In the Meantime

Pretty Dress, originally uploaded by Mellahoney.

Once upon a time, I could actually spend quiet moments mulling over which glittering part of my day to bring here and write about. Not so much lately. It's four-thirty in the morning. I've been at work for over five hour and can hardly see straight, let alone stand for very long at this computer (yes, I have to stand at the desk computer's here...)

I am officially longing for the "good 'ol days" - when diapers and kitchen clutter were the biggest of my worries. When I was seeing more clearly the all of the ordinary magic of motherhood, wifehood, life.

I trust I'll make my way back there, soon enough. Soon enough. But, for now - only this. Because she makes me smile. Thank goodness for lighthearted children to keep us from taking things too seriously. For dropping forks and grinning over spilled cups of juice. For fervently denying the poop in their diapers, no matter how bad they smell. For potty-training and cartoon character underwear and the innocent blurting-out of casual observations ("Momma, my peanut is cold.") For imaginary monster's and made-up games of blanket-head and bare feet pounding out rain dances for crackers across my kitchen floor.

For giving me a thousand happier things to dwell on as the final few hours of the graveyard shift unwinds.

Distance

I drive by my past once a week. It's spread out like a necklace, link-to-link, as I travel the short stretch between my mothers house and my office. Down the rural route that I once thought was the be-all and end-all of roads in our state (and was later shocked to discover that my husband had never even driven on it) - my past winks at me at each turn.

First, the building that brought our family to the area - a twice (or thrice) bought and sold office building where my father's van spent nearly a decade, parked by the back door. I would wave at it from the backseat of my mother's car if we happened to pass by while he was working.

Just beyond the parking lot is a pair of tennis courts and an athletic field - where I took gym classes and played soccer. The booth at the top of the stands is now orange with large black tiger paws, but the field remains the same. Pepsi-cola scoreboard towering over a football length field, circled by a pummeled gravel track.

Keep driving. Pass by the playground where I worked in an after school program, where I swung barefoot at midnight with friends as a teenager, where I went on warm spring afternoons with my preschool class. Next, of course, is the preschool - followed by the corner store where we bought penny candy, sucked on smarties.

Keep driving. I pass the building where we held our rehearsal dinner for our wedding - it's now an office park. Two buildings down is the hall where I sat through Mother's Day luncheons, eating swollen ziti with fellow girl scouts. It's also the hall where five years ago, I danced my first dance with my husband.

Keep driving. Pass the best soft-serve ice cream you'll ever taste - but never will. It's now an Enterprise Rental Car office. Then there's shell of the grocery store that once fired me over a stolen kiwi. Then there's the Wendy's that popped up on the town line and prompted the McDonald's on Main Street to hang banners and flags - terrified of losing it's place as the fast food heart of the town.

Keep going beyond the town and there are small shops I went with my mother - then the private school she worked at - and ultimately, I arrive at the hospital she works at now. The hospital that gave me my first job, the first job I quit. The building where both of my children have been born. The children I dropped off this morning, at the start of day, at my mother's house, before driving through two decades of my life, and arriving here.

No wonder they seem so far.

My Mayhem

Mayhem, originally uploaded by Mellahoney.

We're fumbling through this for now - upheaval, mess, mayhem. Change is in the wind, and so are about a million germs (as the kids and I are all sniffling, sneezing, snotting), and so is something that smells (either the garbage, or a diaper, or both), changes at work, and Spring rising on the horizon, the thaw happening all around us - ice dripping and falling in dull thuds from our roof to the frozen ground.

In the midst of this dizzying mayhem of diapers and cell phones, tissue-clusters and sinks of dishes and tires with slow-leaks, I pulled out this journal that a friend gave me after Lila was born, and I turned on my fancy-pants Zen and I picked up a pen and I...sat in the bed and just stared at it. The word, Mayhem and the blank white pages inside.

And I thought, (The World Spins Madly On whirring ironically through my headset) What is it that I'm looking for in here? What did I hope to find on these stark white pages? Some sort of clarity in the midst of my daily chaos?

Attempting to return to this once easy and effortless habit was, well, an effort.

As a teenager, turning to a journal was necessary for dealing with all that cliche teenage angst that I carried around. Angst over imagined problems, social situations, stresses that shouldn't have been stresses at all.

Of course, I see this all now, now that I have no angst. Only a blank journal, a headset, and a husband sitting in the next room playing video games while I try to reclaim this habit of introspection, of writing things down.

Perhaps, the trouble is that I have no pent up frustration in need of venting. Life is, in general, good. I have a husband who does dishes and changes diapers. I have pleasant, well mannered children, who despite the occasional poo-on-the-walls-carpet-furniture-bedspreads-etc incident, are easy and wonderful. I have a home, a healthy relationship with my parents, my in-laws, good friends.

What is it that I wanted to journal about? Diapers? My so-easy-a-monkey-can-do-it part-time job? A few dirty dishes? Pshaw.

Instead, I finally brought pen to page and wrote a list of good things. Things to look on when riding a wave of stress or worry or self-doubt. I stuck in pictures of said good things. Pictures of my husband and I from before we were 'my husband and I.'

Pictures from our first apartment, the black and white ones I mentioned here before:

Things we wrote each other - Mella, You are Weird - His first love note to me, scrawled on a small piece of black paper while sitting at a booth at a 24 greasy-spoon diner (New England institution really, which has since been shut down.)

Then I moved on to pictures of my little whirwinds, the real mayhem bringers, the poop slingers, and my favorite people under the sun, the moon, the stars. I put their little hospital bracelets and the index cards with their birth weights and lengths - the first documents with their names, written in my mother's handwriting and taped to their glass hospital bassinettes.

It's all in there. My little journal of life-as-it-was-and-is.

My little journal of Mayhem.

Me

Last semester began over the weekend.

Things I've learned so far:

1. I love being alone in a place where no one really knows me. It's like hiding, ducking out of my humdrum life for squandered hours here and there and getting to return to myself - to the me that's silenced by Spaghetti-O's on the floor and smears of Balmex. The me I pushed aside for my children, to carry them I gave my body - but to raise them, I gave the me I've always known. The one who secretly thinks terrible things like If I were living each day like it's my last, I'd be on the other side of the Atlantic...and then I realize that in that perfect, idealic existence, I'm walking the cobblestone streets alone.

Thankfully, before I can delve too deeply away from myself (my mommy-self) the subway car jerks to a halt and my daydreams are scattered like the Cheerio's I'll be sweeping up when I get home.

Sitting in the workshops, I'm creative-me. I'm curious and interested and, before we begin, I'm quietly listening - absorbing the gentle chatter of non-parental conversations sprinkling around me refreshing as rain.

Walking home, I peek in boutique windows or ethnic markets and am tempted to pause. To stop my fast foot-to-concrete pace and just let myself slip into aisles of foreign stores, fingering linens or knick-knacks or bags of strange sweets, until I forget where it was I had been in such a rush to return.

Except, I can't. My mother-in-law can only watch the children so many hours in a day.

So I instead descend the million-steps to the subway, stare at the bricks, the rails, the dirt, the smudges of footprints on the thick yellow "Do Not Cross" line.

And I wait.

2. I love being home.
Because he runs to hug me within ten seconds after I walk through the door. Because his hair is soft and his cheeks are cool and he smiles when he looks up and calls me Mom like it's a word he invented - just for me.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

It's impossible for me to not be reflective this time of year. Growing up, my sister and I would plop ourselves on the couch and watch homevideo's of previous Christmas mornings - both in anticipation and out of our innate need to look back.

For me, the feeling of the holidays is found in the details - in remembering holding my Christmas stocking, feeling it's soft weight shift in my palm, sliding my fingers in to pull out foil wrapped kisses. The smell and crinkle of paper and tape and the sticky scent of pine. It's in remembering the carpet-grain dots on my knees from kneeling before the tree in my nightgown - and in the smell of cinnamon rolls - and the vision of my bathrobe clad mother sipping coffee in the doorway to the kitchen.

Silly and absurd details, like my father's feet - bare and pale and playfully prodding our catnip drunk kitty's nose. My skinny little brother excitedly waving his presents in the air and yelling for the video camera's attention. Or, the three of us kids parading down the stairs in dramatic fashion - flips and songs, whatever we could think of in our Christmas-Morning enthusiasm.

This year, nothing is so simple - it's all loose threads - gifts to wrap, treats to make for Christmas and birthday parties (I do not recommend having a baby so close to Christmas), cleaning to do, and work to finish. I feel breathless, but not with anticipation.

And oddly, this is the first year I haven't yearned for those childhood video tapes. Rather, the nostalgia was set in motion by the black and white's that I found recently, and so my yearning has been to look back on more recent years. On that tiny tree in our first apartment, sitting on a miniature coffee table, hardly a decoration upon it, and hardly a gift beneath it. Yet, it was perfect.

It's what we make it, I suppose.

Huh. Look at that. I sat down here to babble and procrastinate before attempting to clean - and yet I found a little peace.

Imagine that.

Just Reflecting

They're black and white with glossy smiles. We found them while sorting through boxes in an effort to reorganize our closet space - pictures from our first months of marriage. Silly, random shots of cats and bananas and us - laughing, lounging on cheap couches in our five hundred square foot apartment.

Aside from serving as instant motivation to lose baby-weight, finding these random pictures was a punch of pure bliss. Nostalgia and warm fuzzies. I loved that short time in my life. Those first few months of living together, feeling our way around the newness of us.

Our apartment? A glorified closet subsidized by the college I worked for - it was love and hate. The galley kitchen had an annoying florescent light, buzzing and flickering overhead. No window. The sink was always overflowed with dishes. The bedroom window overlooked a noisy parking lot. Our furniture was nonexistent or handed down or purchased at WalMart and assembled with Allen wrenches (and aggravation.) Our neighbor blasted tele-evangelists at odd hours of the morning, even when he went out (to "keep the spirit" in his apartment while he was away.)

The apartment was my first real taste of responsibility. My first (official) home away from home. And I loved it - despite it's many (many) flaws, because it was my first home with him. The man in those pictures, laughing with a big orange cat on his lap. The man who wrote me poems and put our picture on bottles of Jone's soda. The same one whose hands shook when I first asked him for a shoulder rub.

We've travelled half way around the world together, and now here we are. The black and white photos neatly tucked away in a bedroom armoire (furniture that wasn't handed down and that didn't arrive with instructions for assembly.) A closet full of ties and button down shirts. A basinette beside our bed. Somehow, we arrived here. Grown-up, together.

Now we're bigger and older and seen in color photos on computer screens with kids on our laps. And I can't get over how happy I am - black and white and present day.

Then, Now and Again

Before this, my shirts were coffee-speckled and I wore stickers beside my eye. I sifted through lazy afternoons like this like they weren't a limited commodity - one that could pass away, or become fleeting and rare and always an occasion.

I frothed milk and pumped espresso for a living. I smiled often and wore t-shirts with innocent words stretched across my breasts - Only in Bellingham. Got great tips.

Today, it's nearly four-thirty in the afternoon and I'm waddling - t-shirt and sweatpants, haven't bothered with a bra. Waiting, without sparkles or stickers or coffee, for the time to arrive. This is now.

A week from now, I'll be different yet again. If I'm still with-child on my due date, they're bringing me in to break my water and I'll wash away again with the tide.

The Dock and Me

I spent naptime today down on my parents dock with a mug of tiramisu flavored decaf and a smile. The dock's turned gray and creaks as the waves push beneath her. She's getting old and moves more easily with the water. We both swayed to the lake's rhythm in the cool of the morning. So calm and peaceful, I wondered why it's been so long since I've sat there.

Well, The Boss, for one. He's hardly the type of mellow little guy that would let me sit quietly on the dock while he sat quietly beside me, and so we don't go down there during the day. And then of course, there are the spiders. Dock spiders - bushy black legged beasties. Last summer, I saw two and lost the nerve to put naked toes near the planks for fear of what might come from between to greet me. I forced myself to imagine that they haven't yet found the dock this summer, that it's still mine, and so I sat.

It was like visiting an old friend. Myself. The girl who used to spend hours scribbling in notebooks, lounging on this dock. The girl who kissed boys she had no intention of kissing, but did so anyway on this dock. The girl who sat at the docks edge and stared at the moving water in the hopes it would somehow give her direction, purpose.

Then I wondered, how is it that I am years apart from this girl, yet still connected? Why is it that I still want for there to be room for her in my current life? The one with the husband and the babies and bills and stress - where she'd serve no purpose but to distract?

But then again, for a writer, perhaps that's a solid enough purpose. Without wondering and distraction, what would there be to write about?

Remembers

(Got a poem from my past in my inbox today...)

remember
we sung stevie tunes
in the baptist mobile,
and counting the key changes?
and the endless cups of coffee
and going to berklee to hang?
and you wore a butterfly sticker
under your left eye?
and i was a mess of immersion
and jazz
and you wanted to be a writer
and i wanted to be an actor?
and remember
sitting
at your lake down a path
behind your parent's house
listening to motorboats?
were there bicardi breezers involved?
and remember i wrote you in romania
to inform you that i was in love with you?
and more cups of coffee
and greasy breakfasts
in a pullcar
and then i worked at that coffee break
and yes
did you work there too?
and remember
i took a male date
to your wedding and was nearly late?
and remember
we danced together
in west side story
and dug kerouac
and vonnegut
and jazz?

i just got knocked out
by this wave of remembers.
i love remembers,
but i remember that your remembers
are made of steel,
and can drink my remembers
under the table.

Here's to Letting Go...

Sitting in a hotel suite, my son is banging toy trucks against the air conditioner vent, the desk is cluttered with faxes and forms and applications for mortgage lenders, the phone is off the hook (with the disconnected handset trailing around The Boss's little legs), towels are spilled in a heap across the couch, blocks and books and puzzles are scattered over the floor and from the corner of the room, the Food Network is teaching me how to perfect my lobster bisque recipe.

And at the center of it all, I'm at peace.

Summer sent an email this morning, she's back with the boyfriend who bruised her breasts and marked her arms with deep purple fingerprints (whom she left not even two weeks ago to pursue another man, who subsequently has decided he wanted to screw his ex instead.) And so she's back with the abusive coke head. Her soon-to-be ex-husband is demanding more visitations with the children and for Summer to give him money towards payments on their old house (that has yet to sell.) The tone of her email is desperate. Help me. Fix me. Tell me what to do.

And at the center of it all, I'm at peace.

The seller accepted our offer on the house, and now we're entering the terrible nerve-wracking, humbling experience of spilling our financial lives out for strangers to pick at and scrutinize. My realtor calls often. My husband is busy in business meetings and training and I'm left to fill out fax-smudged documents while holding our son at arms distance so that he doesn't get sticky fingers on the important papers.

And at the center of it all, I'm at peace.

My body is no longer my own, and is making it known moreso with each day. My hormones are a mess. I burst out in hysterical laughter during sex the other night, which would have been fine, except that it then turned to sobbing...and when my husband asked, quite nervously, what was wrong, I started laughing so hard that I again doubled over in tears.

I stand in front of the mirror and lift my shirt to study the smooth white skin of my slowly-stretching stomach. Will there be stretch marks this time? Is the scale going to scream at me at my next appointment? Have I lost the contours of my face - has it become rounder. Fatter. Twenty-more weeks of self-scrutiny and hormonal mishmash to go.

And at the center of it all, I'm at peace.

Time to let go of these things I can not control and embrace the ones that I can. Like my little man, who's so quietly sipping his juice now and staring out the wide windows at the cars that rush past. Vrooom. His voice hums from behind the cup. The sound of life moving beyond our small space. The sound of letting go.

Closure

It occurred to me as we wound through twilight-lit roads last evening. It came, not as a terrible thought, or even as a sad one - only as a simple hmm amongst a myriad of other thoughts to share with my husband on a rare toddler-less drive.

It was: I would've been holding our second baby right now, had we not experienced our first loss (my due date had been May 2nd)

The thought wound its way through me and out into the air between us. We paused for a moment of reflection before letting it dissolve between us, spoken and vanished in the course of a three minute conversation; neither of us any sadder or different than before it was uttered.

It wasn't simply a thought though, or a fact, or a reason to stop and ponder the what-if's of our lives.

It was closure.

Revelations of a Stay-at-Home-Mom

It occurred to me today that I might be a more interesting person now that I spend my days at home practicing toddler-talk and cleaning diapers than I was when I dressed nice and worked forty-hours a week in an office.

My life before meeting The Boss was a simple routine. Wake up (grudgingly), start coffee, take shower, commute with the husband to my soul-sucking office job (to "pay the bills" -darn you "Communication Arts" degree and double-darn you, Sallie Mae.)

After work, we commuted home, occasionally stopping off at the local grocery store for a loaf of fresh bread, but otherwise, it was directly to the condo for an evening of dinner/tv/treadmill/sit and watch tv until one of us was jolted awake by a commercial and dragged the other to the bedroom. Homework fit in there somewhere, but I can't honestly remember where.

Riveting.

I'll be the first to admit that my first few months of being home were abysmal. I'd just had a baby, survived the holidays and started graduate school in the span of two weeks. My body and my brain were in shock. I spent the majority of the first month alone in the condo with the baby and VH1/Food Network/OnDemand keeping me company. It was January in New England, too cold to leave the condo and I was too tired and sleep deprived to do much of anything in the condo. (Including, laundry, dishes, showering, getting dressed...pretty much anything. Not a pretty sight.)

In the past year though, I've grown more comfortable in this stay-at-home skin. Each day lived outside of an office is filled with just as much work (moreso, perhaps, considering the amount of effort I expended for a paycheck, compared to what I do now for free), more eye-opening experiences, more time for writing, and just as much to talk about. Even better, our conversations carry more weight than office politics or gossip or discussions around whatever the talk-radio host said on our commute home.

The television remains off during the day and we listen to music. It's not so much that I worry about the brain-sucking effects of that glowing screen - it's more that I have just found myself so utterly bored with it. Aside from a very select few programs that my husband and I watch after The Boss goes to bed, I don't watch it.

Reading books. Writing (here, there and elsewhere.) Cooking. Raising my son. This has been what I've been doing for the past few months.

But, I've come to the realization that this is short - this part of my life. This momentary freedom, where I'm not tied to offices or classrooms and I'm able to write. Able to spend time with my son. Able to read during a naptime.

Life moves quickly, and I will need to be back at work sooner rather than later. But, there's much to accomplish before then. There are stories to be written, to be submitted (published, perhaps?) A son to explore with. Hopefully more children to carry and cuddle and adventure out into the world with.

Oh yes, there's plenty to do, paycheck or not.

Better get to work.

Broken

We've long been broken. Our words are delicately curled wisps of breath, spit out across thin ice and afraid.

Or we don't talk at all.

Once we were hooked elbows and laughter through city streets - and our words were power. Fire. And we sat in smoke and watched them burn. We drove miles for good jazz. We dreamt poetry, theater, music, travel.

Now, we no longer exist, though his fingerprints remain on my heart.

I broke us. In a moment. In a week of moments. A month. In the time it took for his hand to hold mine, I dropped my dearest friend and sent cracks through our smoothness, our shell. Killed what was inside.

Years have passed. Lifetimes. I've learned to find the beauty in brokenness. That the shattering of a shell, brings forth life. That the cracking of ice, signals the coursing of life pushing below. I've found beauty in broken glass; the shards curve sunlight differently, sending it shooting in new angles. I've found beauty in weathered relationships - that friendship is meant to ebb and flow, and that life is meant to be filled with both the present spectacular and the ashes of our past.

But the rubble of our friendship remains constant. A pile of smooth stones, I can run my hands over and smile. Moments of us. I've yet to piece these remnants into something as good as the original.

A Simple (very incomplete) List of Good Things

Blueberry Patches
Homemade whipped cream
Well worn-in boots
Books
Scent of Lilacs
Photography
Music
Docks on small lakes
Peeka-Boo
Lilies
Lace
Warm breezes
Foliage
Holding hands
Chenille blankets
Tiramisu
Coffee
Stained glass
Summer
Lift off and
Landing
Sleeping well and
Waking rested.
Bread
Rocking a baby to sleep
Long walks on sunny days
Butterflies
Art(istic expression)
Waterfalls
Hot baths after long days
Garden-fresh tomatoes
Velvet
Sliding your foot to the cool spot in the sheets
Writing

...

Getting Lost

If I sit still long enough, it comes to me. It always does in the silence, even all these years later. It starts with the simplest of thoughts. Dense slabs of bread - cut on the table with a dull knife - crumbs scattering. A sticky jar of strawberry gem. A mug of Nescafe mixed with cacao and sugar.

Then she's there. My Romanian sister, inspecting a jar of Super-Chunky Skippy that I've brought with me to share. She licks her fingers and squints at the label. Nutritional Facts? She asks, her brow lifts. Fat. Calories. She laughs, You really want to know how bad what you're eating? I laugh with her. Oh, crazy, neurotic Americans. But I still refuse the jar when she tilts it toward me.

Her family spreads their bread with untura from a tub. Pure, white and shiny - a plastic bucket of lard. They fry potatoes every night in a pot of oil and eat them with fried eggs and untura slathered bread. Yet, they're the skinniest family I've ever met. Each with willowly limbs and impossible legs that stretch to their necks.

It's because they work hard and they don't own a car. They walk everywhere. It's a beautiful place to walk, Sighisoara. The old city, with it's infamous market square where once Vlad the impaler displayed his bloody pride. The park, filled with barefoot children. Main street. The smell of hot bread.

And I'm lost there.

Until the phone rings or the baby cries and I'm spit back out in the present. Years apart from those streets, that family, my once-upon-a-time life. But, aching as though I've just left.

I feel like a marshmallow.

Hovering over an open flame, expanding on the end of a pointed stick, crisped around the edges and sticky-melty-gooey within.

This image of myself has been sliding through my thoughts for the past few days. A slippery little feeling that I can't quite pin down. Could be that I'm approaching that time of the month. Could be the white puffy sweatshirt I was slumping around the house in the other day. Could be the smell of burning branches and leaves coming from my neighbor's fire pit last night - enjoying a bonfire in the midst of the unseasonable warmth. Could be any number of factors.

It's the life-long struggle of Me Vs. Myself. The logical, rational Mella and the one who wants to hide beneath a pile of blankets with half a gallon of ice cream and tell the world to go away.

I want to be invisible. I say mindlessly while flipping through a game of Skip-Bo with my husband, feeling all puffed and swollen and fighting the urge to pull my hair down over my too-round-face. But you can't be, I want to look at you. He says, shuffling the cards, peeking at me as I tip my head down to my arms and peek back.

I smile, but it's half-hearted. He's always sweet in trying to cheer me up when I'm being irrationally down. I ask if he has ever felt like a marshmallow. He hasn't.

While he stacks the cards neatly back into their box, I turn my words over again in my mind. I want to be invisible. They're familiar sounding. Have I thought them before? And as easily as that, a memory emerges. Clouded and dusty - one I've put in the far reaches of my mind and forgotten.

High School. I was attending a national conference for "The Leaders of Tomorrow" in the Hancock building in Boston. I was clearly not in my element - surrounded by boys in suit coats and button up shirts - girls in neat little skirts and sweater sets. All with ambition and drive oozing from their pores. I felt small and lost. I was only there because the representative from our school was chosen by an essay contest. And I wasn't one to turn down a writing contest.

I remember watching a power point presentation surrounded by Alex P. Keaton wanna-be's and regretting ever hearing my name called over the loudspeaker as the Winner.

This is where I first felt myself wanting to disappear. It was a hot little room crowded with teenagers lined in rows like a classroom and a speaker at the front with two whiteboards and a giant pad of paper. The speaker asked us to go around the room and introduce ourselves,row by row, seat by seat. There was the sound of clothes shifting, feet dragging, desks creaking - as all eyes turned to face the student at the first desk, and again as they moved down the rows. Faces turning. Feet shuffling. Necks craning.

I remember the eyes coming down my row - and the throbbing of my heart. My palms sweating. I wasn't listening to anyone else's names - I didn't care where they went to school, what sport they played, what colleges they were applying to. All I wanted to do was blink and make myself invisible.

Not only invisible. I wanted to be gone. An empty seat in the classroom. A lone girl wandering the city streets, heading for her train home. Gone.

Coming back to the table, my husband is still stacking the cards. I'm still slouched in the chair - and wondering why this feeling is emerging now, after years of feeling fine with being visible. My mind surges through a list of ways to fix myself. Go to the gym more. Drink more water. Get up from the table and do sit-ups. Now. Go. Do. Fix.

Instead, I push myself up from the table and come here. To type. To let myself feel what I'm feeling. I'm going to try not to over analyze or blame myself.

No, I'm going to just ride it out. Say shut-up to myself when I need to. And be invisible when I need to. Going forth with the knowledge that this too will pass.

Since I Began Blogging...

The mundane and ordinary events of my life have been transformed into invaluable and shining moments. Like glass beads, clicking together on an invisible string, some catching sunlight, some clouded and curving back into shadow. I collect them now, watching as they slide over my palms and twist themselves up my arms, around my waist. Clinging to me throughout the day.

Each night, while listening to my husband breath his long sleepy breaths, I sink into myself and begin unraveling the chain of beaded moments from around my body. Counting. Remembering. Imagining each is a story unto itself. Each is a life lived and died in the breath of a moment.

The look of where-the-heck-have-you-been? on The Boss's face as I walk in to pluck him from his crib.

The view of the lake as I walk down the stairs. Its frozen body now pocked with imperfection. The clear gloss of ice has thawed to a chunky mess of rime and downed branches.

Smoothing my palm over the velvety skin of my child's back as he curls into my chest.

Pounding raw-chicken flesh flat with the butt of a jar - slimy juice seeping from the sides of the cutting board and wax paper.

The broom and I, barefoot and waltzing across the living room.

The sink full of soft bubbles that climb my arms and melt, leaving my skin damp and rigid with gooseflesh.

Vivid, but ultimately meaningless moments. Like beads of glass, catching light at just the right angle to capture my attention.

And so, I bring them here.

Us

Your hand first held my thigh. Slid the length of my leg and rested just above the knee, before our fingers met and palms pressed. A backward introduction - legs before hands.

We were in a packed little room with a small flickering television; friends crumpled together on couches and sprawled across the floor. But we might as well have been alone, up on our couch, our bodies hidden beneath the soft warmth of a flannel blanket.

My fingertips traced the curves of your knuckles and the length of your fingers. I felt the gentle weight of your hard-skinned palm. Your hand cupped mine delicately as though I was porcelain and as fragile as the moment - the beginning of us.

News from Small Town America

I saw an old teacher of mine on the news the other night. It was the mug shot of a bedraggled old man. He was crumpled and defeated - layers of sagging skin and fat washed white in a bath of florescent light. The story behind the wrinkled, puffy eyed picture: child abuse. Rape, is the word used to describe the alleged crime in the local papers.

I come from a small town. Downtown is two one-way streets that meet in a Y by the corner of an old mill. The public high school is two hallways, one stacked on another, housing enough classrooms for grades 8-12. I graduated with less than 60 other students. Many of my former classmates still live in town - working at the new offices that have been built in the remodeled mill landmark.

They still walk the two one-way streets, eating at the same sandwich shops or at the McDonald's - the only fast food to be had in town. They have settled alongside their parents and their aunts and uncles and their grandparents. It's the type of town that you're born in, you live in and eventually, you die in. Case in point: the middle-aged officer, who arrested the teacher, was a former student of his.

It's a place where roots run deep, sunk firmly alongside the muddy banks of a slowly churning river. Headlines reading: Beloved Teacher Accused of Rape send shockwaves. Violent, rippling ones - shattering the quiet, droll life of a town stuck in itself.

News teams wondering the streets, poking their nosey microphones in the faces of shocked citizens How do you feel about Mr. So-and-So and the rape allegation against him? They don't understand, that in a town like this - they might as well be asking How do you feel about Uncle Charlie touching your neighbor? The town is knit too tight for outsiders with lights and cameras and questions.

And yet - someone, born and raised beneath the shadow of the 'ol Clock Tower was bold enough to shout the accusation: He Raped Me.

The Show

Black box theater. Sold out and shoulder-rubbing room only. We were lucky enough to find three seats together and even more so, in the second row.

Before the show begins, I let myself a moment to indulge in the gloom of it all. Black-brick. Black stage. Black floor and seats. I settle on the black curtains that hang before us and I realize that I don't even need to close my eyes to see what only ever haunts me in the final moments between dream and wake.

I blink. Breath. Make myself listen to the scattered murmurings of the audience surrounding me. Within moments the stage is just a stage. The curtains, only black.

I see the memory of my former self, sitting just one seat forward, hardly more than a year ago. Rounded and uncomfortable - with life pushing and turning inside me as the concert rose to crescendo. I let myself remember what it was to rest my palms on my drum tight stomach and how my lips curved with each sharp, sliding movement that rolled through me. My own private concert.

The lights dim until we are swallowed in black. Tonight, I am without my concert. We're here to see nine one-act's, one of which stars my aunt the Dancer -a natural to the stage. Ever graceful. Ever confident. We are witness to her acting debut, at fifty.

She's smooth. A success. And, she comes to say hello during intermission. So, what's new? The three of us shrug and joke, what isn't new? It's been months since we've seen her. Her elegant arm reaches to my knee, Well, you're pregnant.

Silence. I look to my mother. Nothing. My sister. Nothing. I was... I finally muster. Dancer-turned-Actress turns red, even in the dark. Her long fingers cover her lips, muffling the rain of sorry, so sorry, I'm so... Stumbling like she's onstage and forgotten her line. She keeps going, bumbling, I must be thinking of someone else...someone who just told me they were pregnant...I must...

I smile politely. Breath. And look at my nails. Breath. The cuticles are a mess. Breath. Straighten wedding band. Do not cry.

Finally, the conversation is dragged elsewhere, but I've stopped listening and eventually she slips away. Breath. The lights fade. Breath.

And the show goes on.