all the stars, every one
Originally published at What She Says. You can comment here or there.
So the boohoo of yesterday, and the day before, has lifted this morning. I slept twelve hours-the sleep cure-I love the sleep cure. I drifted between real sleep and twilight sleep during the night. Writing ideas flowed and ebbed.
The last two nights there has been a strange shadow on the floor. I dreamed of snakes, a pre-awareness of snakes, a paper bag full of snakes, and John who laughed, and Dale whose head ached. Then I woke up and saw the shadow which could have been a skinny black snake. I touched it with my foot. There was nothing there. There was no trace of anything in the morning.
As for the job, let it be. Let it be. Like the Christians say-let go and let God. Like the Beatles, the Buddha. Make Zen. Make mime. If I were to get the job, I would have to work harder. Tenure-track people have to do community service and UTC-wide service and claw and climb. If I keep on keeping on, I will fly more freely. I will publish and publish and publish. I will do the thing that matters. I will soar straight through. And my students will love me and I will love them and some of them will laugh and some of them will cry and some of them will remember me. And learn from me. For some of them, I will make a difference.
So ranks and titles and boohoo and nonsense. Boohoo the disappointment and wallow, the knee-deep lard and peanut shells. There is a God in me, and a heart, and a sparkling brain full of words and mint-colored ribbons. And girls who look just like me, who snap their gum the way their mother did, who put pepper on their eggs because their father did. Who want nothing but to be told they’re special, they’re pretty, they’ll never have a double chin. All her life she wanted to be special, to belong, to be in the know, in the in-crowd. And actually, she is. She belongs at her job. She belongs doing what she loves.
So fuck the disappointment and the rage. Fuck the things that don’t work out. I’ve had two children, fallen hard on my tailbone. I lost my virginity to the wrong man. I fell off my horse. I jumped from the barn onto a load of hay and twisted my ankle. I have a serious mental illness-overcome, overcome. I have an autistic son and a legally-blind son and a happy life. I’ve done my clawing and climbing out of holes, those black holes of my twenties, of my thirties. I have published and breastfed and learned to drive in a pasture, in a red jeep with no power steering. I have spackled walls and the seam of a thirteen-foot ceiling. I have raked leaves and jumped in leaves and put wet leaves and dirt into a large milk carton and hid in a maple tree, waiting for the neighborhood kids to come and roll my yard that I might smite them. I have prayed freely and from fear and from obsession. I have carved a place for myself and I eat cream filling and I will never give up the great wings of hope. They are growing in, just now. I am in my 50th year of my life. I have done much and almost, almost regret nothing. I offer up stinging, angry prayers and God smacks my head with a golden staff. Enough. Enough. The end will come, as it always does, for everyone and everything. God has assured me that I will return to him, to the stars, to my burning fire place in the universe.
The End
~r.