real

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“Because it’s not real.”

My therapist’s expression softened. “That’s the great thing about imaginary places,” she said. “You can do anything with them. They’re not limited by realistic factors. You can kind of craft whatever you need and change it any time.”

I dug in my heels. “I need you to understand. I can’t dream up a place that isn’t already real. I have huge defense mechanisms against it. That’s probably what’s wrong. No fantasy. I’ve got to use a real place.”

“What happens if you try to imagine a safe space?” she asked.

I looked at her. She was watching my hands. I looked down at my hands and saw that I was compulsively gathering the corners of the Kleenex I was holding into perfect alignment, trying to fold it exactly right, putting it in order, mashing down creases. I looked back up at her.

“I have to tell the truth,” I said. “I can’t lie.”

She thought for a long moment, then said, “The problem with a real place is that it can change. Something can happen and then it goes from being a safe space you’ve built out to unsafe. You’re left without one. That’s why I feel apprehensive about you using it.”

“I understand,” I said. “I can think of spaces I would have chosen in the past that became sinister, even dangerous, because they were real and real things happened in them or around them.” I paused. “But for the time we’ll be working together, and from what I know about the frequency of reinforcement and the nature and likelihood of it all, this space is ideal. I want to use it. Please.”

“Okay,” she said. “Just be sure to let me know if anything at all changes.” She handed me the smooth metal balls that we settled on for bilateral stimulation during EMDR work. “So this exercise is what we do to build out the space. You’ll actually focus on the positive things about it. Instead of imagining them and strengthening that, find what it is about that room that makes you feel safe and protected, like you could retreat there from any attacker or terrible thing and be completely safe, able to catch your breath. So go ahead and be in the room, feel what that’s like.”

( …. be in the room. The house, the open space they made by relocating the staircase just so gatherings could happen. Sitting in the arm chair, looking at the hand-hewn rough timbers holding up the roof, forming the center pole, the foundation for floor boards above our heads, the loft. Looking at the kitchen, the gently ramshackle bathroom with a hook for a door knob, the island a shuffled mess of games and activities and toys for the several children who live here as part of an extended family. Looking at the bookcases stacked with some of the same science fiction books that P.J. has, not neat but stuffed and pulled from and put back in no particular order, the bookshelves of a rebellious and free-spirited librarian ….)

“How do you feel about being in the space?” she asked.

“I can see it all clearly,” I answered, which wasn’t an answer at all.

“Okay, try again. Go back into it and see how you feel when you’re there.”

( …. the chair beside a smaller bookcase, the one I always get to sit in. It’s a lower-set armchair, rounded, floral fabric and shabby and too big for me, and I can cross my legs and sit in it like a little girl and take everything in. Because it’s beside the bookcase and backed against the stair rail, it feels like it’s tucked away in a corner, and this …..)

“It makes me feel safe,” I said before she could ask me. “There’s a chair I always sit in, and it’s tucked just right, and from it I can see the door and everyone who comes in it, but I don’t feel trapped there. I feel like I never want to leave through that door, that I want to stay in the chair. Nothing bad can reach me there, no matter what comes in.”

“That’s interesting, and it sounds like a good space. Okay, so tell me more about what happens there and why it feels safe to you.”

( …. Kate with a toddler on her hip showing me how she braided her silvery hair to be like mine. Stu and Nathan watching each other as they pick out an old English traditional song and tune that each can barely recall, scratching it from their brains. Hannah smiling with her lips shut to hide a misgrown tooth but her smile is beautiful and she should just let it happen. Bobby’s grunge-metal guitar skills and charisma across from Steve’s hippie-leaning mild mannerisms and skillful ear. The choruses we all sing when the songs lend themselves to it, making us belong even if we don’t perform a song when our turn comes around. The chair, a safe place in the circle, an anchor, an entitlement, a bit of real estate, just enough and all one really needs ….)

“It’s chaos. There’s so much music and talking and in that chair, the chaos is around me but it can’t touch me. I promise you, it’s safe. It’s perfect for letting memories come through EMDR. No matter what shows up, that slipcovered arm chair can hold me. It’s worn with love and there’s a stain on the arm and it smells slightly of cat and dog and all that makes it real, so incredibly real. I could never dream up something so raggedly perfect. That chair tells the truth. I will sit in it.”

sacred spaces

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“There’s a pretty intense storm coming, almost here. Is Molly down there with you?” P.J. called down.

” — hhhesshhh dwnnnnhrrrr,” I called back.

“What?”

I spit out the wrench in my mouth. “She’s down here with me. Probably not enough time to give her trazodone. Almost done, be right up. I’ll sit with her in the bathroom if she needs it.”

I tightened the last few bolts and smiled. Two new chairs for the deck. Friends are coming over this weekend, the first we’ve hosted since adding a deck, and now there will be enough seating for everyone to be comfortable. We asked them to come because we have a remarkable view of the White Mountains and it’s incredibly selfish to keep it for ourselves.



P.J. and I are both surprised by my willingness to sit outside. I initially disavowed the entire concept of the front deck, given my aversion to heat, sun, spiders, wasps, mosquitoes, and generally the entire outdoor/natural world. But there are two rocking chairs and a tiny table between them, and each evening (earlier and earlier), we “go sit out” and watch the belt of Venus form and then wane. Sometimes it’s chilly and we have blanket wraps, and there are usually two mugs of tea with milk and honey on the table. There are still mosquitoes, but it’s a sacred space now, and I’m drawn to it. The breeze and birds and distant dogs and cows bring on dusk. Staring at the distant mountains opens me.

The other sacred space in our home is the opposite of a distant mountain view. When we renovated the basement, the staircase was drywalled in and a door added to make a storage closet. It was intended for all things holiday, but after shoving in the bins and boxes and Christmas tree, there was still room enough for my idea to take shape.



I painted the whole closet as close to the shade of peaceful hot cocoa as I could. I hung a curtain in front of the clutter, made and hung a shelf on one side. I added a rug, a writing desk less than three feet wide, and a small task chair. I used flexible board and dowels and caulk to proximate a ceiling. Battery-powered fairy lights cover it, the switches by the door. The light is just enough.

This is my writing closet, or my “office” at home. There is no electricity, only enough light to see by and space for my laptop and a cup of coffee. The shelf holds my music scores and some assorted notebooks. I have to sit down before the door can close, and once inside, the space is a pillow fort, a tent in the dark, a blanket draped over chairs, the perfect hiding place. A place to whisper into this keyboard.

One space opens me and one space shelters me. Both spaces are sacred. Both are home.

a hole full of things

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Anne Marie is a thread woven through my life, and I am woven through hers.

The way we relate now has seemingly little to do with our origins, our friendly competitiveness in elementary school, our enmity in much of middle and high school, our reuniting when we realized our two heads were the only ones lifted above the others, noticing the little things because our senses of humor were aligned. Those high school summers, she taught tennis lessons while I worked long days at Wendy’s. She would come buy a Frosty and I would stand behind the counter, a bit sticky and greasy, and we’d talk. I abandoned her to her senior year when I left early for college, and I attended the graduation that year, the one that would have been mine but wasn’t. It hurt us both, but her salutatory speech received a standing ovation, and I stood beside her parents and clapped the loudest.

We choose the term “childhood best friends.”

In adulthood, things got real. Graduate school and weddings and challenging parenthood occupied us. Sometimes we lived in proximity; sometimes we lived apart in distant cities; but always, we managed to completely fail to get together in person. We’ve always preferred correspondence, through e-mail and now through messenger apps. We’re writers and it’s the vehicle through which we best express ourselves.

This doesn’t minimize our friendship. We’re unusual. Anne Marie is a couples therapist, soon to be a doctor. We used to go months without talking, then pick up the threads as if no time had gone by at all. Now, we talk daily. She is in therapy and she provides it to others, but when she needs therapy about the therapy, she comes to me. I know her best. Likewise, whatever I am grappling with mentally and in therapy, she knows and understands, often better than anyone else involved. We share The Ache, a longing that calls out to be filled by the affection of a mother figure. Our own mothers were as different as the sun and moon, but The Ache is there. Thirty years of discussion later, we still cannot pinpoint why.

To the outside eye, there is a gaping hole where a normal friendship should be, one in which we try to see each other, go for dinner, coffee, anything. I’ve seen her in person more since I moved nine-hundred miles away than I did when I lived in the next city over back home. That “seeing her more” was one visit to Herbie’s Diner last fall, for an hour, with our mouths full of egg and toast and frantic attempts to talk between bites. I had to use GPS to find the place and she had a head cold. But when we said goodbye and left, we were sixteen again, with our cars, and Anne Marie honked her horn as she drove away and flipped me the bird. I yelled obscenities at her, not caring who may have heard me, because sixteen-year-olds don’t heed those things when they’re performing their rituals and laughing. I climbed back into my rental car and remembered that it wasn’t my old Mazda, and her SUV was not her ’92 Corsica. My radio wasn’t stuck on the Oldies station, but I would have bet anything she still listens to her daddy and that SUV always has at least a half tank of gas.

Her writing is spectacular. We talk about writing a book together, but I know we won’t. Instead, our messages about our children’s struggles, absurd and hilarious observations, and the very contents of our hearts will not be set to pages meant for others.

There will remain a hole, full of an unwritten book and bread not broken together, a shared mystery never solved, cars never in each other’s driveways. Don’t be deceived by the hole. We’re out here together, threaded and woven, still weaving.

lake day

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It’s one of the last warm days before September yields to its first frost. The air is eighty degrees but the water is less than seventy. Most of the people on the north shore beach have braved wading in to their knees or chests; many are on paddle boards or in rafts. A radio on someone’s blanket plays Queen and Led Zeppelin songs and a man throws a frisbee for his dog.

I step into the water and walk, determined to acclimate and reach the point where the shivering stops and the water feels warmer than the air, determined to relive my July swim and the childlike wonder of floating while staring at Willoughby Gap, the cliffs, the summer cottages. I have to concentrate. My body wants me to return to safety and warmth, back in our camping chairs on the shore. Every second, I choose the cold, and keep walking.

When the water is waist-high, I turn and look around me. First the fjord, then the man who found a tennis ball for the dog, then our chairs hidden among the countless other chairs and blankets, then the splashing children at the far end of the beach.

Then the hillside east of the lake, rising sharply. It holds a cemetery. I’m not wearing glasses so I can’t be sure, but there are at least a hundred graves, some with new, shiny granite headstones, others old and worn, or plain white and spaced like piano keys.

The graves seem to be looking down at the beach scene, watching, remembering when they were the ones swimming a single generation ago, or maybe two, or five, in glacial waters left here in the Pleistocene.

I stare up at them for some time, then imagine them watching me as I pinch my nose and plunge under the water, submerged and shocked by the cold. I surface and breathe and let my heart pump blood and begin to warm me. I owe courage to that hillside, because my heart is beating and I don’t have much time. Already, I feel warmer. The sounds of playing children and the bustle of the beach drown out my sudden laugh of delight.

smoldering

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candle knot

I’m in the process of recognizing that I have an undiagnosed auto-inflammatory syndrome.

It would appear I’m allergic to stress – at least, to what my endocrine system dumps into my bloodstream any time I’m the least bit upset by something, or subconsciously worried, or not processing. I envision waste treatment plant vats bubbling with ACTH and epinephrine and tiny little men in uniforms directing other tiny little men driving industrial machinery as the entire works operates in response to the world as it appears inside my head.

Since as early as 2017, I’ve had “fevers” that have sometimes been called “weekend fevers”, “fake fevers”, “fake colds”, and “day flus.” I’ve had runs streaks stretches of weeks when I thought I had developed IBS-D that then spontaneously resolved. Vague weakness spells and maladies. Sore throats that never progressed. “Coming down with something” but never, in actuality, descending anywhere in particular. And always, those fevers, with burning cheeks and forehead and temperature fluctuations that don’t register on thermometers.

I’ve gone through seven thermometers and thrown them out. They were all rubbish. They all said this isn’t happening.

I feel like a pale woman draped on a fainting couch in Victorian times, a hand to her forehead, declaring that she is too delicate to be subjected to the whims of a turbulent world.

I’m not fragile. I carry ladders in my job. I scurry up and down stairwells and crawl under desks. I have a tattoo and I once pulled out my own IUD. I broke my tailbone this spring and didn’t miss a day of work. My head is a different matter. I’m hyperaware, hyper-emotive, and incredibly sensitive. My psyche is glass-blown intricacy. I’m wide-open and vulnerable, born missing a protective shell. The gift of the genuine, heartfelt smile that stays put many seconds after I speak to a stranger in the hall and pass by is countered by the burden of exaggerated interpretation of the slightest disapproval.

It’s a mystery why the immune response kicked in a few years ago; the greater mystery is why it’s getting worse, at an accelerated rate. The slightest provocation causes the tiny little men to check things off their clipboards and upend another steaming vat of cortisol into my system. I go up like a match and fatigue comes on me like an egg cracked on top of my head, trickling down. Post-nasal drip begins. I go through Covid tests like potato chips.

Sometimes my bladder becomes inflamed. Sometimes my joints ache. Sometimes I have facial paresthesias. Sometimes I cannot endure anything touching my wrists or hands, clothing touching my skin, a chair touching my legs or back. Sometimes I feel I cannot get enough oxygen, no matter how deeply I breathe.

If there is such a thing as “postive anxiety” then it applies here. Looking forward to something delightful in the future can produce the same constellation of symptoms. There is a brain center responsible for processing both, and that must be the source, the impetus.

So all I need to do to feel healthy on a daily basis is to never be excited about anything, have any good experiences, or feel strongly toward anyone, and to hole up at home so I never encounter any anxiety-producing situations. Right. Easy peasy.

I should probably avoid thinking, too, for good measure. Metabolizing is iffy. So is basic circulatory function.

Breathing. Breathing is a safe bet. I’ll focus on breathing.