Tomorrow I'm Calling In Dead

Just in case anyone had any doubts whatsoever, the phrase "if it weren't for bad luck I'd have none" was solely coined for me. I'm convinced.

And so the litany of annoyances began early in the week. It starts with the minor things. Things most people would giggle at really. A lost hubcap.

Really, who loses 1 hubcap? I didn't hit a curb, have an accident or hit any resoundingly deep New England potholes that I recalled. I didn't hear the tinny sound of it escaping off my wheel-well and off into the great beyond. Nope. I just came out to go to work, and noticed a black hole where my once silver covered Ford emblazoned hubcap once was.

Unlucky yes, and mostly annoying.

And then, then my Monday morning continued as I had a job interview...sort of. I say sort of because it wasn't an interview for an actual job. It was with an Agency for staffing. Now mind you when I was laid off last year for that fateful 5 month period, I worked with 3 of these said places, so let's just say my hopes weren't sky-high.

Alas, I get stuck in traffic. First Monday morning back from school vacation week and there was a horrific accident and a car got stuck under a tractor trailer. Awesome. I call and announce I am running behind, and since my GPS was not finding a signal, I was going to now take the subway, and needed walking directions. The girl on the phone gave me some and I drove to my current work, parked, and walked to the T station.

On the train, off the train and then walking in the brisk, cold New England winter air. Brr. I head in the direction the woman had told me, turn left here, right there, walk walk walk. I felt like I had been walking for ages and the next cross street I had been told to look for was nowhere to be found. Hmm. Maybe it's farther down. I am suddenly in Chinatown, a not so pleasant neighborhood in Downtown Boston.

Stellar.

I call the woman again. "Um, I'm in Chinatown" ..."Oh you went the wrong way, you need to turn around and go back the way you came"

So maybe 20 blocks in the opposite direction, in the cold and in heels I finally make it there. Heaving and out of breath and a half an hour later than intended.

Awesome.

So afterwards, I asked how to get back to the T the easiest way, since I had clearly been lost. The guy gives me the easiest directions to another stop that was like 3 blocks away. I was pissed. That entire sightseeing trek through Chinatown could have been avoided.

Tuesday brought another great stroke of luck as I picked up Dylan from school.

I get handed a letter by Dylan's teacher. Hmm, I open it up. Oh, tomorrow will be Dylan's last day of financial coverage because DSS closed the case (small victory) and failed to notify me, so I now had to come up with close to $400, that I didn't have to keep him in school.

The letter was dated February 3rd and they handed it to me on the 22nd. Yeah. I was livid.

I called the school's office and there was nothing they could do. I had to call this payment place and get the money squared away by the 23rd or Dylan couldn't return to school. Awesome, just kick the kid out of kindergarten you assholes.

So I cry, I fret I scream. I call my mother who somehow is able to finagle a solution for me, and I git-r-done.

I then call DSS and tear them a new asshole for having poor practices and notification exercises and request to speak to a supervisor. Oh I am so not done with them.

So Wednesday I go to the school and fill out new paperwork to get on a sliding scale payment deal for school. All would be great if they did things in a reasonable way. They look at your pay before taxes, they don't care or look at what your bills are, your rent, your car payments etc and then pull out an amount.

Stellar. I am now $500 in the hole every month, out of the gate. And that's without even having been laid off yet.

Life's grand.

So then this morning.

Ahh this morning.

I go out to my car, get Dylan ready to buckle in and ready to start the day at about 7:30 this morning to take him to school and head to work....and my freaking car had been broken into,

My GPS stolen, dashboard ripped to pieces and stereo gone, wirers hanging everywhere, CD's all but 2 gone.

I was shaking. This happened in my fucking driveway.

I get Dylan back in the house to the safety of his Nick Jr. and I call 911.

The police come and inform me the town got hit pretty hard last night, so then the County comes to CSI my car. Another cruiser pulls up and they start to powder and process my car. Looking for prints and taking pictures like I was right out of a Law & Order episode.

Of course, my insurance has a deductable that is more than what was stolen and broken is worth, so putting in a claim will only cost me points on my insurance and more money out of my pocket, so I get to eat it.

Not a single day this week has gone by where something shitty has happened, each day worse than the next, and it's only friggan Thursday.

I think I'm calling in dead tomorrow.

FDR Was Wrong

Fear is a persnickety thing.

It can send you running into the wind, limbs flailing and screaming for all the world to hear or it can stun you silent, your screams only heard as they echo soundlessly inside the callous solitude that is your own mental prison.

It can be wrought seemingly from nothing. A memory that steeps from childhood that grows overtime like an ivy slowly crawling its way over the side of a brick facade home, until it's completely consumed by it. It can be from something so tragic and obvious that all the world would be sympathetic to your plight, understanding and empathetic to your whimpers and shudders as the culprit as such were brought to light.

It can be a culmination of things. Built up over and over again, a continual chain of events that has you guarded and bitter. Fear of change, the unknown, or moreover what you do know, what you have come to expect.

It is powerful, omnipotent. Invisible and consuming. Some surely unfounded, rooted deep in your psyche, haunting your every thought, move and instinct. And when they prove false, you sigh relieved...for now. As you never truly feel safe from them, as though you merely just got away with it this time, somehow. It just lay in wait.

In eats away at you at times. Decaying all you once knew of hopefulness and aspiration. Recounting time and time again when those fears, those seemingly needless worries had proved right, had come to fruition. The mild, the unsightly. From one extreme to the next.

There's no rationale. No rhyme or reason to anyone else. No need for justification. You feel justified in your own knowledge of repetition. That all that keeps happening is reason enough. To shut down, to hide. Or to scream on the inside, the outside. To know you're not crazy. That the proof is truly in the pudding.

FDR was wrong. Fear itself is not the only thing you have to fear. It's everything it comes with.

You In Your Glass Houses

Why can't other people leave your own life alone?

Who's business is it besides yours and whoever is directly involved in it anyway?

I loathe and abhor people who are on the outside looking in and think they know more about you and your life, or the people in it than they think you do. That they know what is best, what will make you happy. What is right, and just and what will make all things right and perfect.

Newsflash, had I not already tried your likely unoriginal novel ideas, walk a day in my shoes, my mind, my life before you sit in your glass house and cast stones my way, that glass is likely to shatter and cut you to pieces.

People are forever in a state of judgment. Judgment and denial. They scorn and look down their noses at your decisions, your lifestyles. Then balk and say they aren't judgmental. Their snide comments meant to glide off your back the way water off the back of a duck in a rainstorm. Not the case as such my friends, sorry.

Who are you exactly, on your pillars, your high horses to know what I need? What my life requires for balance and happiness? That I share is only a mere scratch on the surface of all that goes on. And you, you spectators to it all, with your scorn and disdain looking at me and the way I live my life, who are you to say it's unworthy of anything? Anyone?

I could make someone very happy as a matter of fact. YOU could even know that person, but it matters not to you, because it's not in your conventional ways. I could never fulfill that Donna Reed image of wife or mother, fit with my apron and dinner prepared when the man of the house arrives home from work, children pressed and clean, house a glow and smelling of cleaning products.

I am disheveled and unconventional. I live in organized chaos. I am a good mother and I work my ass off. I am not a substitute for day care nor am I a person to fit into someone else's molds, but alas that very reason I am makes someone happy perhaps and it matters not. I am financially unstable and a medical mess. I am emotional and callous and am a walking contradiction.

I am not black and white. I am full of piss and vinegar and I will say what I think when I think it, whether appropriate or not. I am not going to apologize for my mistakes, for they are mine and mine alone, and I alone will fix them. Not overnight maybe, and not without the help that I may ask for from time to time, but I will do it on MY terms.

And you, in your shattered glass houses will sit in awe as I traipse by you triumphantly, as you wallow in your cuts and sores, blood drying slice by slice, and I, I will be the one to smile.

Black Clouds for the Birds

Why does being an adult make everything suck?

Everything is magnified to the 10th power and you just have to suck it up and take it because, well, that's just the way it is damnit and there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it.

You over think, over stress and over do everything in your life. You never have enough of what you need and always have too much of what you don't. Always off balance like 2 kids in a park on a see-saw, one fat one skinny.

We all know what a cake-walk my 2010 has thus far been (insert eye roll here), and let's just say that the past week has not made it easier.

After the 3 deaths I already had to deal with, and my father's birthday I thought I had enough grief to last me a long time. But then on the eve of my dad's birthday, my great aunt died. Not just any aunt. My dad's aunt. The one who took him in when he was 15 years old and left home. The one who's driveway he slept in his car before she made him come inside and took care of him when he was on the outs with my Papa.

Sad.

And so my father's birthday came and went, amid another New England snowstorm last week. Making a trip to his grave impossible in the frozen ground and powder covered everything. So much for an homage.

And then, what's this? I bleed. Not in the ever regular femalely routine way (sorry fella's for the over share), not in an oops I got a paper-cut way. In an oh man if this doesn't stop I need to call the doctor way. SO days pass, and instead of better it gets worse, more dominant. Ok, by now it's Thursday night and if it doesn't stop first thing tomorrow I am doctor bound. I bet you're shocked to know what didn't stop.

Friday morning and alone in a hospital waiting room. Not only plagued my some sort of mysterious intestinal bleeding, but a rampant onset of some virus. Throat hurts, coughing, swollen glands. Stellar.

I wait and wait. EKG's, Blood work, CT scans. IV's. Medical terms strewn at me hither and yon as I sit alone in a room, randomly kept company by a Law & Order marathon and the random blips of various text messages.

And just my luck a hot doctor with a finger up my ass.

So tests came back negative thus far for upper GI trauma like Colitis and Chrohn's Disease, but I have the joyful pleasure of looking forward to a colonoscopy to rule out Diverticulitis in the near future. Fun times.

So home again home again jiggity jig. An evening that was supposed to be filled with a Broadway show and dinner reservations replaced with recuperation and feeling all over miserable. And the decline begins. Chills, fever. Night sweats like a menopausal maniac. Coughing fits that make your throat feel as though it were lined with razor blades and a faucet where your nasal cavity once was.

A call to the courthouse and a bitter man yelling at your that a Sherriff will contact you about the court date you missed due to one of the previous funerals you had, since you are clearly now in some form of contempt and your former landlord is still a vindictive asshole.

A week or so away from your last day at work and you still don't know your fate. No jobs on the horizon, no interviews, no prospects. Just spam mail from the various websites on how to make your resume better and how to sell insurance. Cold calls for commission. No freakin thanks.

Your son's grandfather has an emergency triple bypass, YOUR grandfather isn't doing so hot. It's too much.

The past due balances getting higher and higher and the shut off dates getting closer. Impending silence at home with no TV or internet or electricity on the wire. Long lines in germ filled, non-English speaking filled rooms of people awaiting government assistance await you. Unemployment awaits you. More depression awaits you.

It all happens at once. All of it. People are dropping like flies, your grandfather is sick, your father is gone and can't save you, you're sick, you're losing your job, you're losing your mind.

It's life people say, it happens all the time. To who? Lots of people. Sure. But why over and over to me? Why repeated hardships? Failures? Losses? Why everything harder never easier? Why no silver linings just black clouds? If this is just life, you can keep it.

These black clouds are for the birds.

Lacquer Thinner & Super Glue

My dad had two universal solvents in his life; lacquer thinner and super glue.

All things could be put back together in some semblance of a combination of these substances. Cuts cleaned and healed, stitches smitches. Stains cleansed, hangnails cured. Throw in the ever elusive duct tape and the man was a modern day MacGyver with a quick fix and all was right with the world.

It wasn't just his knack for building things with great skill, and boy was he a craftsman. I could repeat his creed of "Measure twice and cut once" in my sleep without hesitation. He was an artist. He could look at wood and know in an instant what it was, what tree it came from with the love of someone who had studied the works of the Louvre.

But more than fixing broken down houses and remodeling kitchens with ease, he was the cornerstone of my life. He fixed everything for me.

I know at 30 I shouldn't brag about this as an adult and should rave and go own about my independence and being able to fend for myself. Being able to stand on my own two feet and every other single mother cliché there is out there. But I can't. I stand on a ground that is crumbling beneath me and I long for my father to be here to fix it. To prop it up with his duct tape and super glue and make it all ok.

Akin to Miracle Max in the Princess Bride he was unorthodox in his methods sure. But he was lovable. In 2 days he would have been 59. 59. It's still hard to say that he was only 55 when he died. His life not even close to half over, half lived.

I can see him now, had he lived. Calling his brother in Maryland, just outside D.C. to taunt him of "Snowmageddon". The same brother who every storm we got here in New England would call us laughing from Florida or where he is now asking us about the snow, rubbing in the balmy weather he was enjoying. I can picture his belly laughing as he saw the show on the other foot this time, even with a pending storm coming here again tomorrow.

I can see him with Dylan. "Dylan-ma-nylan" he would say, making silly rhymes out of everything in his sing-songy dyslexic Dr. Seuss ways. Wanting to take Dylan to his wood shop and teach him all there is to know about tools and sawdust. Sitting back in his computer chair, leaning so far back you'd hear the chair creak from strain, and watching his eyes smile as he watched Dylan play and say "Papa look".

I can hear him bellow into the phone as it rang incessantly at my parents house. Off the hook some days it seems. "Is this you?" he would always say in jest, like he'd forgotten who he was talking to, or if the caller ID had steered him wrong. Listen as his Nextel chirped away, bright yellow and stained from a hard day’s work as more people just needed to talk to him.

I can smell him. That combination of sawdust and sweat. Various food stains on the belly of his t-shirt, tucked into his belted tan work pants, complete with suspenders. His hair combed over mostly by hair, its silvery black wave littered with flecks of sawdust from being surrounded all day with hard work. Chubby fingers calloused and sore.

I can hear his laugh. See his white teeth thanks to dentures as he smiled broadly across his wide face. His steely mustache, his "whiskers" as he called them tickling Dylan's face as he kissed him as a toddler. His giant arms squeezing you as he hugged you in instigation, more to annoy you than to cuddle you. His rising tone because he had zero volume control and the constant arguing over nothing with me and my brother, because well that's what we did.

And I want it all back. I want to go back to the chastising for making bad decisions with my life, as I clearly continue to do. I want to go back to hearing that Nextel chirping, even if it's the worst cell phone plan on the planet. I want to go back to weekends of roaming aimlessly around flea markets with him and my mother. To camping in Maine and to Griswoldesque vacations. I want those World War III family arguments. I want the smell of sawdust and sweat that used to sicken me when he'd try to hug me when he got back from the shop. I want to see him blowing out a candle on his 59th birthday cake in 2 days.

And I know I am screwed up. I know I make wrong choices, and I can't let go of things. I hold on to things I can't have, I long for things I want and then walk away when they come close to happening. I have a skewed sense of reality and a false sense of relationships. I have been bruised and battered and beaten and I hate that the only person I feel that can bring me out of any of it is 6 feet underground in a box made of wood I am sure he would criticize.

If only for a moment, and if only in a dream, I wish I could have him with me. To fix things, to guide me. I know his birthday wish would be for his kids to be ok, and I don't know that I am. I need your lacquer thinner and super glue.

February 11....Happy 59th birthday Daddy.

Wish you were here.

Inconeivably Misconceived

Is it inconceivable to be misconceived? Understandable to be misunderstood? An illusion to be disillusioned?

Thwarted in between what you know and what you think. What you expect and what you want to believe. Your own mindless purgatory.

Torn asunder in the misery you find now so comforting, like a soft blanket that surrounds you, keeping you warm and protected from the cold harshness of the outside, yet knowing that the softness you crave isn't there at all. You're not shrouded in it, you're hiding from it.

You know no other way really, not anymore. That once naive girl so lost in romance and happy-ever-after a stranger to you now. You try to remember her, in thoughts and memories, you reach deep into yourself and try to resurrect her, to no avail.

Resuscitation failing time and time again.

You love, you feel love, but can't succumb to it. You start to fall and catch yourself. You feel the hurt quickly from the vulnerability of it and you pull yourself back into yourself, as a turtle into its shell, hard and calluses, hiding the tenderness known inside, but outside, its hard, closed off.

For this you're faulted. Flaws known yet thrown back at you like boiling water splashed in your face. Burned by your own being.

You keep things not secret. You're candidly open about your closed offedness. An irony in and of itself. And yet punishably afflicted. Those flaws which were once so drawing, are now like a magnet in opposition pushing away.

The circumstantial decrepitcy that is your life, that follows you like a rabid animal, repeatedly taunting and biting, foaming at the mouth, beyond your control that consumes you, is not just your demon. Not just the poltergeist that takes over every ounce that you are and turns all around you negative and sour. Your life, your mood.

And you're expected to just smile through it all, pretend you're not affected. That yes it can be worse, but golly-gee I am grateful. I am not built that way. Perhaps once I had that mechanism to be blank and bland and unfeeling of all things real, but then I had things happen, time and time again. I tried to be grateful. To be optimistic, to wishfully think that things would be ok, and over and over again I was proved wrong. Shown that things don't work out, that if you expect things you will be disappointed, that if you love you will be hurt and if you work hard, it won't pay off.

So I stopped smiling. I stopped pretending that it would all come out in the wash, that things would eventually be ok. I stopped expecting anything from anyone. And I was realistic. I was ok with that. I was self reliant. Self-preserved.

And sure, I get those silly estrogen notions that someday my prince will come, and I will live happily ever after, but then I wake up. I remember its all bullshit and lies. All driven by hormones not necessity. By media and not by need. It's all fiction and greeting cards and not reality.

Even when presented with what you think is real, the looking glass shatters and you stumble like Alice, down down down into an alternate reality. Things you thought were real, not. You reach out to touch them on your way down to realize it was all an illusion. Falling into a dark abyss surrounded by oddities until you land hard, in a cold, bleak underground place. Alone, and inevitably hurting.

And yet...you are torn.

Inconceivable.

Short Days to Longer Sanity

Short days, short month, short tempers. I have come to loathe February.

The pomp and circumstance surrounding a rodent with ridiculous expectations to fail to bring the warmth and new life of Spring ever closer. The abundance of pinks and reds and hearts and all things love related in a Hallmark calculated holiday creating pressure to live up to relationship perfections, or remind those who are alone just how alone they are. And the reminder that another year goes by where on my father's birthday he doesn't get to age another year. Doesn't get to grow old gracefully, but decay farther in the box he resides in the ground.

I start every year resolute that the next will be better, hopeful wishful thinker closeted behind cynical eyes. Yet every year, come this second month I am assured that in no way is it possible for this to be so. At least not for me. I should be accustomed to it. Should change my middle name forever to "Disappointment" much like Austin Powers his to "Danger".

It's always different yet the same. The ins and outs of people, faces changing but the situations always remain the same. Never for the better. If ever I glimpse that elusive silver lining, it's quickly stripped away and replaced again with that looming black cloud, hovering over me. Following as Winnie the Pooh over his Bee's nest in disguise after his honey, though honey is not the prize, my dissatisfaction is.

I think and think and wrack my brain of things I could have done. Wrongs I may have committed for the bottom of my life to continuously drop out time and time again. For surely Karma has it out for me, if only I can find it's reason.

So finally when dust seems to settle, I start to let down a wall, slowly, surely...and for what? To have it invaded. Vulnerability stabbed again through the heart like a sword, a reminder of why it had been built in the first place. A place you vowed to yourself you wouldn't go back to.

But it all comes tumbling down in February. You lose your job, you lose your stability, you lose your mind. You think every day, day to night of how disappointed your father would be with you. How if he was here he would fix things, only he could fix things. That was what he did. You need him, only him and he isn't here.

3 years gone and you still can't breathe. The ground above him frozen and him inside, and you want to dig, dig deep not only into the ground but into yourself and pull him out and you can't find him. He's slipping away and you're afraid. What if he's lost? What if you lose him forever? Shut out everything else. Nothing else matters.

And all that happens, all that revolves around you this month, your head is spiraling, spinning. It's crashing down too fast and you can't control it. You think back and back as far back as you can. What did you do then? How did you go wrong?

And suddenly ghosts from the past come out of the woodwork, and you're already in a tailspin. And suddenly everything you feel is a fault. It's a complication to someone else's life. But it's not about them. You can’t get out of your own way and no one can see it. You're a mime trapped in an invisible box and you're screaming. Screaming so loud that no one can hear you. So loud that your throat is aching and your eyes are tired and soon enough you just give up.

Crawl back inside yourself. Where it's safe, it's quiet. Back into your quiet calloused solitude. Behind your bitchiness and sarcasm where no one can hurt you, where nothing can get to you. Where you can hide in plain sight.

Counting the days, those ominous increments of 24 hours when it will all be over. When the clock ticks away this month and you can maybe start again. Try again. Be again.

And hope for longer days, and longer bouts of sanity.

Exclamtion Points and Mix Tapes

"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

Probably the greatest line to ever start a movie.

The poignancy of music, of feeling. The art of the mix tape, gone but not forgotten. Those raw emotions that flow when you hear a certain melody, even in the first bars of a song you know are about to send you reeling into fits of rage or passion or sadness or longing. You listen with every fiber in your being. You drive to them, singing at the top of your lungs. You cry to them, softly weeping or deeply wailing hardly able to catch your breath. They remind of mostly of people, good, bad, ugly or indifferent.

It's the little things in life they say. Those momentous little things that in retrospect turn monumental in memory. A mix tape. A CD. Carefully plotted and extricated. Designed for you and you alone. The last I got one, maybe late 90's. Burned distinctly to CD at the beginning of the technology. But it was for me. A mix of songs calculated by someone specific to capture my essence to them. Like a decadent perfume created for one wearer alone, it was mine.

Those songs weren't written by artists with me in mind, no. They had never met me. I hadn't broken their hearts or inspired them, but their words, their muse had given the intender muse enough to floetically put together a thought. Something I still listen to now. Though scratched and skipping slightly, I still listen.

It's not hand holding or sleeping together than constitutes a relationship. It's not the hope that something is happening or the eventual and natural evolution of things. Sure that is all part of the grander scheme of things, but it's moments and to each those things are something different. Monumental? Maybe. Grandiose? Hardly.

There's no need at 30 for a whole lot of pomp and circumstance. No need to shout things from rooftops like a giddy child. When you've had strings of failure, you tend to not want to put carts before horses until you know things for sure yourself.

It's not a battle to see who hurts who more. Or when things don't go how you want to walk away in an instant before they even begin. To be a coward. It's a chance, a crapshoot, a dance. And a dance is between two people. Sometimes hurried and quickstepped sure, sometimes sensual and sometimes soft and slow, drawing each other closer with each and every movement. But it’s all set to music.

It's old fashioned reminders of femininity. Of flowers and compliments. Of poetry and mix tapes. Of other's words if you can't find your own. It's not text messages and phone calls. It's tangible. It's letters and cards and things you can hold onto forever. Things you can store not only in memory, but in carefully laden boxes to pull out and mull over when times are tough. It's looking back at happiness in your hand, as well as your heart. It's listening to something personal and knowing it was for you, even once upon a time.

Exclamation points and mix tapes. It's really not that hard.

Loves Me, Loves Me Not

Haunted by a memory
A person, place or thing
Recounting thoughts
Reliving moments
The uncertainty it brings

Keep moving forward
Step by step
So you believe
A brief reprieve
Yet pieces still are left

Inopportune you find me
To wonder yet again
Relive the past
Old memories hashed
Of how they once began

Your touch seems now so distant
Your breathe more like the wind
Your kiss is faint
Your face a disdained
Too many years infringed

Yet ghosts perhaps in haunting
Remind you of your life
How far you've come
And what you've done
The triumphs more the strife

Naiveté consumes you
If you could just go back
To simpler times
The clock though chimes
But many things would lack

Gone would be independence
The backbone that you built
Your motherhood
The ground you stood
The overwhelming guilt

But time is an illusion
And what was great was not
So now your ghost
Who touched you most
Loves me, loves me not

Rapunzel Has No Hair

There's a saying that inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist. A once upon a time romantic who more often than not had her dreams shattered like shards of glass at her fingertips, leaving her scared and staring into her distorted mirrored image projected in front of her.

You live with longing. For so long, wanting, waiting, hoping. Wanting the next time to be real, be better than the last. For the scars to make you stronger and the pain to be forgotten, but it happens again. You get a glimpse really of what that memory felt like, that shattered dream, and before you can reach your hand out to touch it, you drop it and run away.

Cast blame hither and yon at others, build walls around you like you're Rapunzel in a tower, only you have no lovely locks to let down. No guard to relinquish. You become so accustomed to your tower, your own isle of solitude, your cynicism and bitterness are comforting now, old friends. They don't hurt you, they hurt others, but you alas are safe. No one can touch you where you are.

You become the ungettable get. Close enough but still far enough away. And you know it isn't right, you can feel it. You talk yourself into things you know aren't real for the sake of it, because it seems like it should be so, and then sabotage them all again because you know its again time to run.

So you closet yourself in your secrets, in your actual need for what you long for. Calloused exterior hiding your inner romantic. It’s safer that way. You try to remain untouchable. But...

You're finding yourself nearing the glass again. Ever fearful, you try to pull away, but the force is like the tide, uncontrollable and strong, yet calming and serene. A paradox.

And so you're secret's out, your humbled self, old fashioned and feminine, lurking under the hardnosed surface of independence. Wanting, waiting, wishing to be swept off her feet. Waiting for those locks to grow. Be saved from that tower built up brick by brick.

And maybe brick by brick it will come down, or maybe with leaps and bounds it will be scaled. With magic or with memories. With careless effort of calculated precision. Or maybe it won't.

But I'll be in it, waiting.

A Nightmare More A Dream

Open your eyes in morning
Choices there to make
Roads that seem the simplest
Not simplest are to take

The tides are ever changing
Strong currents to light streams
Life proves to be tumultuous
A nightmare more a dream

You sit in ever wonder
How you got to where you are
Seems a million miles away
Though really not so far

Changes though were drastic
Sliced you like a sword
Some subtle though, subdued
Whispered softly, said like words

Callously you pondered
Calculated every act
The Fates were out to get you
Convinced that this was fact

You're falling off the wagon
Always waiting for the shoe
Though you feel the sole intact
You don't know what to do

The bottom falls day to day
Chaos follows suit
You turn and pull inside yourself
The point it seems is moot

Think no one understands you
Alone you shed the tears
Bitterness, frustration
Built up throughout the years

Like onions there are layers
A turtle there's a shell
And only those who care to
Seem to see beneath it well