Story Monster

There is a Story Monster inside me.  But I have not seen her for a while.

Oh why did I go for it?  Did I say yes to everything?  Why did I do these things that make it so difficult to find the monster.  The shy monster who loves time and loneliness and empty space.  Plans scare her away.  She buries herself, makes a nest in my throat and stays there indefinitely while I busy around and do stuff and check things off of my list.  

Who wants to be busy like this? 

I suppose I do.   Because I’m scared of her.  I’m scared of the monster.  She grabs me and I lose myself.  She moves me for her cause which, in surrendering to it, dissolves a part of me. 

Where are you Story monster?  You scary, scared being?  You brilliant wave, who takes me for your vessel.  I miss you.  I know I have not been a great house keeper.  The room smells like caffeine and importance.  I could clean up… Talk less, do less, worry less.  

Talk less, do less, worry less.  

Love more.  Thank people more.  Play more.  Rest.

Or I could stay here casting words around a unknown space, making desperate attempts at finding you, at seeing the invisible by scattering the glitter of language to reveal a negative image.  The Words point to you, suggest your whereabouts.  

Words are the lingerie for a truth that forever changes shape.  I could lose myself as a fetishist - obsessed with the form, mistakenly stroking leather and lace, forgetting about your body underneath.  

Beautiful Story Monster.  I’m sorry.  

Death Makes Me Beautiful

Death makes me beautiful.  The the bad decisions, hateful love handles, giant worries and failures - these become pieces of lint, with mortality near.

We think we’re grown-up.   We think now that we’re in our 30’s and 40’s and 50’s and 60’s, we know life.  Then Death walks up - gets all close.  Suddenly the everything that seemed to be important dissolves.  All that stuff was so easy compared to this.  This, this, this… immense nothing.  This too-big-to-make-sense-of disappearance.  You were here a moment ago - gorgeous vessel for my love, stunning light that shone in my sky.  You were here and together we made a constellation - even when you were billions of miles away.  But now you’re gone.

I burn more brightly trying to figure it out.  Trying to find you.  Listening for your voice. The others don’t matter - I want you.  One more laugh.  One more bear hug and wandering conversation. 

Somehow - the magic in you has turned to tears and grief. 

I don’t know why, but there is also gratitude.  And shame for that.  All I want to do is cry and celebrate my body.  I’m sorry I am grateful for your passing.  It’s confusing.  I want you here, but death makes me beautiful.  The flaws and imperfections are alive and radiant. 

I thought I was all grown-up.  But I’m not.  There is still so much I don’t know.  Information is everywhere.  Understanding is endangered.  But it begins to grow in the wake of you. 

Unless we open up, we never get to see or share the parts that come to life with the stimulus of grief.  Just as birth catalyzes that which cannot be known before parenthood, death awakens something.  It puts in motion the maturation of imaginal cells, those that sprout wings as we let ourselves go and expand into something new.

I undress:  every sensation is divine.  Every “could-be-better” is perfect. 

To the living:  Sit in the sun with me.  Let me smell you.  Let me hold your face and touch your skin lightly, like a whisper.  Let me know the parts of you I didn’t get to see in them. 

Death makes us all so beautiful.

Icarus and the Giant Clitoris

If we were all so open...maybe pain wouldn't be called such.  Because it would be shared.  And when it is shared it is somehow more comfortable, sweeter, unpainful.  It becomes a medium for connection. 

Happiness is Icarus flying skyward, on his own, delighting in the experience of individual corporeal incarnation - the freedom to be one.  Pain does not have a specific archetype (in this metaphor).  Pain is the mother of experience.  It is the impetus for surrender and the terrifying truth that we are all one, little nerve endings on the end of a giant clitoris.  All sensation is shared, regardless of the walls we build.

Why would it be terrifying that we are all one?  Because I am no longer... The reality of oneness suggests Katrina, in all MY beauty and insecurity and invented importance, is not real and never was.  All that righteous self-making, for what?

Who is the me that possesses the idea of Katrina anyway?  Could it be that happiness exalts the self, while pain dissolves it?  Does Icarus know that his elation pulls him to the sun, the heat, the perpetual orgasm that melts the wax in our wings and swallows our joyful bodies?

Strangers Die Every Day

I'm struggling today.  With death and birth and trying to understand.  Trying to do a good job.  Trying so hard.  All this gratitude and all this suffering at once.  I feel big and bright and lonely.

I'm giving a presentation tonight.  I'm proposing and working and all those things... but I feel  stuck.  What do we do with life?  There is so much to feel and explore and make - we stumble around in our glorious imperfections and get triggered and yell at our friends and then someone dies and it hurts so much because we opened up and then we ask, “Do I just keep opening to this pain?”

Strangers die every day.  (I had friends at Naropa who were in a band by that name).

Thank you for being someone I can write all this to.  Thank you for sharing dreams and searching for potatoes.

Sly's son jumped out of a window.  He was having a nightmare...that's what Sly thinks.  He didn't jump out of an open window.  He jumped through it.  Now his brain is dead and his body is alive because his organs will be someone else's organs soon.  Sly thought the crash from the other room was a painting falling off of the wall.  Then he felt a breeze and opened the curtain to see his son crumpled on the pavement.  His spine was crushed.

And who am I in this momentary, star-muted world?  What do we do when the ineffable happens for real?  I write a lot of manifesto-ish stuff, but now I feel so distant, so impotent to help my friend or even help myself understand emotionally what is happening.  I want to hug everyone...No, I want everyone to hug each other and hug me and why did I even put on mascara today?

Strangers die every day.

And I worry about love handles, bags under my eyes, whether to buy kombucha or kevita, if I'll ever make a lot of money...

And I realize that humans are superheros.  Because how do you suffer through suffering like this without being a hero?  This happens, terribly painful things, brilliantly painful things happen all the time and we keep going.  How is that possible?

Suffering, fear and pain are the stimuli for heroism.  It's what triggers the hero inside and what makes us such incredible creatures.  We love even when we know that as love deepens so too does the potential pain of loss.  It is a risk we can't not take.

People fall...in love all the time.  And strangers die every day.

Don't Be Worried

Everyone is a Hero

In the heat of late Oklahoma summer, in a beige 1983 cadillac, my Oma suffered the weight of a poorly placed wig and a broken air conditioner.

It was July 13th and with two broken wrists, Oma had elbowed her way into the clunky vehicle.  Her injury was the result of a drunken slip at the mailbox earlier that week.  She wore casts from knuckle to forearm and was crippled to most activities with her hands, so I don't know how she drove to the liquor store. 

Without the use of her fingers, she was unable to release the car door handle.  So she laid on the horn until a kind, Ma'm-speakin' fellow came out.  “Be a good boy and bring me a case of Jonny Walker Red,” she said.  And he, or someone, did.

Maybe she enlisted the help of a good samaritan to light her Newport.  Or perhaps she had a reservoir of energy set aside specifically for that task.  When the whiskey arrived and the exchange was satisfied,  she fore-armed her way back through the town, steering wobbly toward a happier afternoon.  Though her exit from the vehicle was awkward and untimely, her journey ended successfully.  She made it  to her bedroom and to the sweet sweet sound of Alex Trebek's voice, with all the answers.

It's Safer Not To Go Slow

There was the soft friction of his entry, of his stubble against my cheek, the smell of his waking breath.  Attentive fingers met my clitoris, gentle, morning paced.  I knew he was about to come and it turned me on.  I was so close.  But I didn’t postpone his release.  I let him come because I liked it and it meant I could leave the scary slowness.

Awkwardness is lost in speed, as are the subtle transitions from one flavor of pleasure to another.  These whiz past in a race to finish.  There is so much more in the slow.  It overwhelms me.

After the orgasm he collapsed on me.  I love this, love the heavy surrender.  My sensation continued to swim above there, delighted at the cessation of stimulation - free to feel, to stretch and expand without urge to continue.  The unprovoked dance of shape-shifting pleasure… pulsing contractions and g-spot lightening bolts.  Untouched, I almost came.  But then it all fell - in a lovely way, much like his fall - the pulsing and inner squiggles fell asleep.  I was still aroused, but he was sweetly dead on me and for a while I didn’t want to move. 

When he rolled over, I lied there, supine, idea-filled and wet.  I brought fingertips to nerve button and resurrected secret intensity.  My eyes, when I opened them, tracked dizzily across the ceiling.  There were lake sounds, the call of loons.  Rolling eyes and rolling mind, sorting through thoughts. I felt a little girl, breaking rules.  Was I betraying him by not sharing this?  It fueled the speed of rubbing.  I made quick, tiny circles.  So wet I could have been underwater.  Faster faster, on the edge of orgasm.  So close. 

Back and forth, little taps, quick circles.  My body sweating and tense.  Any moment I would melt around the point, I would dissolve into sensation.  I paused, then returned to it.  Thoughts swimming, drowning, swimming - broken into pieces.  Faster, finish, go, go, go, go, go!

Covertly touching myself with a promise of orgasm.  (It would mean success, freedom, perhaps even a morning nap which I desperately need).  Come, come, come, come, come, come!  

But it wouldn’t happen.  The forced-ness prevented its arrival.  How bad would I be anyway if I came on my own as he slept next to me?  

“Oh!  I’m sorry to wake you.  No, um, really it wasn’t that I didn’t feel satisfied, it was just that I didn’t want to bother you and, well, I thought it would be easier this way.  It would have taken forever.  You would become ambitious and then I would start to feel bad for not delivering after all your effort.  It might get awkward, you’d be bored and I would force some sort of apologetic smile.  

“And if that weren’t to happen?  Well,  if we were to go very, very slowly…I don’t know, the consequences could be even more serious.  I might cry.  I might remember something awful.  I might fart or fall in love with you or, who knows what?  I might just die.  No, better this way - fast and alone.  I know what to expect.  It’s safer not to go slow.”