Natch

In January 2005, I replaced my paper journal with this site. In the time that has passed, I've grown accustomed to pouring my experiences and emotions out in this very public space, but still finding my answers in the process of the writing, and finding support in reading comments from people I would never have met on my own but whose support fortifies me nonetheless.

Today and tonight, I realized that I lean on this space so much that in my real, here-and-now life, I'm a ghost in the fog. I watch my life as if I'm not participating, I silence my opinion, my voice, so that I might figure it and write it later, and I think how I'll set it up and send it out, how I'll display whatever it is that is on my mind or in my heart, whatever it is that is worth recording.

I think I've orchestrated an extra step between me and my awareness, but sometimes I truly don't know how I feel until it comes out in words that I can see, here, understand. Perhaps that's the very thing that drives it all, what makes writers write, journalists journal, diarists... well you get the idea.

Internal comprehension through external expression. It is what it is, I suppose.

Everybody knows one

There is a woman who works for the same company as I do but we don't work together and I don't know her well, though she's always pleasant if not a bit too friendly for my comfort zone. She's a busybody, that one, and I've heard several stories about her, stories that seemed a bit stretched in their telling. I privately held the opinion that there was no way someone could be that unfiltered in her manners and words in an office environment.

Until today, that is.

In our lobby this morning, Busybody was waiting for the elevator, along with an office friend. I was sorting brochures at reception. The office friend asked, When do you leave on your trip?

I tell her Tuesday.

Busybody asks, Where are you going?

I tell her.

She says, Ooooh, nice. Is this what you're doing with your inheritance?

The lobby is silent. I stand there, mouth agape and wordless.

The elevator arrives and takes her away.

I look at the receptionist and she at me. She shakes her head and answers the ringing phone, listens to the caller and puts the call through, all the while her head shaking. I walk out of the lobby and hear her, tsk tsk tsk.

It's the little things

I like mail, I do. I like ripping offers in half and half again. I like the minor power of shredding what I don't want or need, and I really enjoy shredding the credit card offers that arrive for my niece and nephew. I also like aligning my bills alphabetically, appreciating the order as if I didn't have to pay up soon enough. I don't mind paying the bills, I don't, because I think they are fair, and I really do like the order.

And so it is.

What I don't like is the newly realized responsibility of my sister and how that is reflecting in my mailbox. She's lovely, she is, but she's also a mess and although child-like, still capable of putting all sorts of power and control on my day. But, well... she's lovely. Except that there always has to be an adult (aka family member of any age) to pick up her pieces.

Since my father died, that adult is me. (With a lot of help from her daughter, I will not deny. Hi Peanut!)

In my mailbox today, a letter from the IRS. Apparently, I've been assigned an Employee Identification Number on her behalf. It does not matter that in her entire life she has worked two weeks at Jack-in-the-Box in the 70s and a four-week stint at a mall pet shop in the 90's, apparently the IRS is after her, and therefore me. I am what they call but do not define TTEE. Do you know what that means? I haven't a clue.

It does not matter that I am not an employer. What matters to me is that in their mind (and hers, mind you), I owe an enormous amount of back taxes and WHEN WILL I PAY?

It's comical, this is.

Are you laughing? I am. Well, not true. But I am trying. I do see that it is funny, but seriously, there's one crack in the joke, and that's the fact that this official letter from the ever-so-serious IRS has listed not one but two of her ex-husbands and, by process of elimination, landed on me. At my home address. One of those two, ahem, bastards, is responsible for this but now I have suddenly become employer and owe back taxes? No one can say the IRS is not determined.

Between us, I know it's laughable, but I still don't like my name on the list.

At all.

I do take it seriously, this letter sitting beside me, in all its archaic courier font and one-inch margins on plain white paper. My name is on it, after all. Matters not that there are three names beneath my own, my name is on top.

When I think about what tires me, it's not what chews at my mind and rewrites my thoughts, not what sits in my heart and rewrites my hope, and it's not dreams changed or loves lost, it's the familiarity of moments like these, moments that come out of the dark and with all their Boooyaaaa voices that momentarily paralyze me. It's the moments that are so small yet so loud and insistent, like she is. Moments that consistently interrupt and cut in line, and demand to be dealt with right now. No matter what I am doing, or where I am, or even if I left her house five minutes ago.

It's these moments that turn me around.

With bowed head

Today, every day, thank you.


Stantis, Birmingham News, 2006

Sunday, kissable Sunday

I give this face a kiss every day.



Love her, I do.

Nine days and counting

In just nine days I'll be on my way to Barcelona. It will involve one car, four airports, three planes, one train, five cities and two cabs before we get to our hotel. I admit it makes me enormously tired to think about, but that's just right now. Who cares if I'm tired then, I'll be on vacation.

And I'm excited about that.

Plus, we're going First Class all the way.

And I'm pretty darn excited about that too.

My niece is in town this weekend and so the guest bedroom is hers at the moment. But come tomorrow when she returns to Austin, it will become less of a bedroom and more of a packing room. I'm ridiculously anticipating the thrill I'll have when I fold my clothes and place them in little ready-to-be-packed piles on the bed.

Also at ridiculously high levels of excitement is how I feel about getting new stamps on my Passport. As if it didn't sit in a file in my filing cabinet most of the time, as if were on display somewhere, as if the hundreds of photos I will no doubt take wouldn't be enough, I still can't wait to have my passport stamped with five new countries.

Painting the fenceline, these

Sometimes I can't get free

I'm not writing for pity, I wouldn't do that. I'm writing because I'm tired and more than wanting you to know that I'm tired, I'd like for me to wake up tomorrow and read this: HEY ALISON, YOU ARE TIRED. DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Parenthetically speaking, here's a suggestion: GO TO SLEEP. (Sorry, sometimes I need all caps to get the message.)

I'm writing because I miss my Father. Because he was the answer to everything and I'm lost without him now. And because when he couldn't be the answer, I was. We were a team, he and I. And I'm writing because I'm still not sure how to go from helping him out to leading the show. I'm writing because it's not fun without him and I never knew then, and wish I could tell him now, that I realize how much he did and maybe thank him again for all that he did because I thought I understood it then, and I really believed I was helping, but I get it now, I do. I was simply a companion on the ride.

I'm writing because I miss the woman my mother used to be and it's hard, so hard, to sit beside her and watch her leaving this world, watch her brunette hair turning grey, watch her eyes move past my face in a daze.

I miss it all, I do. I miss him and her, and I miss the children that my kids were, the freedom we danced upon when we all thought that my being Aunt Alison was all it would take.

I miss the love in our home, Cat saying, Love you, and Dad saying, Love you too too. I miss then, just then. The love, the fun, the thrill of family unique. Their exchange echoes in my head at night. Her voice: Love you. His voice: Love you too too.

We were musical then. Dreamy and musical. Memories do that, don't they? They spin and shine and I wonder if I'll one day look back at now and smile.

I miss him reminding me that no one said it would be easy. I miss him reminding me that destiny is only as much as and what you believe.

I'm tired. I'm tired of trying to be what I was so damn sure I would be, should be, but maybe can't be, I don't know. I'm tired of him being gone. I'm tired of her forgivable needs, tired of my unforgivable anger, my forgivable failure. I'm tired of the guilt and the battles that should never be, tired of the silent but enormous wall of denial. I'm tired of the shadow of her ever-presence. I'm tired of me. I'm tired of desperation, and tired of reality. I'm tired of the many things I am and the many more things that I am not. I'm tired of wondering who I'm fooling and knowing it's me, just me, and I cannot possibly do it alone.

I am one thing more: I am here. I am present. I believe that above all what matters is that I show up. For her, for him, and even you. It's what I do, I show up. I'm proud of that, I am. That is all I feel good about right now.

I'm tired of showing up and seeing that I'm building my hopes on dreams and chains.

Did I mention that I'm also angry? I thought it would be more, and in way, less. I thought he'd be here, always be here. For her, for me, for them. Blame it on my heart. Eight shades of grey out my window and I'm still blue. Blue like his eyes. Blue like my heart.

I'm tired of the Sea that I am, and I'm angry to be the water beneath the wind. Sometimes this heart of mine rages, even when it's calm. What does not change is his eyes. God I miss his eyes. They were blue like hope, blue like the Sea. Blue like my heart.

It's only love, doing this to me.

Modern times

Today has been yet another day of meetings. If interruption disrupts productivity, meetings destroy it. Meetings are the nuclear bomb to productivity. What have I done this week? Listen and speak. Not work, just listen. And speak, as in reminding the team that according to the agenda we should be having a break right about now.

Today's meeting was with a different group of my fellow workers than Monday and Tuesday, so at least the faces and the topic at hand were fresh. I had the chance to observe a new lot of things I find either interesting or irritating about my fellow workers. For instance, the Diet Coke guy. When lunch was ordered in, the drinks did not arrive, so the receptionist purchased an assortment of drinks from the machine on the third floor and brought them to us. When DC guy realized there was no Diet Coke in the selection, he had a bit of a meltdown and said slash whined, "Who in this day and age would not include Diet Coke? I can't believe that, I really can't believe that." As he spoke his words, he double and triple checked the 7-Up and Dr. Pepper cans just to be sure that they were not Diet Coke in disguise.

Apparently, he couldn't believe it.

In this day and age? He said it as if he had gone to the emergency room with a serious bloody gash on his arm and the doctors placed leaches on his wound to stop the bleeding. Or maybe he had to use a rotary dial phone. Or the cab he called arrived as a horse and buggy.

I wanted to sit him down and tell him that in this day in age, we thank the person who, upon realizing there is a problem, takes it upon his or herself to resolve it. Even if the answer involves 7-Up.

In which inspired unravels

I was in a meeting today that started at 8:30 and ended at 5:30 and then moved on to a social dinner until 9:30. There were 12 of us in the meeting and dinner. I learned that 11 of us incorporate the phrase, At the end of the day, regularly into our speech. Regularly as in often. I stopped counting at 25, the number of times I heard At the end of the day. I didn't start counting until I noticed a pattern and realized that I was being tortured, so there must have been at least at 10 times the phrase was uttered before the twitching began. The day was young when I quit counting, not yet noon.

It's like nine hours of sitting in a room while someone scrapes their ridiculously long fingernails along the chalkboard, the phrase's over-use that irritating to me.

Now, it is the end of the day. And, finally, I've stopped twitching.

But I know it's only temporary, the lack of twitching. Tomorrow is the second day of the meeting, which will carry on until the end of the day. Or eternity, whichever comes first.