Past and Present

I decided to clean out my file cabinet today because the desk area is overrun with financial papers and tax papers and receipts of all sorts that I can no longer control. I stumbled on a wedding invitation and opened it. It was mine. Don't get me wrong every time I clean out the cabinet I discover things I once knew well and now no longer associate myself with. Inside the invite was a picture of my first honeymoon. He was far away on the beach and crouching on an erosion barrier, the sunset in the background was God showing off. It was 12 years ago.
I found the ticket stubs from the Ani Difranco concerts and the playbill for plays I once loved. Paintings the kids brought home with these tiny hand prints that no longer exist were in the mix; so was the card my grandmother wrote me when my grandfather died. She wrote me a comforting card. A manila envelope of letters that first husband sent from rehab it was full of empty promises.
I also found the sealed envelopes addressed to Seth and to Drew. Inside these were my suicide letters to them. I opened them and read the depth of my depression just 6 years prior to now. How desperate and alone I was just 6 years ago. Thank God I never had the guts.
While cleaning all of this out my 7 month old was having a blast in the debris on the living room floor and I saw this glimpse of my past there scattered all around her. All of my dark, alone, scared, hiding was there on the floor and she, my present and future, was just tossing it over her tiny head and giggling as though it was the funniest thing.

In Transition

Things I do not know:
How our money will hold up once my husband begins his program,
How I will handle not being in classes for a whole year,
How to help my best friend heal her broken heart...again,
How to make sure my daughter learns to write and count with her "issues",
How to make the choice to hold her back a grade or send her on,
How to keep the neighbors dogs from using our yard as a potty,
How to relax,
How to breathe deeply,
How not to gain anymore weight with 12 weeks left in pregnancy,
(the cookies are so good),
How to stay out of the yard area at Lowes.

Things I know:
We will be ok, We will be ok, We will be ok...better than ok actually but for now I have to tell myself "ok".

Thinking about baby

The water as hot as my body can tolerate.
Drops whisk away all.
My children, my husband, my sickness, aches, and pains.
Bubbles hide all the imperfections.

And I think about you, what you will look like,
How your voice will sound, if you will have daddy's freckles,
Boy or girl, I think about the pearls of toes on a newborn.
My newborn, our newborn.

letter to bob

I dreamed of you the other day and you were the you before all the chaos.
You wore a shirt that I bought you as a gift while we were dating, soft, deep purple.
I had forgotten the shirt until I saw your twenty four year old self wearing it.
You smelled of Grey Flannel.
You were in my home and I was the me now, not the eighteen year old me I would have been with you at twenty four.
Your skin was unblemished, your face full, eyes not wrinkled and puffy.
You came to me and asked why it wouldn't work.
We held each other and wept.
I told you that "you broke me inside."
You pointed to my head and asked "in here?", then my heart and asked "or in here?"
I answered both. and I told you that you had died. I explained to you that you had taken your own life in a way and it was over now.
You evaporated then, into thin air, gone, just gone.
I stood there thinking you voice was gone, your handwriting, your laughter, your yell, your arrogance, your cocky walk.
I woke up beathing heavily and with tears on my face and I wept again for you, for me, for your mother. I did not weep for your children.
And I wept with happiness thinking that it was over, I need to let go now.

Future Story

I want to write a story
I'm not sure where to begin.
Do I start with the day I said that I loved you
or the day, years later, you told me the same thing?
Do I go into detail about the chivalry you displayed?
Do I describe having to go to the doctor to fix what you did?
Do I tell about your arrogance and ignorance when you told me there was no God?
Do I talk about your preaching the gospel with relish?
The story would become a book, maybe too much for my mother to read.
She would have to turn away from the pages and gasp
Others would say "No one knows what she lived through."
Or maybe, "There is no way that is all true."
But it is.
I could never make up all the ways you changed me, shaped me into who I am.
There is no fiction like this.
I want to describe it all so I can read myself and then I will know how to feel
about you and life and death and survival.

Troll under the Bridge

Those times you lay on the couch and I on the love seat and our hands would touch and we left them that way because we wanted to.
I thought you'd always be there for the rest of my life.
I didn't know I had more time than you.
The sand in my car there weeks after,
Simpsons every night,
Sundance films,
I'd slap your face even though I knew you'd hit me harder,
It still felt pretty good to slap you.
Jokes always, even not funny ones,
Grey flannel and Polo,
Edisto Island, always Edisto.
Signing that petition like it mattered.
Peaches and boiled peanuts.
I knew you'd never be the same...
Suddenly I allow myself to remember the good things that were overshadowed by your devastation path before.
I forgot so I could survive and now I remember...
Like a troll in my head that only comes out when the town stops trying to crucify him.
That troll is out.
He sits on his bridge and weeps and mumbles
all the things that were good about us.

Definition of Gone

Gone
Wind through the fingers, riding in the car.
Eyelash you wanted to wish on.
Stone you decided to skip.
That one sock.
Book you loaned to the wrong person.
Necklace you dropped in the wave.
On the tip of your tongue.
I am the soul rememberer.
I am all that knows what the picture of the feather means.
I am the survior of you.
I am all the stories now.
Because you are gone.