I don`t always appreciate this but I remind myself of this when it is the darkest.
I aspire to grow up like this…
There is enough mediocrity in the world. I don’t believe sex should be one of them. What a perfect, vulnerable, terrifying, energizing way of feeding your soul. Don’t hold back. Your neighbours need something to talk about anyway.
There are some great things about being broken. For one, people stop inviting you to baby and wedding showers because they are afraid you will:
a) break out weeping
b) make cold, sarcastic comments about the impending event.
They are not wrong. I’ve done both. You really only have to do it once before word spreads that you are not the right guest to be seated next to Aunt Nancy.
Being broken means you can be an asshole and people will offer you get out of jail free cards. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. The expectations change. And you let them. Because if you have to explain to one more person why watching a father and daughter dance at a wedding makes you want to slam your head into a wall, you think you will die. So you drink your body weight instead and pass out in the lovely garden behind the reception. And nobody thinks twice about it. Not even you.
But here’s the thing, being broken means you are…broken. Like for real. It means every time some one tells you they love you, you screw your face up like there’s a bad smell in the room. It means that you stop answering your home phone because you would actually rather not know than answer an emergency call ever again.
This may strike some of you as a fairly pessimistic view. Granted, it has its downer moments but there is also something very liberating about looking in someone’s eyes and just admitting how fucked up your puzzle pieces are. Somehow, owning the broken means it owns me just a a little less.
The bigger problem about being broken is that people think they can heal your broken. Flowers, nice words, remembering your favourite wine. I love these things. It would be untrue if I said they didn’t impact me. But deep wounds are not fools. They have not forgotten the kind words that precipitated their making. And they cannot differentiate between then and now. You have roomed with them for so long that you no longer believe you are worthy of being treated well. Fucked up side effect of being fucked up. Ask any child who has ever lived in care. We think if we place them somewhere warm and lovely, with people who are warm and lovely they will become…warm and lovely. But they will fight you, test you, wreck every last thing you offer them because it feel foreign. It feels too, too risky. And then you will finally agree too that they are not worthy of your love. And at least you know something for sure then. Stability in the chaos. Broken logic.
I have often said that it is the broken people in my life that make me feel whole. Like our pieces fit together somehow in a strange abstract portrait. What I am missing, you lend me. Hiding the bodies of our experiences in each other’s back yards. It is the only love I believe. And the picture above becomes the mantra we speak to each other: You are broken and I love your pieces.
There may have been a few moments at work today where I felt like this…
This is essentially my life. If I don’t get the stink eye from someone at least several times a day…I truly feel I’m not doing my job.
Also if you are on twitter, follow this kid. He makes me laugh every day. Which is half the reason people are looking at me weird all the time. #circleoflifeyo
We wage war on our bodies as if we have done something wrong by being beautiful
I recently read an article on the demise of literature as it pertains to blogs…particularly blogs that reveal far, far too much. This immediately made me think of my last blog replete with minute to minute photos of my allergic reaction. Then it made me think of my other, other blog about my soul mate gone wrong. I just stopped thinking after that.
I would be lying if I told you that I don`t have moments of shock and embarrassment at my own candor sometimes but if you happen to be anyone who has known me for more than 5 minutes, you will recognize that this is not my blog persona, this is me in real life. I live out loud. I have lived through much too much secrecy and adornment of truths. In my work, I get a backstage pass to what happens when we choose to cover ourselves up and cover over who we really are. It is devastation. It is also the thing that any parent will tell you leaves them in state of paralysed fear that they are the worst parent on the planet because no one tells you about the secret rage and disappointment that comes with having a child – we just make Easter bunny cupcakes and dress our kids up in clothes that we can barely pull off ourselves and smile, smile, smile.
I don`t have the answers to everything but what I know for sure is that every time someone has let down their guard and opened their stories to me, I learned something valuable…every single time. Those are pretty good stats. All of my best friends are `broken`people who would instantly agree and then show you their scars. I like these kind of people. They inspire me to be that kind of people. And I have come to appreciate the uncomfortable feeling I give others is sometimes the price of living a transparent, authentic life. Gosh, that seems like a much smaller price to pay than your whole darn soul.
So Dear Sir or Madam, author of the article about the egregious over share, kindly kiss my inspiring ass.
XO,
B
CRUEL COSMIC JOKE #268,098,711
After a heinous case of the hives gets me some well deserved days off work, the equally heinous weather finally breaks and it is a beautiful day outside. Unfortunately my doctor advises me that should I expose my skin to any kind of sun I will receive a sunburn equivalent to 1000x the hell fire of Hades. I can barely look at the sunshine out a window without my skin bursting into flames…
COOL COSMIC REPRIEVE #378,209,001
My night meds make me feel like I drank 10 Tequila shooters with the same warm feeling in my tummy and equally entertaining banter with anyone around…and there’s no hangover.
I miss you.
I would like to say this is a tragic statement about someone who died. I have them too. But this one is about him.
I am not the sappy, soggy kind of girl who has ever believed in fate or destiny or even serendipity. I have had my hopes dashed and drowned and strangled and left for dead one too many times to be that naive. There has always been something easier about expecting the worst. At least I have that one shoe to hold onto while I wait for the other one to drop. That is more realistic to me. Less profound and magical, but realistic. And I have always dealt in the currency of reality. Some people say I’m blunt. Some people say I’m rude. He said it was like looking in a mirror.
Have you ever felt that paralysing feeling in your skin when someone comes so close to your own DNA that it is as if you have always known each other? I want to differentiate here between like and lust and love and similarities – it’s different. You read about it. You watch movies about it. You hear about it and expect it feels exactly the same way it did when when your heart would skip a beat right before you kiss someone the first time. That’s nice, lovely really, but it’s different too. Your heart doesn’t skip a beat, it just starts beating the same way as that person. It syncs. Your energy actually settles down. You can breathe each other. You can feel each other. And you have absolutely no choice.
Even now, I can feel his thoughts. I am sure his radar is going crazy while I write this. It mostly just pisses me off these days. I say in my head, “Beat it” and he says in his “Make me”. At a stale mate. Again.
What do you call this? A soul mate? Is it that simple? Because frankly I have a thing or two to say to the powers that be if this is who they have chosen for me. Consider this – what if you were being robbed? Say you were thrown in the back room with a gun to your head and told to shut your mouth or you’d be killed. What if as you were sweating and crying and begging every god you could think of, you looked up, and looked into the eyes of your soul mate? Think about that. Like the very opposite of everything that ever made you feel safe and loved and good was now staring at you with the grim realization that you are the one true reflection of him.
Yep. Fuck me.
I imagine this is what the universe is saying to me. It’s not like Cinderella or the fricken mermaid that gives up her tail and walks on land. It is far, far less complicated. It’s not romantic or charming even. It’s simply two people who just cannot live without each other. Or anywhere near each other.
It makes more sense to me now having discovered this than when I thought everyone was born in the exact right place and time to stumble into their soul mate. How convenient and lovely would that be? I used to wonder to myself how the stats got stacked so evenly. Then I started to wonder about those crazy cat ladies who end up dying alone with the stench of unchanged cat litter -don’t they have a soul mate? Did they wander too far out of their geographical area? Did their soul mate? Did she miss a bus or an appointment or a memo? I mean if you read the stars or the palms or the tabloids – everyone has someone for them. It’s just accepted to be the truth. And they are wonderful. And they are kind and rich. And when you have a break up, people say, “He wasn’t the one honey”. And you start working out and fixing up and going out more often so you will be hot and gorgeous and ready when you slip on a banana peel in front of him and he saves you from falling head first into the subway. I mean, we get out bed for this shit right? We slough off bona fide heart ache and self doubt and cruel indignation because we believe we will find the holy grail of partners – your god damn soul mate.
I literally feel like I’m about to tell you there is no Santa Clause and I feel like I should prepare you to reveal that while there is indeed a St. Nick, he is less the jolly gift giver you have always thought him to be and more the startling real human being that can’t remember your birthday or where they left their keys. Soul mates are just human beings who have been through the same or more or less than you and may not be anywhere near the same life page as you are. Soul mates aren’t matched on socio economic similarities, or matching skin tones or extra curricular interests. No. They are other human beings. That in some strange and weird and wonderful amazing way have a piece of you inside them that glows brighter when you get closer to them. It’s like a magnet to yourself. Your human, flawed, scarred self. I am certain he had a similar reaction to me the first time I started to cry and was looking up the soul mate manual on how to make it stop and just be wonderful. Like the first time he advise me I was “trying too hard” at sex and I wanted to instantly file a grievance with the soul mate association. It is confusing to me how you can love someone so much, so instantly, that has the ability to tear out your insides like they are casually gutting a fish. It is even more confusing to me that there is no earthly way to be with this person that supports a healthy state of mind. Like I’m in the back room terrorized at gun point all the time. How wretched, soul crushingly wretched.
Ok, before you write me off as a complete cynical nut job, let me say that despite my obvious disappointment, I am grateful to have had the chance to lay eyes on him, to touch him, to know him. He was indeed my mirror, holding up to me the very flawed way I was conducting myself, the holes in my well manicured exterior, the strengths of my tormented soul. I miss the way his very presence could soothe me. I miss the way we laughed at jokes seemingly invisible to everyone else, and how time passed like it didn’t even exist when he was around. Time sucker, he used to say. There was never enough time to drink him all in. And now there is nothing but time to miss him.
I think the idea of soul mates is very real but even after that experience I just don’t know or understand it all. I can’t fathom that being it, him being all there was to discover in this life. I hope that the notion of how I felt with him will keep me from being with less than I deserve since being with him also proved that even a soul mate can devastatingly be less than you deserve. Is a soul mate meant to be an everlasting love or the only thing that would wake you up when you were living a dead life? I just don’t know for sure. Even as much as I know for certain that something was strange and beautiful about us together that can’t be explained.
I’m thinking of you. I know you know this. And yes, I had my ginger tea today. Thank you for making it for me that first day. That, and so many other things you taught me have changed my life. And while in theory this alone is consistent with what a soul mate is meant to do, I will forever lament the absence of you and be thankful for it at the same time.
brandiland.net 