Dress Sizes

There are a great many posts of late by women saying they have the blues and are feeling like their own skin is a size too small.  There is something in the air women are saying, maybe a funk has settled in, worse than the cold, harsher than the flu, debilitating like pneumonia, and that nothing is moving forward.  We’re taking steps forward, but the wind is pushing-pushing, pushing us around and damn-it, it’s taking our spirit too.  Those damn Karma fairies are holding back on the good news, a winning lottery ticket, come-hither stares from a lanky stranger, they’re holding back on all those little intangible perks in life we inhale greedily and take for granted when we’re not under that grey cloud of the blues.
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I dislike making lists.  I pride myself on my memory, and ability to unfold the recent events that might make up the numbered items on the twice-folded piece of paper shoved into the right pocket of a pair of blue jeans and referred to as needed.   It goes against my grain, and if I was to peel back the layers, I’m sure I’d find that the act of scribing notes to myself is associated with mental weakness.  It’s not, of course, it’s a pride thing. I have amazing short-term recall, but it’s the older memories that blur between fact and fiction.

When Billy started having his minute memory losses, ultimately diagnosed as a malignant brain tumor, I started writing, a way of making lists I think.  I didn’t want to remember his march to death, but to remember how I got there, which eventually lead to the unthinkable, ‘where do I want to go’ question.  His journey, a fight to his right at life, wasn’t so different from mine, only I didn’t have doctors poisoning my body with chemicals, and cutting me with knives, rather I did that myself with introspection.  I clearly had the better end of the deal, and now that Billy is gone having lost his fight, and I am still here, fighting a different battle—acceptance for those things I cannot change.

I didn’t take if lying down because it felt too much like a shrug of the shoulders, and oh well that is life, what could I do about the cards I was dealt sort of feeling.  I don’t know if my life is predetermined, and regardless of what I do differently now if it will change the events ahead of me, or if I do alter my course now if I’ll end up at the same place regardless, who knows for sure.  Acceptance of loss didn’t mean that I had to surrender or find a rocking chair for the front porch, and wait around for my spirit to leave me.  It simply meant I had a choice.
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Disconnected.

There are days when my well of words runs low.  Will I lose the feeling to write, live, and write again and again?

My head is a ghost town, its cranial passageways have a fine layer of dust covering the ground, and my feet leave imprints. The tumbleweeds bounce off the walls leaving a trail of smudge marks on contact.  This is a lonely feeling for a writer, it’s when we are the most vulnerable, the most at risk, the most lost.  Our word pictures can’t connect.  It’s not dot-to-dot. It doesn’t work like that…

My words are suspended in their singular state inside the tumbleweed trying to connect, to form a sentence. 
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