SO HARD WE GREW SOFT
Click to viewLast night I went to visit my friend Marsha at her bar The M&M Saloon which has been closed since March. Last night was the first night Marsha re-opened. Marsha's seen some very hard times this past year (and the past 62 years of her life). During the Year of the Quarantine, she nearly lost her business and her home. Having to "sofa dive" was challenging enough, but she also lost the men she loves -- one to literal death and another to death by The System.
But I'm not here to share Marsha's hardships with you. Those are hers, and she bears them admirably because, well, she's tough. Hard lives make hard working women, who often appear to just be be hard. But under that hard, there's a hell of a lot of soft. We carry our soft like the most treasured secret in all the universes. We were born bearing the responsibility of protecting our soft place in a world where there was no one to keep us safe and where everyone seemed to want a piece of our innocence. They were not gentle or kind in their taking.
Marsha and I are both hard-soft/soft-hard women. Marsha has produced amazing creations during the quarantine. Her bar shines with the glimmer of protection she has been creating for herself. I am making a film about Marsha's Magical Creations and will share when done.
After I left the M&M last night, I felt the weight of history tug at my heartstrings and at my gut. I pulled up a chair in the gravel parking lot and had a talk with the traffic and the moon. This "song" is what came out of me. The inspiration it came from Marsha's comment when I asked her, "You have a good support system, right?" She laughed. Shook her head. Told me about her new dog.
That's the thing about us so-called "strong women." People are often under the impression that being who we are is all the support system we need and that we will be just fine. The reality is that "strong women" who have survived hard lives also often live lonely lives, even when surrounded by people. The horrors we have survived have turned us into myths more than people. People are drawn to us, but they also "draw" us, write their stories on us, or write the stories they see in movies or read in books onto us.: the strong women survivors.
But while they are defining who we are, they don't know our favorite color or what makes us cry; they don't know where we grew up or went to school, they don't know the name of our childhood pet or what we like to eat for breakfast, and the list goes on. They don't know who we are. They know what they want us to be and what they have made us be. But they don't know us.
We live lives in which we are surrounded by people, but remain mostly alone. Social distancing has existed for us since we were in the womb.
When hard times hit us now, the perception is that we are some kind of warrior high priestess of hell who can survive anything. Except we can't. We are old. We are tired. We have exceeded the limit of Hells We Survive. Our expiration date is expired. We carry hearts heavy with all the things that have broken inside them. We no longer have mindless youth to shore up our immortality or our bodies. We are our support system, but it's buckling at the knees.
These are the things I was feeling when I walked past the Cyclone pinball machine and out the door of the M&M last night, though I couldn't have told you I was thinking them if you asked. I sorted my heart out in the parking lot with my ukulele, and I shot out this little song off the cuff.
I cleaned up the sound a little. Other than that, the song exists word-for-word, breath-for-breath how it came out of me in the moment. Not a word of it was in my head until it came out of my mouth while I sat on an old office chair in a gravel parking lot at midnight, listening to my heart beat between the sounds of tires rolling down Old Benson Highway and the traffic signal changing from green to red.