A thank you note

I remember that last day at the Inner Harbor, when you told me 'This is how I will remember you'.

It was raining, a drenching soaking misting rain and through it fell rays of sunlight.  I wanted to answer your question, the one behind that comment but as I tilted my face up from under my baby blue cloche hat and smiled at your dark eyes, I couldn't.

Instead I reached up to let my fingers glance down the side of your face, fluttering as they fell and I looked away to the ocean. After a moment I turned back to you, all my thoughts tripping over themselves, my breath heavier than a humming bird's wings; yet still I froze. You watched and smiled reassuringly at my silence until I laughed a little.  So we said nothing more and I let you take my hand as we walked on.

Later, weeks later, I remember your voice.   I was sitting on the floor, my knees pulled in, clutching my phone with white knuckles as I heard the break in the connection, the break in your voice, "Come back- come back to me" and still I didn't have the words to tell you I could not, and why I could not.

Years have passed and that moment still exhales as if it just inhaled.  I wanted to write to you when I wound up out on the west side of the states.  I wanted to tell you about the day I met my sweetheart.  I wanted to call when we were engaged.  I really wanted to tell you about the day I decided to stop being afraid and instead love to fly.

I didn't. 

I didn't because I still did not know what to say.  But I know what I want to say now. The words came unexpectedly, while I was alone on a white mountain in a bright blue day.  They came with an easy understanding that reminds me of looking into clear water. 

I don’t want to interrupt the place I am in and the place you have doubtlessly moved on to.  I do not want to betray our strange and delicate friendship found during such a chaotic time in our lives. But I am going to write all of these badly belated words here because they are a tribute to your gift to me at a time I needed it most.

Regardless if it was because of how I was wired, how society had trained me or the experiences I’d had;  At that time my personal doubts were so all encompassing I could not see anything but them.  I needed a mirror to show me what was above and below; what was inside and outside and this mirror was to be you.  You were my first mirror and when I saw myself as you saw me; everything changed. 

You were the first person I believed who believed in me.  You were intelligent, successful, kind and good looking.  You were in a position of authority and inappropriately and significantly older than me.  You asked nothing from me (except to sometimes hold my hand).  You called me eclectic and beautiful and you told me I could Do Anything I put my mind to.  And because of how I saw you, I believed you.

Over the months, you began to love me, not just the attracted-to-you kind, but the real kind.   I knew you would shield me from the world; you would have showered me with excessive kindness and indulgence.  You would have given me anything I wanted, anything at all. 

I had began to understand the value of the gift you had given me and I began to know there was only one gift I could give back to you.  And that was to leave.

It was your character that made you kind and intelligent; it was your experiences that had taught you patience and given you your insight; Your successes were achieved after persistent attempts made over years and continued after failures.

I was young and I knew I knew very little.  I, wild and thin, I lived on coffee, cigarettes and spontaneous choices.  You had a community, you had businesses, friends, family – you had built a life I should not be a part of.  

Looking at you, I too wanted to gain character to make me kinder and intelligent.  I wanted experiences to teach me patience and to give me insight into myself and the world I live in.  I wanted to learn persistence, perseverance and gain my own success.  I wanted to find a place and choose to call it home.  I wanted to find a man I could grow to belong with and be equal to.

When I look back, now that I am also in my mid-thirties, maybe you only saw my youth, my femininity and vulnerability.  Maybe I made you feel young; Maybe you just wanted to help the broken unhappy girl.

But perhaps you saw my possibility.

Dear friend, here is an update.  While I am still not an ambitious person when it comes to a ‘proper’ career, I am competent and independent.  I paint, and sell my work.  I write and post my scribbles here online and sometimes people from all over the world read and re-read my work.  When you knew me I had never belonged anywhere, and today I have lived in one place with one person for more than ten years. 

I love a man who is everything a man should be and more And he loves me back  We argue, we squabble, we laugh and take care of each other. Because of him I have battled my way to becoming a half decent skier.  I was terrified of water and I learned to scuba dive and make myself swim in the ocean.  I am scared witless by heights, yet I love my paraglider.  I have overcome my social anxieties and I capably manage my dyslexia and naturally scattered self.    

I have taken what you gave to me, what I saw in you and made it my own. Thank you for being my first mirror.

Dear Friend - Part 3

Dear Friend,

It is funny, the habits one develops without noticing. It was my habit to talk to you old lady. To talk to you about everything.  And now, without you to talk things through, when I try to write them its just a messy knot of sticky spaghetti noodles.

The words run like a rampant virus in my brain, spreading and infecting everything, yet the moment I go to write them down, it all retreats under a convenient mental blanket.

I stare at the lump on the bed in my head and I try to remember exactly what it was I really needed to have said.... but I am unable to discern the shapeless heap.

For so long I chatted you. I never thought twice about it when you started to talk back to me. My words may not have been all that different from your grunts, woofs, sighs, growls and whines.  One of my favorite memories was when you began to kick the floor when you were impatient with me or someone or something.   You would kick the floor, just like a child would stomp their foot.  Even as an old lady, (when standing for any kind of time was not reasonable), while you were sitting on the floor you would kick your foot against the floor and woof! I am laughing right now just thinking of you!

Last November Sal, that last gorgeous warm sunny day with you... when I needed to be strong for you?  That was the memory I kept replaying to make myself smile and be calm in front of you.

I have put that last day with you on my inner shelf.  The one I keep things on when I don't know what to do with them.  My inner shelf has been relatively uncluttered for a while and that day, sitting up there, nearly all by it's self, that day looks a little daunting.

I, fortunately, have my darling.  A tolerant (although I tend to exasperate him) man, he has watched me mourn, held me close and poked me into finally painting again.  We started going for walks together in the evenings, a habit I sorely missed when you were gone.  I have bonded with our Charlie Cat; Prince Charles to you who are not on intimate terms.

I started walking dogs at the Humane Society in December after work.  I was going every day and I would pick out two and take them for a walk.  Maybe it is because I think of you too much but none measured up.  They were not quite... sassy enough.  Even when we first were together and we were both all jumbled up inside, you were sassy.  Intelligent, sure, gentle, always and comfortably sassy.

Now it is January and earlier this week I met a dog.  Rescued from a pound in New Mexico, she is a stray on an Indian reservation, she is about a year and a half old.  She is sweet and nervous and excited and spooked and curious.... and I hesitated.  I walked her and she did her best even with her fear of the leash and the cars and me and the place.

Afterwards, I talked to her foster human for a few minutes.

Around the 20 minute mark -Which is a terribly long and boring time to stand and wait for humans to do something interesting, this little dog despairing groaned aloud and sunk herself tragically to the ground.  I looked down and found her bright amber eyes looking curiously into mine.

And my heart smiled.  And today I wrote this out.

My sweetheart has adeptly picked the name 'Luna' for this little Muppet.

Possibility

She is slender and very young.  Just old enough to be allowed into this little eclectic Portland bar. Perched on bar stool, wrapped in a pretty summer dress, legs crossed and shoulders hunched forward over the bar; her body language declares "Do not disturb".

I had to lean across her to order but I flashed her a quick "sorry " smile as I did.  Looking up and seeing a female face she returns a tight one, curling herself tighter around the little hand bound journal in front of her.

My inadvertently rude glance at her elegant cursive catches a few words "I'm struggling, I can't explain what I feel..."  and I am sympathetic as jerk my eyes away.  The rush of fellowship is familiar. I was this girl. Granted on the the other side of the country but I was her.

I have a giant bin full of journals from this time in my life. It's so heavy I can't pick it up.  I would write and write and draw and draw.  I still do, of course, I am writer and an artist. But it was constant then, literally, every moment, my fingers struggled to get my words out.

I look around at the world, at all these people with so many different temperatures in temper and conflicting points of view -so many hearts convinced it walks alone.  I wish I would pull over and talk to that old man on the bus stop I see each morning.  I am grateful I reached out to that old lady in the store who needed someone to see her and listened to her stories about beloved cats and grand-babies. I regret I didn't leave a little bigger tip to that waitress; I wanted the check and found her by the kitchen door and heard her whisper, "I am invisible." before I startled her with my approach.

I breathe my wish to this girl, that she sees forward to all her possibilities. My eyes find the bartender, my voice startles my ears back into hearing; I order my drink.

'Remember the Light after the Storm' (Original Fine Art)

Sunday evening I landed, I packed and then I stepped away to close my eyes and breathe deeply.  I took a long sip of air slightly chilled with a cold front passing, warmed with early summer rays and sharp with a taste of cut grass and dust.  I have the perfect amount of quiet gratitude in my glass of joy.  

I am lost in time again; looking around at a little eclectic community framed by wild clouds and golden sunset.

And I remember… I am twenty again, twenty and cold.  I hadn't anywhere to go that night and I was afraid to be found by the one person looking.  There was no one to call and no way to call anyway.  I had snow soaked tennis shoes on, a small stash of squirreled away cash in my pockets and the sudden inexplicable belief that I would 'will' myself out of the corner I'd painted myself into.  

I remember this night like it is now; I cup my soul’s hands gently, carefully, around that night with palms full of humble recognition.  That beautiful night I huddled, shaking and shivering, in the shelter of a covered door entry at a closed grocery store. I remember a fire born in darkness and determination.  The heat of it burned my heart, my ribs - the inner flames torched my icy fingers -I would get out of this mess.

I closed my eyes at that moment on that night and I pictured what this would mean, how it would taste, what I would be able to do.  I pictured the road trip Dee and I promised each other, I pictured my identity,  I took my fears of water, of heights, of friendship, of roots and I held them to this fire and watched them burn.  For hours, alone and un-found, until early dawn, I concentrated on this vision.  

I had realized one of my truths, (I have a few now), and this one is a big one.  Maybe an obvious one but that’s the thing about being young- we all start out not knowing anything. 

Truth#4:  We forget that both happiness and storms will come and go and pass.  Again and again. Happiness is such a fleeting, painfully fragile, delicate and wondrous thing. And we forget, as we bask in it's luminous glow, our arms stretched out and up to the welcoming sky, that it will come and go and pass.

Storms, so wild, wicked and dark, as our ship is sinking, ropes lashing in the wind and unsecured sails perilously unfolding; we despair and forget. We forget it will pass. That the heavy suffocating rain will lessen, the clouds will break and the moon will return with stars to guide the way.  

Here is the point; Storms will come all on their own.  Sometimes we may mistakenly steer ourselves into them, sometimes we choose a course that lengthens the duration we ride through them -but storms will come. 

Happiness, while it may seem to 'just happen', happiness is always a choice.  Happiness is in our heads.  Sometimes it is a hard choice, one reached for with grasping hands blinded by pain, loss, or most terribly of all, with regret. 

Happiness was the moment I believed, that night and the nights after, with all I wanted to be; I believed I could and I would figure out how to get out of that situation. And every happiness since then leaves my mortal beating heart shaking with thankfulness to the person inside me trying her best, the man standing beside me and all the people around me reaching out with giving hands.

Remember the light after the storm Reader.  Even if that is all you can do as you hang on to the wheel of your ship, nose into the wind, the world black and your horizon tumbling, remember the light outside of the storm.

'Remember the Light after the Storm'

16" X 20 X .75"

Original Art - Oil Pastels/ Acrylic (Sealed to protect against fading/UV)