I bet you thought I'd never come back to this tale. Listen. I've thought about Part 4 nearly ever day since I hit "Publish" on Part 3. In fact, I wrote a lot of this soon after.
Tag: summer
Living and running
This is a year for living.
That’s what I keep telling myself. Every time I walk away from a blank Word doc. Every time I decide to take a ride rather than write a letter. Every time I put off what I should be doing (i.e. scheduling car appointments, doctor appointments, vacuuming, etc.)
If nothing else, this election and resulting presidency (along with all its little heartbreaks and setbacks and mini strokes) has me full speed ahead. Into what? Uncertainty, mostly. But definitely art, definitely risk-taking. I’ve opened my own Etsy shop, got at least one vendor show under my belt and have been riding around in a motor scooter.s
“I’m living,” I say to myself from the inside of my spaceman-like helmet as I cross the Birmingham Bridge one day.
Behind the silvery mirror-like shield over my face, I’m grinning like a wild woman. Admittedly, I’m mostly smiling there. Or gritting my teeth (on like every turn). Or crying. I cry a lot on the scooter. Thankfully I had enough foresight to order that damn mirror-like Bubbleshield that you can’t really see through. I mean, can you just imagine looking over on your commute home to see a red-faced woman crying on her black-and-chrome scooter weaving between potholes and tar snakes on Beechwood Boulevard?
A call the scooter my mindfulness in these hectic times. I can’t do 900 things. I can’t pace or run around or make things. I am focused and alert. And because of it, sometimes the feels come rushing back, as though I’d been running from them all along.
Living or running. Living or keeping myself occupied. Living or wading out the storm, up to my ears in art and art supplies, up until the wee hours of the morning because it is finally quiet and I can chill without feeling like I’m missing something—another headline, another atrocity, another outrage.
But there’s a beauty, a sensory type of travel and place that you don’t experience in a “cage,” as riders call the call. The tears are mostly good tears, or so it seems. I can’t say I’ve had that happen too often, good tears. Those were reserved for moms at weddings, not for childless 30-somethings crossing the Oakmont Bridge at sunset.
As I sit down once more to write, I think about my scooter… about the sun that will drop soon and how I could get in a few more miles, conjure some sort of errand or excuse. And hey, in Pittsburgh, a nice day isn’t one to waste.
I hope you are all living… doing whatever it is that can keep you sane in these turbulent times. Maybe later is for overthinking and processing. For now, maybe it’s time to enjoy what is in front of you. If you spend 1-2 hours reading the news, spend 1-2 hours playing the violin, or whatever it is you people do. Don’t forget taking care of you is a way to resist in itself.
<3
mt
Without
Happy Birthday, Dad.
Two-grief kind of day, maybe?
Sometimes it feels like someone pulled the bones from my body. Like a walking (somehow?) jellyfish. Sometimes I don’t know how to stand up, don’t know how to breathe. I forget what beautiful looks like. Isn’t that horrible? Sun or rain, I don’t care to be outside. I don’t care to be a part of anything.
I guess it is that finite. Death. And that world doesn’t interest me, permanence, black and white. It’s forever that we all want, right? For everything to exist in a higher plane, for a better reason. And I think… for that year and a half it did. Finally. I had the feeling of “more.” And I’m not ready to go back to what this is. This is no substitute or alternative. Not after the knowing.
It sounds dead-ended. It sounds desperate and depressed. I’m ok. I’m living, doing that thing everyone else is doing. Yes, sometimes feeling like a zombie, sometimes a human shed of its skeleton.
If I could only be empowered by this, take the lessons and the love and build on that to go forward, but those moments are fleeting. Minutes. Until the memories take over. And I can be in mid-sentence or mid-laugh and my guts fill up my brain and then… fuzz cloud.
How can I live now? How do I live now? How do I hold up everything, keep it together? I just haven’t got a clue. And this writing, only here…
This is me trying to figure everything out.
xo
mt