Tag Archives: relationships

Break for Freedom – Day 4 (Fabric softener)

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Day 4 – Monday, August 14, 2017

7:08 a.m. – This morning feels intensely like a maybe. This is wimpy on my part, but waking up later than usual throws me, and generously offers all kinds of reasons not to walk solo today.

8:14 a.m. – Just as I’m going out the door I’m raging with discomfort, I’m thinking the inside of my sweatshirt is way rough on my skin and how can I walk…

I walked anyway. Next problem. My t-shirt is soaked through in no time at all and, as that too starts to bother me, I remember that when I was a dancer, or playing sports, I loved being sweat-soaked, fully immersed in the task at hand.

There will be no fabric softener for this kid.

Marty’s knees (a romantice divertimento)

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Marty knew it made no sense and couldn’t possibly be true. That it felt true was besides the point, (almost). Because oh man, were he to believe it, live it, and be wrong? That shit would knock him down. Like most, Marty was tired of getting up one way or another in life. I’ve donated enough to that cause. This is precisely what Marty thought when he realized some bizarre shit was going. Had to be. He’d fallen in love with Sheila and that couldn’t possibly be right. He’d known her for more than a decade for fuck’s sake. It wasn’t like her beauty — admittedly the kind known to buckle knees when first observed by even the most casual observer — was anything new to him. His rational side, what was left of it, understood this. But, there was a problem. You don’t know somebody for more than a decade for shit’s sake and suddenly, badabing-badaboom, you’re in love. It doesn’t work like that, or so he’d always thought, until now that is. Somehow and in some way she’d become an anomaly. What the fuck’s up with that? Had he missed something all these years? Did some part of his mind simply leave the area when he wasn’t looking, knocking his understanding of reality out of alignment? They need body shops for the mind, he thought, not for the first time.

And if all this wasn’t enough to make his head spin, a new Sheila reality was on the scene. She made his knees weak.

Home with no name

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Home with no name, this charcoal deep airy lost place. Cut bonds and cords flit in the wind, a thousand tentacles. Sad hearts stand in quiet corners, lost, trembling, cold, bent, buckled, they weep – they weep – they weep.

Now, stumbled to standing, I’ll split the heavens for you, snare the brightest sun. Across the pond out of reach your heart glistens warm gold love. I am now, finally, bound by nothing but me. If I could only cleave the pond in two,

find myself lost no more.

for jch

Open doors

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You can open the door to your life to someone with the genuine hope they will enter your life. But, while the instinct to urge someone to explore the offer of friendship, the chance to fall in love chance, the chance to reconnect by, say, healing a wounded bond, can be a muscular one to say the least, it is an instinct better left untouched.

In the first place, if someone enters your life, you’re better off – and so are they – knowing they’ve done so because they really wanted to. Not because you’ve offered up an effective sales pitch of some kind. You want someone to come into your life under their own steam.  

When you’ve opened the door to someone you want to be able to say: I’ve done my part. Your part is all you can do and all you should do. There are a plethora of reasons people don’t walk through an open door: fear of intimacy, guilt, fear of getting hurt, they simply don’t like you, difficulty trusting you are who you say you are,  dishonest lifestyles (some people are not who you think they are), and so on.

For the door to be open to my life one is wise not to enter unless honesty and kindness and two of their tenets. Also, my private life must be a peaceful place. Ain’t no room for emotional or physical violence. This is not to say one can’t angry. Anger is emotion. Violence is behavior. Two vastly different things. The thing is, I do enough battling on the advocacy front, dealing with people (I used the word loosely in this instance) who see people with disabilities as little more than revenue streams. These people are able to sleep well at night knowing they either author, co-author and or carry out positions that will destroy peoples lives and sometimes put those lives at risk. Evil people, in my book.

After all this you might wonder what on earth would possess you to open a door to someone in the first place. Good news. If you do, and if you stay loyal to self, the relationships that can and at times do blossom as a result make all the effort, and, yes, risk taking, worth it. At least that’s my opinion. If I have to walk away, disengage as it were, or in some instances, close the door, as long as I can say and believe I’ve done my part, all is well.


We’re not dark yet

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Listening to John Hiatt singing Feels like Rain thinking so of many battered and bruised by life’s travails, sheltered behind barricades that blind, or lead or to miss or lose the love that’s right in front of us. Were trying again, letting love happen, taking that risk, an act of weakness, then why’s it so hard to do?

Listening to what may be the most beautiful version of Hallelujah I’ve ever heard, remembering dreams lost, lives gone, chances lost, thinking God give me strength to accept the possibilities life offers me, and please don’t let my fears lead me astray. Yes, I know it’s hard when some have had other try to end them,  but do we really want to allow those others to pilot our lives from here on out? Not me, not me.

Listen to Springsteen’s Tougher Than the Rest … Toughness (strength),  the capacity to allow life’s experience unabridged by history’s wounds, plans gone wrong, the missteps of ourselves, and others. Finding the strength to love sometimes means going through the fear until the fear can’t hold on; it means going through the rain to reach the sunshine. 

Listening to Marc Cohn’s One Safe Place  I find myself still believing love  can be one safe place. If this makes me a fool, well then, fuck it. So be it.  I say dream on, keep the faith. Don’t give up. We’re not dark yet.