Damn I wish I had more kombucha

He didn't mean to do it, but he did it.


My ankle hurts hurts hurts and I take to my bike anyway. I can no longer stand all this stillness.

I ride and I ride and I ride and my lungs burn and they burn and they burn. I have forgotten my water bottle.



It has been a long seven weeks.


When I was six years old, I had an ant farm. 




I think We all know one of the reasons I work so much and one of the reasons I run so much is because when I stop working and running I start thinking about it. Of course by "it" I mean all of it.


Case in point this week I cannot run, as I have not been able to for seven weeks now, and this week I have worked less than I have in at least five or six years, and here it all is. I do not sleep without the assistance of drugs. I write down story ideas every 20 minutes, it seems, and I write and I write and I worry about the news and I think about you and I regret and I ache and I doubt and I am afraid it's going to kill me I remember I remember I remember I remember


Here I am listening to Carrie and Lowell and even though I've heard that Sufjan is kind of a douche and even though he does look like kind of a douche, frankly, in that yellow frat-boy hat, it is making me cry like it usually does

I am picturing taking flight again. It is a 14-hour drive to Oregon and 24 to PA. I need to change up my life, again, because long ago I made a promise to myself that I would never spend my evenings watching TV and also because I am queer and he will not talk about it; he's afraid I will leave him for a woman

What I can no longer abide is making myself smaller for someone else's comfort. 

What I regret most is not taking the time to define what love means to me.


Meanwhile he goes to meetings and tells everyone he knows that I am a love of his life.

That love can be so easy, and so hard, is one of the many things that confuses me. The man in the live video recording says, I had this anger problem, but I was only ever angry with my intimate partner. Never with anybody else. Just her.

I am the him and the her and the anger and the intimacy.



I am embarrassed of my googling, a private window for my private inquiries. Only they may not be private; only they consume me sometimes such that I cannot breathe; only I do not know how to tell you that I miss you so that you hear it

We watch Brokeback Mountain and he weeps and he weeps and he weeps. Here is the flesh and the blood and the fighting and the salty tears. I cup his temples in my palms and I stroke his sweaty, curly hair. I feel such tenderness as I cradle him. And still too I am wondering: How many men have I held in my arms? And will I ever be given a turn to be the one weeping, and the one embraced?


Suddenly fall arrives.

Of course it has me homesick, as fall always does, that breathless sickness for both the woods and farmlands of Pennsylvania and a vague something that leaves me wanting. Fall is my season of yearning.

This explains partly why I took to my bike yesterday, and it is nearly all of the reason why I will ask my physical therapist at tomorrow's appointment when I can run again. He will remind me, as he did on Monday, that I have asked him this question repeatedly, and that it will still be quite a while before I can take to the trails. This is painful to me. I am trying to get somewhere.



One of the things I remember is how you smiled the first time we dropped down in that pirate's ship out of the sky.

One of the things I remember is how he speculated tenderly on top of me on that quilt in the dark night Maryland grass.

One of the things I remember is having sex on the futon in the upstairs of my parents' house, climbing on top in that long, blue dress.

One of the things I remember is smoking weed in his parents' house and staring at the seaside screensaver, swearing that I could see the little surfers dashing across the waves. The image of that room forcing me to confront, every time it appears in my mind's eye, that I am a survivor of every category of abuse.

I am working to integrate this. Here is another sentence.


I have let the arugula go to flower. It is for the butterflies and the bees.


I am drinking room temperature water out of a giant plastic beer stein. 


You are 5.5 miles into the backcountry when you hear your ankle snap.

Bathtub gin

"The fact that I am writing the scenes means I survived them, and that fact alone brings comfort." 

--T Kira Madden 





My writing is percussive.

Yesterday I walked for the first time in five weeks. I took maybe 20 steps in the physical therapy clinic, probably less, and I wobbled the whole time. I held my arms out at my sides for balance and I focused all of my might and I walked.

I am not done with the crutches; or rather, they are not done with me. But this morning I woke up and after brushing my teeth in the bathroom I stood in the entrance to the main room, handed over my crutch, and walked all by myself the five feet to the couch. This is something.


The large man on the collapsible camp chair tried to mask his shock as the 29-year-old blond man sat on the lap of the 29-year-old brunette man and asked him if he could rub sunscreen into his back.

I ask him if he is a local and tell him I've just adopted a dog from his town.


She runs alongside me as I crutch through the cemetery. I am not supposed to be crutching this far, least of all alone. But she has laid so steadfastly by my side as I have prostrated myself and willed my body to heal, and she is bored, and I do not want her to think she has been adopted into a cage. And so I let her run off leash around me, and whenever she charges more than 50 feet or so ahead she turns of her own accord and waits until I have propelled myself to her side. The only time she leaves me is when another dog appears on the path above her. She charges up to greet him before she remembers that the voice calling her back is saying her name, that she has a name, that the voice is mine, and that she is beholden to me. She sprints back to my side and grabs a stick, flinging it into the air.


 I have eaten too many grapes and my belly hurts.



I have been manhandled in the security lines. While one woman screamed the other grabbed the pack on my back and yanked, and here I am on crutches nearly toppling backwards. By the time they are through with me I have tears streaming down my face. As I exit the station a kind man named Russell asks if I am okay.


I don't think I have cried in public like that since I was 11 years old and furious with my parents during an outing at the Wisehaven pool. That time I sobered up quickly and switched from tearful to unbelievably pissed, stalking the pool grounds for all purposes looking like a cherubic sociopath. This time it took me a little longer, because I was taken by waves of flashbacks for the rest of the evening, and there is not much I know how to do with those except sit them out and try to remind myself that here and now I am doing okay. Now these eight days later the anger is here and I will fight for the people who cannot walk, and who are treated less than for being that way.



Honestly if you do not know how to be kind then you are probably wasting my everyone's time.


Because I have not been able to walk I have been watching hours and hours of American Ninja Warrior. I imagine my body along with theirs, willing it to remember what it's like to leap, twist, grab... hold on. Willing it to be ready when I am capable of moving again.


I vacillate between acceptance and not wanting to be here. Never resentment of it having happened, never why me. Just frustration with watching my quad return to fleshiness, my calf withering away inside the brace. Just the dread of knowing what's to come. He instructs me to press backward and my whole leg shakes.



I chew on gluten-free flax crackers and drink Stevia-sweetened, no-sugar ginger ale to settle my stomach. Tomorrow I will drive myself to the pool alone, the first time since the injury, and I will clasp my legs around the buoy and swim with just my arms for 40 minutes without stopping.



Wilson is reclaiming his cuddle time. He crawls atop my chest, and when Hanna tries to crowd her way in he reaches out a paw and baps her right across the face.


Already in the mornings he is putting on a sweater before stepping outside.

I have written something that matters to me.

what is a flight nurse

Now that I cannot walk my life has changed. I am so tired of lying on the pull-out loveseat in this basement apartment, looking up through the window at the tip-top green leaves of my neighbor's trees.

At least I can see trees.


Poor Hanna is bored and I do not blame her, so am I, in my fourth week now and still I can't stand on my own two feet.

How quickly the illusion of independence is shattered. How frightening to realize I am one bad step away from being completely dependent on the generosity of others. For nearly a month now I can't cook, or shower, or step out of this basement apartment and into the world without someone else by my side. I am simultaneously shame, knowing that I need not feel shame, frustration, despair, perseverance, and gratitude.  


I have lost all of the muscles in my right leg. Yes and I cried about it. I remember acutely coming back from my lung's collapse, retching on the side of the road the first time I tried to run. I told myself then I would never stop running, so that I would never have to come back again. Well here I am.

The black brace that has become my constant fashion accessory gapes around my atrophied calf. My right thigh spreads across the seat beneath me while my left quad holds firm. I know that it's just muscle, and I also know what it meant for me to build that muscle in the first place, after they told me I would never run again. And so I despair, and I know that there is no need for despair.


I am scared of camping amidst the throngs this weekend. I had been looking forward to it all year and now I find myself shrinking from it. Already I have pushed my comfort zone so much, teetering on my crutches into spaces and groups I do not know. Can I do it again, this time when porta potties are involved?

Of course I can do it again. Of course I can, and I will, because they told me I could not, and here I am. And here I will be, again and again, because even when my leg is atrophied I always have strength within me.

This conversation is so good I need to put the link somewhere I will remember it

https://tricycle.org/magazine/understand-realize-give-develop/

whiskey ginger (part II)

I don't think I'm pretty, but I know that I am beautiful.


I thought that adopting a dog would save me, but in reality I think I am saving her.


The divorced woman with the dyed red hair is establishing her independence.



I am familiar with the changing of the seasons, but here the environment changes by the hour. This morning it quickly rose past 80 degrees. This early afternoon it became cool, and cloudy, and pebbles of hail dropped from the sky. Later in the afternoon it thundered and rained. Then it grew sunny again, and Hanna and I took to the trails. There we found a pond, nearly four feet deep and at least 15 wide. It was not there last week and, I suspect, if it stops raining for a few days it will be gone by the weekend. Here, you are forced to understand the constancy of change. Here, you are forced to confront that everything is fleeting.




If you could only see how big the squash and the cauliflower and the arugula have grown. The squash died back twice in the early season, the result of unpredictable mountain frosts, and I firmly believe that me telling them I believe in them, over and over again, is what brought them back to life. You are free to disagree but I know belief manifests miracles. For weeks I have been dining on salads and kale sauteed in coconut milk, walking home every night from the garden with bouquets of greens.


We named her Hanna for the river, Big Suskie, forever one of the places I can call my home.


I do not miss as much as I thought I would, and for that I feel both shame and understanding. I didn't even realize how much I was not myself. I have started pronouncing my name differently when introducing new people into my life.

There is a feather tattooed on my ribs. It is temporary, a test. When I find the right artist--a woman who specializes in watercolor designs, who believes that belief manifests miracles--I will know where I want it and what it will be. So far I am considering my rib cage, my left forearm, and the inside of my left ankle. It will be a great blue heron or Maine meadow lupines or a lodgepole pine or the V with the calla lily I designed when I was 23. Cast your votes.


In BUTI yoga I hesitated to strip down to my sports bra, and then I remembered I'm 30. I don't have time for this shit. I pulled off my shirt and I twisted and sweated in front of women I know and women I don't. I did it again the next time, and the next. In September I will show up to the training in short shorts and a blue-strapped sports bra, and I'll just let 'er rip.


I spent months after the election in a state of abject despair. I had never felt that hopeless or defeated in my life, except for maybe when I was trying to kill myself. Now I am seeing the horror and I am calling its bluff. It will never be as big as I know my love can be. Maybe we only have a few more years but mark my words I'm going to be a force of nature for as long as I'm here.


My family and I played a lot of poker while they were in town. I didn't win very often, but I think my brother appreciated my bravado--bluffing to high heaven and tossing in all my chips--and the merest hint that he might like or appreciate or even respect me is enough for me to have won. I don't know if my siblings will ever Know how much I love them, and I will never stop anyway.


Every night a different doughnut.

Wilson sits at the window staring, alert to each movement and sound. He is braver with Hanna here: staying in the living room when it thunders, walking up to the fan pointed at the wet-drying rug and pressing his nose against the slats, his 50-pound pal right behind him.


On days like today all it takes to shake me out of a bad mood is a clump of bright yellow wildflowers growing up out of the high desert trail.

I am so grateful to get to be alone. Oh it feels good to be back.

"On the Beach at Night Alone" by Walt Whitman

On the beach at night alone,

As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,

As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,

All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,

All distances of place however wide,

All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,

All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,

All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,

And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

"All You Do Is Perceive" by Joy Katz

I was given a city, with coffee and sunlight. “The coin-purse smell of the subway,” I wrote. In the mornings policemen would stand, lightstruck and pleasured, over trays of danish. Mornings I wrote and workmen raised up their nets. Hallelujah the brick, the debris! I was given a city. The city got between me and God.

 
I was given a house. The curtains breathed over wide sills. There was a leaf in the middle of the floor, I loved the crispness of the leaf. I loved the privacy of sills. The sills sailed, I fell into the sills. The sills got between me and God.
 
I was given a mud hut. The walls curved to meet the ceiling like a tongue curves to make a word.
 
I was given God, with salt and sweet together. I was given a piece of meat. I loved the flesh. I was given bread only. I was given only water. I loved the coolness of the water. The water got between me and the feast.
 
I had an empty plate and there was the color of it. I cannot even describe the color of it.
 
I was given a cell with a window. There was a certain light at evening.

 
I was given nothing but the air, and the air dazzled.