Uncategorized

Coming Home

August 25, 2016

My boss pulled me in the office the other day and asked me what I wanted to do at this new company.

“Do you want to come in and casually help out or do you want to take over and run things?”

Told me to think about it for a couple of days.

I knew there was no wrong answer and I thought about it pretty hard. But I already knew the answer.

I am going to run it.

He wants to build a tiny empire and I want to help him.

My strong suits are his weak points and vice versa.

Every job I’ve had in the past lends itself to this one. I got this.

I had the job when I walked in the door, I just had to say yes.

And I did.

I knew it would change things.

Like being up at 5:30am to write. But I like being up when the world is still asleep.

I haven’t had a straight job in 4 years and that ended as badly as anything could. I was to have a 5 year contract, paid over the table, a chance to save my money and build a life. It ended fast and furious a few months in and I was forced to regroup. I did a pretty good job of it and I love my life now. That place literally burned to the ground after I left.

I’ve been getting by on the grace of god and a bit of my own wits. Mostly god, and my comfort in being naked amongst strangers.

I just moved in with my Sunshine and it’s not perfect, but it’s really good. I love our little nest, I love her. I want to stay for a while. I really don’t want to move again until I buy something.

I want to finish this book and start another. I want the book to do well enough to keep me comfortable for a long while. And it very well could. I finally cracked the thing open after a month of avoiding it and damn, it’s good.

I always figured if I won the lottery I would probably keep working, I don’t sit still well.

JK Rowling got knocked off the billionaire list because she gives so much money to charity. I will be that way. What do I need a billion dollars for? My sisters need houses, people need food, dogs need rescuing and I wouldn’t have a clue as what to do with that much money other than making sure me and mine are comfortable.

Comfort to me isn’t about yachts and limos. It’s a cabin in the woods by a lake I can swim in. With a garden and roses.

It is possible to be an optimist and a realist when you realize anything you can imagine is real.

My dreams are my own and the only thing needed to make my life better is to dream bigger and work work work work work.

I am poised on the precipice of finally knowing what I want and having that be a good thing for once. Bliss.

I still say to my son “it’s a one in a million chance that you will become famous or a rock star, or an athlete or win the lottery of have some stroke of genius or luck in your life that leaves a big mark. But never ever think for a minute that it won’t happen. It does, every day. People win at life, amazing things happen. Why not you?” It is within the realm of possibilities. Everything is.

I have my Eeyore moments, everyone does. Mine are usually regarding men and relationships because let’s face it, they haven’t gone well. If they had I wouldn’t be here talking to you good people about how to tuck and roll when shit starts to burn.

There was a back and forth on this meme.

I have a +2 credit or I’m at 7, if the 3 good ones subtract from the bad, and they do. My girl said it was never going to happen for her and I wish I could gently reach through the ether and tell her that isn’t the truth. People win at love all the time.

It came along right as Rob Breszney posted this

http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/20160825.html

And my horoscope.

Gemini (May 21-June 20)
I invite you to dream about your true home . . . your sweet, energizing, love-strong home . . . the home where you can be high and deep, robust and tender, flexible and rigorous . . . the home where you are the person that you promised yourself you could be. To stimulate and enhance your brainstorms about your true home, experiment with the following activities: Feed your roots . . . do maintenance work on your power spot . . . cherish and foster your sources . . . and refine the magic that makes you feel free. Can you handle one more set of tasks designed to enhance your domestic bliss? Tend to your web of close allies . . . take care of what takes care of you . . . and adore the intimate connections that serve as your foundation.

Of course I cried. I really want to go home.

My soul let out a triumphant bellow and a cathartic sigh.

I am so close I can taste it.

Of all these people, places, jobs and relationships I have tried to call home…they just didn’t fit. The bed was too soft, the porridge too hot something was always off and I would get rereleased into the unknown like a dandelion fluff on the wind. I would settle in hostile territory and grow anyway, just to wither and die and send my wishes back out into the world looking for somewhere to call home.

I am getting close to touching down, I can feel it. Somewhere where the ground is fertile and the sun shines and the rain falls, somewhere I can put down roots and grow that isn’t the cracks of a sidewalk or an abandoned lot.

Somewhere like a cabin in the woods, near a lake so I can swim. With a garden and roses.

men

Swimming without the Sharks

August 23, 2016

I notice patterns, it’s a thing I do.

Not quite Rain Man, although I do agree K-Mart sucks and hot water does burn babies.
I count crows, not cards.

I write things and other writers write things. We send our words out in little bottles to float through the flotsam and jetsam on the vast stormy waters of the internet ocean. Some are valuable and need to be caught, remembered and released. Some are like Wilson in Cast Away and provide company and comfort. And there is a lot of trash. This metaphorical ocean is polluted with bad metaphors.

I’ve been on this island of mine for over a year. I see trends in the things the currents bring. It’s probably just algorithms, but still. The internet is my ocean, I shall not want for things to read.

One week eeeeerrrrrbody is talking about wolves. Then they morph into monsters. Full moon comes and, moon things. There is weeks of goddesses and then masks floating ashore.

I have used poetic memes to weigh what sits with me like truth and what makes me roll my eyes.

Everyone has their own ideas, ideals, wishes and wants.

Anything that says things like “I am a queen bow down to me.” Makes me think (nay, KNOW) you aren’t a queen, you are an asshole.

All this talk of wolves is mostly done by sheep who have stolen real wolf’s clothes.
The real wolves are naked and don’t give a fuck…because they are wolves howling with laughter at the fucking sheep playing dress-up.

This week it’s about love, this year really or if I am going to be totally honest, this life.
I am still learning what it is to love and be loved.

Correction, this week it is about equating love with the ocean.

There it is, that is better.

“My soul is so deep I want a deep love” rhetoric is right up there with the kings and queens of sheepland. Not buying it.

Turkeys often drown in puddles because they don’t have the common sense to get out of the rain.

But “I want a love so deep you need James Cameron to find it”. It’s really cold out there kids.

There was room for 2 on the headboard. Fuck that love.

I am tired of drifting, tired of drowning. I’d rather float.

I wrote this ages ago. Paraphrased the idea really.

It’s true.

I needed to stand up. I like knowing where the bottom is. Fuck, I love knowing where the land is. I like that stability of knowing where I stand. May not be as deep as the ocean but I have found these abysmal poets are all talk and no action anyways so I am drifting in a lifeboat interpreting Morse code, waiting for someone to come get me? Nah. I can swim. I’ll be on the beach with a bonfire, blanket and snacks getting wet and overwhelmed by the waves when I feel like getting wet and overwhelmed.

They weren’t wrong when they said salt water heals. It does, but it can suck you down in its depths too when the boys you cross oceans for make you cry the seven seas and liquefy into a puddle of tears.

I prefer waterfalls, flowing rivers and days at the beach.

No more perfect storms.

men

Red Riding Hood Escapes Neverland

August 22, 2016

One of my favorite books as a kid was The Ordinary Princess by MM Kaye.

A pragmatic fairy godmother ‘curses’ a princess with being ordinary. But in reality, it’s actually a gift.
Said Princess happens to be Sleeping Beauty’s great-great-great granddaughter. She finds herself a King dressed in rags (without amnesia) and after a little misunderstanding everything works out.

7 year old me was onto something. Good girl.

17 year old me got sucked into romance novels. The fairy tales for adults. Way too much conflict, but the sex was good.

https://www.facebook.com/KingsPoetry1/photos/a.1723946661175572.1073741829.1723932144510357/1802633866640184/?type=3&theater

I’m going to use one of my 3 wishes to pass on extraordinary, that apple is definitely tainted. Or just rotten.

I wish instead for a calm, peaceful love that nobody wants to read about and I don’t feel compelled to write about.

Once upon a time me telling tales about my dating history sounded a lot like “I met this guy we went on a few dates then suddenly its 5 years later we aren’t fucking anymore and we’re arguing because he can’t find the socks I just washed and I realize I never want to wash his socks again or fuck him ever. The end.”

That is how it went. I didn’t actively participate in choosing a partner or even dictating the relationship.
Someone found me and I just stayed, way past when I ought to have stayed. Lost my 20’s and my 30’s like that.

Fairy tale princesses that get rescued from whatever (usually in my case the previous bad relationship) end up just blindly loving the next prince.
For what? Showing up? What is he bringing to the table?
My princes became assholes that couldn’t do their own laundry and Cinderella is back in domestic servitude.

Happily never after that. Fairy godmama showed up late to the ball and she was a little drunk.

Next chapter.

Once upon a time I had my one true love. He was on his way to save me once when I was trapped in Mordor, or Forks.
He was living in Mexico, looking for work in Ontario so he could rescue me.
But then the girl he’d been banging told him she was both 20 and pregnant.
And then they lived happily ever after. Just had another kid too.
Kinda grossed me out that he messaged me a few days before she gave birth to tell me he loved me.

Fairy godmama got back into the schnapps.

We are all inundated with fairy tale love from such a young age.
I taught myself to read using Disney read-a-long records.
Someday my prince will come huh?

My best friend in grade two used to read a battered copy of Grimm’s Brothers to me every day on our way to school. I would help her with the words she didn’t know. I was never good at reading aloud but my vocabulary was strong and I won a spelling bee or two. We made a good pair. Still do.

My alone time at home was spent with my mother’s collection of My Book House Books. They were hers when she was little. I still have them. I escaped in there, tucked in my closet with a reading lamp and a bowl of Cheerios reading about the Snow Queen.

My parents love the fuck out of each other and always have. I don’t ever recall seeing them fight. That is part of it too. Imagine hearing as a child that your dad saw your mom and knew she was the one he was going to marry. There were no talking mice or magical lions or witches or poisoned apples or unicorns, those are really my folks, folks.

So ya. I thought it would happen for me.

I still do.

So, after my 20’s and 30’s came my 40’s and I turned a lot of pages. Sat back, spent some quality time alone out in Narnia, met some wolves who spoke in tongues. I figured out how I love and I started liking myself and being me. And lo there were others like me and I dated some of them and then…

And no and then.

Problem is I’d left a trail of breadcrumbs that led me back to the same type of men I equated with home.
Those houses were built with hay and sticks and were not meant to last.
I was hungry. There was cake.

The last handful of times I have tried to date anyone in the last few years read like fables about what not to do.

The Young Un took his (then) new girl on a road trip in my chariot that I had loaned him while he ignored me.
So Cinderella couldn’t get to the ball.

The Hulk found his way out of the woods of his depression and now lives with his love in the mountains on the other side of the country.
(I like that happy ending)

The Poet debacle reads like the Sleeping Beauty trilogy but when Anne Rice tells it. The one where Sleeping Beauty is raped, kidnapped and gets Stockholm syndrome until she thinks the prince’s fucked up kinks are all fine and good.

And the Giant. I don’t have the time for magic beans, he doesn’t water his plants anyways. I’m seriously exhausted trying to talk him down out of the sky. He is gonna fall and it’s gonna hurt.

Sunshine reminded me of the fake tin soldier. I don’t even know what happened there, I don’t even know his real name. Rumpelstiltskin? That was just some next level psycho shit. Thankfully that was a short story. David Lynch wrote it.

I am sick of all the grand adventure in the middle with trials and ugly plot twists…

And no and then.

I hate having to end recollections by saying “I can’t make this shit up.”

Calm is the new novel romance.

I fucked myself writing this book ‘o’ mine, rookie mistake I put too much of my life in it and my 2 knights have proven themselves idiots dressed in tinfoil. I just want it to end.

I don’t want to write about the person I am with.
Sure I spin straw into gold, but I am tired.
All my girls are single now, let them tell me stories for once while I sit back in a comfy relationship full of actions and less empty words. Something pragmatic and simple.

Once upon a time Red Riding Hood saved herself and then a lumberjack showed up with his calloused fingers that knew how to text her and hold her hand. They went fishing, had lots of amazing sex and snuggles. They both smiled a lot. The end

unable to even

Fortunate Cookie

August 21, 2016

Everyone this is Sally.

Sally this is…everyone.

Angel came down from heaven yesterday, she stayed just long enough to rescue me.
Jimi Hendrix

Sally isn’t an angel, but she has wings, close e-fucking-nuff.

We used to ride through the hayfields on the tractor. The mantises would whir up out of the grass dancing in the motes from the hay we were cutting. The golden glory when the sun was going down made it look like fairies and heaven to me.

She came in from the less than heavenly porch and landed on my desk lamp the next morning.

My son anointed her with the name Sally and the working title “Guardian of the House.”

I moved her to the golden glorious morning glory porch, lest she starve, and there she stays. Guarding my house.

Thanks Sally.

The book I am writing starts out with a girl, much like me, who is a writer, much like me, sitting outside and a mantis lands on her startling her out of a daydream.

The pic in the background was a gift from the man that inspired the book.

Now, I am not saying it’s a sign from god, but it’s a sign from god.

A few things happened that keep pushing me back to the book that I don’t want to write because my muses are treating me like dirt and leaving me in the lion’s den then pointing and laughing when I got bit.

There was this fortunate fortune cookie.

And then Rob Breszny said things. A lot of things.

And then the moon was full and I was left unsupervised.

The theme of this full moon?
Leave your comfort zone and go explore the dark, your magic is in there.

I did that.

and this…

The theme of every full moon ever?

Let it fucking go.

“The mantis comes to us when we need peace, quiet and calm in our lives. Usually making an appearance when we’ve flooded our lives with so much chaos that we can no longer hear the still small voice within us because of the external din we’ve created.”

I have to return to therapy next Tuesday and she is invariably going to ask me if I worked on the book and I am out of excuses as to why I haven’t.

For a while there I didn’t know what to write.

I get it now.

I have to finish the thing.

I have plans and the book being done and sold is part of my future.

I have encouragement from other published writers that it is good and I should keep going.

So what of my fortunate cookie?

Double entendre.

My favorite.

I am writing my literal financial fortune.

I can finish this thing any way I want.

I got stuck on the book during the part where our dear heroine gets assaulted in a parking lot
Life imitated art and I was scorned by the hero and anti-hero because of it.

“Well what did you think was going to happen?”

Um, not that and definitely not this.

They left me to my own devices, laughed when I got hurt. Made me feel dumb and small. An insignificant speck floating around in a huge sea of blue.

“Enlightenment is when a wave realizes it is the ocean.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

I’ve always been able to write the story of my life.
I just forgot for a bit and handed my pen to others.

The ending has always been up to me.

Now I know what I don’t want.

I love the ocean, god knows I do. But that doesn’t mean I want to go ass over teakettle off the side of a boat in the middle of nowhere breathing canned air with no idea where the land is.

I am content playing in the surf near the shore. I can go under, get wet and stand up when I am feeling overwhelmed and catch my breath.

I just want to play in the waves, I am done drowning and choking.

Neil Gaiman said his favorite stories were the ones where women saved themselves.

I am swimming to shore.

So now I know what I want because I know who makes me cry when I look at my phone and I know who makes me smile.

It ends like this…I get loved as is. By someone who doesn’t make me feel like I am gasping for air, grasping at straws or unworthy.

He isn’t a poet, but neither am I.

He calls me a ‘dork’.
I know it means that I am adored.
It’s not everyone’s happy ending, but it works for me.
I’d rather that than be someone’s sexual soulmate and never hear a word.
Or someone else’s Lady of Stars, but we have to end this gracefully.

Fuck that fuck this fuck them.

I want peace and quiet. I want a relationship that doesn’t have me posting to this blog every 5 minutes trying to work shit out because I am not getting any help and I can’t breathe.

I am a good girl, I just needed a good man to see it.

I’ve done my PhD. in Fuckboi Languages, Variations and Interpretations, I have the Scorpio decoder ring, learning how to speak pragmatic lumberjack is going to be a cakewalk.

Or a cookie walk.

lost boys

No Funeral Required

August 20, 2016

The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.
Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Sometimes that is the truth.
I have shit days, we all do.
The ones where we just want it to end, whatever mask ‘it’ is wearing that day.
Good news?
Masks don’t last, wounds heal and eventually things get better.

Hot Neighbor is always asking me if whatever is vexing me in that moment is going to bother me in a year. My answers vary from a ‘Probably not’ to a chuckling ‘nope’. Then he hugs me and I feel less busted than I did before I said the thing out loud. He is leveling up at lightning speed and keeps asking me to join him. With his gentle nudges and check-ins that all sound like “Sarah, evolve, its time now.”

I ask after his Russian nesting doll and he shows up when I need him.

So there is that then.

The hardest thing I ever had to do was forgive someone who wasn’t sorry.
Unknown

It’s actually not that bad. You should try it sometime.

Once you have done it, it gets really easy.

I’ve done it and I’ll do it again a few dozen times before my life ends.

Here’s how, in one easy step.

Realize that…

Everyone has their own perception and reality.
Matter changes when observed, so me being near you will alter your behavior to a degree, but the microcosm that is you, is still you. We have this immediate second that we live in and everything else is just stored data. As creatures with active imaginations and sometimes/often corrupt filing systems for memories, sometimes the data gets distorted and no amount of arguing or worry on my part is going to allow me to change your mind. Whatever you think happened is your hardwired reality. So be it.

So that isn’t it either.

I think the hardest part of the human condition is saying good bye to someone who is still alive.

I avoid it like the plague.

‘Cause when you’re done with this world
You know the next is up to you
John Mayer

shit.

It IS up to me, and for a long time I didn’t know what world I wanted to live in.

The fear of the great unknown keeping me tethered to the Walking Dead. Just like Michonne and her walkers on leashes, no arms to hold me, no teeth to bite me neither, but damn they smelled bad and held me back.

The severance becomes exponentially harder when there are invisible threads and entangled particles.

I went to a funeral once and a Buddhist monk came with a ball of string. I am not sure what the purpose was but when he cut it I felt a palpable release, like she was free.

I have been wrong this whole time, I don’t need an exorcism with an old priest and a young priest, I need a monk with scissors and a ball of string

I wrote a thing once and now it’s making me cringe. That happens a lot.

Something along the lines of ‘when given the choice between the devil you know and the devil you don’t stick with the familiar, he will probably hurt you like he has before, but at least you know how to tend to your wounds.’

That is a shitty philosophy. The girl who wrote that is dead to me now. I have no problem burying older outdated versions of me, I don’t even bother with flowers on their graves anymore, just smile wistfully now and again, thinking ‘you silly bitch, thanks for the lessons on what we ought not to do again ever.’

Catharsis is easier when there is a cataclysmic event to accompany it.

“Traitor child. I must despise you now”
Queen Bavmorda, Willow

But what happens when there is no blow out.

What if you just drift apart slowly?

What if you really like being near that person because your soul feels good but because of circumstances beyond your control (see above where their reality is different than yours) it ain’t working anymore.

What then?

That my friends, is the heaviest door to close.

There is no fanfare or funeral or closing ceremony.

It just is, becomes it just isn’t.

I think that’s why the easy way out is what everyone else seems to do which is flip the switch between I have you to I hate you.

I don’t hate anyone because a huge part of what I am is understanding. So it’s hard for me.

Damn near impossible.

Probably because I see walls where there are actually doors and vice versa. I have bloodied my knuckles knocking on doors that once were opened to me but have now been locked/bricked over.

Watching through my fingers, watching through my fingers
Caught off guard by your favorite song
Oh I’ll be dancing at a funeral, dancing at a funeral
Sleeping in the clothes you love
It’s such a shame we had to see them burn, shame we had to see them burn

What’s gonna be left of the world if you’re not in it?
What’s gonna be left of the world, oh

Every minute and every hour
I miss you, I miss you, I miss you more
Every stumble and each misfire
I miss you, I miss you, I miss you more
Bastille

What is going to be left of this world without them in it?

Me.

I am all I ever had anyways.

All the things they left behind, all the things I became when my particles met theirs and my atoms changed and transformed from being tangled up with them.

This I get to keep.

I’m gonna go ahead and do what Joseph Campbell suggested and cleanse my doors of perception and wander out into the infinite.

They can stay in that graveyard where I buried all the previous versions of me. Keeping each other company.

No funeral required.

…and if the moon walks out, the sky will understand
Sanober Khan

lost boys

Tinder and the Really Big Fish

August 8, 2016

I shut that shit down 2-3 weeks ago now?
I don’t know exactly, just more time has passed that I have not been on it than I was actually on it.

The first guy I pulled out of the water is the one I want. He’s huge.

But the fuckbois just keep on coming. And I keep throwing them back.

My arm is tired.

Bad date messaged yesterday asking if I wanted to see him again. I did not engage.

‘He who bailed’ keeps checking in on that weird timeline I only associate with my lost boys who don’t have access to clocks or any concept of time.

I am totally out of get out jail free cards, must have lost them in the move.

I told him that I already have amassed a fuckboi army with those from my past and I wasn’t looking to add to it. They are enough trouble as is. I have already established patterns and relationships with them. They are not ideal but they are familiar, and as much as a fuckboi can belong to anyone, they are mine. And I have the anti-venom for when they bite me in the ass.

The problem with a fuckboi army? They don’t show up when I need them, they just show up, fully armed and ready to take over whenever it suits them. ‘I wonder what Sarah is doing, she was really nice.’

See also “when I am happy a bell gets rung in the graveyard of my heart and all my skeletons get up and ask me to dance.”

And the new ‘recruits’?

Ew, no.

I didn’t ask for this.

My tinder window is closed so they are finding me on instagram and messaging me there. Delete/block/repeat.

I had tentative plans with one or two, but that was July and you are just messaging me yesterday?

‘He who bailed’ said he was trying not to message me so he didn’t appear desperate. He’s a nice enough fellow so I gave him the following advice.

“If you are interested in women my age I will tell you a secret. Good morning texts are good, good night texts are good. Shoot a message out during the day and we might not answer because we are busy, so don’t double up. Don’t listen to your cock or your brain, go with your gut, your gut won’t lie.”

I didn’t want someone who was going to message me every day. Until He did. And I liked it. And then he stopped, and here I sit. Feeling like shit, wondering what happened.

A month, a full calendar month of checking in here and there daily. I didn’t feel overwhelmed and I didn’t feel neglected. Now I do.

I really did try to keep feelings out of it, just breathe and see where it goes. But that is the thing about being in the ocean. You are bound to get wet.

Sunshine and I noticed a strange category of men on tinder who had a profile pic of them holding a fish.
(See also men holding gators and goats, a bizarre sub-species)

“Is this fish for me? Am I supposed to be impressed with the size of the fish? Do you need me to cook it for you? Did you wash your hands? What do I do with this fish?”

I like fish and I like fishing, it just seemed odd, like a cat proudly yowling after the gift of a dead thing.

Then I looked on my guy’s Instagram and there he was, grinning and holding a huge pike.
And I thought it was adorable.

If you like someone, perceptions change.

Changing them back, now that is a bitch.

Establishing happy habits just to have them taken away?

Ain’t that the fucking truth.

This would be a good time to call in the army, but they don’t come when I call, they only come when I’m happy and I ain’t.

I don’t want to go fishing again.

Uncategorized

Firewalking

August 7, 2016

The neighbors are fighting again.

At least she is fighting back this time. She sounds like a different woman when she sticks up for herself.

It’s not going to last long, she is going to crumble, I give it 15 minutes.

I have heard their soundtrack before, played it too.

I relocated to a bigger apartment in the same building and now I have front row, balcony seats.

It hurts me.

Mostly it’s him calling her names and smashing shit and then this shrill wail, like a banshee comes out of her mouth.

It is echoes of my own.

I used to be her.

I dated a him.

And another him with another face, and probably a few more.

I want to reach out and down from my balcony and pull her up to mine. Show her what it looks like when women make it on their own. How nice it can be, how clean and quiet. How we laugh. How we swap stories saying ‘yes honey, I’ve been there too’ over coffee.

One of my best girlfriends is in the shit right now.

She said “I know you are getting sick of me.”

I replied “I got 9+ years of being in those relationships, my patience for you is nowhere near ending. However, please don’t take that long.”

It seems to be some rite of passage. Like some phoenix from the ash bullshit but the fire has fists and a drinking problem.
And what happens if you don’t rise? You have to pack so much ice around you, you freeze to death.

Mental abuse is still abuse and she has suffered with the rest of us.
And she is in it again.

Different man, different face, different way of cheating on her.

He is an addict and his mistress is drugs.

“But he has demons”

Honey we all do, he just chooses to feed his.

He would rather risk another psychotic break than stay clean.

The core 4 friends I have are all strippers, or were until recently. Myself included. We’ve all seen drugs change people we knew and loved into strangers and we have all watched as years have gone by and somehow some of them stay intact.

There is a spectrum. On one end is the unfortunate kid that smokes one crack rock and dies of a heart attack at age 16 and there is Keith Richards. Everyone else falls somewhere in between.

I have watched people succumb to cocaine psychosis and it made me quit. I didn’t love myself but I didn’t want to give myself a chemical lobotomy either.

I have watched girls end up on the street from bad boyfriends and bad drugs. Took a few into my house and gave them a shot at getting clean. They took it.

I wish we had some kind of hive mind collective we could tap into, project our experiences into the minds of our friends. So they could feel what we felt, the fear, the knuckle that left me with a scar on my lip. The warm arms of those who loved me taking care of me and now…the men who defend me, protect me, love me, take up arms against those who even look at me the wrong way.

The ones that love to watch me belly laugh and squeal, not scream. The ones I can melt into because I trust them.

They are what is waiting on the other side of that firewalk.

This is the “warmth that can only come from a burning”. (SK)

I know you are tired, but come, this is the way. Rumi

The neighbors got evicted, too many noise complaints. I hear him blaming her for it and my eyes roll so bad they get stuck and my blood boils. But that is the way it is, I can see it from one floor up and across the way, she is in it and can’t see what he is. I wish she would just realize he ain’t nothing but a wet paper bag and fight her way out.

I don’t know how old the neighbor is 25-30 if I had to guess, the years haven’t been too hard or too kind, she wears her sadness like a mask that only the rest of us who have shed one just like it can see. The fake smile that never reaches her eyes that dart in fear lest she get caught talking to me.

I am the enemy. I am a walking example of what she could be if she left him.

And I called the cops on him one night when I heard the sickening sounds of a well landed punch and the air leaving her body for a minute. Nothing happened, cops came and left, she stayed. I’ll call them again.

I’ll go get my girl again and bring her somewhere safe. My house is safe, we built it that way.

My Sunshine went through some shit too, an addict witnessed the whole thing left her to get beat. So I rolled up with my kid and a baseball bat. Still regret not running that waste of skin down with my car.

I will do it again for anyone in harm’s way.

I escaped death by the kindness of strangers and the patience of friends.

Someone has to help. I am someone.

Uncategorized

Who is this Masked Man?

August 4, 2016

Who is he really? I have no idea.

There exists a meme that makes the rounds about forgiving someone who isn’t sorry and how that’s strength.

It is.

I should know, I just did the thing.

It’s going to take longer for me to forgive myself. But only by a lil bit.

2 years it took me to come to the realization that I fell in love with a masked man.

And only the mask.

He’s kinda an asshole without it.

He is not the Batman, beyond the rich/hermit thing. He can’t even save himself.

The lightbulb that went off burned my retinas.

Sitting in therapist’s office, she was questioning why I even come to her at all.

“Sarah, you seem to be able to figure things out rather well on your own, why are you here…am I actually doing anything for you?”

She is, but I have to stop with the day-to-day and resurrect my past. I am afraid I did that thing that I warned her I would do which was twist the conversation into a new direction to get away from what I don’t want to deal with.

Recent past? I got this.

The time called ‘before’ like when I was married? I am actually alright with all of that too. I learned a lot, mostly what not to do. I shed skin that didn’t fit and itched something awful. I have already danced naked on that grave enough. I can’t even remember where I buried them.

Way back when I was a little girl with glasses, a huge vocabulary and skinned knees?
She needs some love and attention and then I think we are going to be okay.

Someday soon I will reach back and pull her out and tell her everything is going to be better than fine. It is going to be spectacular.

I hold onto ghosts, lawd knows I do. I feed them, water them and give them a place to manifest. My bedroom is a Ouija board and I commune with the dead on soft sheets, my hands are wandering planchettes that move with psychic, spiritual guidance and spell out sweet things on their skin or trace the constellations in their freckles trying to decipher maps to home or both.

At least when they appear I can recognize them, they remain true to the men I knew, and their newfound transparency is pretty sweet.

The golden rule with the dead is ask them what they want.

I said to the Giant “When I start to develop genuine feelings for someone it’s like a bell gets rung in my heart’s graveyard and all my skeletons get up and ask me to dance.” Via text the morning after we slow danced in my dining room.

Happened when I loved him, Jason too and the Hulk. Young Un the first was the first so he got immunity and I recovered alone.

I am doing that thing again. Talking (non)sensical nonsense in avoidance.

What of this masked man…

Well shit.

I can see it with abundant clarity now.

Flowed off my tongue as the truth tends to do.

I said

“The first night, the night we talked for 12 hours he was this attentive, excited, vulnerable man with this unyielding strength. I fell in love. I did. I fell in it and stayed there, wet up to my waist and waiting for his return.

But the man that called me the next day and every subsequent day or night after that, wasn’t him.”

Maybe the stars were aligned a certain way that first night, or it was the Fireball, blame it on the alcohol. Or maybe the doors of perception were either cleansed or filthy…filthy sounds more astute.

Or it could have been prima nocta. I was taken away and mindfucked by a man that wasn’t mine.

There it is.

Whatever happened, he never came back. Except to lord over me a bit.

I wanted that back so badly I couldn’t see the truth. I just wanted My Poet back. But My Poet didn’t actually exist outside of that time and place.

It was a well-constructed mask that fell away over the next two weeks and then he fell away too.

I did the same thing in my marriage. Fell for him in the first 3 months when it was summertime and we were new and life wasn’t hard. Then he turned into a video game playing couch-potato and I became a Fallout widow. But dammit I hung on to those 90 days for dear life and wasted my dear life for the next 2556.69539 days.

Until I landed in therapy.

I’ve worn masks too.

I wasn’t exactly myself when I’d go to work, but that veil was a fake name and more make up than I wear on a day to day basis. Geisha-face with stilettos basically. Salome in her war paint. Call it what you will but I was only selling the skin my soul came in, not my soul itself.

I’ve spent a lot of time teaching and training myself not to lie, I can happily say ‘what you see is what you get.’ I’m mutable and I have my moods, but I am always myself.

I wandered off again.

He claimed to be one of 4% of men who derive pleasure from sharing his woman with other men. We talked about it at great length, I sent stories and started a book about it.

I had yet another moment of clarity. They have been coming down from heaven like lightning strikes in the heat of July.

He’s never had what he wanted. What if the reality of it is actually more than he could bear?

That too feels like truth as it rolls off my tongue. It’s my truth as well. I am not sure I could be that girl/his girl, but I was willing to try.

I am all the things all these men ever wanted until they are confronted with the reality of it.

Be careful what you wish for.

This is my one true face.

men

Of Course You can Touch my Butt

August 3, 2016

Oh honey, you had a bad day?
Come over here, tuck yourself into me.
And of course you can touch my butt.
Do you need a sandwich?

Oh honey, you’re still at work 16 hours into the day and you can’t come over?
Here is a picture of my butt to remind you that it is here waiting for you to touch it.

The word document file name for this article is ‘actually touch my butt’.

I was sitting on the porch last night and the neighbors were fighting and my heart got heavy and I’d just made a new Word document called ‘touch my butt’, it was open so I vented there.

This is why I lose things. I give them obscure names, my laptop reboots without my permission and poof.

Buh-bye now, see you next year when I’m cleaning and organizing.

It’s the morning after the new moon.

Save one bill, everything is paid. I’ll get to it today.

The house is spotless, like “It’d be okay if Queen Elizabeth popped over for tea” clean.

Burned some candles and some sage last night.

We are only letting love into this house. So mote it be.

I feel clean, calm and I keep smirking.

Doesn’t hurt a bit that the Lumberjack messages me intermittently throughout the day, every day.

He’s working way too hard right now and I haven’t seen him in…I don’t know how many days.

Huh, funny, I usually count these things.

He said his last girlfriend and he broke up because she was constantly fussing about him working too much.

So she spent the time she did get with you bitching about not seeing you so now she never gets to see you?

That makes no sense.

A lot of things women do when it comes to men make no sense to me.

There are a bazillion people on the planet, if the one you have isn’t working for you do not play blacksmith and try to heat them and hammer them into something that is not their original shape. Go find another one that fits your shape.

Don’t get me wrong. In the folly of my youth (which really only ended 3-4 years ago) I thought if I just tried hard enough ‘I could change him’.

I’ll tell all y’all a secret. No, you can’t. And really? You shouldn’t want to.

How hard that must be on a person you (profess to) love or care about to constantly feel like they have to adapt to please you, like they are not enough as is.
Pretty sure that isn’t love.
I am quite sure that is how the bulk of my exes made me feel. If I just behaved a little better, or was a little quieter, less aggressive, less sassy, less needy/slutty/chatty/sleepy/sneezy/bashful/dopey/grumpy etc. etc. but then I am not me. So why’d you pick me again? And why won’t you touch my butt?

I still have men in my life that make me feel this way. But not for long. We are only letting love into this house.

This is the problem with the neighbors, they fuck and fight and that isn’t love. It’s just a loud, screaming, sobbing mess.

Women are not put on this earth to fix men. They aren’t broken.
Men are not put on this earth to lord over women. We got this.
We’re two separate yet compatible halves of one whole.
Men don’t need to be fixed, they need to be loved and nurtured and left to go build things.
Women do not need to be ruled, we need to be left to be creative and kind and loving.

I’m about to get called out for being anti-feminist.

I could give a fuck.

I do not believe that men and women are equal. I believe we are symbiotic.
And by sucking the life out of the opposite gender trying to get them to submit, we are actually hurting ourselves.

Women have access to this powerful, protective, productive male energy and we harness it to
…
hold our purses at Bed Bath and Beyond?
That doesn’t seem right.

When did we trade nurturing for nagging? And can I please take my nurturing back?
Nagging feels shitty, both to give and receive.

By denying a man his masculinity you are denying your divine feminine self.
Um, what’s not to love about being a woman, we are soft, mystical creatures that create things out of nothing, capable of abstract thought, we feel things on these deep emotional levels and have multiple orgasms.

I jiggle when I walk. He likes that, as do I, I hate doing squats. I am soft. I do not consider this to be a weakness, but strength instead. I am not hard and rigid like him. I flow. I adapt. I soothe myself and others.
Put me against a wall and things change a bit. I have a vicious mouth on me and for the most part I can hold my own physically. But when there is a good man around, I don’t have to do those things. I can build things, fix things and I can appreciate having a man around to open that jar.

Lumberjack is having a stressful time at work right now. He talks to me about it, I make suggestions and ask questions and he comes to his own conclusions. I do not presume to know what is best for him or even exactly how his business works, I have an idea because I listen when he speaks and I ask questions.

He throws the word ‘perfect’ around a lot. I am not. What I am is compatible. The things about me that are feminine and good work with the things about him that are masculine and good.
And for once I feel appreciated, so I make sure he does too.

My job here is to see him when I can. Listen to him vent, rub his back and let him touch my butt. Because like the rest of me, it is soft and soothing and divine.

lost boys

All the Damned Vampires

August 2, 2016

“That’s what this place is. One Giant Coffin.”

I have never thought of a more apt description for my website than this.

So many dead things.

Wrote it on the back of my hand whilst driving down the highway late last night.
As if I could forget.
As if I get the luxury of forgetting anything at all.

I’m an old hotel that fell into a fault line. And now monsters live here amongst the dripping candles and canopied beds and obscure artwork.

I wait in my little magpie nest for the sun to go down, for the dead to awaken, for the second star to the right to appear…anything…then straight on till morning.

I’m just going to roll with this glorious fucking metaphor.

I dress like her. Star. Arms stacked with beaded bracelets. Layers of colorful silk, belts that make noise, and tiny lacy camisoles with messy long hair and smudgy black eyeliner. And I love like Wendy, darling.

For someone who references Lost Boys so much, both the group of boys/men I surround myself with who disappear from bedrooms in the night and go to some place unbeknownst to me where time doesn’t seem to exist or the only clock that hasn’t been smashed got swallowed by a crocodile or some such shit, and the 1987 horror movie. You think I would’ve clued in before now.

I don’t know what’s worse. A tribe of gorgeous wayward boys that literally live in a place called Neverland. As in nuh uh no never gonna happen. Or the ones with beautiful faces, no heartbeat that walk the boardwalk at night eating people and fucking shit up.

They’re all beautiful and none of them are here.

I stopped inviting them in.

One of my lost boys said that he can’t ‘drop everything, come over and make me ‘a happy Sarah.’

Wait now, back up there sparky.

I didn’t ask for that. It is no one’s job to make me a happy Sarah. I don’t outsource/subcontract. That work is internal and mine alone.

Besides, you already came over, added to my pre-existing happiness, asked to come back and sit on my porch glowing in the star lights and fairy lights and my attention.

I think I just stumbled on some of the ‘why they leave me’.
Other than their predisposition to do so because they are lost boys who get lost.

If you place the source of your happiness in another human being, that happiness can be taken from you.
People leave.
I’ve been a lost girl from time to time. Both akin to the television show full of fae folk and just by base description.
Treat me badly and I wander off eventually.
But it’s like they are all trying to beat me to the punch and I’m content meandering. Looking at flowers, feeling the sunshine and enjoying the journey until I look up and they have either gone to ground or flown away using my pixie dust or blood, depending.

Then I feel lonely, lost, abandoned and drained. I question myself/my worth. I can’t help it.

So I’d leave my window wide open at night and invariably the come back to get their shadow stitched back on or snack on me, or both.

I think the one might have likened me to some kind of drug that he is denying an addiction to. I am an opiate I know this. But he keeps calling me cake.

“You’ll never grow old, you’ll never die, but you must feed.”

And I kinda am the girl with the most cake (Hole)

And he fights it. He’s only half, “like Laddie and me.” But the hunger is there.

I’m done being ego food, Mama Wendy, having my life shaken up to harvest my pixie dust.

“These creatures do not die like the bee after the first sting, but instead grow strong and become immortal once infected by another nosferatu. So, my friends we fight not one beast but legions that go on age after age after age, feeding on the blood of the living.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula

So what to do? WWVHD?

Van Helsing: Yeah, she was in great pain. Then we cut off her head, and drove a stake through her heart, and burned it, and then she found peace.

Take all the emotion out of it and do what needs to be done.

I know who the head vampire is, I know where this stems from. Kill him and everything goes back to normal.

I am nailing my window shut.

“That’s the one thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach, all the damned vampires.”

Italics = The Lost Boys

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…and if the moon walks out, the sky will understand Sanober Khan

…and if the moon walks out, the sky will understand
Sanober Khan