just to let it go

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it.
Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
- Dorianne Laux “Antilamentation,”


The dusty boxes are still sitting in the bottom of my closet back home in Oklahoma, my meager pilfering through them surfacing so many emotions that I felt like I needed to stop, to breathe, to reframe my thinking before I carried on.

A text sent to my friend said it all:
"Sorting through all of my childhood to pre-Portland life. Kind of intense to realize what a depressed and fcked up young adult I was, even if people didn't see it on the outside. Crazy."

and

"It's really weird to struggle with the idea that there was a lot of lost time in my life. Time I will never get back and time I may not have in the future."

So today when the poem above from Dorianne Laux came through my feed, something hardened from long ago became soft inside of me.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation.





Every year I spend the days before Yom Kippur reflecting on the past year (no, I'm not Jewish but I borrow this tradition). Thinking through the things that made me happy, thinking through the things I regretted or that made me sad or wistful, thinking of things I want to do in the next year, who I love, who I want to spend time with, how I want to challenge my mind and life to do good things. It's a important time to write things down, to take stock, to see where I am going.

Sitting with these feelings this in-and-post cancer year has brought in the added layer of "time". Time I have wasted, things I have done, situations I have been in during my life that were neither healthy nor happy. And the great sadness of looking forward and thinking about time and not having it and how horrible that would be.

{And then reading that Susan Sontag was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in 1975 and lived until 2004. So go figure.}

What softened inside of me was the realization that life is too short to dwell in what happened in the past, to rehash the things you wished had happened in relationships, to question decisions that led to different paths than the future I had seen for myself. Even for a person like me who has struggled with the depressive tendency toward rumination over such things [the twisting of invisible hands and the sighing of invisible sighs that leaves you sitting in a rut you can barely peer out of], there is the possibility to not revisit this, not to drag it with me, just to let it go.

Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it.
Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by. 

Amen.