Yep, that’s me.
I am getting better at saying No.
I am learning very slowly that No is a complete sentence. It does not require explanation or argument.
Having been gifted a vagina at birth, this is a lesson hard fought and won. We are taught as women to speak coy and play safe. A hard no is a hard thing to say. It’s dangerous in some situations or socially inappropriate in others. But I am learning. My feelings matter, my body is my own and all that jazz. I’m 43 now, kinda about time.
I do not know where in my life I learned not to torch bridges. Some of those fuckers should be burnt, blown up, the landscape altered forever and the ground salted.
I never salt the ground, it’s not mine to destroy.
Just because nothing grows there for me doesn’t make it desecrated or unholy. It’s just not mine. Not much is. Maybe someone else will have some luck.
Maybe the seeds I sow don’t belong where I attempt to plant them. Like I am trying to grow orchids in the desert. That sounds about right. Me and my euphemisms, those grow like prolific weeds.
Nobody knows how to say goodbye
It seems so easy ’til you try
Then the moments passed you by
Nobody knows how to say goodbye*
I rarely argue with the Lumineers but Ima beg to differ here. It seems like most people know how to say goodbye to me. That is the word I struggle with. Goodbye.
There exists a list of things that Beyoncé can do that I cannot.
1- Slay
2- Pull off a sun goddess head dress and/or singing in public
And the big one…
3- Tell him boy bye
Goodbye, bad bye, any bye is not in my vocabulary.
Not in a permanent, fare thee well kinda way anyways.
noun. leaving
- abandonment
- adieu
- bow out
- congé
- decampment
- desertion
- egress
- egression
- embarkation
- emigration
- escape
- evacuation
- exit
- exodus
- expatriation
- farewell
- flight
- getaway
- going
- going away
- goodbye
- hegira
- migration
- parting
- passage
- powder
- quitting
- recession
- removal
- retirement
- retreat
- sailing
- separation
- setting forth
- setting out
- stampede
- start
- takeoff
- taking leave
- taking off
- vacation
- vanishing act
- walkout
- withdrawal
- withdrawing
Abandonment, ya, that is how it feels. Desertion. (See above where orchids don’t bloom in the desert despite my best efforts). Quitting (not sure how to do that). Vanishing act. Nay, I am here. Withdrawal. Like coming off heroin sometimes when they leave. Puking, shaking, screaming, craving, crying.
I have compared the place my exes go when they leave me to a room full of boxes, a graveyard, or a holding area of sorts. I called this blog One Giant Coffin and maybe it is (and I am) all of those things combined. Like my life is a Stephen King novel, Salem’s Lot perhaps where the dead don’t stay dead. Or Pet Semetary where I do try to bury them and the ground is indeed some unholy cursed place and sometimes (almost always) they come back.
Thrice in 30 days the resurrection has occurred. And 3 times I have had that line from Lost Boys pop into my head after they entered the Big Giant Coffin attempting to eradicate the vampires known as lost boys “they pulled a mind fuck on us and talked.”
It’s not the talking that threw me or mind-fucked me. They talk, I listen, this is in my wheelhouse.
It’s actual tangible effort.
They
Are
Trying
Like Skynet, they are learning and evolving, becoming sentient.
It’s a little overwhelming.
Every time her phone rang or someone knocked on the door Dorothy Parker would say “what fresh hell is this.”
My current amendment?
What fresh bliss is this?
My heart is spoken for but good god damn
The return of the kindness and attention I expended is this sweet, soothing balm on old hurts. I feel exonerated, liberated and justified for the times I chose them, waited patiently and spoke of them highly even in absentia.
After a hiatus my him came back and did what I always wanted.
He’s trying.
Maybe there is some truth in the old adage about loving something and setting it free, see what it does on its own. If it does come back, they do tell lovely stories and say nice things. And they are grateful to be let back in.
Regardless of the eventual outcome, it is comforting to be thought of fondly in retrospect. To be sought out and apologized to for things I had already forgiven.
Search the heavens and the Earth below
Nobody knows how to get back home*
One more time I gotta disagree…maybe sometimes we can go home again.
*Lumineers
