Wrinkle at a time

My therapist told me to imagine what my life would be like if I found someone who worked just half as hard as I do? Not even as hard. Half as hard.All good stories start with “my therapist told me…”

I should be writing out other things. Bigger ones than having someone with me again. I can’t quite wrap my brain around them though. They are too big. Too wrinkly. My dad died and I pretended to talk to him as if he were walking right next to me along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. I even pretended a set of footprints that were next to me were his. This pretend did nothing to sooth the ache that exists within the reality. It wasn’t his feet, he wasn’t there and I was talking to no one. But a small part of me wants to believe he heard. That those were his feet. Even though I had to at first turn and walk the other way to be going the same way as the feet then they wondered off to where they really belonged when I secretly wanted them to belong to the ocean and my dad walked right back off the edge of our universe into the unknown. And I couldn’t follow simply because I am still here and he is In another one that the only way to it is to walk off the edge of the planet into the water and there is a void in the beyond that you can’t see but just have to feel. Called heavens. And it’s managed by Gods. And there are clouds like pillows and feathers floating through the air that when you try to touch them they pop like bubbles but look like stars. Because they are. There is music playing softly on a piano as if you just walked into a piano bar. The air isn’t air but full of souls so thick it looks like smoky swirly air. Everyone talks in thoughts. There are trees. Because heavens can’t exist without trees. They take on different forms. Their roots in the air and their leaves below? Below what? The ground. Is there ground in heaven? What is it made of? Are there layers? Is it just space and the trees are floating around and are fed and nurtured by the smoky souls around them. Like they should be on this planet. They intertwine like a life form of their own.

Take me there. Not here. Let me move those feet to the wrinkle I see where the skyline just stops right where the sun looks like I can touch it. Where my thumb is as big as the ocean. Yet it’s thousands of miles and on the other side is just more land not heaven.

These feet were not his. The words I spoke softly to him out loud sounded like I was yelling. They echoed off the beach back to me. They went no where and really sounded so strange. Just simply “hey dad.” Sounded like what my first words ever to him likely sounded only he didn’t hear these just me. Me saying my first words to my dad not here. But there. I heard nothing back but the waves and wind. My daughter chatting softly to her blanket and my other daughter shouting to the universe about spaghetti. I felt nothing but cold sand beneath my feet.

This was painful for me. I felt I had reached a pivotal moment in grief where I was just going to let the waves come crashing into me, pull me under tumble me around then spit me back out. I’ll stand soaking wet and nearly dead from holding my breath and breath again. They will hurt. It always hurts to breath again when it hurts to not breath. Those first breaths after holding your breath hurt.

I’ve been holding my breath for months. My dad stopped and sometimes now I forget to. Since the ocean of waves of grief keep spitting me back out to the ground again I have to keep finding that ground again. I am exhausted from fighting it and decided I’m going to let it be what it is.

Grief-y. Wrinkly.

It is painful, fearful, messy, beautiful, vulnerable and itchy like tickly. It makes an anxious mind tickle our feet more than they usually do. We have to find answers and relieve the stagnate tickles that run up and down the body from mind to toes. I’ve been mildly electrocuted and it is a similar buzzing that we feel. Sometimes I try to tap it out the side of my head and hope it pops right out of my ear. I’ll pick it up and throw it away. This strange urge to resolve. To know and understand things that can’t be known and understood. Just felt. I feel so much that I feel I have no room left to feel the things we feel only.

I woke from a dream I slept an entire year. Not woke up and it was the next year. But woke hundreds of times to a day then went back to sleep and woke and it was 2022. It sounds like a dream but It became a nightmare. I was taking strange baths daily and wondering a childhood neighbors yard that I once believed held a ghost in their attic. The ghost haunted me daily. I remember waking in my sleep and waking in my wake to confusion about the day. I woke for real several times and went back to the next day in my sleep. I woke in a fit of sweat and turmoil of blankets. I nearly died one of the nights in my sleep from being tangled only to find it was just my daughters blanket she talks to and sleep with when she is gone with a giant hole wrapped around my neck in my wake.

I wake exhausted as if I worked out 365 days in my sleep. I woke overwhelmed with thoughts of global warming and the lackluster goals of recycling efforts of the entire world. I woke with concerns about my own carbon footprint. I woke with the thought that this virus came just in time. Wake up. I woke up thinking I need to wake up. I don’t put much thought into my daily consumptions, my daily output, my daily footprints. I’m not following others I’m just literally not making my own. One single set of lighter steps will matter. I won’t save the whole planet but I will save mine. One wrinkle at a time.

I can’t save the planet. It feels doomed and in dire need of a rebirth. Could we just explode and flutter off into the heavens and be chunks of planet. Who will know? What will the chunks run into? Will we be found smashing from our own orbit into others and land softly but leaving a big dent in their what? Ground? What will physically happen to the planet when we single handed destroy it? Our atmosphere is thinning and allowing more heat? We are going to burn? Our middle is super hot will we melt? Will it just be us to go and the planet will breath again in pain? Take in that big first deep breath after all the pain of holding it is gone. It will breath again when we all quit traipsing around it? What if we all stayed still? Is a day of rest enough? Can we undo what we did or are we now just too late? Like wrinkles. They really can’t be undone. Once your skin has wrinkles from age and wear and tear the skin can’t be unwrinkled. It’s now a wrinkle in time. These lotions that say so are saying buy me and believe me. They aren’t going to stop them. Then they say Buy more of me. Buy more of a different me. Buy more of anything to ease the pain of death. Wrinkles are patch work of death. And life.

I tried parting my hair on the wrong side. Meaning the right. I think my hair naturally parts in the middle. Except I always say on the left and put it on the left but when I am out in the woods for days and don’t even think about my hair I come home to it smack in the middle. It fixes itself without me manipulating it. I was just curious if my day would feel different if I made it go to the right. It wouldn’t stay. Not even a little bit. So I pulled it back in a bun still parted on the right. I felt out of balance and my sweater even felt wrong. I was unbalanced by thinking it wouldn’t matter at all. I undid it in about an hour. It fell to the left. My face looked more serious and my right side have its shape back. I changed my shape of my face by moving my hair?

I had to google. There is no good reason why some are one side and some are the other but if it’s on the left you are more logical, serious and often lead. My right side is my more creative side. It tries to dominate my entire brain. I spend a lot of time not just in my own head but on the right side of it. Maybe I part my hair to the left to fight my creative side and force logic and seriousness. I have a creative mind and am often free spirited but I can’t be all the time. I have to be flexible which is why probably my part belongs on the middle and often my part gets imparted and becomes a zigzagging wrinkle on top my head.

I never answered my therapists question directly to her. I answered with a question. If she is going to force me to think about something I will back. Imagine a life where I meet someone who works half as hard as I do?

How will this ever happen if we both don’t quit working half as hard as I do? He is out there. He is working half as hard as I am and busy. As am I. If I meet someone and they aren’t working half as hard as me then they should be so I can keep working as hard as I do. On my own isn’t my first choice it is my only one. I can’t imagine a life where someone wisks me away to tropical places, where someone buys me socks and knows I like coke with little ice from the fountain. I can’t imagine a life where I never have to text again because he is there and always will be and I am and always will be. I can’t imagine a life where someone works as hard as I do and takes time to say good morning. I can’t imagine even if I part my hair on the right and let all my creative energy go into it a life beyond the one I have made. It is unimaginable. Like the heavens.

Maybe I should keep my part in the middle for awhile and see if I can get some balance to this logical left and creative right. It naturally goes to the middle I am not naturally logical I am actually naturally illogical and full of creative thoughts that allow me to imagine a life beyond the edge of the universe that my dad was waiting for me to come walk with him and learn to talk to him, then he walked off to his heavens and swirled with floating trees made of souls. We are really just a big wrinkle at a time that no amount of lotion can unwrinkle even if we eat it right out of the jar which it doesn’t say not to do. We are folded and creased right in time until the next one.