Be Where Your Hands Are
Writing through a depression
My husband takes my daughter to the market this morning and in that time I down my coffee and I begin to go to work on cleaning up my office. I have two projects that need to be finished and it seems unfair to start the new year among boxes, and my endless pile of books to read, my daughter’s old clothes to donate, stuff to send to another friend’s little girl piling up in my distraction. My own clothes to donate or sell spilling all over the floor. Starting the new year wanting to consume less. To find the piece that was still missing inside of me and fill it with poetry instead of cheap fabric.
Someone writes that they have seen a mountain lion in our neighborhood, on both sides of the avenue and my dream has always been to see one. Smelling one, once, in Topanga Canyon. Some of the rocks littered with the outline of the seashore. The canyon took my breathe away when my husband first brought me. The huge red sandstone piled high. The smell was intoxicatingly sweet. And then it was gone.
On the 2nd day of the new year the sky in Los Angeles is remarkable, is actually doing something. A few wispy clouds covering the bright blue.
For days I have been saying that if the baby wakes up early from her nap we would go to the beach, but she hasn’t. And we stumble into the arriving dark to run through the park before french toast or grilled cheese. And my daughter in the dusk reminds me of the photographs of Mark Cohen. With cookie crumbs still around her mouth, and the short bangs I accidentally cut growing out, making her look like some hip club kid from the 90s. That sometimes when I see a picture of Ewan McGregor’s youngest daughter I think that that is what my daughter will look like, sometimes when I see a photograph of Natasha Kinski. How just before my daughter turned one my husband started to refer to her as Klaus, because I said I couldn’t stop seeing it, the big eyes, the blonde hair.
I have been thinking a lot about the desert, and how I wanted to ring in the new year out there, how still it seems, how every time I arrive on the other side of the San Bernardinos and under the San Jacintos, I uncover something. Something I call God who thrives in that silence. Who once whispered Stay. And who then whispered Go. 10 years later to me, standing barefoot and slicing peaches into the August morning. How on January 2nd on Main Street, in the backseat of the car with my daughter instructing me to hold her, I watched my past walk by, skinny and with it’s head down. And I was reminded again of time, of all the lives that can fit in one body, that I had lived over there once too, on Bay Street and 11th a few months after I got sober. That I had eaten several times on that corner of Main. Ordering a mango lassi. And I would walk to work and I would walk to the beach, and so of course, I can’t stop thinking about freedom. About what we sometimes leave behind in order to have what we have now. And how the heartbreak of not having, the heartbreak of what could have been, the heartbreak of what wasn’t, the heartbreak of what could never have been, became the present of today. That when I first got sober, a hollowed out gangly group leader said, I just try to be where my hands are.
That when I ask my girlfriend, who is making lunch for me this afternoon, what she needs and she writes Dill. I am reminded of joy, and how once again, one never knows what might happen.