And the Heart Will Break All the Plans You've Made

These early mornings when I'm awake before 4, I sometimes feel as if I'm stealing time; a few precious hours I hadn't counted on and therefore hadn't accounted for. I guiltlessly read a novel and sip a huge pot of coffee slowly, from my favorite mug, brought to me across the ocean from that place where my blood flowed from.

It's usually after I spend an hour or more tossing and turning, gently, so I don't disturb the cat asleep on my legs. I'm his second choice in the house, but with a closed door, you take what will have you. He's had enough suffering for all nine lifetimes and I plan to let him suffer not another moment.

I'm focused on our mission this week. In fact, I've spent a great deal of time focused on our mission. I think in our hearts, it's the same one, all of us expressing what we want in different ways. I don't think I've ever felt like a handful of people could disassemble and reassemble their parts into an equal number of people, each with little slivers of the others, all made better by the tearing apart and crashing back together in exactly this way— whole planets colliding. I think it took people as different as we are, bound by love and survivor's guilt, and likely a whole narrow-neck bottle of self-pity as well, not to only to make me feel like such a thing could happen — this mashup of human strengths — but the product of that wild universe that made the molecules of our hearts and minds and hardworking hands come together in the way it has.

It was said to me last week that I have to save one specific person because I could not save my Jay. That felt like a stranglehold on my existence because since that day, the anniversary of which is nearing, when my world was kind of torn apart and reassembled in the same was as my new companions and I, but perhaps taking longer to be beneficial. It's this typhoon of words in my mind now, almost whispers, but not fully-formed ideas. Colors and odors and textures that aren't really organized into feeling as much as just a collective lump in my throat that never goes away. The lump is usually easy enough to ignore until a monsoon observation drowns me in it again.

So, as I do, I turned that idea over in my mind. I shared it with the supposed subject of the present saving. Another observation, true, but tinged with what to me felt like accusation. I'll fight anyone over someone I love, even someone I love. I turned the idea over and over, tumbling like that great, noisy machine to which my grandfather fed stones and retrieved gems. As usual, I came to the only conclusion that now makes sense. It's not in my purview to save anyone. It never was. Despite the guilt, grief, shame, and all the other excruciating feelings that are in six days old enough to drive a fucking car, none of this was ever my burden. 

Lucky for me, that person I'm supposed to be saving was saved when we were hardly more than children. After that, he's been much like me and has saved himself. That coats you in double-blown glass. It's hard and not brittle, but if anyone dares to chip away at it, they're rewarded with tiny, invisible shards and pain they can't see to extract. No one ever really gets too close after that. It's our own faults too. Lonely and total bullshit; self-protection turned self-isolation.

But we share that mission. And I managed to articulate it. "I'm pretty much just about people not wanting to die." I guess we've both spent enough of our lives wanting and trying that we understand that we can't save anyone, but maybe, just maybe, we can give them what we never had: the tools to save themselves for us. The desire and the weapons to kill self-destruction and make bricks of the shards, rebuilding lives that are transparent, and perhaps, building a door in the fortress that the right people can open.

I think I've really been let in for the first time. And that vulnerability — and I found it at first truly shocking and more than a little uncomfortable — has allowed me to be the same. I've been given permission to soften. When I speak of them, and write of them, I've been accused of being in love with them all. I think "in love" doesn't have to be romantic and I've spent enough of my life refusing to be in love that it probably just explodes out of me now. And I think that's necessary here. I think they needed a soft, ferocious love. I think they all do. I think that's how they'll finally understand that love and weakness aren't the same. And I think it had to be a woman. And I think it had to be me. I'm untouchable there. I am unthreatening because of my provenance. Not that I've ever been a threat to any man. It's always hard to explain that to someone with the way I come crashing through the jungle though.

One of my new friends said I'm unpredictable. He's also the first one who told me that I'm one of them now. And that same evening admitted that he was afraid I'd leave. Nothing could make me leave this. Love makes me selfish about this one. He says he'd never want to make me angry. I told him I'm slow to anger real anger, so his danger is small. He said you can't ever tell if I'll be sweet, soft, empathetic, heart in my eyes, or if I'll be ferocious, aggressive, assertive. I know it all depends on how someone treats me. I am soft, gentle, kind even as someone eases a knife between my ribs. I'll stay that way until they look me in the eyes, grits their teeth and shoves. Even then, I tend to let someone twist. I forgive. But once I'm finished, I am finished. I am the Princess of Leave. But this cause can't wield a weapon, so I'll stay until I'm dust.

Through this, I think I've really embraced the power of "I don't know" and "I fucked up, I'm sorry." Again, because it does not diminish me. Being wrong or not having the answer doesn't make me stupid or weak, but admitting it makes me strong and smart.

It's changed me. Their blind faith in me has made me stronger than I ever was. That bending has made me the willow I always wanted to be. I am smarter and braver and more loving than I ever was now that I'm here. I need them like they need me. And I don't feel, for the first time in my whole life, like saying and feeling that I need them diminishes me at all. Open this jar of capers and I'll make dinner. Refill my glass and I'll work on this grant proposal. We work hard for each other instead of competing. In fact, it does the opposite of diminish: it multiplies and refines me. And I almost wrote "I hope I can do the same for them," but I have and I do every day.

I'm going to go do some small things for someone else now, in my two remaining hours before I have to leave for the job that pays the bills instead of the one that nourishes my heart. But I'll say one more time, this one is for Daddy. This one is for Jay. This one is for Steve-O. This one is for all the people who ever loved them. And they were so loveable. Let us make them immortal in that remembrance.