Me, Myself, and I.

Today I feel complicated.

Little bits of me are scattered around my world and I haven’t the energy to retrieve myself, to put myself back together into something that might pass for solid.  I feel shattered, but in a way that makes me feel relaxed, like the work of recovery can be saved for another day, maybe for another me who lives in another world.  A me who is taller and thicker, who owns power tools and a blowtorch and an exacto knife, a me who is up to the impossible job of collecting the pieces of her fragmented self and bullying them back together again. Somewhere she labors while I laze in my bed typing words that come to me like crumbs….

Another me is still at work yesterday…

I hate the patient with the broken neck, and I hate his wife and I hate their son who looks  just like his mother, and I have ill feelings toward their daughter too, but I like her earrings, big gold hoops that hang from her ears like two elegant planets. For this frantic family everything is an emergency…it needs to be dealt with NOW, or else the sky that is already threatening to fall will most certainly come unhinged and rain disaster all over all of us forever and ever. I have never experienced such collective anxiety, at least not this particular flavor, it’s verging on psychotic, their questions and demands like bullets shredding my dwindling reserves of compassion. I wish for a world where I can spray Ativan in their faces like mace, a lovely and relaxing chemical defense against their psychological assaults. 

Another me is craving  The Pacific Crest Trail….

I am craving nature. Big nature, nature that goes on for miles, days, weeks, months. Nature that is so unsafe, so wild, so dag gum NATURAL that it forces you into present tenseness, a place where survival is the only thing on the menu. Pay attention or perish! I am lusting for solitude. Big solitude. Solitude that allows me to scream until I’m empty and no one is around to worry or call the cops. Solitude that is only disturbed by the realization that within this solitude there lives more aloneness, aloneness deeper and more profound than the loneliness that I was sure would take my life just a moment before this moment showed up to slay whatever was left of the previous moment.  I want to shut up for the rest of my life. I want to listen to water moving over rocks, falling down mountains, tumbling in tiny balls from a sky that goes on for all of unrecorded history. I want skies that slap me awake, skies that hold my broken, never to be not broken heart without giving up an inch of space, without charging me a cent. I want texture and  I want brilliant color and I want to get lost….I want to be eaten by a bear. Torn from limb to limb, I want to be devoured, not savored.  I want to my flesh to give life to some furry monster. I want to laugh when finally after centuries….disembodied…I finally get the punchline to the most hysterical joke ever told.

Another me is mourning my mother.

She was a terrible mom. Awful. She lied and smothered me with something she called love, she made promises and she broke them. She let me flunk the 4th grade because she didn’t make me go to school. I watched soap operas and became savvy about Luke and Laura and Port Charles. While the other kids learned long division, I memorized commercial jingles and listened to my mom yammer on the phone about auras and psychic visions. I still need a mother, but not her, never her. But then who?  There is no one. Just me and my orphanitis, a disease that blows holes into my soul when I’m not looking….I’m pissed she’s dead, but dead she is. She is but dust.  Dust in a box buried next to other dust filled boxes in the ground in a cemetery lush with trees and promises of perpetual care.  My mother is dead.  6 years later, and I still don’t know what that means to me.

And there are more bits of me flung around…I am grooving to a chaotic rhythm, I’m rocking out to some obscure station….turning cartwheels, flinging myself with a sling shot, electrocuting myself, melting myself into liquid, loving myself, seeking myself,  finding myself…..letting  myself —–go—- go——go—–clinging…..hanging on for dear life.

Still. I still do this.

The bits moving farther away from each other….the universe is expanding….Perhaps I am expanding too.

And once me and all my parts reach capacity…..POP!