Reflections

When I was younger--for I am still less than old--I would get the urge to write, but check my pen at the page. It wasn't time. I was still in life's bootcamp.

In this limbo, I journaled and journaled. As soon as I filled a notebook, I would burn it. I thought I had to keep my writing free from any audience--any ego.

I filled the pages with some poetic prose and some fetid thoughts. In retrospect, for my ego, it's a mercy they're burned. Life became more jagged with every year. Some days, I felt I had taken so many punches that the next would finish me. Somewhere along the road, in exhausted self-protection, I stepped out of life's boxing ring and became a spectator.

I was wrong to do so. We humans, we may bruise easily, but we rarely break, at least not irreparably.

This blog is my way of strapping those punching gloves back on. I'm not going to slip under the ropes of that same brutal fighter's box, though. I'll slip out into the hot streets, out into a back alley, under stars the city lights won't let us see. The sweet-acrid smell from a few lounging smokers masks the garbage stench; well, not really, but a little. It's okay. We'll hit the open fields, or at least the suburbs, by the time the dawn breaks. The air will be fresh.

We'll get our boots wet in the dew. We'll suck sharp, cold air inside. Maybe we'll get hot coffee at a ramshackle diner. We'll walk so far that our legs go wobbly under us and we don't just want, we have to rest. We'll sit on a grimy, mossy log we find, not caring that it stains our ratty pants. We'll let the wind have its way with us--whatever dust, leaves, or scent of lavender it blows our way. And then I'll tell you a few stories.

In their way, these stories are neophyte phoenixes. I burned them all once. Should I wonder that even my stories insist on a second birth.

"The Spirit breathes where He wills; and you hear His voice, but you know not whence he comes, and whither he goes: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)

I was so tight in the gut, I kept forgetting to look when I crossed the street. I was a country girl walking in a city downtown with my man. I knew this was our last time. To this day, I don't know if he was breaking my heart, or I was breaking it, or maybe we both were.

My big sister had protectively invited herself along for part of the day. The three of us passed through a butterfly garden in a thin strip between two old museums. I saw a large, florid, pink and white lily, and for some petulant, childish or childlike reason, I asked my sister to put it in my hair. The flower was so large, it spread across half the side of my head.

After my sister left, the day went on, in the relentless, excruciating way of wasted hours. I never cried; he never talked. We met his friend for drinks in a bar. They ate. I smiled, and joked, and played the good girlfriend that wasn't. His friend drove him away, back to a soldier's base, to another life in another state.

I sat in my car to take my own long drive to the country. I pulled down the rearview mirror to wipe away the tears that were finally beginning to come. Then I saw the flower: a big, exuberant lily, half as big as my head, on the side of my head. I had forgotten it. All through those hours of reinforced rejection, through something dying in my girlhood, back and forth in the bar, meeting his friend, it had been there all along. No one had mentioned it, not a museum docent, not a bartender, not a vendor, not his friend, not even in innocent compliment or comment. It was so large, it must have been all anyone saw. Had I remembered, I would have torn it from my bun in anger and shame. But I had not remembered. I had carried some testament from Pan's garden, some gift from Eve to her daughter, a strange flamboyance in the face of fate. I laughed and laughed, in my broken tears, at the ridiculous truth.

If you ever see a woman in pain, put the largest, hothouse flower you can find in her hair and pray she forgets it is there. It will tell the world what she doesn't have the words for.