Your Memory is the Ghost I Fear

This house used to be light and airy. The light pine cabinets and honey colored floors were warm. The sun slanted into the windows like dusty ridges of daydreams. The curtains fluttered lightly in the breezes from the open windows. Cherry wood shelves held dark leather volumes Homer and Austen. At night, laughter and warm golden lamplight spilled out like a bursting star. This home always smelled like flowers and food and laundry detergent. Dogs curled in comfortable piles across cushions and children while movies or music played. While you held me.

While you loved me.

Now the house smells stale and acrid, like a stain that just never seems to leave. The lights flicker and go out when I walk into a room, leaving me in the dark and scared. Just like you left me. Alone and afraid. Sometimes I hear the doors slam when I'm all alone in the house as if the spirit of your betrayal still haunts me.

I want to continue to love this old place with its wild gardens and twisting trees. With it's owls and hawks and squirrels. With it's hummingbirds and sparrows and quail.
But...

Since you left the dog has started to sound just like you when she snores and I feel you watching me in an empty house. The air still smells of your body.

Your memory haunts until I fear my home.

Big Eyes

We just watched the movie Big Eyes and I'm feeling so fucking triggered. Margaret Keane suffered from trauma that is so similar to the abuse that we have suffered. The girls had to leave the room briefly to get "air and sunshine" after it was over.

Yesterday I was reading an article about ways narcissistic parents abuse their children and all I could do was turn to Ari and apologize. I'm trying so hard not to bad mouth him so all I could do was repeat "I'm so, so sorry" over and over again.

We were abused and I'm helpless to guide my girls through it because that would be seen as bad-mouthing the other parent.

Lord only knows what he and Jason say about me to people.

Watch Big Eyes. It could save someone. Maybe you.

I have no container delicate enough to hold this heartache.

I was walking on the side of the road and right in front of me was a perfectly clean, perfectly white quail's egg. I was instantly struck by this little miracle. I mean, what are the chances that this fragile, little beauty would have survived, on the side of the road, at this symbolic time of year? What are the chances that it would be placed right in my path, in such treacherous terrain but where it's symbolism of growth, life and renewal would be instantly recognized and appreciated in a troubling time of my life?

I reached down, thinking to put it into my pocket for a nest I have on a shelf at home. As it tilted over I saw that it is only half a shell, the inside bloody and scraped out by the razor beak of some precise, opportunistic raptor. The shell was so thin, barely a breath of white calcium, yet here it sat in my palm, a testament to the brutality the life it held suffered. Again, I felt kin to it.

I feverishly try to figure out how to keep it safe, knowing full well that this shard is so much weaker than the full orb had been. I had no container in my life delicate enough to hold such remanants of heartache.

Again, I say: I have no container delicate enough to hold this heartache.

I find a tuft of cotton along the shoulder of the road, snagged with thorns and tumbleweeds. After cleaning it as best as I can, I try to delicately pad the hollow of this broken shell with the remnants of this discarded cushioning...

So delicate was this shell that even my attempts to protect it split it, the fissure appearing like a river on a map.

I cannot protect the evidence of this hurt. I cannot keep my pain to display upon the shelf like a broken egg in a discarded nest.

I have to leave it on the side of the road or risk doing more damage, no matter how careful I am.