the touch

As if neurons could conduct heat

From one year to the next

And the degrees of separation

Don’t matter

If I can quickly trace the line

From a song

back to days that left me rough-hewn from loneliness

It doesn’t matter

If the years changed my face

And my lungs

Shook blue from the sky

If the curl of a tv smile

Can stoke a memory back into flame

I can wish that my body weren’t a Time Machine

But it will always feel June like a trap door

August like an I-5 meridian

Maybe I deserve it,

The purgatory of my own thoughts

I won’t deny that

Karma is a bitch

But hey,

Time is, too.

The 17most likely reasons you’re annoyed with me right now

(alternative title: Ode to Anxiety)

1. I left the gas tank on empty

2. I didn’t tell you something bad was happening because I was more worried about telling you than the thing itself.

3. You’re not but I’m convinced you are

4. I over explained something in a meeting because nobody was nodding and so I just kept saying words.

5. I wanted to be firm without sounding like a dick. It didn’t work out.

6. I quoted Brene Brown one too many times.

7. I used words like ‘acquiesce’ and ‘perpetuity’ and you concluded that I’m an uppity bitch.

8. You’re not.

9. I donated that thing you haven’t used in years but now you’re trying to find it.

10. I told you I hate being interrupted after I interrupted you twice.

11. I’m really hungry and I’m making it your problem.

12. You aren’t but I’m taking things personally anyway.

13. I overshared. Again.

14. I laughed too loudly at a joke.

15. I cried at work. Again.

16. I…I can’t think of anything else.

17. You. Are. Not.