"Bye bye Carolina"

"It's OK if you cry," he said.  And so I did.  I cried with my face buried in his naked back.  I cried while the moon rose and his breath evened into sleep.  I cried as I grasped his hand and as the garbage truck lumbered down Mt. Vernon street.  I cried as the street lights turned off and dawn broke across our bed.

Our bed.  The one we had shared since I was 19.  Our bed.  The one that had seen 3 moves.  The one we bought with money I got as gifts for my college graduation.  Our bed.  The one I would never again share with him.  The one, in a few hours, I would dissemble with the special tools LL Bean gives you and pack into the back of a Penske truck. My bed.

By the time he stirred I wasn't crying anymore.

"We are some of the worst drivers in the country but we do have a sense of humor;)"

The ice storm in 1998 hit Maine during Christmas break.  Home from college you and I were suddenly kept apart by mother nature herself instead of just distance.  Whose idea was it to flee southern Maine for the mountains?  Tucked together in my mother's green Subaru we drove snowmobile trails to avoid downed power lines and sang along to the radio, windows down. We arrived at Sugarloaf to find the resort all but abandoned and were able to rent a condo for nearly nothing.  It felt like some grown up dream.  As though you and I had a future together instead of series of short affairs in between other relationships and trips home from school.

We built a fire and held each other while the storm covered the state in ice so thick it looked like glass.  A reflection of what life might have been in the cards had been dealt differently.

"The teeniest tiniest jar of Vaseline I've ever seen"

This morning the sky was gray and the alarm was more startling then usual.  Pulling me out of a anxiety fueled dream that left me out of breath and feeling though I was forgetting something or had forgotten something and that either way there was nothing I could do now.

In my dream I was begging you to come how. Except you were not a singular person. Instead a composite of everything that had ended in failure. Everything that continues to end in failure.  And so even now, hours after I have woken and had coffee and spent time answering emails, the sense of impending doom sits of my chest like the elephant who won't leave the room.

"I have a spare for Parquet Courts tonight. Anybody?"

Remember in high school we had that fight and you walked away.  You were the first person I had ever told about what had happened.  It seemed safe because it had happened to you too.  When my mom picked me up from school I was crying and she drove me to find you and on the side of Route 1 we fought for another hour.  My feet were frozen in my sneakers and we ran out of cigarettes and I didn't understand why we were fighting since I was sure you were the only person who could understand me.

When you went away for two weeks a month later you wrote me 14 letters, one for each day you were gone, and I did the same.  Some puppy dog love attempt to stay connected over a period of time that felt like forever to our 15 year old selves. Do you remember the moment you knew it was over?

"Clam chowda with lobsta roll love New England"

I am standing in my kitchen trying to figure out why I bought shallots.  I haven't cooked with them in years.  Since I stood in a large kitchen with a black and white checkerboard floor and a marble fireplace.  There, I used them more then regular onions.  Maybe because Whole Foods charged more for them and so they seemed more valuable.  But they were always in my kitchen.  At the ready for dishes of roasted vegetables.  For steak marinated. For quiches and side dishes.  For a person I know longer knew.

And so it must have been instinct or habit that led me to put them in my cart.  I didn't even realize I had purchased them until I got the groceries home and unloaded.  There in my kitchen with laminate wood floors and a large breakfast bar, amidst the whines from my toddlers for lunch, I found them.  Tucked away with the string beans.  I hold them tight in my hand for a moment.  I roll them over remembering the feeling of them.  Of then.

Before I drop them into the trash.

"Oscar the grouch revisited."

He puts on Pandora.  Trying to fill the empty space of our home with music.  For him, it is background noise.  Something to break the hard edges of silence.  For me, it is the soundtrack of my life playing.  Every song conjuring a moment.

Songs that bring memories of mornings spent sobbing in the shower.  Trying to convince myself, that someday the pain will become something I can live with.  Memories of my CD Walkman headphones, walking up Revere Street so sure that where I was heading was where I suppose to be going.  Driving over the bridge, the city of New Orleans behind me, the East breaking through the sunrise and fog, cigarette burning, radio on loud.  The walk home through Downtown Crossing where every step felt like I was both running away and towards something all at once.  Broken dishes. Loud voices. Expensive wine. Sleepless nights. Sushi. Abandoned dreams. New Orleans, Boston, Maine, Savannah, Virginia, Manchester, Pensacola, California, Ohio.

Memories of the person I used to be, regrets of who I am and the knowledge that I can not change a thing. That I can never go back.

The song switches again.  I am 18, walking home drunk through the Boston Common.  Trying to convince myself that I wasn't doing the walk of shame.  That it has been my choice to leave your warm bed at 3am.  That everything was going to be OK.

"14 years ago. Wow. Check us out."

At night when darkness settles around her like a blanket, and the kids are nestled in their beds.  When her husband is asleep and re-runs of Law and Order generate a constant stream of chatter to fill the silence.  She sits alone in a room that has never felt like home. A throw with woven images of Bethel from a lifetime ago covering her legs and a laptop keyboard never far from her fingers.  She fights hopelessness with every key stroke. Answers emails with vision blurred by tears.  She clenches her teeth against the rising tide of anger that fills her chest. Swallows down the resentment. Not just of today or last year. But of years wasted.

Out the window the sky is filled with small blinking stars.  Without thinking she starts to say the old childhood rhyme..."star light, star bright..." and then she remembers that most of the stars she can see burned out thousands of years before.  And that wishes don't come true anyway.

"Good advice. Not something you can rush..."

From her well appointed apartment on Mt. Vernon Street in Beacon Hill she could see down Walnut Street to the skating pond on the Boston Common.  It was a Sunday afternoon and the pond was covered with kids while their parents sipped Starbucks coffee and tried to shake off the post holiday malaise.  The holiday lights and good tidings replaced by the monotonous gray of January.  She was seated on her floor at the foot of her Christmas tree meticulously removing, wrapping and sorting each ornament.

This one was hers, her mother had bought it for her when she was 10.  A wooden gymnast captured in perpetual motion on the uneven bars.  This one was his, the Star Trek emblem his mother had made him when he was a child.  Hers, the glass unicorn from her youth, his the Mickey Mouse made into a nutcracker.  Theirs, the glass ball they had bought in Disneyland Paris.  Theirs, the "Our First Christmas" heart hung on a red ribbon he had bought for their first Christmas together.  The year they spent tucked in the Kenmore Square apartment shared with two friends.

How do you divide memories?  Divorce papers not filed yet and her husband of 7 years seated in a leather recliner watching football, but they both knew.  Both knew what they could not say.  That it was their last Christmas as a married couple.  That the next time boxes of Christmas ornaments were opened they would not be together.  That years after this moment one of them would unwrap one of those shared ornaments and surrounded by new families, a new spouse they would pause before carefully re-wrapping the memory in tissue paper and pack it away.  That there would be no place on the new tree for it.

2016- Back to Basics

My attempt at character writing in 2015 was not a success.  Mostly because I failed to devote the time necessary to create what was in my head.  The idea has not been abandoned and I am determined to create the story and characters I envisioned a year ago.

In the meantime we are going back to basics.  I am returning the original intent of this blog.  Capturing moments and memories inspired by Facebook posts.