a gasp and a sigh

Between expectation (the inhale, the before) and reality (the exhale, the after), there's this beautiful moment of uncertainty. You hold your breath and everything in your body floods with oxygen. Your heart beats and your lungs inflate and blood and adrenaline and possibility flood through you, follicles standing on end and toes throbbing and every whorl on your fingertips alive to it. And the brain fires with hope and possibility and optimism just as the bloodstream fires with oxygen, leaping and knitting a web of so much dense, entangled connection it could trap you.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to hold my breath and stay in that place, the space of fullness and vitality when anything could happen, the next step is undefined. It's why every basic bitch in the world expounds the virtue of "living in the now," why Pinterest brims with pretty typography and Hallmark platitudes. You can't hold your breath forever, though. There is no way to suspend yourself in the in-between. Expectation and reality exist as inexorable ends of the polarity of any given moment, and all we do is vacillate between them. Eventually, holding your breath too long makes your heart beat overtime and leaves you seeing spots, gasping when you stop.

Every inhale is a possibility. You could gasp, you could choke, or you could simply exhale, surrender to the after, and say goodbye to the death of the last expectation before inhaling and seeking the next...just breathing. 

fiction (II)

For a long time, she sat there in the dirt. Passers-by would look at her, occasionally stopping to extend a hand, express concern. Too broken to stand and too proud to plead, she shook her head, demurred and turned away. She told them she had chosen this, that she liked to be brought so low, to see the sky from so far away. That she needed to take the time to feel the earth beneath her while she grew back her wings.

She sat there, folding again and again back into herself. Memories that she painted rose-colored became her favorite companions. She thumbed them over, crumpling them, pleating and creasing them until they faded and melded into each other. Over time, their sharp edges softened, until she no longer bled as she ran her fingers over them. One day she realized that their weight had diminished, that they had crumbled and disintegrated from overuse. Without thinking too much more of them, she set them aside, and they blew away like chaff on the wind, and she turned her eyes skyward. 

ghosts

It's a funny thing, having lived so much life in Minneapolis. I've built myself a city that's haunted by my past self. Selves, even. I drive around or walk here and there, and most of the time, I stay in the present...focused on getting to the store, making it to happy hour, or not being late to the gathering. Sometimes, though, I get taken off-guard, and that's when the ghosts creep in. 

It happens to me at work, sometimes. I spent a weekend in St. Paul with the Band of the Fighting Irish for the Frozen Four once. I now park at the hotel the band stayed at, and we have work happy hours at the bar where the official pep rally was held. Sometimes, I sip my beer and look up and can see myself, 30 pounds thinner from mono and a flirtation with an eating disorder, clutching a piccolo and wearing a hockey jersey so big it could drown me. I had my first pair of skinny jeans on, and I never considered that the glittering, glassy building just across the street would one day be the source of my professional fulfillment. 

Restaurants haunt me. The tiny taco bar where my parents took me for my 25th birthday while he was at a class he hated, where he took me mere days before we broke up and sat at the table on the front porch. I've come dangerously close to car accidents when the ghost of that embattled couple catches me off-guard there. The window tables at Chino Latino will never cease to draw my eye, an old Lizzie trying to cheer up her depressed boyfriend with s'mores and the cheesiest jokes. And Culver's...Culver's will forever be the road trip food that conjures the old two of us, leaving our ButterBurgers and chicken tender memories along I-94 en route to weddings, football games, training.

Crave still echoes for me with the devil-may-care laughter of my mother, godmother, sister and cousins on a girls' day that included one too many lemon drop shots. Pizzeria Lola will always trigger memories of cat plates and photo booths and my dad's "lack of a sweet tooth." 

The corner booth in the bar at the Smack Shack is redolent with memories of Kaitlin, a bartender with a sense of humor, and a coloring-book kids' menu placemat. 

It's the apartments, though, that are the true graveyards for me. Every time I drive past Laurel Village, I count down the corner windows from the roof, 25 down to 19, and look to see if the lights are on. Sometimes I swear I can see my past self out of the corner of my eye. Biting back tears of frustration with EY and letting that view...god, that view...be the balm that soothed the angst of a brand-new stab at adulthood. Lit up for a party that brought the weirdest, most electric mixes of people together. 

Or that shithole on the corner of Nicollet and First...the white-washed brick, the vagrants drifting across the street. The rows of tall, narrow windows, behind which I know the radiator squeaks and the floorboards squeak and the faucets all squeak. The streaky windows I peered through, trying to spot my apartment in their vista because I was so besotted with the boy who came up behind me and hugged me close and made me think this was forever. 

222 is still the only place I know I'll always see myself. Leaning up against the corner of the railing on that rooftop deck. Hot pink gym shorts on, taking a day of actual PTO to "finish up the move." Waiting anxiously for him to get home so we could swim and decide where to order takeout from--we hadn't unpacked all the way, the place was too new to cook there. I remember the feeling of the concrete burning my bare feet, and watching the passers-by look up at me. In my mind, I was having a Princess Jasmine moment...being on the inside, with them looking up and wanting in too. Now I'm back on the outside and I know how much misery was on its way for that girl on the deck, and I'd never want to be anywhere but on the outside looking in. 

Sometimes I think about the ghosts I'm creating right now. I dream ahead to a day five, ten, fifty years down the road when I drive up to my building from work. I look at it through those far-away eyes and wonder who I'll see when I look at those windows on the top floor someday.

I like to think that I'll remember this place as the one where I put down my roots and took some time to grow back my wings. 

because I used to write fiction, once upon a time.

He peeled away small pieces of her, pieces that once upon a time she would have offered up willingly. She used to pluck them from herself as lightly as molted feathers, handing them over just to see the answering look of delight, satisfaction. He scraped and clawed at the remaining pieces too savagely, the parts that were too tender and raw to be dealt with so harshly. And she gritted her teeth and licked her wounds in private as he diminished her, shred by shred. 

Soon, too soon, he found he had stripped her of all he could take. He left her then, shivering in the dust, tasting ash and wondering how the phoenix could find it in itself to rise again from so much nothingness.