Carry him in your pocket.

Posted on May 28, 2012 | 6 Comments

Dear Eilis,

Last night, sitting in the passenger’s seat of my best friend’s car, parked halfway inside my driveway, I wrestled with the idea of losing a father.

I don’t know how we ended up at that table, hammering hope into regret, but I think I know where it began.

At the tail end of 2003, when funerals were for the movies. When, six months before, a motorcycle accident was the closest some of us had come to saying goodbye. Back then I learned to hate the number 13.

So when, that same year, I spent the 13th of December learning that the world did, in fact, keep rotating on its axis while sixty or seventy preteen girls sniffled and sobbed on either side of me, I started toying with that idea of losing a father. A fourth father, perhaps, if I counted them right.

The Father I read about in books.

The man who named me. Who held me when I was just the length of his forearm. Who worried I’d never be bigger, grow stronger, if my mother didn’t write down every ounce of food I ate.

The man who held me and my sister to his chest on Sunday mornings as people filed out of wooden doors on either side of us, stumbling down red velvet stairs, whispering to Please Be Good For Your Parents This Week, OK?

And then this man. The one who taught me lessons every afternoon. Who looked after me long before he had a daughter of his own. Long before he never got the chance to hold her in his arms or look her in the eyes or dance at her wedding to Butterfly Kisses after Midnight Prayers to Father Nos. 1 & 3.

I have a feeling your father took the pieces of 1, 2, 3 & 4 and threaded them together. Piece by piece. Heartstring by heartstring.

And as you jump from one lily pad to the next, fumbling for your balance, I know it seems near impossible to land correctly without his hand stretched out to steady you. I know how it feels when you’ve never felt too good at this whole Life thing, this whole Change thing, this whole New thing, and he has always had your back. The perfect words when you fall on the floor.

And then, in a flash, he slides the cushion out from under your feet and whisks away to someplace else. Someplace that’s Gone far away.

I know it. So badly. Know the tears that last for hours as everyone says how wonderful he was, how it is such a shame to see him go so soon.

But I want you to know this: I believe in angels.

I see his eyes and his smile in the photos of his daughter sitting in a card from his mother, a woman who hung through pregnancy and grief all at the same time, just two weeks of We’re In This Together before his car smashed itself into the road and left her alone, holding out for the baby he left her to love.

He was my Father No. 4 for six years, the one I spent the most time with. The only one who never did the leaving. No, no, that was my job. Until, one day, it wasn’t. Until, one day, he didn’t show up for practice, to steady my balance on the wooden beam, to catch my flailing limbs when I smacked onto the ground.

Your dad is up there, hands on his knees, watching you from the sidelines of life. He’s in your smile and your eyes and the way that you carry yourself from this lily pad to the next. He is right here, right inside you, right where you can always keep him close.

And he’s not going anywhere. He’s left you with his words and his heart and his love. For you to take and spin into something wonderful, something he would have loved, with this next chapter in your book.

Carry him in your pocket. Unfold his words like roads on a map. Trace the outline of your smile and see his love in the corners of your eyes.

It is there. No matter where you position yourself on this Earth. He’s there.

Love,
Kaleigh

Note: Eilis lost her father two years ago. She’s graduating high school, jumping into college life, and needs your words. Want to write to her? You’ve got until June 5.

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Posted in college, growing up, loss, love letters to young girls

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She’ll whisper “Call Me Maybe.” But Never “You Better.” Never “I’ve Been Waiting For You Forever.”

Posted on May 24, 2012 | 2 Comments

She deserves your words.

I think you know which ones I mean. Those words you sometimes shove in between the wall and the crates beneath your bed.

I am sitting here playing Fairy Godmother because I am such a good liar.

And really, you can burst out laughing at that one because we both know my heart is stitched into my palms and my words are stained on my teeth and if people still went around dyeing their tea like lovely Mr. Heath Ledger in “The Patriot,” surely they would sop up some of my blog posts and let the ink turn hot water into black & bitter truths.

So let me be honest: she needs your words.

In dimly lit bars. Over bowls of potato soup. On the car ride home from a long night at work. Rushing through a maze of tables to deliver ketchup bottles to screaming toddlers. Inside the voicemail box on her phone that holds messages from six months ago, maybe.

Messages she cannot bear to delete. Messages she probably plays on repeat.

Because this silence is killing her.

You know it is. I do, too.

Instead she’s got me. Miss I Cannot Tell A Lie, She’s Forgetting About You. Miss I Wish It Wasn’t True. Miss It’s Not Supposed To Go Like That.

All while she sits on the other side of the computer screen and paints her toenails. Head ducked down. Shirt stained with more memories than the top of the Empire State Building has held engagements.

She deserves that, too. Your engagement, you know?

Your undivided attention. Your “Really Now” and “Exactly” and “How about we set aside a couple hours to sip wine and scour the Internet for the perfect pattern to sew ourselves to each others’ sides for another four years?”

Because she’s not ready for goodbye. For lonely. For the quiet saturating a solitary Saturday inside a house that once held fresh baked pie and the smell of lavender burning and Tahitian candles and his smooth voice whispering terms of endearment.

You know that’s a crime, right? Sitting in the same bedroom where your heart has broken over and over by that voice saying things you don’t understand?

She won’t tell you. She’ll whisper “Call Me Maybe” and pretend it’s just a song on the radio. Just a tune to crank while she cooks chicken on the stove. Just someone else’s words, but never hers.

Call Me Maybe. Maybe Not. But Never “You Better.” Never “I’m Waiting For The Phone To Ring.”

She needs you, you know. Before she moves on.

She’ll be in San Francisco or St. Louis or Southern Mississippi with a baby on her hip before you ever turn around and whisper I’m Sorry I Forgot To Care in her ear. Before you offer to hold the baby so she can have three seconds to breathe. Three seconds to remember how she felt back Now. Three seconds for her to pull the baby away and say No, No, I am not doing this.

She will be making new connections. Gathering new phone numbers.

I told her so.

If you are angry, darling, you best run to me and settle it.

In the meantime, I will be learning the art of slurping potato soup. Or something like that.

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Posted in broken friendships

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Your life is an art project. Imperfect and chaotic.

Posted on May 21, 2012 | 1 Comment

I have this theory that our lives are in the hands of eighth graders.

It’s not a pleasant thought. Don’t I know it. But I can already see their sticky fingers and scrunched eyebrows and scrutinizing choices over where, oh where do I place this next piece of fabric?

Picture yourself as a square of fabric. Or a newspaper clipping. A painting from the antique shop downtown. Anything, really, that holds your heart upon its color palette and marks your soul with the sort of thing that made businessmen long ago stumble over the word Brand.

You are a brand. In the form of a fabric square. Held in the hands of an awkward eighth grader. Musing over his or her next decision in art class during fourth period, stomach churning because it’s almost lunchtime but somebody’s got to make a decision about your life.

Somebody’s got to mark the bland canvas, the wooden sphere, that holds each of us together. Binds us in its mess of mistakes and disasters and catastrophes and triumphs, though it often feels like triumphs are set back by all the umphs heading toward failure.

It often feels like it’d be easier to wait until after lunchtime before making a decision about where to place yourself on that canvas. What corner of the sphere should you papier-mâché your square of fabric?

Because once it escapes the fingertips of that eighth grader and superglues itself to a place, it feels like Losing Something. Like Permanent. Like Oh No, Why Oh Why Did I Let Myself Do That?

But if it’s any consolation—and maybe, quite frankly, it isn’t—there are thirty eighth graders in that classroom. Each with a new sphere or canvas, depending on whether they follow the logic that the earth is round or flat. Depending on whether or not they are Travelers and Explorers or Inhabitants and Dwellers.

And unless two of them push their art desks together and collaborate on creating you a habitat, a place to call Home, you’ll have thirty different answers to that question of Where Do I Belong? And What Do I Do Next?

Because your life is an art project. Imperfect and chaotic. And always starting over if necessary.

A little bit like that art classroom the seconds before the bell rings and seats squeak against the tile floor and the hallway fills with faces that have seen much different places.

Places that are given no discussion, like the closet of their bedrooms, parents’ voices coming up through the air vent at their toes. Like the speckled bathtub, when even a thirty-minute shower feels much too short.

There are places we go to get free and places we go to get away. And hopefully, you’ll find yourself in a classroom with thirty eighth graders where more than half of them wish to set you on street corners and rooftops and the crust of the world, ocean water kissing your toes.

But if not, you just get yourself down to Michael’s and buy a new canvas. Layer a new sphere. Cut a couple more scraps of newspaper or magazine articles or bits of cotton from the t-shirts of your childhood t-ball teams.

And begin again.

And again.

And again.

Until you land your nomadic self somewhere you’re proud of.

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Posted in imagine this world

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For The Swing Set Souls

Posted on May 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

If you shoved me in the DeLorean and Scrooge’d me into my ten-year-old self, I’m not so sure my side of the playground would be buzzing with activity.

Or swimming with sticky fingers from flavor ice pops. Crackling with sneakers scrubbing pavement.

I’m not so sure you’d run up to me with a jump rope and ask if I could hold one end.

“Please, oh please,” you wouldn’t have said. “We absolutely need your help. Come with me.”

More likely, you’d find me scraping my shoes against a pile of woodchips as I swung back and forth, back and forth, so close to those smiling faces and churning backward all the same.

That go-to interview question pops into my head: “What’s your biggest weakness.”

“Well, sir, you see it’s, um, kind of a funny story. Have you been to Home Depot lately?”

“What?”

“Home Depot, sir. You know those swing sets with striped overhangs and monkey bars? I’m kind of like a swing.”

“You are,” he might say.

Because I am sure that if it were a woman, she would already be pulling her wallet out of her purse and unfolding a photo gallery longer than my forearm. Pictures of her own children pushing each other at the neighborhood playground in her hands.

“A swing,” I’d say. “Yes. I’ve been waiting for too long now like one of those rusty swings cracking and weathered, hoping the store employee might brush his forehead with his orange apron pocket and drag me inside. Out of somebody else’s rainstorm. Away from the back of the pile. Into somebody’s backyard.”

He might not follow, but maybe he will. Maybe he had some swing days of his own, back on the playground, hands tucked inside overall pockets.

I am sort of hoping his childhood years weren’t categorized by foursquare games and knockout championships and getting presidential on the mile run in gym class. I am sort of hoping he got an X for that portion.

Because just like I learned to lace up my sneakers and round a 400-meter track four times, I am ready to stop sitting and pausing and shuffling and waiting and hoping and praying some swing set lover comes over to sit on me. Learning how to take Rooted In Place less metaphorically.

I hope the rest of you Swing Set Souls are, too.

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Posted in being yourself, bullying, guest posts, introverts, love letters to young girls

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You are you and she is she and we are all together in on this secret of Not Knowing.

Posted on May 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

She gave me words to wake up to.

It has only taken twenty years, a couple thousand missteps, and one last Goodbye to turn all the nonchalant See You Laters into How Long Until Later, Again? But I know her words will be the first thing I see when I roll over every morning.

That and a spectacular view of a bare wall that she says needs more decorations than a teacher’s classroom on the first day of school.

I can picture her a thousand miles away, head ducked in concentration, back aching as she leans over this canvas and paints me a melody to sing on my way to work in the morning, as I pour milk over my granola, as I slide my car keys into the ignition and wait for it to catch.

It’ll be the first thing I tell guests as they tour this new place I’m still fumbling to find the right words for. How many Homes, after all, do we get in this little journey of ours?

Surely not more than one. To take another would be selfish.

And those words of hers, stapled to a wood frame and stenciled in shades of kelly green and eggplant purple, lifted from one of the greatest storytellers of all time, hold hopes each morning for a day worth dancing about.

A day worth serenading for five point five miles from Point A to Point B. Because I have enough. More than enough, really, to bring this wild life into its own.

I have feet in my shoes and brains in my head.

I am her bird with untethered wings, the dandelion she has scrunched her eyes closed for, blown some air on, and let scatter across a new field to plant myself and grow.

And hasn’t she always been doing that? Hasn’t she always had fingers ready to canvas my brain with reminders that I can do this, this little journey, not because I am her, but because I am me? Because you are you and she is she and we are all together in on this secret of Not Knowing.

That is the big ole secret she’s been whispering in my ear, every time I turn and shake my head when she looks at me like Life, You Got This and I am just pretending my knees aren’t wobbling under my sundress, ankles unsteady in these heels. She is just as scared, just as sure she won’t paint the right words or paint the right sailboat or hitch herself to the right cloud floating along for her to dream upon.

I know she will. I know she needs her own words stapled to wood frames and painted on cream-colored canvases and hung on wire across her bedroom walls when Doubt starts dusting her shoulders and graying her conviction.

Because conviction wouldn’t be conviction if we knew where our dandelion seeds would land tomorrow. Whose ears would hum with our pump-up speeches next Wednesday.

But it’s real. On my bedroom wall and the crook in the left shoulder of the kitchen where her words hold every reminder I ever needed.

I am alive. I have what I need. I am a work in progress. And so we all are. Unsure and impassioned together.

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Posted in being yourself, growing up

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