A Drop of Ink

Yosemite, Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, Shenandoah, Niagara Falls, and Yellowstone… jewels of the nation, in all their striking splendor and in all their breath-taking beauty, are places I will perhaps see someday with my own eyes. Places I could have seen, if I’d had more time or more money, or if I’d had company, or if I’d wanted to. But I didn’t. It is a curious thing when an old, vague dream takes shape and unfolds into reality. The words “someday I’d like to do a road trip around the US and see all my friends”, meant almost as a joke, floated across the distance of the kitchen table and fell on serious ears. Unlike me, my friend believed this to be entirely plausible and even gave me a time frame. And while her timing (or mine?) was off, she proved right. The words had been released, the dream had seen the light of day and started to grow. Handing in my letter of resignation two and a half years later fed it even more and soon enough I had a return ticket to Portland, Orego...

I like to imagine my womb as warm and welcoming, her lining exquisitely molded and extraordinarily cozy and calm. She is pregnant always with expectation. She is filled with desire and hope, she floods with life potential, patiently ready. She is beautiful and strong. Her yearning ancient, she reaches ever for what could be, ever for the swell of new life, the expansion of love into new territory. She is unwavering. But every turn of the moon around the earth, she is disappointed, her desires unmet, purpose unfulfilled, her emptiness taunting. Her wailing sears through my body, racking me with pain. Her hot tears drain out of me, uncontrolled. Her grief sits raw, heavy and aching in my pit. Restless and roaming, it goes. And it comes in wave after wave, repeatedly debilitating me, doubling me over. I’ve learned to let her grieve, to give her space. To not exhaust us both beyond what we can bear. I’ve learned to slow down, take a breath, accept that I must do less, be gracious. For in...

I swallowed the words and they made me sick. I had felt how they surged forth from my thoughts full of meaning and purpose only to fall flat on my tied tongue before my lips. The muscles in my face twitched with almost speech, words composed for you. A revelation of me. The limp words made one last attempt to reach fresh air. No luck. What was left for me to do but swallow? They dropped with a thud to the pit of my stomach and then they churned with unease.     They join the company of all the Unspoken, Held Back,  Muffled. Words that will never experience Resonance, Dialogue, Clarity. Only projections and echoes, bouncing off the walls of me. Reined in in the name of keeping peace, hindered by self-doubt, the words cannot rest. They wander without aim inside me.   I pick up a pen and let the words flow out.   We both find peace.  ...

  We used to play among the olive trees, chasing each other in games of tag or mission impossible, dashing from tree to tree as if their thin knobbly trunks could hide us. We were careless then, impervious to the hardship of the outer world… there were walls built around our places of play, containing our laughter. We called these places home, the space between the olive trees, the safe bubble of our existence.  I suppose we must’ve always known we looked like outsiders, though. The older we got, the more obvious it became. We had only to look at the different color of our skin and hair, which was uncovered, to realize we were the foreigners in this land. We had only to be stared at by hungry eyes on the streets we walked and be told not to make eye contact, not to laugh out loud, and not to show too much skin to realize we were not free beyond the walls of our safe zones, in this place we called home. When did we realize what this did to our relationships to our bodies? Dista...