This is the Sea

Crouched on the dusty floor of my new studio, light streaming through the huge casement windows, I took a deep breath and lifted the first plastic lid off the first randomly selected box. I'd brought all of the archives into this new space, the boxes and bins of my college and high school history kept for years at my childhood home, my compulsion to keep scraps of notes and cards and pictures and random fragments of my life come to roost in a city so very far away from the ones where I was from. I'd decided that it was finally time to sort and parse, to try to make sense and to try to remember and to be in what was my history at that time as I had recorded it through pieces.

The first piece of paper held my best friend's signature scrawl, the words of a song that sang in our souls at the time, nailing me between the eyes.

Damnit. 

I walked over and dialed up the Waterboys This is the Sea on my iphone and let the music wash over me.

These things you keep
You'd better throw them away
You wanna turn your back
On your soulless days
Once you were tethered
And now you are free
Once you were tethered
Well now you are free
That was the river
This is the sea!

One verse in and the irony of standing in the middle of this excavation hit me.

Now if you're feelin' weary
If you've been alone too long
Maybe you've been suffering from
A few too many
Plans that have gone wrong
And you're trying to remember
How fine your life used to be
Running around banging your drum
Like it's 1973
Well that was the river
This is the sea!
Wooo!

Verse two and I couldn't read the page for my tears.

Now you say you've got trouble
You say you've got pain
You say've got nothing left to believe in
Nothing to hold on to
Nothing to trust
Nothing but chains
You're scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
Scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
But that was the river
This is the sea yeah!

Three and my heart broke open.

Because that's really what this excavating was about, the finding, the sensemaking, the retracing steps and remembering who, what and why. Recounting, recontexualizing, renaming what has been lost and forgotten and erased and left behind over the countless miles. The who I had been back then made me the woman I am today.  

Two inches down and I found an envelope containing melted coins from my brother Hunter's car wreck.

Another layer and I found a cache of old love notes.

Another brought a rough letter from my mom.

Another offered hilarious cards from friends sent in the days before texting and email and iphones.

Hot, tired from the sorting and feeling, I was about to close everything up when I looked over to see that unmistakable handwriting once again, this time written across the entire swath of the envelope headed with PLEASE READ THIS.

oof.

My heart went zooming back to 1990, standing in my summer sublet, staring at this envelope from my clever-as-hell best friend. Months earlier, we had a bitter break, one so deep and severe that it felt it would be impossible to overcome. I refused her calls and wrote Return to Sender on every card even as they continued to show up. I was hurt and that hurt felt so huge that I had to throw gasoline on it, light it up and take it all down, even if it meant losing the most important person in my life. 

But she kept at it until one day this letter showed up with her message on the outside, her knowing damn well that I would be powerless not to read it, the message explaining that she refused to give up, that she was standing for me and for our friendship. That she wasn't going anywhere, for life. 

It also taught me a lot about myself: that friendship and loyalty are not light things for me, that maybe I expect too much or don't communicate clearly enough, that sometimes my favorite flamethrower is on deck with trigger finger poised. But also that I am there to extend the olive branch to work it out, show up, be there willing just as she was for me. 

I have never forgotten that act of love, just as I have never forgotten her patience and willingness to put herself out there again and again to rescue something that, decades later, is deeply precious to us both. That day, and the miles with her before and after, taught me about trust, what is earned, what friendship means, about not giving up. That people stay. 

These things you keep. Eternally grateful. Love you, sister.

Simple gratitude, for persistence's sake

For Ally, with all of the lovey love.
***********************************************************************

I don't remember if it was the second or the third time that I had come home to a note on my door written in beautiful, clear handwriting, something to the effect of "would love to get to know you and your kids, lets get together for a playdate." It was another note I placed on the table inside and went about my day, back in the relative safety of my house, nursing the fresh wounds of having made yet another move in a short period of time.

We had just moved back to Seattle, leaving our newly-settled life in Cincinnati for a return trip to a city that I loved but didn't want to leave friends for, to a house on a block in a neighborhood that, at that time, would change my life in ways I couldn't comprehend.

And here was this note, again, from the cheerful and lovely mother my own age down the street, beckoning me to come out of my shell and into the light, to make friends, to start living my life where I needed to be instead of living in the last life I didn't want to leave. Patient, persistent, loving, kind with just enough pressure to nudge me. Those early days of Ally knocking at the door of our friendship were the traits that have run deep and abiding through a relationship that has spanned the past 11 years.

It's impossible to describe what my friendship with this woman has meant to me. This morning I was scrolling through past Facebook Instant Messages, looking for a nugget of wisdom that she had shared, past dips and turns in each of our lives, alongside words and advice so profound I savor them every time I read them today. But it's always been like this, after I got over my initial resistance, be it sitting on her leather couch drinking wine while our children played in her playroom or marking miles around Greenlake, those physical presences shifting into digital spaces where we could both write our advice, consolation, cheerleading, handholding whenever things got good, bad or indifferent, a digital Room of Requirement where the advice I need to reflect upon seems to magically reappear.

She is wise, this woman, and fierce and loyal and loving and creative. She's the Ally of the chocolate cake. We have an odd sisterly synergy, often experiencing the same things on parallel tracks, our timing slightly before or after the other so that we can lean into one another's experience. Tapping into her spirit is like getting onto an electric grid where you are fed a stream of low current love. Always, you always know she is there, consistent power on reserve. And she creates a space for you to share your energy with her and with others. She's at once a conductor and a generator. If you know her, this idea makes total sense.  She's electrifying and stable at the same time.

As I am writing this, I'm thinking of too many things to write at once, all the while with tears streaming down my face in simple gratitude and the overwhelming feeling of being so. damn. lucky. to have collided with such a generous and loving spirit who kept at it at a time when I needed it in ways that I didn't even understand. I trust her with my very heart and soul, this girl, and am so very blessed.

I love you, sweet friend. And thank you.

Each for what they are

“Sometimes you meet someone, and it’s so clear that the two of you, on some level belong together. As lovers, or as friends, or as family, or as something entirely different. You just work, whether you understand one another or you’re in love or you’re partners in crime. You meet these people throughout your life, out of nowhere, under the strangest circumstances, and they help you feel alive. I don’t know if that makes me believe in coincidence, or fate, or sheer blind luck, but it definitely makes me believe in something.”— unknown


I have a fool's understanding of the beginning of the Universe, my untutored lens on the nature of its existence peppered with romantic ideas about particles and their attraction. But I love my ignorance, as it allows me to believe what I believe to be the electricity of deep connection, particles from the beginning of time reconnecting, people finding in another something elemental, fundamental, paired, true. It's a coming together of things long ago separated. It's attraction that is undeniable, electrifying and real. 

There is little in the world that matches the feeling of finding belonging in another, and little that matches the exhilaration of allowing yourself to open up to make that connection of deep friendship. This, for me, has happened with only a handful of people in my life and, as my life has progressed, I've grown less available to that possibility. I've been less willing to put myself out there, more afraid of investigating a connection to a new friend that may not fit and to have to back away, awkwardly, from relationships that aren't meant to be. There is a fitting to intimate friendships, as if your heart is made more whole upon connection and diminished in multiples upon loss. If you let it, the losses cause your heart to calcify; to look with a prejudiced eye at the attempts of others; to resist your own awesomely joyful and open nature; to tamp it down, lock it up, seal it off.

But the truth is that they are there, these connections well-worn and those not yet hatched, even if you try to keep yourself from them. Sometimes they last a lifetime or two, sometimes they intuit when you need them, sometimes they are moments in your life stitched together just for the moments that they are. You leave the ones that don't work out behind and relish the ones that stay. You chip away at the calcification and warm up the veins. You recognize each for what they are and for what they bring to your life. And you are grateful.

circuitous routes

Steering through the small streets, squinting to remember the color and shape of houses I had seen just a week before, I used the Force to find my way back to the little white bungalow, perched in tree-lined shade on streets ordinal in number and alphabetical in line.

Ten days earlier I had arrived in Portland, skinny as an abandoned cat, grief-stricken, bereft and sad, newly repatriated after a dismal end of a romance over 9,500 miles away. I had come to take shelter in the warm home and friendship of my best friend and her husband, to stay a few days and renew, be with people that knew me best. Now with as much as I could cram into my car, I was heading back to start a new life.

I could fill up a page with words describe my friend: hilarious, brilliant, daring, feisty, creative, sharp as a whip, mischievous, unpredicatable, predictable. Equal parts beguiler and revolutionary, she had a personality that drew you in and held you fascinated. And, damn, was she funny.

We had a history of weaving in and out of each other's lives, taking long pauses after angry words, always reconnecting to be thick as thieves once again. Our friendship spanned decades, growing from the tumult of high school, through moves and loves and heartache and distance to new marriages, children and the fine crackling of expectations that accompanies a newly minted life. The many things that have shaped my life since that fateful decision to move to Portland (my husband, my career, Seattle) all hold her mark.

In short, I loved this friend. She was my constant, a phone call twice a day habit that I had grown both to depend on and to appreciate. Ours was one of the most important relationships of my life, not a girl crush but a deep and connected friendship. She was a taproot that held me fast in who I knew myself to be. I can hardly think back across my life without the best stories coming from our time together.

Five years have passed since this friendship ended abruptly and without obvious (to me) reason. For a time, I figured that we'd just run aground of something, that we would circle back into our relationship once again whenever what ever it was worked itself out. A year passed, then two, then my mother got sick and died, then I got cancer, and now I am here on another shore of living, the phantom feeling of someone missing popping up at moments when I feel most unguarded.

Because losing this friendship has been unmooring, disorienting, anxiety-provoking in ways that I'm just staring to unpack, I have decided to reach out to her, just to say hello and tell her that I am sorry if I did something wrong. I've decided to put up or to be prepared to just let it go. Thinking about this gives me a tightness in my chest that reminds of my six year old self trying to swim the length of the pool in a single, long-held, under-water breath. I feel my lungs burning and know that this is a surfacing that has to happen even though I want to continue to kick against it. But it's time to tidy things up, know where they stand, let things come full circle once and for all.

Gifts

The heat rolled in liquid waves off of I-35 as we blew down the highway, bandannas on our heads and beers in our hands. Wide as the road, Sharleen's gold '76 Cadillac convertible "Darcy" danced through the shimmer as we took Texas by storm that summer. We were in that middle space between highschool and what comes next in life, driving out the past few months of our lives with deep conversations and hundreds of miles back and forth between Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and beyond.

Sharleen was the sister I never knew I needed. Twins of different mothers, we had the kind of deep and intense relationship that highschool girls have when they are wrestled off to boarding school and left to their own devices. Even at 13, you could tell her soul was a thousand years old. Late nights in our dorm room, we would sit up talking through the stuff that carried heavily with us; sometimes painful and challenging relationships with our mothers, dads who were intense, loving and often difficult men, what it meant to escape to the big city from small towns and all their complexities. Sharleen was, in many ways, my first true love: the person who knew me best in life, the person I bared my heart and soul to, the person that I learned to fight with and work it out all the while knowing that she wouldn't haul ass no matter how bad it got. She was, and is to this day, the person I can trust most with my heart.

Because I write this blog as much to document a bit of my life for my children as I do to hammer stuff out, I am tempted to tell all of the Auntie Sharleen stories here so that they will some day read what this friendship has taught me. Like the time I picked up the mail to find the card I had sent back to her, returned out of anger and hurt over a rift that nearly broke our friendship, written with a note of explanation on the outside that made it impossible to not hear her message. How that act of persistence and love taught me that people who love you will ride through the rough shit and take the lead position, even if it's painful and sad, even if it means they have to be the one willing to prove what you are worth to them. That trust is borne of those acts.

Or the time I turned around in a crowded church at my brother's funeral and saw Sharleen and her entire family there, completely unannounced, having journeyed at great expense from different states just to stand with our family. That being strong for someone is sometimes quiet and deep and subtle. That solidarity means everything.

Or the many times we sat through death together, celebrated life together, flew to each other for advice and a steady hand even though months had passed between communications in our insane lives. That once built, a strong friendship transcends all other things and becomes a fortress, a port, a refuge, an oasis. That people who you have let into your heart can be your best guides, for the fundamentals of who you are as a person, what is best in you, does not change.

I've struggled to write this post for some time, actually. I began it after a trip to see Sharleen earlier this year and have sat at my computer trying to compose it over and over. There is no way I could begin to capture what this woman means to me, no way. I remember sitting in a darkened movie theater in New York City, a plastic cup of surreptitiously procured wine in my hand, watching the movie Beaches with my best friend, this woman that means so much to me, this person with whom I share a connection that will never be broken. I remember tears rolling down my face at the thought of losing her, just as they are now. I remember thinking that I could never thank her enough for what she has given me, what she has taught me, and what I hope to give to her in return.

These blessings are deep. I am so lucky. 

Little Did They Know...

Years ago, my mother, Nick and I went to go see the film Shackleton's Adventure, the story Sir Ernest Shackleton's now-legendary 1914-1916 British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. It's an amazing film, narrated by Kevin Spacey who uses a VERY SERIOUS, British-ish voice that just tells you that SHIT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. And it does, brothers and sisters, yes it does. 

A bit of description from the internetz: After five months of journeying, 28 men became stranded as their ship became trapped in pack ice. After eight months of waiting through the Antarctic winter, by October, encroaching pack ice crushed the ship like an eggshell. Needless to say, the story gets worse from there...much worse. Spacey peppers his narration continuously with ominous lines like "little did they know, the worst was yet to come."

We walked out at the end of the film, each of us completely exhausted from watching the relentless hell these 28 men had to endure. Exhausted and amazed at their resilience.

Not to put going through chemo on the same level as enduring the Antartic in the dead of winter, but sitting in the dr.'s office on Tuesday, I felt Kevin Spacey's voice in my head, And little did they know, the worst  WAS  YET  TO COME.  (duh! duh! DUH!).


So this week, we celebrated the halfway done mark and were supposed to launch into treatment #5 and a switch to Taxol.  The last two treatments on AC have been pretty sucky from a feeling-the-effects perspective and so I am simultaneously happy to move on to a new drug and completely petrified of the side effects. Eyebrows and eyelashes? Gone.  Feeling in fingers and toes?...hmmm, well lots of folks get neuropathy and about 5% never regain sensation again. Fingernails? Probably going to get really ugly and maybe fall off. And how about the delivery of the drug? Well, about 10% have a pretty serious allergic reaction sitting in the chair.

I sat there thinking about the risks and the gambles. I sat there thinking "I only have four more of these left and then I am done". I sat there and thought that my vanity and love of the use of my hands means something to me. I sat there and thought about the worst being yet to come. And then I realized that the worst part is not having a choice. You are in it. It's done. You move forward. The other options (a 30% chance of getting breast cancer somewhere else in  your body = metastasized cancer) are not simply not palatable. 

So instead you go out for dinner and drinks with wonderful friends to celebrate the midpoint. You laugh and cry a little bit with these friends, you tell stories about what life was like before and after this happened and you realize that it's worth every single bit to get to stay around to be with such wonderful people.

Friends and loved ones lift you through these times. I have felt angry, I have felt sad and depressed and more than a little lost, but never once, not once, have I felt alone. And that is pure gold.


Today I went in for the infusion only to be told that my counts are too low and that I am going to need to delay for some yet-to-be-determined period of time (likely a week). The thought of delaying puts me in a really bad place (more time? I want to get this DONE) but the idea of having a somewhat-ok-feeling week with my husband (and no kids!) might be something that I really need.


Yes, the worst, in some ways, may be yet to come. I hope not, but I won't know until I get there. And, Shackleton's crew of 28 men? They all made it home, every one. Working together, they pulled each other through.  If they could manage, with your help, somehow I think I can too.