Not Even A Little Bit

What I didn’t know was that I would be angry. Anger is not a feeling I am comfortable in. Grief, sorrow, heartache, elation, joy, confusion, indecision, panic, sure es. These I can slip into like a silk dress; these I can wade through and know that they come and go like the tide. I can ride the wave. But anger to me is immovable. It is sheet rock and sheer cliffs. It is no way through and no way around. It is everything I am not accustomed to. My feelings have always been so fluid. This is stronger than I am it seems. I cannot write it, will it, or walk it off. From what I can tell and what I have been told, the only thing to do is to allow it. I suppose in that way it is like water as well, like a river, like a riptide. The harder you push against it, the quicker it wears you out.

Let me tell you, and tell myself, about the thing today that melted my anger like an iron. When my son woke up from his nap, he reached out to run his fingers along the stones on my bracelet. And he asked where I got it. And I told him I won it at a carnival when I was a child and I’d had it most of my life. I said, “Someday, I will give it to you.” He looked at me and smiled and time origami-ed in on itself, and I knew how soon it would be that I would pass things along to him, little trinkets that I built my life around, like my mother did to me. What I did not know was that all I would have were bracelets that I won or tokens an ex-boyfriend gave me on the side of the road in Montana. What a humbling moment this is.

In Minnesota in July there is heat lightening.

I flew back home, though I have no home there. However, I have friends who feel more like home than any house I have now. And I went to my high school reunion. 20 years. And I could tell you about all the particular strangeness that comes from inhabiting your old self, held up like a paper doll for you to remember in the eyes of people who do not know you at all but once knew you very well, who you once looked at the stars with and dreamt about adult things, like being a writer and ordering a tequila soda, while he tells you that he loves your writing. I could tell you how people change and how they do not seem to change at all, and how friends that old are friends that seem to almost share DNA with you. They know, without knowing, about the baby you lost. I could tell you about all of that, but what was the most startling was how those 20 years just folded themselves up, and I was there and here.

How quickly my son will be 22 and I will hand him a bracelet he’s seen me wear since I was a child. How quick. How quick it will go. This does not make me angry.

What I’d like to do is inhabit the anger so I can let it roll off of me. So I can not just know how precious and gorgeous these moments are but that I do not have this stone pressing upon me as I move through them.

What is the point of this? What is the point of what I am saying to you? I’d like to be as graceful as letting things go as I am about holding onto them? That I haven’t changed. Not at all. Not even a little bit.