Grateful for what might not have been

It's a time of reflection and thanksgiving, and I remind myself again: it might have been otherwise. I wrote this poem at a time when I was almost consumed with longing and anxiety. Among my desires then: to have a child, to transcend my own childhood and be a grownup, to find some way into what I dreamed my life could be.

Doppelganger

We meet between the glass of frames
And photo paper
And the thirty years
That separate us.

And mostly, you seem
transparent--
Blue eyes looking out
from plans and details
and preoccupations with, premonitions of
long and good
days to come.

In your winter coat and muckluks, you are
bright with snow light
on your cheeks and in your eyes.
And I--
I am there, too.
on my sled,
small and red, veloured and fat-fisted,
not yet a miniature you,
not yet aware of the camera
or the spring that follows.

2
There is a chemistry of shadow and light
on certain nights
when the fan above my bed starfishes
itself across the ceiling,
past the rattling cage of
minutia mind
to the rocky beach
of memory.

I stand on the shore
skipping thoughts along the flashing lake
singing in clean strokes across the water
until they sink
like obsidian into oil.

And here you are again,
but opaque to me
This time.
And it's clear to me that
those captured, auspicious moments
left a world of questions
out
of the frame.

What must you have thought,
worried over, as your own night-
beach tumbled into your room
and roared you awake with its waves?


3
I have learned that
if I touch the glass, or
ruffle through papers
or sing stones over water 30 years deep,
I can imagine you as
Another me.
And for a moment,
I can see the world outside the lens.

And as for the me that was then, well,
She
is lost at the bottom of the oily lake,
Waiting
(for now)
for a tide.

K.R.

originally published in Red River Review

The shifting nightscape of my insomnia

I sometimes have insomnia, the kind where you find yourself wide awake at 2 am, mind racing.

The river of thoughts that rushes through me at these hours used to be frightening. I would torture myself with a full spectrum of what-ifs, which spun my nerves more tightly with each round, until it was all I could do to lie flat on the mattress. During the first years of our marriage, my poor husband would sigh as I slid out of bed and fled toward the study. There, I would turn on a light and read or write, and wait for a feeling of "normal" to pull me back into my life.

This habit of getting up and doing something became an easy habit for me, and one that only made my insomnia worse. If I could grab a last hour or two of sleep before I showered for work, I felt like I had "slept." To my surprise, I managed; in fact, I thrived during the day. The light itself was a tonic, a revelation that everything was okay. And in the middle of the daylight I marveled at how clean and safe everything seemed. It felt impossible that the shadowy loneliness of my wee hours could coexist with the happy days I experienced. I look back at that time, and I know that I must have propelled myself through the world on sheer nervous energy.

The funny thing is, I never dreaded going to sleep. I loved our room, our home, our cozy life. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, and my dreams were mostly rich and sweet. It was the slow, dark hours I hated, while I worried myself into a frenzy, my mind buzzing at the low frequency of the traffic on the interstate outside our loft.

In college, years before I had my own sleepless nights, I shared a dorm room with a girl who had chronic insomnia. She was the first person I'd ever met who talked about it and accepted it as a part of her life. When I woke to use the bathroom at the end of the hall, the half-light from our window revealed Lisa in the bed across the room, her eyes wide open and fixed on some spot on the ceiling. Almost always, she would roll over on her bed to greet me in strangely chipper yet sotto voice, "Hi Kirie!" Amazingly, sometimes she would start to engage me in conversation, as though I had just returned to the room after a class.

Lisa was probably only 20 years old, but she was as sensible as a real grownup. She never complained, but instead just took her insomnia on her own terms. Her solution: the radio on her Walkman. During those post-midnight hours, she tuned her radio to AM talk radio hosts, and they lulled her off to sleep just before light each day.

Knowing what I know now, I probably would have made a point to waken just to talk to her. The hardest part of my own insomnia was the loneliness. The otherworldly feeling of the wee hours comes not from the darkness so much as the absence of other people. No wonder Lisa welcomed my waking so eagerly. How I would have loved to wake my husband to talk with me on those interminable nights in the loft!

My insomnia pursued me through several moves, the arrival of our oldest daughter, and some practice with meditation. But, by some stroke of grace, once I got into my mid-thirties, the river of thoughts started bringing fewer and fewer anxieties with it as it coursed through my 2am bedroom. The darkness started feeling less oppressive, the dusky forms of our dresser or the curtains less threatening.

I stopped retreating to a lighted room, and resolved to instead feel the night settle around me each time I woke at odd hours. And on many of those nights, something resembling a calm came to me. Sometimes, I would even find that I could get myself back to sleep. By some small miracle, more and more of my nights were spent sleeping. Insomnia has now become only a sometime companion for me, and for that I am grateful.

When the formula in my life is right, the river of thoughts resumes its path through my night room. But bobbing along with it now are ideas, plans, things to puzzle through. When I wake up at 2 am these days, I am not buzzing with what-ifs. I am dreaming of projects, I am mind-writing, I am hearing music in my head. A few weeks ago I even caught myself practicing the fingerings for a song I'm learning on the piano. It is still otherworldly at night, but now the world feels charged with possibility instead of dread.

When I was younger, waking to the knowledge that I was the only one conscious left me gasping. And far from comforting, my husband's rhythmic breathing made me only all the more aware of how far away he was when sleeping, as though he had receded from me and into his dreams. My panic was practically tangible, like a whispered, frantic mantra of "I'm alone! I'm alone! I'm alone!"

Something has shifted since then, certainly. And perhaps it's because I'm distracted by my burgeoning list of projects, but I no longer feel so lonely when I'm up with my thoughts. Or perhaps I feel more secure in my marriage; fifteen years with my soulmate has taught me something more about trust, and I no longer feel he has fled from me in his sleep. The house itself offers its companionship. Far from frightening, the house at night envelops me, welcomes me, and nurtures some excellent ideas for all the things I enjoy making.

There is still the silence, but it is laced with the sounds from the woods outside our window, the foghorn on the bay, the thrum of the cats as the sleep on the bed. When I do want for a facsimile of human interaction, I find I crave voices. Last year, I realized I could, like my old college roommate, listen to stories through headphones, and I started using my ipod during my night wakings.

Hearing the whisper of a storyteller is intoxicating. I've found that with these voices in my ears, I'm soothed to sleep, but at the same time, inspired by the stories themselves. I've been discovering an unexpected energy in the spoken word, an energy that carries over into my perceptions of the next day. And, most surprising, I have actually started relishing my sleepless hours as quiet opportunities to just listen and dream my waking dreams.

Whispering in my ear--Can you miss someone you never met?

A little background:

I have a thing for stories, as you might know. And as much as I like to read, I love to hear a story, too. My mom would read to me incessantly when I was little, and long after I knew how to read to myself, she continued to read aloud to me. She read, late at night and her head nodding with fatigue, through many series--Little House, the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew. It must have been exhausting for her, after long long days at work.

But how I loved it! We shared the story together, discovering it, though in a way it also seemed almost to spring naturally from her as she spoke the words. I especially loved how her voice wrapped around the characters, made the pictures move in new ways, different from the way the pictures formed when I read to myself. Listening to those stories was pure pleasure.

I still love to hear a story. It's probably why I am an NPR addict, and I am usually a rapt listener to anyone willing telling me a narrative of their life, or even what happened to them that day. I love to hear it.

So it's not surprising that I have affection for audiobooks. I may have resisted the ipod for years past its introduction, but at the prospect of hearing podcasts of This American Life, and the Moth, and StoryCorps, well--I caved this winter, and now I'm often found wearing my earbuds, a story whispering into my ears.

The past few months I've been mining itunes for good audiobooks, and listening to a mixture of oldies and some new, more pulpy stuff. Heart of Darkness was amazing, real and thick and haunting in a way that, shamefully I admit, it wasn't before I heard it read to me. After Conrad, I wanted to go for something lighter, with the thought that it would be good to listen to while doing chores or exercising. My choice was James Patterson's Beach Road, which definitely falls into the pulpy junk pile, was disappointing and grungy.

So, in an attempt to find a middle ground, I stumbled across a mystery by Kate Wilhelm, a writer I'd never heard of before. Of course, I’ve since come to find out that she is prolific, talented, and lauded by many. I’m thrilled to know I will be able to explore her books for a long time to come.

For now, I am into Wilhelm’s books featuring character Barbara Holloway. Just as I did when I was a little girl, I still enjoy a series of stories. Mysteries are especially great in a series. While they can be cute and fun, a series can also leave lots of room for development of character and place. More importantly, they leave room for ambiguity and growth, and maybe that's why I like them so well. That, and the fact that my mom and I can exchange them between ourselves and have our own little book club.

Anyway, Kate Wilhelm's series about Barbara Holloway are like pearls on a string, each one smooth and well-constructed from the inside out, glowing. I started accidentally in the middle of the series, with The Unbidden Truth. Read by Anna Fields, it was engaging, lively, haunting. I was hooked.

I say hooked, and I mean it. As I listened, I was almost addicted to hearing what would happen next. In particular, I was drawn to this narrator, Anna Fields. Like my mother, her voice made the story move, wrapping itself into the plot and the characters so that it really did feel as though the story was being spun exactly as I was listening.

I was so taken with Anna Fields’s warm and mysterious voice and the way she gave life to Wilhelm's characters, that beyond finding other books in the series (which I did), I wanted to see what else she had given voice to.

A Google later, I learned that Anna Fields was the stagename for Kate Fleming. Like Kate Wilhelm, Kate Fleming was prolific, narrating over 200 books. And clearly, she was talented. She was asked to narrate the 9/11 Commission, and awarded honors from her peers. I also learned, with heartache, that she died in 2006, tragically trapped in her Seattle studio during a flash flood.

All of this background leads me to confess this:
In some strange way, for the past week or so, I've been feeling a certain loneliness knowing she is gone. I was puzzled over this melancholy, but I finally put a label to it: it's that I miss Kate Fleming. I know, I know--I didn’t know her at all, she is a disembodied voice in my head, and yet, I miss her. The intimacy of audio can foster that kind of connection, I suppose. I think of the way she could get inside a character, and get inside my head, and I know that the world has lost someone special.
Is it possible to miss someone you didn't know? Perhaps.
I suspect I have this lonely, loss-filled feeling about her for another reason. Because while her voice is firmly in my head, I have the sickening outside knowledge that at the same time she was making those detailed recordings, her fate was rushing toward her in a way she couldn’t know. She is stuck there in time, unknowing, but vibrant and powerful with stories each time I listen.

We are all like Kate Fleming, in a way. We are firmly in our own reality, with the voice in our own heads shaping and moving the story of our daily life forward. And it feels so permanent, like something recorded and tangible, something to be accessed again and again. But it’s not. For each of us rides on an unstoppable river--or that river flows toward us, I don't know. But I do know that the permanence of things is an illusion. Like anyone else, I shove that knowledge down each day to some hidden place so I can "get on with life." I only recognize the pull of the river again, if only for a moment, when I encounter beautiful and fleeting, something perfect and special. Something like a perfect whisper in my ears as I'm lulled into another storyland.

Open Heart Letter 1: To Kim

Yesterday I wrote about my new project, the Open Heart Letters. I have been inspired to do this project, in large part, by the loss of my dear friend Kim, a woman with whom I had this in common--she wore her heart on her sleeve, too. She died in December--young, ravaged by disease, and leaving an amazing family.

Any wise person would insist that our society needs to learn how to accept death as a part of life. I think of Kim, and her grace and honesty as her own death approached, and I understand this now in a way that I did not before. While I am in great health now, I know also that I am here on loan, and by the same grace she was. What Kim taught me, in the way she lived before she was sick, and the way she remained herself afterwards, was to embrace and to be and to love. To cherish those many, many connections that make us feel life all the more deeply.  And writing these letters is a way for me to express that in some way.

I think it's only appropriate that my first open heart letter is to Kim. I was fortunate that I could actually send her a similar letter before she died--selfishly, I needed her to know how much I cared. I share this letter with you now, with love and gratitude for having known her:



Kim,
It seems to me that it’s the little things that make a friendship. Let me tell you about some of my memories of you and us. From the smallest to the most prominent, I have lots of important memories about our friendship:

From the moment I met you, I knew you were a kindred spirit. One of the first times we spent together was just after D. started teaching. It a late spring evening and you and your family came to see us. You were still living over an hour away, and I remember that by the end of the night I was wishing very much that you lived closer—(I eventually got my wish!!)
That night was especially beautiful—the dusk was mid-summer long, and the trees were throwing plum-colored shadows all over the yard and the pool. We lit some lanterns with candles and hung them around our back porch, and we all sat out on our deck—you had your feet in our pool.
Later, after dinner, we were in the screen porch, and I vividly remember little B. listening to us tell stories about ourselves as we got to know each other better. Her eyes drooped, and soon she was asleep on your lap. And you were so lovely—the candlelight lit up your face, and you glowed. I remember many times we spent at our pool as the years went on, but that first night is strongest in my memory.

A few years later, we were thrilled to learn you were moving to our town, and we were so happy! After that, we spent more time together, including one visit on Thanksgiving. Our screen porch was a closed-in room by then, and you were our first Thanksgiving guests to eat with us there. I felt so pleased that you had been able to join us. The kids were so excited that night they had a hard time eating!

Speaking of eating—I must tell you again how I much I love your cooking!! You have a real talent in the kitchen, and I will admit that at least one of my favorite things to cook is a down-right ripoff of something you served us at your home: Moroccan-style chicken with figs, olives, cumin, etc. Oh my. That was one of the best meals. Thank you for sharing that recipe!

I have another ridiculous confession: I think of you every time I fold clothes. Really. Do you remember all of those lovely clothes of B’s you gave me for Ada? We have been loving those clothes for years now. Ada has been “on the small side” forever, and so she was able to wear some of those outfits for two years (or three! Amazing!). Now Esme is starting to wear them, too. It was so generous of you to give those to us. But here is the funny thing: When you packed them so carefully, you folded them in a way that was new to me: arms across each other, then fold, and fold again. Each shirt looked like a neat little hug. Inspired! Here I had been folding wrong for years--lumping my clothes into folds that wouldn’t stay, and they would sort of slump and shrug themselves out of the closet shelves into heaps. So I copied your way, and now the clothes stay put. So silly. But every single time I fold my clothes I think of you. I’ve been wanting to tell you that ridiculous thing for years, and now there it is.

I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you how much we have loved the many gifts you’ve given us over the years. Almost every afternoon, Ada and Esme still wear the fairy wings you gave Ada many years ago. For Ada’s Christening, you gave her a beautiful book about the twelve gifts of birth—it’s one of my favorites. And all of the cards and notes you’ve sent me—it has meant so much to me. I don’t know if it’s always the case that one’s handwriting corresponds with the sound of one’s voice, but with you, it is undeniable. Your voice is sweet and distinctive, and your handwriting matches it perfectly. I swear I hear you talking when I read it!

When we had to move away, I was sad to leave all of our friends behind, and you were such a source of comfort to me. First, D helped us move a U-Haul truck of stuff up north. (Do you remember that crazy time? Our guys spent 8 hours driving to our rental house, 2 hours trying to get a key from the rental agent, and then 1 hour unloading the entire contents of the truck into the house itself. It was a wonder they made the plane to come home!) What a blessing his help was. And yours—A. was so little at the time, and B., and I was so grateful that you and D. could sacrifice that time to help us. Then when we moved, I was really lonely. Sometimes when you move, people fall out of your life—you probably know how this can happen. It’s hard to keep relationships going, and it’s a testament to you, Kim, that so many people stay in touch with you—you have lived so many places, and collected wonderful friendships everywhere along the way!
Anyway, when I moved, only a few people still called or wrote, and you were one of them. The conversations I’ve had with you over the years have been so honest and understanding—I’ve always been able to open my heart to you without fear of judgment, and it’s a true treasure. After I moved, I was so cheered by our phone conversations or your notes; they would stay in my mind for days. Thank you so much for being there for me.

I know I’ve said it so many times, but I wish I were there for you now. I would love to cook for you and D and the kids. I would take the kids to the park. I would hug you, and listen to you, and make you silly little things. I would try to pretend that this would all go away, and I would cry with you when it was clear it would not.

You are so strong, as is D. You are walking a path now that we will all walk one day, and you have taught me so very much about Grace and strength. I know you’ve had the gamut of emotions over the past year and a half, and I’m guessing that riding that emotional rollercoaster might sometimes rival the physical pain.
Your honesty and wry humor are a potent and uncommon combination, and I know you attract wonderful people to your circle—D. being the primary example, of course!—but also all of your friends who I’ve learned about since your illness.
I hope you can feel the strength and love and well-wishes we all try to send to you every day. The waves of love from here are strong and constant, and will continue to be no matter what. You really do always have my heart, my dear friend. I love you.


Kim left us on December 9, 2008. I think of her every day, with love and admiration.

Wearing my heart on my sleeve: An ongoing project

If you have read more than one or two posts here, you know as well as anyone in my face-to-face life this important fact about me: I wear my heart on my sleeve.

I fight it sometimes, I do. But I just can't help it. I put my whole self out there, into the world, just because I feel I have to. You'll not be surprised to learn that I do not have a poker face among my repertoire of facial expressions.

Being this way brings its complications. I'm overwhelming to some people with my puppy-like eagerness. Because I'm not good at pretending ennui, I probably lack a certain mystery; I don't do aloof. 

I love meeting new people and getting to know them. I think most people are interesting, and I love learning about new friends, getting to know the details of their life.   And equally so, I love connecting with people whom I've cared about in my past.   


For years I have been a little ashamed of this kind of enthusiasm.  But now, instead of working against it, I have decided to embrace opening my heart to people. I am wearing my heart on my sleeve, proudly.

Tomorrow I will post the first in a long series of posts I'm calling "Open Heart Letters." These are open notes to people in my life--both currently or from my past--who have made some sort of impression on me. For the people in my life now--well, I am writing these because it's so good to know that someone cares for you and thinks of you, isn't it?

And for those people I knew long ago-- I realize that many of them won't even see these "love letters" I feel compelled to write.  Regardless, I think it's a worthwhile exercise to reflect on the people I have known at formative times in my life, even those I knew for just a short while. They stay in my memory. From time to time my thoughts will land on such a person, and I am reminded how amazing the wide world is, filled with good people who make positive impressions on you just by crossing your path.

This is an ambitious project, and potentially endless--there are so many people I've admired and cared for over the years.  Some notes will be long letters, others distilled into a few lines or a poem.   I invite you to come along on the journey, and consider your own connections as we go...