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where the light comes from

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When I was eleven or twelve years old, I won a talent competition at church. ( I've actually talked about this before, but any excuse to post this photo.) It was the first time in my life that I felt like  I had done something well. I was never going to be an opera star, or a rock star, or any kind of star, because to be truly excellent and rise to the absolute top, you need to have about seventeen different kinds of hammers in the toolbox you carry around inside your chest and I had only one.  I still have it, it sleeps quietly inside me, snoring softly, and I only ever really let it out to play when I'm alone in my car or the stairwell or a really excellent empty locker room. It's not the ability to really dig in and rip it, although any karaoke night anywhere will try and teach you otherwise. It's being able to blow the goddamn doors off the sucker, but almost never doing so. It's the other end of the continuum, the softness, the sensual gentleness that comes fr

the skies never so blue

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There is no way to brace for this impact: I lost the baby. I've had to find ways to write it, to say it out loud again and again. It's impossible to sugarcoat it. I can't put a positive spin on it; even me, the eternal optimist, is unable to find some shining way through. There's a really good reason that no one ever talks about this, and that's because it's fucking unbearable. How do you grieve a life that never was, how do you mourn the loss of not only that life, but of hope? Why do we say it this way, my child has been lost , when I think it's actually my own soul that will forever roam, invisible and misplaced at sea, when it's me who has vanished into a violent squall of heartbreak? It is my body that feels quiet and desolate, hushed in unfamiliar stillness. I am the one that can't breathe, that has been blown apart, that is not surviving. A week or so after it happened, I was chatting briefly with a friend, and he said something that resonate

before I ever knew you

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And now we've come full circle. I'm a storyteller. I said it last fall, in a post weaved through the crappy Snow Patrol song that is somehow marking time around the beginning of it all. I may not do it well, or properly, but it's never so much about the story as it is about the telling, the things I learn about myself as I pour words onto a blank page. Hoping for nothing more than to dig through the tumbling waterfall of adverbs and commas and murk in order to unearth the mirror I'd like to hold up to my soul.   I've learned over the last few months, maybe in the hardest possible ways, that sharing my story is what creates forward motion. It's how I grow, and to hell with anyone who judges me for what I have to say or how I choose to say it. I'm not going to stop being who I am. And who I am is ready, now, to weave an intricate thread through this particular story, of how I've arrived into my stunning and startling destiny, to tell the tale that the univ

and then we were two

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There is something I have been dying to tell you...