[But nothing worth doing is easy. A dream like this demands all of you. A dream like this demands you risk everything. A dream like this takes you down the the darkest pit of despair that you can possibly imagine and asks, "Are you ready to give up yet?" And when you say No, it it takes you down one level further. "How about now?"]
Coffee & Chocolate
Lord, I want to be lightning
streaking wild and crackling
across your open expanse of night
the stars above me watching
unable to outshine me
cold and uncaring
while I set fire
to the world.
And the pens are all here. The set of highlighters and colored Sharpies and the ballpoints with the special grippy dots and metallic pastels that you bought with rolled pennies three months ago and mailed them to me on the sly. The graph paper comp books are here. Four of them. Black, green, red, blue. The 1:4 ratio you love. The scent of another woman's perfume. The taste of coffee on my tongue. The beating of my heart.
The grandfather clock is ticking.
The rulers are here. Two lengths. The pencils are here. Purple erasers. My hands are on the table top, palms flat against the cool wood. There is bread in the oven. There are fat lilies floating in a bowl of scented water. My Bible is open. A deck of cards from the game I've built -- the game with the Fallen Angels and the quantum mechanics -- are fanned like a rainbow. There is a silver thumb ring resting in the white margin at the top of the page.
The grandfather clock is ticking.
I sit there for four hours. I straighten the rows of supplies. In the silence of the room (silence because no one else is here) all the little inanimate sounds become elaborate distractions and launch flights of fancy completely unrelated to any reality in or out of work. I sharpen a pencil. I click a ballpoint. I pop a Coke. I tell myself, "If you were here..." I tell myself, "What is the point?" I tell myself, "You are afraid to succeed."
You are afraid to try.
My housemate comes home. She has known of me for years but only known me half of one. She hangs her keys. I hear her smile because the bread is done and sitting out to cool. She unzip her jacket. Comments on the cold. I hear the snap of her clasp popping open as always. Her hair tumbling free. And then the sound of her heels on the hardwood floor.
"Eliza..."
Then there is true silence. It seems, as the wave of her anger rises, there is a moment when all sound -- even the inanimate sounds of the radiators and the clock and the house in the cold wind -- is swallowed. I am holding my breath and perhaps more than anything else I have ever wanted, perhaps more than anything else I have ever needed, I pray for her to yell at me.
She doesn't.
Her heels. The sound of them. Her slacks. The swift brush. Her sharp, short intake of breath as she steps up behind me and sees the table... exactly... *exactly* as she left it... eight and a half hours ago.
As if on cue, the clock chimes 2:00. In the morning.
I look up at her. I want the lecture. I want the indignant speech. I want the confusion, betrayal, hurt. I want the litany that will rain down on me like stones and batter me back into the warrior I know I am. I want to be dragged, kicking and screaming, back to the table of the last supper and be forced to eat, to drink, to listen.
I look up at her. I turn my face up like a child. But I am not a child. The failure of a child is a learning experience. The failure of an adult is poor planning, laziness, sickness, no excuse and no lesson learned. Failure enables more failure. Until finally, even small successes don't feel like victories any more. Failure casts a very large shadow.
Her face is hidden from me. Her hair is beautiful and dark and full. It falls in waves like chocolate. She has been on her feet, literally, all day long. The "break" she got eight and a half hours ago wasn't anything more than her racing in to pick up a change of clothes and a different PDA, another set of keys, and three ounces of peach yogurt. She could be thinking that I escaped stress and doubt by watching tv or playing BioShock or even falling asleep on the couch in front of the fire. She could be hating me. She could be forgiving me. She could be thinking about the stack of bills -- all opened and dated and categorized by payment plan and due date -- and how I have never touched one of them. Maybe she's thinking I am weak. Maybe she's thinking I am fragile. Maybe she's just so consumed with jealously that she's been working all day and I've had the balls (or lack thereof) to sit here, at her table, doing *nothing*....
"Get out."
Her voice might be conversational. It is neither loud nor soft. It is simply strong.
She walks from the room. There is a new sound. A blue vase I adore (but which is not mine) shatters. I can't see her but I know she's picked it up by the mouth and slammed it against the cream stucco wall. With the pottery there is the sound of coins across the hallway floor. The household piggy bank is empty now.
She come back into the room and throws a wad of cash into my lap. There is maybe four hundred dollars. I stare down at it. This was toward the month's mortgage. I had contributed maybe one tenth of it.
"Get out."
She turns and leaves again. I see a mane of hair as I catch a glimpse of her face. It is as though she is carved from stone.
I stand. I stare at the door way into the house. I dare not collect my things. I can't think to do anything else but turn away and go to the door. I don't need to get my keys. I trashed my bike almost a month ago driving way too fast when it was way to dark and all I knew was rain and that hard, cold jerk of some hand yanking me off my baby before she went over the rail and I went under.
My hand on the knob. I can't say if I'm afraid. I can't tell you if this is rock bottom. I feel nothing. I am past numb. I am somewhere on this side of done. Somewhere on that side of terrified. I look back at the table.
She is standing there. Her fist is clenched over my open notebook with the blank page. My ring is gone. Her eyes burn like I have never seen eyes burn. She dares me silently to speak.
She lifts her chin. Her jaw twitches. Her breath is broken for a moment and then, "Come back when you grow up."
And she stares at me hard... until I turn and leave. Because there is nothing to say. There is no excuse. There are no words.
But everything more she could have said and everything I want to sob, flooded me over and over again in waves all the way down the coastline, all the way across the border. Words unspoken and embraces not given, haunted me for three days and three nights and filled my body with so much truth I had no room for food and forced myself to sleep only when I could no longer see.
I made my confessions:
The fearless one is afraid.
The resourceful one is out of ideas.
The inspired one is unmoved.
There would be no resolutions. There would be no second chance. This was the first offense. It was hell. A second failure would not be so bloodless.
When I returned, the posters on the wall were gone replaced with a white board, markers and eraser. With a yard stick she had graphed it all out in permanent marker. I had a new desk. It faced a window. A new laptop. It faced the room. There were cards on the wall -- Alpha and Beta Deck -- slipped into protective sheets and tacked in order. There was a color-coded schedule of chores, of work, of project tasks, all broken out with little flags and arrows and instructions and slide time and firm lines. It was posted in the hall where the vase had once been.
I heard her step up behind me. I smelled her perfume. One hand on my hip as she leaned against me, her cheek to my shoulder.
I covered her hand with my own. I reached back without looking and touched a lock of her hair. I looked at the schedule, the meticulous hours of work. "I like," I told her. "'Dinner out with Sunshine' on Saturday nights."
"Only if every prior task is marked complete," she told me, and she reached past me with her free hand and tapped the small white boxes next to every colored task.
I nodded quietly, unable to speak, the warmth of her so obvious after being so absent. Her fingers traced the lines of days, the open spaces of slide time that would surely fill with contingencies and shifting hours. She stopped when she reached the empty bars that represented this hour, this moment, now. I blinked. "What should we do?" I asked very quietly, my voice almost a whisper beneath the pounding of my blood in my ears.
Her voice against my shoulder, "I think we should pray."
Lord, I need to be grounded
fighting hard and impassioned
through all these burning days
your dawn above me watching
doing everything to lift me
the ones you send help me
to find the truth right here
my faith, my lightning rod.
