The Old Me

I've been thinking about the boys I used to love. Is this what getting married does? Stirs up all the sediment that has slid down the walls to fill the chambers of my heart?

Sedimentary, my dear Watson. All these ghosts. Nostalgia Dos. One for you, my true blue; two for the girl I would have been, had you been, and for the boy I was on my way to visit when the call came and they said you had only days.

Would it have been different? Lately, I wonder about those; the relationships that didn't go sour but instead slipped into yesteryear's circumstance. I miss you, old me. Meeting would-have-been him, breathless on an early spring night when he took my hand and pulled me around the corner, kissed me by a tiny row of fence posts; the back of something. And there, in the absence of dedicated space, I witnessed the last pure beginning of my life, the last time I wouldn't know that things just stop, no explanation owing. The sweetness of new love, seen through the wrong end of the telescope as first love, the sting of you going like sea water filling me up and making me drunker than the sun.

I wish I could go back to her, the if-you'd-lived me. If life were a Greek myth, I would travel to the underworld and make my offering of blood just to hear you speak. I'd peel back this decade of unfounded and needless regret like a banged up toenail, and there I'd be underneath, clean and new. Wearing lilac dresses and sitting on stone steps with a glass of wine in one hand, or at Mildred and Schubert, walking with you on the phone. Here I am again, a girl teetering on the edge of things. Telling you my stories, the air filling up with the buzz of exchanged words and turned earth. My face lit up by the promise of being young. Hey mom, I'd say, rounding a corner, I've got to go. Will you be around when I get home?

To Dad in the hope that he stays with us

I saw a photo yesterday of you riding an ATV. This was before ATVs were the devil, before anyone but Rachel Carson cared about the environment, when it was okay to drink and drive, smoke indoors, and not use sunscreen. My parents and their friends, young, bandanaed, thin and tan, in perilously high-waisted jeans, would go racing over the dunes with a bottle of beer in one hand and a precarious grip on the wheel.

I saw a picture of you riding an ATV, wearing the white shirt, white shorts, and deck shoes that have been your summer costume forever, and I thought to myself, I have your legs. I had thought, or rather hoped, that I had my mother's legs, but this profile doesn't lie. Looking at this stack of photos, it makes me long for the time before digital photos, when it was a surprise to find out what was on the roll, when there were more duds, but things were less posed somehow, and there was no option to delete.

I've spent a long time missing your counterpart, but I've often thought about how I'd miss you when you went. These pictures tell us stories you never did. Oh, we've all heard about the turkey you shot on Cumberland Island with a rifle at point blank range, but what about the small struggles that make the man? We were so busy holding on to the memory of her that we forgot to make enough of you to hold on to, to store up those memories on lined shelves and guard them for the future.

Am I too wrapped up in nostalgia? Your doctor took us down the hall to a consultation room in the hospital yesterday. He was wearing a yellow button down and a pink spotted bow tie, and had the look of an old country doctor sprucing it up for the small town-big city. He propped his arms behind his head like he was about to dive into an old yarn, and told us how you showed up to appointments a couple drinks in. He was trying to pass on parameters for how not to be an alcoholic. As if a lifetime of you isn't inoculation enough.

My brother mentioned later that night that at a job interview in Cincinnati, he found himself suddenly swept away in a sea of bow ties, a disconcerting notion that resonated and sent him running. The heartland, symbols of a simpler time and all that. There's something off-putting about the mass putting on of nostalgia. But how to avoid the riptide tenacity of the past when every time we try to shake free, we are pulled back into remembering? I want to move forward, but I don't want to lose her, or you.

Why Are People So Scared of Death?

I'm not trying to be superior; I have no wish to die prematurely. When I had my first colonoscopy two summers ago, I mentally shat my pants for a week waiting for the results to come back. I'm not unscared when confronted with confronting the Great Beyond. But I don't get why talking about death freaks people out so much. There must be other cultures that handle it a bit better than we do and I really ought to research them, what makes them different from us. When you know someone who dies, and in my case a young parent (back me up on this fellow half-orphans), death ceases to become an awkward topic of conversation and becomes as normal as checking movie times. And at least for me, it lost that sense of taboo that it had before I lost my mom and became something that I longed to talk about because I was never allowed to. My one friend who lost her father and my cousin who also did are the only people (other than my bro) with whom I've felt like I was able to talk normally about it. To everyone else it seems macabre, and you have to edit everything you say about the subject, or you worry no one will want to hang out with you again. You also lose the sense of what is macabre and what isn't, as though the thermometer that normally tells you which lines not to cross got busted at 110 and no longer works. I get so overexcited when I find someone else with a dead parent that I have to restrain myself and try to act normally and not assume that their experience was the same as mine, or that they are as strange as I am. :)

Sometimes when you mention a parent having died to someone,  you can see the other person's brain going round like a computer trying to load a webpage--they're desperately trying to find an appropriate yet noncommittal thing to say that will assure you of their social competency while simultaneously avoiding a prolonged conversation about death. After this happens a few times, you start to feel bad for imposing situational awkwardness on other people, so you end up trying to rephrase things so as to make them as innocuous as possible.

The whole kibosh on the death talk makes it extremely awkward when you have to answer a question that, in my case, involves the words "mom" or "parents." These are the things you never have to think about when you have a normal life. Example: That's a beautiful necklace, where did you get it? It's not appropriate to say the actual answer: I found it in my dead mom's jewelry box and liked it, so I took it because she's not likely to wear in anytime soon seeing as how she be Miami-DADE County. Get it? Like dead with a Kentucky accent? I don't care if you don't think this joke is funny, because for some reason I really do, and I'm allowed to say it because I lived in Miami. But anyway, what are you supposed to say? Still likely to provoke odd/pitying looks and uncomfortable silences is "It was my mother's." People pause and wonder if they're supposed to ask what happened to her, or if they should assume she just gave it to you as a gift and is still in the picture.

This is going to sound really silly, but something I really hate to talk about because it inevitably leads to an awkward conversation/ because it feels like lying: My parents house. I have a house that I can visit, it is my parent's house. Yet I feel weird saying my parent's house, like I'm somehow secretly trying to lie about my mom being dead. So I say, "my dad's house." But when I say "my dad's house," it makes me feel either like a child of divorce or like my mom is a dead beat that ran out on us. And then sometimes people ask, oh, where is your mother, and I don't want to make them feel awkward by telling them the truth. Sometimes people ask me where my parents live in the course of getting to know me, and this is worse because then I also invariably have to say: "my dad lives in…" or just name the place without saying "my parents live…" because then seemingly run-of-the-mill small talk becomes uncomfortable. Does everyone else overthink the way I do?

Getting Your First Colonoscopy at 31! Yay!

It's not that bad! Really it's not! Okay, the part where you have to drink the stuff that makes all crap leave your body is REVOLTING. Like cough syrup's evil twin. Worse is the day and a half you have to spend not eating, or eating green and orange jello (no blue or red) and tea, and water, and chicken broth and crouching on the floor with your stomach cramping from hunger and your head spinning (the vomit feeling you get fifteen minutes after drinking the mixture is awful too). By the time you get to the hospital the next morning, you are falling-down hungry and so excited to be over and done with it so you can eat food that you're practically screaming STICK ANYTHING YOU WANT UP MY ASS! I DON'T CARE! JUST HURRY UP!

I remember calling my boyfriend a tall drink of water in front of the registration desk person because I could barely think straight. Then you get little warmed socks and a gown and an I.V. dock and sit and wait to lose your butt virginity (unless you've lost it already, of course) among the mostly older women, a forty-something woman next to me who also had colonoscopies in her thirties, all of us a strange little club of naked magazine-reading cyborgs with plastic docks taped in our hands (naked underneath hospital gowns, not reading nudie magazines, though that would be terrifically amusing).

Then they take you in, and this I remember so vividly: the ceiling was this beautiful bejeweled display of back-lit photos; they had replaced some of the tiles with images of fish and coral and such, and it was very pleasant looking up at them. Then the doctor came in--it seems so wrong to meet a doctor for the first time in a hospital gown does it not?--a very nice Indian man, and explained about being in a "twlight" state. I don't know if my body listened because I think I conked like a conch shell, and from that time on it was a whooshy dreamy floaty experience of which I remember once blinking at a yellow computer screen and hearing someone say, look there's your polyp. Then I blacked out again very peacefully until I was given cracker and juice options (saltines, cranberry) and pinched my cheeks to look rosier for my waiting knight who was going to take me home and FEED me. A few weeks later they came back and said the polyp they found was benign and that I wouldn't need another colonoscopy for five years (yay!) Small blessings abound :)