I definitely have some ideas about what I want to say here, but it’s going to take a minute to say it the way I want to. Especially since, as always, I never want to provoke the knee jerk reactions that saying certain things causes, because there’s words that we all feel bound to say in certain circumstances.
Please keep those reactions, I don’t want them. I’m not saying that you won’t legitimately feel something from what you read here- that’s between you and your feelings. I’m saying I don’t need those knee jerk words, okay? I appreciate that you want to say them, but I can’t use them and I’m not trying to be in any way ungrateful. They just don’t work here, that’s all.
One of the things about traveling around is that you need to have your documents in order. Most of the rest of the country put Real ID into place years and years ago, but New Mexico is the outlier (as in so many ways.. you should see how long it took us to ban cock fighting!), so it’s one of the things I just hadn’t got put together yet. Getting documentation out of California during covid? Yeah, no easy task. Even now, it required an online video notary call, a bunch of paperwork, and just over a hundred bucks.
But you got to have your documents in order.
Day to day life is a highly variable thing on the inside of my head. There’s epic wins and ebbs and flow of time that is mine versus given away to others. There’s so many words that want to be more clever and insightful than they truly are. Realization that there is only one chance at this day, and it will happen whether I’m ready for it or not, whether I am prepared for it or not.
Some days, it’s definitely not. But it’s going to happen anyway, so a deep breath and on goes the fake it til we make it mask. And it helps, because it makes a smile come through my voice when I don’t have one of my own to give. It lends me energy to do the thing when I don’t have it.
On the outside of my head, every day is very much the same. I get up, I run, I work, I talk, and sometimes I even breathe. When no one needs me anymore, I curl into a corner of my safe place and try not to talk because I’m spent. All I have left to give are echoes. I talk to the pups, so undemanding of anything but love. And treats. And play. But so simple in comparison to everything else that it’s a relief.
But some days, the mask is too heavy to hold in place. And I have to sit down and figure out, in the pithy words of my ex husband, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Because we have to keep all the things in order, you see.
Earlier this week, I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once.. if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. It’s incredibly powerful, a really amazing piece of storytelling. And there’s one line that has kept resonating during this whole week. Which is happening all around me, every single day, whether I’m ready for it or not. Whether I want to deal with it or not. Time marches right the motherfuck on, without even considering my opinion.
It’s like that.
And I got my birth records in the mail, too, which I was relieved to see, because it made me more than a little nervous to have something that key to my identity floating around in the US Postal Service. I opened it up, cause it would just be my luck to get the wrong one or some crap.
I didn’t realize it, but I’d never seen the official record before, with all the dates and signatures and blah de blah. I never knew I was delivered by a Dr. Graves. Or that my dad’s name was misspelled.
Or that my mother signed it the day after I was born. Her hand was a little shaky, and it made me wonder what was going through her mind. At that point, she would have seen me, in all my cleft lip and palate surprisingness. Did she know, then, that it was genetic? This little tiny window into a moment that I can never really know anything more about than what I do right now.
Not a thought for the time, fold it back up and stuff it back into the envelope because next call starts in two minutes. Not today, distraction, not today.
And then, the part of Everything Everywhere All At Once that had made me cry came to mind… why was it so easy to let me go? Even if she was here to ask, I’d never get an answer that meant anything real or true. Because there’s all these knee jerk things we say because that’s what’s expected.
Because that’s what keeps us in order, you see.
The bitchy thing about grief is how it will sneak up on you. While you’re busy keeping all the things in order and focusing on how just fine you are thank you very much, it’s there, biding its time. It’s laying in wait for a moment to unmask itself and take you back to the terrible moment that created that divide of before and after in your life. You don’t get to pick which losses do that. You can lie to yourself about how that loss wasn’t so bad, because whatever blah blah reason is in your head. You can even tell yourself that it doesn’t hurt that much because reasons.
Those are the lies you tell yourself to help you keep your documents in order. And, to a degree, you have to tell yourself those lies to keep the mask firmly on.
Doesn’t mean they aren’t lies. And eventually, all the masks will come off.
Curiouser and Curiouser 