The Scintilla Project: Day Eight

The prompt: What are your simplest pleasures? Go beyond description and into showing the experience of each indulgence.

Words. 

Long ones, short ones, cliche and obscure

Modern, archaic, proper and all slang-like

I love them all

If I had my druthers, I'd piddle about with them all day; 

I'd pick 'em, spit 'em, drop 'em

I'd twist 'em, mince 'em, chop it up

I'd sing 'em, most loud, sweet cacophony

Oh, but occasionally

I eat 'em

I quote 'em, I give 'em, I take 'em

I live and breathe 'em 

I fear them 

"They can and will be used against you"...

They'll break you, maim you, cut you down to size;

A detail, minutiae, to an infinitesimal speck of who you thought you once were

They'll expose and exploit you

Pulchritude, power, horror, ugliness and shame

They are love and loathing, hope and despair

They incite riots and laughter and insight and change

They escape you, they fail you, but they come back...

Awestruck by love, writhing in pain, at desire's peak, on the brink of death

A final utterance, one last plea

For naught but their own posterity

Words.

The Scintilla Project: Day Six

The prompt: Write the letter to the bully, to the cheater, to the aggressor that you always wanted to but couldn't quite. Now tell them why they can't affect you anymore.

I wish I was there. I wish I was ready. I wish I could narrow it down to the one thing, the one time that hurt the most. I wish I knew that any of it actually mattered; that my pain was not in vain. I wish you'd come to me someday having discovered empathy, ready to offer an apology. I wish that apology might somehow validate me and set me free.

I'm gonna put this out there Universe, and if I may, just one more wish. Will you aid me in the strength and clarity to revisit this prompt at some point when I'm there, when I'm ready, when it doesn't affect me anymore. 

The Scintilla Project: Day Seven

The prompt: Talk about a time when you saw your mother or father as a person independent of his or her identity as your parent.

Talk of the units always presents with a bit...OK a boatload, of trepidation. As the once-- but no longer-- only child of addicts, I've struggled through the years to let my siblings have their own reality, their own experiences and mostly their own voice, often stifling mine in the process, but that ended when my writing began.

I'll tell you that much of my life I've seen my mother as anything but a mother. For the entirety of my childhood, I was the parent, hers and mine, and later my siblings and lastly--still amidst my childhood, my own children.

She is the subject of many unpublished essays, therapy sessions and my own looming fears. She's just so flawed, so human, so independent of her identity as anything or anyone, and subsequently independent of obligations to anything or anyone. I find her equally as shameful as she is enviable.

I could go on forever about the times she disappointed me, "dropped the ball", but what I fear I'll never understand is why I always rush to pick it up, again and again, until I'm juggling-- mother, daughter, sister, teacher, friend, therapist, perpetual fixer-upper to the clan. I've spent my life navigating and surviving her independence. What I'd like is to someday bear witness to the declaration of my own independence; a life independent of codependency.   

The Scintilla Project: Day Five

The prompt: Show a part of your nature that you feel you've lost. Can you get it back? Would it be worth it?

Aah... if I knew then what I know now. I've heard it, I've said it, I've willed it, wished it, vied it over and over and over, again and again and again. And, now I know. I know now, that which had I known then would place me exactly where I am now--only sooner, and for longer; wishing, vying, over and over and over, again and again and again that I didn't know-- not then, not now, not ever, what it is that I know now.

Two subtle divots, at the upturned corners of my lips ago, alongside a certain soft and supple something in the light of my eyes; regrettably, I never took note of them until the day they went away, the day I learned what I'd wished I'd known, but now know, and wish I didn't.

It was a time when forever meant for ever, when there was but one version of the truth, when love was more than enough and that meant by default, I--in love, and being loved--was more than enough too. It was a time of innocence, of ignorance, of bliss, it may very well have been the best of times. But, I wanted to know, to know better, and so now I do, only I wish I didn't. Aah... if I knew then what I know now.

The Scintilla Project: Day Two

The prompt: When did you realise you were a grown up? What did this mean for you? Shock to the system? Mourning of halcyon younger days? Or the embracing of the knowledge that you can do all the cool stuff adults do: drink wine, go on parent-free vacations, eat chocolate without reprimand? 

The short of it--I'm not grown yet. I'm thirty-eight, and if the powers that be wouldn't spare me this earthly existence in the throes of past years' miseries, that Bitch--capitalized with all due reverence-- had better let me live long enough to make sense of it all.

The long of it--depending when asked, I'll dig deep into my mental crates and offer you a tale or twelve of victory and some defeat, starring me, in what sometimes looks a lot like a -- neck roll, eye roll, pursed-lips-- grown ass woman, but one can never be too certain.

Was it my wedding day? I was eighteen years and a whole fourteen long summer days old. Mayhaps...

It could have been the twenty eight hours of grueling anything-but-natural, natural childbirth. Or, the time spent thereafter in NICU deciphering medical jargon whilst my painfully engorged breasts leak and my child lay cyanotic. Maybe it was when I finally got to bring him home...or, last December when he left home.   

Maybe, it came in the subtle silence of the formative years, his and mine and ours, when we were three. Or was it amidst the storm when I fled, or when he fled, or when I fled again? No umbrella, no coat.

 

Perhaps, I clenched the moment like a baton? Twenty-four and relaying back and forth between two lives, two loves: the one that felt right and the one that was right. Then again, I just knew I felt a certain tinge of something when I committed...recommitted, to the latter. Sacrifice, take one for the "team", isn't that what grown-ups do?

Did I lay my claim to adulthood at 26; one last push and bellow, the birth of child number two. Or is it in my admirable resistance to push back when she pushes my buttons; vitriol spewing from pink, angry, pubescent rage-filled lips?  

The moments when it all falls apart are as relevant on the journey as when it all comes together. Maybe it's all of these things collectively, and maybe it's none at all. Growing... grown...I just want to hold on long enough to make sense of it all.