How You Come Back (an Everyday Essay)

This post is part of the "Everyday Essays" series. See below for a description of the series, and read others essays here.

how you unsettle me — how you go
infinite — how you come back —

(from "the silver book" by jen bervin)

My mind tries to recreate you in dreams, but it's a poor sketch artist. And maybe I forget more than I remember. Last night you sat in the back of my dream space, it may have been a bus, or maybe an auditorium (two places I've never seen you while awake), and your hair was the wrong shade: light tan, when it should have been dark chestnut. Years ago I dreamt you into the wings of a stage and there you were, until you removed your sunglasses and showed me brown eyes instead of the true blue they should have been. (The blue they were, and the blue, presumably, they still are.) "Excuse me, don't I know you?" And then the big reveal of some detail gone wrong. "Oh, I guess not."

I can't make my mind paint you right any more than I could wring out of you the truth of your leaving with my young tears and a pleading so ancient as to be banal. Foreshadowing: When duty called and you had to leave, I begged you, "Don't go. Please don't leave me." That was unfair, I know. You weren't leaving me then, though that would be the beginning of your eventual goodbye.

When you finally disappeared for a time and came back changed, I gave you an ultimatum, and you chose to take the out, which wasn't what I'd intended. (I remember you saying you don't appreciate ultimatums.) (I don't remember giving you one.) (How many times did I let you convince me of something else?) If you wouldn't stay, you should have at least told me the truth about why. "This is for the best" is what you tell a child. I know you were young and that I was younger, but that wasn't very brave of you, was it?

"Someday you'll understand." I don't think you ever said that, but I always hear it as the subtitle of the book called, "This Is for The Best." A lifetime later and I still don't understand. I've made the best of it, as every one does about every thing, but who's to say what's best? Sometimes, just before I fall asleep, when I need a familiar hurt to fixate on as an escape from more pressing worries, I leaf through that book, "Someday You'll Understand: This Is for The Best," and I try to read the appendices, where I expect to find notes about the meaning of things. I fall asleep.

In my dreams, the puzzle pieces of you -- the odd shapes of action that don't fit my narrative -- take on physical form: hair, eyes, the sound of your voice. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We keep piecing you together, my subconscious and I. Childlike renderings, simplified, symbol, redux.

I imagine you in the passenger seat of my car. Stepping through the broken gate of my backyard fence. Standing outside my front door, looking up to me in the window. (I swear to you: These are not metaphors. I mean all of this literally.)

You have dark brown hair and indigo blue eyes. I remember. (The photos verify.) Dark hair, blue eyes. Dark hair, blue eyes.

** ** **

About Everyday Essays: At least a few times a week I jot down notes about something -- usually a small moment, detail, or thought -- that I want to write about. Most of those ideas stay frozen as notes and never bloom into essays. Everyday Essays is my new writing practice to allow some of those notes to move beyond infancy. I've decided to share some of them with you here, even if they're still half-naked or half-baked. The word "essay" (as is almost always noted when the form is discussed) comes from the French verb essayer, which means to try. The essay is a reckoning, a rambling, an exploration, an attempt. Think of these Everyday Essays as freewriting exercises, rough drafts, or the jumbled, interconnected contents of my mind, which may or may not take root and grow into longer (deeper) essays.

Rediscovering Neverland

Several people have told me how much they're enjoying Roller Derby Makes Me Brave, which makes me happy for several reasons. First of all, well, it's just nice to hear that people like what I write. My ego thanks you. On a deeper level, it's been gratifying to hear that a few of you have been inspired by my little acts of bravery and have embraced your own whispers of courage. One woman said she got up the nerve to start swimming in the mornings, in part because of my roller derby posts. She almost didn't tell me about it, she said, because she felt "silly." That's not silly. That's fabulous.

There are so many seemingly ordinary things that scare each one of us -- things that we see other people doing and long to try for ourselves. It may be swimming, getting on roller skates, public speaking, deciding to have a baby, or traveling to a foreign county by yourself. Maybe it's baking a cake from scratch or planting a garden or starting a business. If your heart is singing out for something big or small, and you choose to be brave for that thing, no matter how silly or scared you feel, well, that's fabulous. And it's been fabulous for me to hear about such things, because it feels good to inspire people.

If you hang around me long enough, you may hear me declare that I don't write to help people or to heal them. It's not that I don't care about people and their well-being, of course. It's just that I don't write with the explicit intent to help or to heal. Come to think of it, most of the time I don't even aim to inspire. I just write what I want or need to write. Even when I'm writing something meant to be overtly helpful or meant to "teach" something, such as a writing tips post or a lesson for one of my courses, I still don't think of myself as a helper or teacher. Mostly I consider myself a sharer: one who shares. So I don't aim to help, heal, teach, or inspire anyone. But if one of those things happens in the course of what I've written, that's a nice bonus. (I'm trying to write a longer post about this topic, so look for more to come in the near future. Maybe. Right now the draft starts, "I don't want to help you!", but I'm a little worried people might take that the wrong way.)

Knowing that I inspired someone also helps with the feeling of post-publication nudity that can creep up on me. I don't often think about how vulnerable I'm being in my writing until after the fact. If I do feel vulnerable while I'm writing, it's usually related to the art of writing, not to the subject matter. When I'm writing I can easily fret over whether I'm creating something interesting and engaging and beautiful. But it's mostly only after I've written something and put it out into the world that I'll have moments of, "Holy cow, that was honest." And then I might feel a wee bit sheepish and naked. Knowing that people who know me read my words freaks me out even more. I pretty much can't think about my parents reading my work without grimacing a little bit, even though I don't write much that's scandalous. (Hi, Dad! Hi, Mom!) But being honest about my own tiny fears and triumphs can feel scandalous. It can be shocking to see myself reflected back to me on the page.

But I keep doing it because that reflection is how I make sense of the world and my experience in it. For me, writing is a form of discovery. I learn this lesson again and again. For example, my last roller derby post took me days and days to write. I kept stalling out and boring myself with it. I didn't think it was going anywhere interesting. I thought for sure I was going to have to kill it and start over. I had no idea what it was really about or how it all worked together (as art or content) until I wrote the last line of it. And then I felt a warm golden glow with the hum of angels in the background, and it was an epiphany of the obvious (of which I have many). Ah, so that's what this post was about! Good to know.

There's a scene in the movie "Hook" in which Peter Pan, played by Robin Williams, comes back to Neverland as a grown man, and the Lost Boys don't quite recognize him. One of them, an adorable chocolate drop of a boy, pushes Peter's face around, trying to smooth out the wrinkles and figure out if he's still the same Peter that they knew. The boy finally pulls Peter's face into a smile and declares in wonder, "Oh, there you are, Peter!"

When I write something true, the writing itself is that little boy, pulling the corners of my heart into shape until I declare, "Oh, there I am!" I remember who I am and that, maybe -- like Peter Pan -- I can fly (or swim or skate). I rediscover my Neverland. I think the same thing happens when we read something that resonates with us. We see something of ourselves in another's words, and then we breathe a bit more easily, knowing, Oh, there we are.

And right now, it's happening again. I didn't start this post thinking about Peter Pan or the movie "Hook." But there it was. And here we are. Oh.

Loquacious: A serendipitous word choice from Laurie Easter

Loquacious:  full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language.

This week, the lively Laurie Easter, writer and fellow VCFA graduate, searches for her favorite word and comes to a serendipitous conclusion. I asked Laurie to write this essay before I named this series. She sent it to me around the time that the first "Loquacious" post went live, but I was on vacation and missed her email. A few weeks later she emailed again to ask about her submission, and asked if her post had inspired the name of the series. I had no idea what she was talking about until I found her original email and read the essay below. Call it serendipity, synchronicity, coincidence, or kismet (all good words), or just two writers' minds dipping into the same word pool. Whatever you call it, it sounds good. Keep reading and you'll see what I mean. 

Loquacious

By Laurie Easter

In considering writing this guest post on my favorite word, I found myself a bit stymied choosing a word, or even several, that deserved such accolades. What do I consider a favorite word? I wondered. (Now, as I write this, stymied comes to mind as a word I rather enjoy.) But on the morning of my deadline, I woke amidst a half-dream of words floating through my consciousness. One of which was SLEEP, a word I love, but whether it is for the sound of the word itself or the act, I cannot say. My snoozing brain whispered, Sleeeeeeeep, as if the extended long vowel sound could sequester me in my lulling subconscious.

Another word floating through my brain was RELIEF because yesterday I experienced an immense amount of it when my twenty-two-year-old daughter called from the wrecking yard after retrieving her personal belongings from her totaled Toyota Camry, which she had crashed two nights prior on a dark and windy rural highway. She said that in the daylight the car looked to be in a lot worse shape than it did in the near full moonlight after the air bag erupted against her face and chest, effectively smacking her into shock. Yes, RELIEF. That is a very good word ― and a very good feeling. Much better than any word that would describe me if there hadn't been airbags in her car. My dream-brain went on to wonder about this word RELIEF. Is it anything like RE-LEAF? In experiencing relief does one metamorphose like the trees that lose their leaves in fall, withstand the stark cold of winter, and then cheerily burst forth new growth in spring?

In search of that one special word, other words floated from my left hemisphere: FAMILY, PEACE, SERENITY, HOPE. But are they words that I love because of the way they roll around my brain or sound in a sentence, or do they merely carry weight due to their representational nature? Are they words that are fun to say or listen to? Peeeaaaace, my dream-brain said. It's got a nice sound, with that long E like sleep. Serenityyyy soothes. But hope and family? These words carry their weight in symbolism more than syntax. My dream-brain reached: What is a word that stands singularly special?

And then it came. LOQUACIOUS. It sounds like an exotic fruit, like if you opened it up to taste it, your mouth would salivate in spurts of anticipation the way it does from the smell of an overripe lemon. Say it: Lo-quay-ciousssss. Do you feel it, the tanginess of plump seeds and juicy pulp tantalizing your tongue and filling your cheeks? LOQUACIOUS.

** ** **

Laurie Easter holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Oregon with her husband and two daughters. But that will change in a few short weeks when her youngest daughter leaves for college three thousand miles away and everyone else has to move out of the house they've lived in for the last eight years. Laurie is the recipient of an Artist Grant from the Vermont Studio Center and will spend the beginning of her empty-nest life writing along the Gihon River in autumn.

The First Practices (Roller Derby Makes Me Brave #5)

This is the fifth installment of "Roller Derby Makes Me Brave," an ongoing series in which I chronicle my journey into roller derby. (You can read the whole series or the individual posts.)

me in my new helmet, straight out of the box

On the evening after April Fools' Day, I showed up at the practice rink with nothing but a knot in my stomach and what I imagine was a fresh-meat-in-the-headlights look in my eyes. This was no joke.

As promised, Sue Zee Haymaker had brought me a pair of Cobra skates that she'd bought at a flea market. She'd paid $2.00 for them. I gave her $2.50. Compared to good skates, these were awful, but they were an enormous improvement over the rentals I'd been using, and I was thrilled to have them.

Since I didn't have any protective gear for that first practice, I didn't do much but skate around and watch the other girls do drills. By now I was staying on my feet most of the time, which was a considerable improvement, given that just three weeks earlier I could barely stand on wheels. But by the end of that first practice, going from standing to skating proved to be a problem. My brain told my body to move, but my feet apparently didn't get the memo. My upper body swayed forward while my legs stayed still, and down I went on my left knee.

In that moment I vowed that I wouldn't get on roller skates again without knee pads. So by the next practice a week later, I had the full monty of gear: knee gaskets, knee pads, padded shorts, elbow pads, mouthguard, and helmet.

the palm bruise, one week later

Well, I had the full gear monty minus one thing: Wrist guards. The pair I'd ordered online were too small and had to be exchanged. I didn't have them in time for that second practice, but I skated anyway. This was a mistake, because I fell and slammed my palm into the court. And it was in that moment, of course, that I vowed never to skate without knee pads and wrist guards.

By practice number three I finally had every single piece of gear that I needed. This meant that I could participate on a whole new level. And this made my third practice feel like my first.

We started that practice with a falling drill. Knowing how to fall well is a key part of roller derby. I don't know if there's any other sport in which "Nice fall!" is meant as a true compliment. You feel smart and powerful when you fall well. It's not that you want to fall, but you have to accept that it's going to happen, and you need to know how to do it as safely and painlessly as possible. Plus -- and this is the real kicker -- you need to not fear it. This mental aspect is much harder to master than the physical aspects of falling safely.

Strap eight wheels onto your feet, and everything in your body and mind screams at you: Don't fall! For the love of your beautiful bones, don't fall! You must overcome this. You have to trust that all of this gear you're wearing will work if you just follow the instructions.

As I stood in the drill line, realizing that I was going to have to execute a physical activity while a bunch of other women watched, everything in my mind and heart screamed at me: Don't do this! For the love of your pride, don't do this!

my $2.50 Cobra skatesWhat terrified me more than the idea of learning how to fall was the idea of other people seeing me learn how to fall. I have spent my entire adult life avoiding situations in which I might make a physical fool of myself. Yet here I was, a grown woman engaged in a voluntary, recreational activity, and I felt like the chubby, out-of-shape girl in eighth grade gym class waiting in line for one of the stations of the President's Physical Fitness Test. Do you remember those? I hated gym class in an average week, but my loathing and level of humiliation reached a new level during testing time. I don't think I ever failed the test, but I certainly couldn't do enough pull-ups or sit-ups to feel good about myself. I didn't run fast, and I couldn't run for very long without getting winded. I think I managed to do fairly well on the standing long jump, but that was little consolation for my overall mediocre performance. The worst part was having the other girls watch while you tried to execute the task. I don't remember anyone ever mocking or insulting me, but they didn't have to. I was doing that silently in my head all by myself.

We grow up, we change. We try new things, we shift perspectives. We get brave, we get hurt. Decades pass, and we're not the same people. Yes, all of these things are true, but we're also still 12-years-old, stuck in the purgatory between childhood and adulthood, old enough to know better and too afraid to know how. (Child self, meet shadow self.) 

Everyone else skated out in groups of four. Skate, fall, slide. But there was an odd number of us that night, and instead of adding myself to a group, I ended up having to go by myself. I felt sick. I felt the kind of panic that makes you give-up before you try. The back-down-the-ladder-on-the-high-dive panic. The sing-too-softly-on-the-choir-solo-auditions panic. The turn-your-head-the-other-way-when-he-tries-to-kiss-you panic. The I-want-this-so-badly-I-can-hardly-stand-it panic.

Sometimes the shadow self triumphs. Eventually you step off the high dive, sing your heart out, close your eyes and soften your lips. Eventually you skate, fall, slide. And no one laughs or points or shakes their head. The next group lines up, and the next, and then you again. Skate, fall, slide. It looks easy, but there's not much in the world that's more difficult than letting yourself fall and getting back up again, no matter who's looking.

I Don't Need to Take my Writing More Seriously

I'm writing a book. It's a collection of essays. Or it's a lyric narrative (a lyrrative!). Or something. Yes, I'm writing something. I'm writing some things. Well, I have written some things, maybe that's the better way to put it. I haven't been writing many of these things lately. I've been stymied for a long time about where the book/collection/thing is going, what I want it to be, what it wants to be. I'm sad about this. I'm frustrated and more than a little bit angry at myself. I'm also baffled; I still don't know exactly why it's so hard to make a priority of the work I love.

Last night I went to bed determined to make a change. I woke up this morning, tired and grim with determination. I told my journal pages (where I still manage to write some things some times) that I was ready to take writing more seriously. Immediately I realized that's not what I need. Dear goodness, I prayed, don't let me take my writing any more seriously than I already do!

I don't need to take my writing more seriously.

I don't need to buckle down.

I don't need to try harder.

I don't need to be more committed.

I need to take writing less seriously. 

I need to write more often and with less fear.

I need enthusiasm, not discipline.

I need to be freer on the page and more forgiving of myself.

I need to stop worrying about getting it right.

I need to stop trying to be epic.

I need to keep learning to write badly.

I need to start having fun.

I need to play.