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How To Fight Self-Sabotage.

Turn 32. Recognize the Day of Birth in ways you did not before. Now that you are a mother, understand that this day, that this life, is not yours alone. There is a debt you must pay to the people who brought you here. There is a debt you must pay to the girl your body opened up–like a whale expelling Jonah–to release.

Know now that the time you have spent convincing yourself of an intrinsic unworthiness was not yours to waste. Those interminable years you whiled away, in conflict with yourself, could well have been spent slaying dragons, climbing Everests, loving deeply and well. Reset your internal clock accordingly.

Recognize that your worries–about the traction of your ability, about the accessibility of your talent, about your value–were the shallow trifles of the bourgeoisie. Women like you cannot afford to laze about on a chaise lounge of loftiness, noshing on the bon-bons of inaction. You–the gypsies, the transients, the intermittently penniless, the debt-laden, the mothers–must walk the length of deserts, must fashion a bridge of rejection letters, must set sail away from inadequacy, tossing overboard inattentive men, and finally, upon a new shore, must drill down to the marrow of your souls and extract the dreams you’ve buried there.

Remind yourself that this painful drilling need never have occurred, if only you’d kept your goals at the fore and tended them the way you do the face you so constantly lament isn’t lovely enough.

Repent of the audacity it has taken to thumb your nose at God. Tell Him what he has given you is potent. Your words evoke tears, evoke action. They occupy hearts, link arms, sit-in, sing songs that overcome. They stir the reader, alert him to the need for revolution, compel him to broaden his capacity for love.

Shame on you for re-enacting the parable of the talents, for burying all that you’ve been given, because it looked too meager to present before kings.

Beg forgiveness. Promise that, should He be gracious enough to let you keep these gifts, you will treat them as gold, not tin. They will no longer be susceptible to tarnish.

Give more to the world. Do not gaze at its magnificent surface, full of the colorful impressions of history’s trillions, and say: there is no space left for me. Leave your you-shaped imprint; none other is like it.

Concede that the artist is a public servant. But never surrender your growth to the public’s expectation. Should you find yourself in a box, obliterate its walls.

Believe those who tell you they cherish your work. You hear this often enough to trust it. Do not dismiss true praise as hype. Question those who would proclaim you the Next Whomever. You hear this often enough to be wary. Do not mistake hype for earnestness.

Finally, in pursuits of love, be kind to yourself. You were never meant to be the girl who pined for disinterested men. You always did, perhaps because it is easier to court rejection than to give all of yourself to the pyres of love. Be no man’s second choice. Be the echo at the end of the cavern into which he yells, in search of interchangeable women’s companionship. Be the voice he longs to hear again, now that he knows he never will. Do not become a salted pillar for him.

Instead, dance wildly at the water’s edge and bring your little girl. She must see what it means to at last be free from desiring far less than you should have.

Be assured: someone will be watching. And a love unlike any you’ve known will ignite itself within him.

But regardless of whether he approaches, regardless of whether he has learned to circumvent self-sabotage, you must slather on your war paint, with the girl on your hip. Begin to deliver your words to the larger space, honor them in ways you haven’t before, and watch them transform: tiny airless things at first, slowly yawning into giants.

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In the Land of At Least.

Twice I turned my back on you. I fell flat on my face but didn’t lose. – Yukimi Nagano

1.

This love is a leaden zephyr: it will always sink but at least it was made in the image of that which can fly.

Long ago, I gave you my heart in a kite. You wound the string around your neck: a floating pendant, an ascot that sailed against sky. And we walked together, two children in grown-up bodies: a girl in an eyelet dirndl, a boy in a sport coat and knickers. Playing school, playing doctor, playing house. You always wanted to be the teacher, always wanted to be the patient, always wanted to be head of the home. But at least I was never made to wear the dunce cap. At least I was not stricken with incurable disease. At least the home that we built was made of air.

Before long you began your proposals. The first was framed as algebra: if I asked you to marry me on your birthday, what is the probability you would wed me before gaining ground in your career?

n is the number of times you have asked for a compromise that solely benefits you. x is the absence of rings.

Solve for y.

You said my heart-kite became a noose. At least you didn’t die.

The bloom has long since fled this bouquet. It will shrivel like a cancerous thing. Its petals, if pulled, will portend our eventual fate: he loves me; he loves me; he loves me not. But at least you chose each flower yourself, at least you picked them from a garden you tend, at least you did not leave our outcome in the cold and scarred hands of a florist.

2.

These inner children have grown. The girl has turned in her dirndl for a rough-hewn maternity smock. The boy is donning track shoes. They are every bit as mature as we’ve always looked and as wary as aging requires. When the sedatives wear thin in her blood and she raises her heels to push, his hands are not the ones that act as human stirrups, his eyes not the first to be laid on their child. He is not there at all; he has left for a gig. But at least he is called when the infant wriggles free. At least he whispers her name through a telephone held to her ear. At least he flies back one month later, bearing diapers, sleepy midnights, and money.

At least when he arrived, she did not say: this is the least you can do. The literal least.

3.

This family is a disassembled mosaic: three shards of brightly colored glass, devoid of base and of hold. We float on the surface of waters, carried east and west on winds we cannot control. You have slit my sails and I have shredded yours; at least we are not without oars. At least we have not been submerged. At least we’re not lost to each other, in fog. At least you do not question the resemblance of the little shard to you. At least, should we ever find meet driftwood and fasten, we will make something beautiful, to be ogled, critiqued, and admired. At least on occasion, you roll a tiny scrit into a bottle. It says: my decision to remain on this water alone has little to do with whether we’ll wind up together. It says: this drifting will not always be, at least.

I know better than to read this as a promise. I have learned how to interpret you, at least.

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Acceptance Is a Drug.

Acceptance is a drug: a rock, a vapor, a potion. Some children first feel its rush in the womb, when a mother’s rhythmic, loving touch pulses through skin and blood and fluid. Her voice tunnels down through warmth and darkness. She says: I love you. She says: I can’t wait to meet you. She says: You are mine.

Other children remain unconvinced of acceptance and its potency until they emerge from the birth canal and find a father, beaming and open-palmed, the picture of pride.

And then there are the children whose acceptance has been cut, laced, or diluted. One or both of their parents may be absent or absent-minded; inattentive or attentive to a fault, but only when enforcing discipline or inflicting abuse; or desperately distracted by the pursuit of their own acceptance.

In other cases, parental acceptance, though satisfying, just simply isn’t enough. For these children, the need for notice, for desire, for praise and validation, is all-consuming. They huff high GPAs; snort three-day school suspensions; cook off-handed compliments until they’re concentrated, then inhale them till they swell inside their chests and crackle.

No, for them, simple acceptance isn’t enough. There must be a headier love, love in its pure powder form, love that can be sifted through fingers, run across teeth, licked clean off a surface.

As with any addiction, there is more than enough blame to go around. As with any addiction, blame is futile; it does not yield solutions.

What it begets is shame.

It makes the girl whose chase leads her into the arms of another addict feel mortified when the act she believed to be a private transaction of passion hits the harsh light of day. It makes her feel mercilessly flogged and without safe haven or sanctuary. Criticism stones her in the public square. Men touting themselves at surrogate fathers will screen her one of most intimate, most illegally disseminated moments, then speculate that this has happened to her because her mother is out “being empowered,” rather than providing undivided attention to her child. He will not acknowledge or apologize for his voyeurism, even as he concedes that the exposure and proliferation of the act makes it child pornography.

There will be over-simplification: The addiction suggests a lack of home training. The addiction is everywhere, manifesting itself in children in exactly this way every day; it will work itself out, if only it isn’t exploited, if only we avert our eyes, if only the children grow up. The addiction requires the help of an agency or institution, it belongs to laundry list of drudgery assigned to social workers, court-appointed counselors, and youth pastors.

It is never a personal problem. It does not require self-reflection. Because we didn’t give or receive oral sex at 14. Because our mamas loved us. Because we had the good sense not to compress our mistakes and our flaws, our naivety and experimentation, onto video and upload them to YouTube.

It isn’t our problem because our daughters are 15 and 18 and 21 and they aren’t yet sexually active. Because we parented them “right.” We grounded them, spanked them when they needed it, set content filters on our televisions and laptops, requested them as friends on Facebook.

But as long as this can happen to one girl, succumbing to the throes of thwarted infatuation, as long as one son thinks he will become a hero through sexual conquest, as long as friends will hold a camera and look on, stifling snickers or sitting in silence, as long as a video of children having sex can go viral within hours of upload, there is plenty of work left for us all.

Posted on by slb · 16 Comments

Marriage, in 30-Second Increments.

I’ve been seeing a little too much of this Subaru Outback* commercial these days.

I worked in advertising for nine months. It was my first salaried, full-time, post-college job. I was just a proofreader, and I spent more time blogging and working on a manuscript and IM-ing than I did circling typos. Most of the employees forgot I’d been hired; they were used to proofing their own stuff. And needless to say, I wasn’t what you’d call a go-getter back then.

Still, I learned a lot about commercials there. Successful ones sell you an experience, rather than a product. They make you desire a lifestyle you never considered. They make you long for an emotion you didn’t realize you missed, didn’t realize you could even feel. (It’s the same concept around which the entire run of Mad Men is situated.)

For those 30 or 60 seconds, there it is. Right upfront, right in your home, for you to see and feel and want. And as it flickers like a flash of what might be gold in your pan, then ends before you want it to, the advertisers have left you wondering: Now what are you gonna do about it?

If they’re lucky, you connect that call to action to their product. But when I see that Subaru Outback commercial, I want the experience. In any car. This idea of starting a new life with someone, cloistered in the woods, blossoms ringing my hair, drenched and laughing and escaping a collapsed tent… this is an idea worth coveting.

I had the same experience with this Mitsubishi Outlander commercial in the early aughts. There’s a very brief scene where rose petals are swirling into the face of the driver’s new bride; when I first laid eyes on that in ’03, it was pretty spectacular. (Incidentally, this commercial has some of the best subtle “face-acting” of any I’ve seen to date. And you really get the sense that you’ve watched a character evolve and mature in the minute you spend watching it. I’d enter this commercial as evidence in my argument that a well-executed commercial can provide the same narrative satisfaction as flash fiction.)

The point is: like most unmarried people, there’s a part of me that will always romanticize marriage. If I marry, I will have some minor, irrational expectation that roughly 75% of my marital experience will evoke the emotions these commercials capture. Ideally, I want to be with someone who makes me feel that, regardless of the unforeseen–triumph, tragedy, great gain, profound loss, joy, sickness, treatment, remission–there simply isn’t anyone else with whom I’d rather be.

I haven’t married, in part, because of this. I am expecting something more spectacular than I’ve experienced.

You hear these aphorisms, these “marriage is what you make it”/”it’s a partnership” cliches, and you know there is truth at the heart of them.

So few of us go into a wedded union with any concept of the mundane, of the dying down of euphoria, of the reality that we simply cannot be confident of how our partner will respond to certain of life’s curve balls. We trust that the love we feel in the moment, in the first months or years or even the first decade , will deepen into a mature and constant, if unexciting love, that will guide us into our golden and twilight years, that will end with us at the other’s death bed.

And sometimes, the person with whom we began that journey becomes unrecognizable as the same guy earnestly floundering under a honeymoon tent, willing to soak himself down to the marrow in order to deliver on the promise of a caring, devoted, monogamous, self-sacrificial life.

I find that kind of risk utterly terrifying, and I haven’t found myself in the eye of a relationship that felt worth it.

I just don’t want to marry someone because I long for the 75% these car commercials seem intent on selling me, only to find myself hiding out in a greenhouse, growing increasingly bitter as I mist the potted orchids, until:

*Those Subaru Outbacks are dope, though.

Posted on by slb

He Ain’t Heavy.

We have lowered our expectation, brothers, have decided that it is no longer necessary that you riot for us, that you ride elephants into Rome, that you heft the whole world on your back, attack unjust law, and convince wigged, impossibly white institutions to come up off a few bucks and revitalize our job market.

It was never a weight you bore alone, but we know it felt that way. We are here with you, always, though often we wonder if that’s been enough.

While we peeled open boll upon boll of rough cotton, wrested weevils from your hair in the night, we listened to the stones settling inside you, the flinty resolve with which you plotted our flight. Yes, we sighed within ourselves, we will slither through these fresh trenches with you, make second skin of the mud to deter the hounds. We will run with you and ward off your fright. We will keep your abiku at bay.

What we could not account for were the voices, trapped in the recesses of your minds for no other purpose than to iterate failure and to assure you that any victory can be stripped away far more easily that it was earned.

Your freedom papers, your driver’s licenses, your permanent records, your rap sheets can be falsified, can be manipulated, can vanish.

You are never entirely your own.

We understand now what we didn’t in centuries past: for some, the voices cannot be quieted. Many will die before knowing their courage was not for naught, and others still will squander the gains our ancestors’ courage provided.

So you needn’t worry about the impossibility of meeting our astronomical expectations, brothers. They have evolved. They are scaled back. They have become more reasonable.

We expect you to be present now and not preternatural. And we hope that, even if you cannot keep wrists and waists and ankles free of chains, you can keep them away from your mind. No longer do we expect you to do this alone. We have been made aware of the delicateness of the brain’s constitution and will no longer rely on our myths to explain away or exorcise an imbalance. We expect that you will demand a diagnosis when your sanity suddenly becomes elusive and agree to ingest the medication that will manage your fear, your depression, your rage, if prescribed.

Brothers, you were born to battle minotaurs; there has never been a choice. We gave birth to you inside this labyrinth that neither of us has constructed and because we have witnessed your strength, we’ve expected you to conquer every foe. We’ve wanted you marching and preaching of mountaintops; brandishing rifles while invoking the Second Amendment; and eventually leading our nation.

We have not always remembered to count the costs, have not considered that, in this unending fight, your minds might be counted among the collateral damage.

We are not at war with you brothers, not fixed at an opposite pole from which we berate you and proclaim to be better at all that you do. We do not want your burdens; we have our own.

But what we have always been willing to be are Ariadnes to your Theseuses. We are always willing to open our hand to you and offer the thread that can guide you toward a harbor, a home.

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How Loss Yields Legacy.

Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions.                                            — Joel 2: 28b

There is a dividing line in the lives of the young. On one side is an insular existence, where the elders live and govern, taking us into the folds of their ancient skirts, where they will knit us a history. There, we are fed and told who we are. They distill from their founts of wisdom a pablum we are capable of consuming. We do not understand what we have. We cannot quite fathom how fortunate we are, to hold them, to hear them, to trace their veins with our tiny fingers. But we are no so foolish that we entirely take them for granted. We understand their arms as the haven into which we can run when our parents’ discipline feels more alienating than effectual. We understand their stores as confections to relish, their thunderous or rasping voices a theatre around which we sit riveted.

On this side, they are hearty and hale. Even if their spines curve like parentheses or their fingers are gnarled as twine, we do not note these conditions as anything more than accents embellishing their character. We do not recognize them as lashes left by the cruelest of all overseers: Time.

Cross the line, and your elders are no more. Depending on what you believe, they hover above your life, acting as guardians, or they sit at the sidelines, watching with disappointment or wonderment. Perhaps they are praying. Perhaps their prayers are preventive, and you will never know what calamities you’ve sidestepped as the result of their intercession.

What is more certain is the impact of their absence. Gone are the raised and winding veins, gone the comforting feel of the blood coursing through them. Absent also are the courageous creases, deepened through decades spent awaiting abolition, petitioning for voters’ rights, sharecropping too-small parcels of land; losing homes and children and lovers; then yielding to the technological advances that stole their jobs and divided the attentions of their once-rapt grandchildren.

You miss their certainty, their Gilbraltar-like presence. Without them, your borders feel unprotected. They carried the world so artfully, you were never aware of its weight.

Now, there are days when you can barely square your shoulders. And you are finally beginning to understand.

There are a few years yet, before we return to the other side and become for our children’s children what our parents’ parents were for us. Our work must be thorough and quick. We are left to decipher the glyphs and mosaics stitched into the story quilts they left us. We must apply their epiphanies to the balance of our days, embellishing and righting and multiplying as we see fit.

Many days, we’ll fall short of their marks. We will not all find ourselves at the forefront of revolution. We may not wind up scholars of law or titans of art and of industry.

We may merely be the mint-givers, the switch-wielders, the pipe-smokers rocking under the moonlight on our back porches. It is possible that our most significant impartation will be the secret to baking a perfect pound cake.

We are just as significant. They will need us all.

This is the meaning of legacy.

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That Night.

That night, our country again became a coliseum, with throngs ascending its risers, teeth bared, demanding blood. At sundown, the gladiator emerged from his pit and presented himself to the lion, emptied and unarmed. He had no steed or chainmail, no sorcery to fell his accusers or hypnotism to convince them of his truth. He had only faith in eternity, only resignation to a likely fate. Death seemed his lot, and he had accepted it, even as a chorus of valorous dissenters railed against it in his stead.

As in so many times before, there were jeers, the drunken sloshing of goblets, hateful epithets sailing through the air on the spittle of onlookers. There were those in whose eyes rabid glee danced in the light of the torches. And I shuddered, remembering those countless clearings in the woods where crowds like this one gathered to string up the bodies of black folks like so many ornaments in their trees.

The same festive bloodlust abided, the same unwillingness to hear reason.

This was no place for children.

But I wanted you here.

You needed to know what we’re up against, what’s worth wailing for, what it means to rend both your heart and your garments in the public square. We are not of a privileged caste, my love, not exempt from the reckoning gaze of an emperor who will never know the acrid tongue of hunger, never find himself so much as grazed by our afflictions. When the life of one of our own sits in the balance, our land condemns to death cavalierly, striking out each fresh crescendo of doubt with the flourish of a 10,000-dollar pen.

The lion pawed at our gladiator who, for his part, remained on his feet, holding his own till the tribunal declared him broken enough for the next round. We tugged the hems of adjudicators’ robes, boxed hundreds of thousands of signatures petitioning our gladiator’s release, fashioned banners decrying injustice, linked arms beyond the iron gates. We sang a song you have heard in your nursery–about igniting our inner light, about bringing the darkness to shame.

As our hymn lulled you to eventual slumber, I thought for just a moment that we would upend the world while you dreamt. We would deconstruct and rearrange the empire, so that when you woke, there would be a remarkable new world, where the cries of the people pricked the hearts of their government, where empathy warmed the cold, long arm of the law.

I thought we would not taste failure, that mercy would fall from the sky like manna and the gladiator, tasting it, would be spared.

I would tell you then that the blight of Jim Crow had finally been scoured clean, that our ancestors’ innocent blood has seeped so far into this soil that it’d begun to yield far less bitter and strange fruit.

I did not know that as I imagined you awakening to find that fairness had swept through our land, the poison had already broken into our gladiator’s veins.

When you woke he would be dead.

The burden of explaining his absence would be mine. Someday, I would need to tell you, as we prepared to protest yet another suspect imprisonment, another battle in the crumbling coliseum, that what we do is not in vain. I will stroke your hair and remind you that in times before either of us were born, we could not protest without being toppled by hoses, could not picket without the attack of dogs. Before that, we could not sleep without the distant crackle of fire against flesh and the terrifying wonder whether the burning father, brother, or aunt was our own.

Beloved, our battles matter. The ground we gain may seem insignificant, but when measured in yards and not inches, you will see how far we have traveled, away from the cotton and cane we once plowed without pay, on threat of torture and death.

We are still without privilege, but there has been progress. We must always believe there will be more. I cannot allow you to live life discouraged, expecting defeat when it’s probable. I have to explain how we hope.

We look at the knights and the lion, at the fattened emperor and the pit. We listen to the gladiator concede.

And still we sing and link arms and we love.

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The Defining Moments of Dorm Life: Frazier, Simpson, and the Murder at Bowie State.

Humiliation burns. It’s a slow heat, originating in the ankles and creeping with excruciating slowness until it reaches the face and waters in the eyes.

I felt its familiar sting two months into my first semester in college, when I returned from an evening class to find that my roommate had double-bolted our dorm room door to lock me out. I tried the key a second time; like before, it turned easily to the right but the door didn’t budge. Darkness filled the pane of glass above it, and as Luther Vandross wafted under it and into the hall, so did half the girls on our floor.

It was clear that how I handled this situation would be the defining moment of my college social life. I’d be distilled into one of two adjectives: assertive or acquiescent; powerful or pushed-over; confrontational or compliant.

I wasn’t ready, just then, to decide what I’d be for the next four years. Instead, I backed away from the door and went off in search of a pay phone, which I used to tearily call a relative. “You get back up there and stand your ground,” she said.

I didn’t know what standing my ground should entail; I’d rarely, if ever, had to do it.

As an only child, this was my first time having to share a room–share anything, really–with someone else. I’d had very little conflict in life; I’d seen to that, by being as imperceptible as possible in any social situation.

Dominique Frazier, 18, was killed in her dorm at Bowie State University on Sept. 15.
Alexis Simpson, 19, confessed to killing Dominique during a heated dormroom argument.

When I heard about the likely accidental homicide of Dominique Frazier at Bowie State last Thursday, then saw her alleged killer Alexis Simpson’s mug shot, and read the quote Alexis reportedly uttered before fleeing the scene, my heart divided its empathies between the needlessly deceased only child and the impossibly young, saddened face of the girl being booked for murder.

Dominique, a freshman, and Alexis, a transfer from Clark Atlanta, were suite-mates. School has only been in session a few weeks. They were already at odds, insomuch that Dominique’s mother offered to help her secure a room change.

Their defining moment came early, the fates of their college lives already decided long before their first midterms. Regarding the particulars, reports conflict; but by most accounts, the row began with an iPod. One powered the other’s off–in front of visiting friends.

A cursory trip to either girl’s Twitter feed suggests that both are strong personalities, unafraid of direct confrontation. For one to assert control over the other’s possessions meant inevitable conflict. Neither would stand for a public humiliation.

Dorm culture is incredibly voyeuristic. Gossip spreads faster than an airborne virus, and all it takes is a peak into a neighboring doorframe to confirm or deny any rumor. As the disagreement between Dominique and Alexis escalated, there were certainly onlookers. There were probably instigators. And soon, there would others gathered in abject terror.

Alexis briefly left the fight scene and returned with a sharp object, which was ultimately transformed from a prop in a dramatic schoolfight to evidence in a murder investigation. 

Upon seeing the damage she’d caused in the heat of a humiliating moment, Alexis then reportedly uttered the following to onlookers: “I didn’t mean to do it. You all don’t know what I’ve been thru. You all jumped me.”

No one knows as well as Dominique and Alexis the extent of their contention with one another. Media coverage describes the deceased as an honor student with a full scholarship who was already well-known on Bowie’s campus. Initially, no one seemed to be saying much, one way or another, about the character of the accused. Now, a few friends of the accused have emerged, saying that she was nicer than she let on, an only child known to claim a grittier lifestyle than the one she actually led.

We do know this: hours after leaving campus, where Dominique sat bleeding out in the dorm room hall, Alexis turned herself in to police. To be sure, she had little choice. With a dorm full of witnesses, it was only a matter of time before the authorities tracked her down and arrested her. But her willingness to submit herself to the consequences of her impulsive actions, as well her quote in her charging documents, suggest that she is just a girl who failed to check her anger in a situation that absolutely called for it.

She is a girl much like I was, as I trudged back up to my locked dorm room, trembling at the prospect of a loud confrontation. I passed my roommate and her male guest, as she escorted him out of the dorm. And when she returned, we had it out.

We weren’t loud, but our conversation was certainly heated. Increasingly emboldened by my own righteous indignation, I quietly hissed that it was wrong for her not to discuss her plans to entertain with me, before barring me from my living space. She very calmly responded that I should’ve been cooler about it, should’ve just gone somewhere and hung out until she was finished, should’ve responded “normally,” rather than blowing things out of proportion.

This is where it could’ve gotten real for me. Alexis Simpson real. If our personalities were different, this could’ve been our “sharp object” moment.

We were fortunate for the opportunity to live longer and to learn what it means to respect another person’s space, wishes, and intentions. We were able to refine our communication skills and have civil, amicable, mature differences of opinion–even if other peers were present. We were able to grow up.

At least I think we were. At the end of our first term, after exchanging less than ten full sentences between that fateful night and winter break, my roommate and I parted ways. I chose to move home and commute to campus until sophomore year, when I got my first of many single-occupant dorm rooms. It wasn’t the most practical of decisions. It wasn’t exactly standing my ground. But at the time, it was what was necessary to ensure that I didn’t become a version of version of myself that I and others feared.

These young women at Bowie were not granted that opportunity. Perhaps their lives will become part of a larger discourse on what it means to live peaceably in a fishbowl. This is the message that tends to escape incoming freshmen amid all the fliers and fanfare of orientation: it is never the iPod. It is never the male guest, the lock-out, snicker and jeer of your peers. In the end, it is two or more vulnerable strangers alone in a room who must learn, with little mediation or supervision, to respect each other’s privacy, property, and personhood or face a complex system of consequences.

In this case, the penalty was death.

Posted on by slb · 1 Comment

Out There is a Garden.

Like a widower, like a prisoner, like an acolyte new to a nunnery, the mother who splits with her lover during pregnancy–or more acutely, because of it–is expected to sustain an extended season of mourning–of mourning and reverence and soberness. She will be watched, her next actions weighed and measured. If she returns to the fray too soon, she is a bad mother, dodging her new role as diaperer, doter, and dairy in order to don peep-toe stilettos and hit the stroll, wielding a clutch full of condoms.
It’s tricky.

When the casual observer spots this woman with an infant, he conjures a domestic life for her that includes a shared bed, nightly lower back rubs, a partner, because this early on–while the baby is still dewy and wordless, while the mother is still bathed in her miraculous life-bearing aura, while the father is still awed by his heir–this is simply implied. There is no uncomplicated way to explain the echoing loneliness, the cavernous absence, the awkward near-daily phone updates on their daughter’s development. At a time when her most intimate moments should be spent with her ex, at the rail of a crib, whispering over the shared triumph of getting their colicky infant to rest, the last thing anyone suspects is that she’s calculating the appropriate time to wriggle free of her billowy blouses and pull on the form-fitting regalia attendant to getting back Out There.

Out There, with its speed dates and hookups and earnest longterm courtships, is no longer her scene–or if she is me, it never was. If she is me, she is practically hermetic, all her previous relationships casual, unconsummated, or in the case of this last, the result of happenstance, fondness, and, later, inertia. Every man she’s dated–and there have been less than a handful–was found in the places she most regularly frequents: school, work, church.

She doesn’t know to meet them, otherwise.

Regardless, an unbidden desire to meet them has risen, like decomposing Lazarus improbably exiting his tomb.

She knows there is a link between this pining and her heart’s recently enlarged capacity for love. Love is emanating from her pores, insomuch that she runs the risk of becoming an unrepentant helicopter, hovering over her increasingly independent child, lifting her for hugs and kisses before she ever has the chance to offer them. She needs a reservoir for the runoff; a dreamcatcher for the excess; a man who makes more sense within the context of a world that has reimagined her as someone’s mother.

And, there–there is the other rub: she is someone’s mother now. This necessarily changes everything.

If dating was a house of mirrors before, filled with misshapen images of herself and her possible suitors, dating with a child is a house of cards, full of false starts and toppled attempts to balance a new identity with an old one.

She will need to reconfigure her banter, curtail her nervous laughter, meet eyes and match their fervor, infuse all conversation with clarity. She can no longer be one for ambling. There is no time.

It has become apparent to her, in these twenty months she’s spent alone, that as the mother of a one-year-old, she will be treated as though she is unavailable. And in so many ways, she is. The best part of herself has been claimed, the bulk of her time accounted for.

What can she offer a prospective paramour, other than leftover love, the slivers of time per day that her daughter spends sleeping, the occasional phone call at dawn?

She must grow more.

It is impractical to desire a garden she has no space or time to tend. But what is life without the wildness of flowers, the sustenance of fruit and grain, the lushness and full spice of the herbs? And what will she do with the love overflowing these buckets, if not use it to water a series of promising seeds?

Her season of mourning has ended. A partner is not so readily implied of a mother with toddler, as the one who conjures images of the madonna when she holds her swaddled babe.

Now, the wind has turned. The soil will yield to tilling.

Posted on by slb · 7 Comments

Lovesick.

It must infect me, must spread rapidly like the virus we all secretly believe that it is. It must pierce my cynicism, bleed through the memories that diseased it the first time, will me to relinquish my yearlong remission.

This love must invade.

Love, crack open my broken ribcage, reach in, begin, get elbow-deep in clogged capillaries, root through the detritus other strains left behind, balloon past abandonment and through the veins I have knotted to block you, remain–even if I code. You should be worth the flatline, worth the sear of defibrilating paddles. Please. Please, be worth the crackle of nerves. Resurrect their deadened endings.

Dissolve the stitches of past disappointments. Glue my skin; seal yourself in. May there never be seepage. Absorb my longings; though they be many, fulfill them–even if they must be liquefied, bagged, and dripped intraveneously. This time, I will sacrifice nothing; I will not go undernourished.

I will be pressed to walls, wrists pinned to the optic white, to the blood orange borders, to the sharpened and beveled mirrors. So fortify my spine, shoot rods into weakened discs. I will need iron in my backbone. No must be non-negotiable–even through tremors and twitches and the offer of alternative medicines. And so also must yes be resolute–even if it would be easier to treat you in stages and sessions, until you’ve subsided and solved.

I will die either way–with you or without you. You will be a germ to which I am exposed, even if I never contract you again. You will either be in the air I breathe or the reason that I breathe it.

But I would rather you leave me restless, heaving, gutted, gasping than as undisturbed as you’ve left me thus far. I am still and unsuspecting as a clean bill of health, but I miss the fever, the fainting, your vapors.

Make your peace with my apothecary. Convince him to pour you, distilled. I will drink of you, straight from the bottle. I will wait for each poisonous wave.