A single tear
31 January 2008 
I don’t usually cry when I’m sad. I cry in rage, in frustration, in stress, but not in sorrow.
I dislike funerals, mostly for that reason. Everyone else cries, and I feel like I should join in and attempt to muffle sobs that I don’t have. Instead I end up standing alone in my silent grief, hoping that people don’t notice my lack of visible emotion.
I expected the same today, especially since my grandfather’s death wasn’t particularly unexpected or painful. And then my dad walked up to the podium. He and I are very much alike, we’re quiet readers, we’re observers, and we rely more on reason than emotion in most matters. And although he didn’t cry when he reflected on the times he had with his father and how he reacted to his death, his story did prompt a single tear to form in the corner of my eye. It slid halfway down my face before it dried, leaving only a thin line of salt.
He said he didn’t expect much sorrow, because he knew it was his dad’s time to pass on and begin his life beyond this world. It was logical and it made sense to him.
“I was there with him when he took his last breath, I felt his pulse slow to a stop, and I was relieved,” he said, “because his pain and suffering in this world was over.”
Yet the next morning, he felt a spring of emotion flow up from within and he began crying uncontrollably, not being able to pinpoint why, he explained.
Later he realized that it wasn’t sorrow or anger that caused his unexpected swell of feeling, it was a realization of the bond he had with his father, something that he could not feel keenly enough until after his father had left this life. Now, he said, he welcomes the tears when they come because he knows it’s a sign of the love he and his father shared.
Something about his story touched me in a way that no hymn, memory or photograph ever could. I cried at the funeral, but I don’t think it was sorrow that brought on the emotion. If my dad’s fountain of grief realized the love he had built up in his 47 years, my single tear realized a glimpse of the bond I share with him.
Love and Death
This weekend was one of those times that makes a person sit back and think. In a slightly ironic circle, the love of my life re-entered and then my grandfather exited in a single breath.
I find myself feeling helpless. After all, I pushed Tom away because I thought it was best, even though it was against my instinct and my heart. And yet something overuled my foolish reason and sent me back to him.
And death — admidst all of its gravity, it has an aspect to it that is light, like a fresh breeze whooshing through a still night. It moves free of everything around it, but nothing is free from it. In a single breath it can knock off a respectable gentleman’s hat, touch the drafts of a biography and make the apers fly up toward the clouds, the stories disperse across the sky.
And so, with a shove from reason and a breeze of the ephermeral, I’m willing to step wherever my instinct takes me this time.
I came back
27 January 2008 
If you love something let it go….
I’ve done a lot of letting go, grandparents who pass out of this world into the next, boyfriends, best friends, my religious phase in middle school, but I’m not sure if any of them have ever come back. So the second part of that phrase — if it comes back to you, it’s yours, if it doesn’t then it was never meant to be — well I figured it was just something to tag on at the end so that you could say goodbye and still keep your composure because of that tiny twinge of hope that it can still come back.
In the course of 24 hours though, I realized that there is something to it, you just have to be completely crazy to see it through. I also realized that it wasn’t me who let him go. He let me go, and after a year and a half, I came back.
I would expect it to feel elating, exciting, but really it feels like a combination of surreal and completely normal.
So I sit here wondering how it happened, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never know the answer to that question. What I know is that I have no intention of ever leaving again or letting him go.
He ruined her yellow shoes
To make sure her yellow heels were visible, she put on the skinny jeans, even though she hadn’t washed them in a week. She’d bought the heels today because…well…they were on sale. And they were yellow (something that merits notice even if she doesn’t have any yellow tops.)
She double checked the evenness of her eye liner as her foot tapped to Alicia Keyes playing in the other room. She checked the time and threw on a pink, loose-fitting shirt. The phone rang as if on cue, it was her best friend Becca, there to pick her up before they went out to their friends’ party.
The next morning, the sun rose gradually and strong, as did her headache. Her hair tossled, shoes smudged and strewn on different sides of the room, she glanced around and saw a guy from her biology class that she had flirted with once or twice. He snored on the bed next to her as images came flashing out of her dark memory of the night before, and a sickening feeling sank into her stomach that had nothing to do with her hangover. She quickly put on her shoes to walk home, and a felt a tightness rise in her throat. The right heel was broken.
Who is she? She’s your cousin, my sister, your best friend’s roommate, our friend, that girl from next door.
More importantly, what happened? Where did Becca go? Did the girl with the yellow shoes remember consenting to stay? Did she remember consenting to anything? Or did she simply accept without thinking, without even really being there.
Does she know anything more than the newspaper reporters who write later in the week that police are investigating a possible rape? And then she reads in print, “Because they are acquaintances, the case will involve a lot of he said, she said,” according to the police.
The police lieutenant investigating a rape from last weekend told me that police are not going to stop rapes that happen at private residences…there’s just no way to stop them, he said.
And she, like so many other girls who have been abused and violated, is forgotten.
Mr. Right Now
20 January 2008
Filed under Uncategorized
Tags: body, dating, Mr. Right, sex, waiting game
Mr. Right is not on the radar. It may be years before he is. But that doesn’t mean I should ignore Mr. Right Now.
Mr. Right Now (we’ll abbreviate and call him Mr. RN, actually Mr. Ron sounds good), may not be perfect. He doesn’t have a great body, he doesn’t do sex, and his life revolves around bands I’ve never even heard of.
But he’s a hell of a lot better than the Mr.’s of Last Year, who didn’t seem to see anything but my body, an image of a bed in their mind and various schemes to try to put the two together.
Also better than Mr. Right Then, the guy who was perfect a few years ago, before all of his good looks and smarts were buried under a lack of motivation and a propensity to feel sorry for himself.
Mr. Ron makes me feel comfortable; I don’t second-guess him, because he’s so genuinely sincere. He calls when he says he will and he doesn’t torment me with waiting games. And then there’s that something about him that makes me grin.
So rather than write him off because he’s not my dream man, I figure Mr. Ron and I can get to know each other and have some fun. Theoretically, it should make for a good dating experience.
I owe my acceptance of the Right Now philosophy to a blogger chick named Roxy. Check her out, http://predatort.blogspot.com/
