Message Received

Sometimes it can take a decade or more to fully integrate a new reality when things fall apart—I've got it now.

This essay braids three stories that I wrote during the most recent session of Literati Academy (Laura Lentz’s online writing workshop) in the Friday class with Robin Gadient. I’m so grateful for the incredible group of writers I get to spend my Friday afternoons with, listening to their stories, finding my own, and remembering who we are together.

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In the months leading up to my marriage ending, I wrote the poem below, thumb-typing into the glow of my notes app during an evening spent with friends. We were talking about birds, and the host jumped up from our circle on the back porch and ran into the house. She came back with a waxed-paper package and dropped it into her best friend’s lap.

Such Great Heights

Abigail looked up from the dead Rose-breasted Grosbeak

in her lap and said a Flicker was the first freezer bird

we ever had as a married couple, as if that’s a thing

that married couples do, like buying a house,

investing in the stock market, a honeymoon.

Two weeks have passed since the Grosbeak,

and I now see the advantage of lifting that delicate

body out of its icy grave to study together the intricate

web of fine bone and feather on the underside of wings

that once pressed the whole atmosphere towards the Earth.

To stare - while in each other’s presence - into the face

of this thing whose very nature is to fly, both of you

forever earthbound, but each aware of the small wings

blooming bloody, and wet from the other’s shoulders.

I didn’t know at the time that I was writing about the fact that my husband could not love my emerging wings, or the fact that I knew I had to fly and foolishly believed I would be able to come back to my nest. I wrote this poem thirteen years ago, and I’m writing about it today, on the new moon in Aries, because I’m told it is a great time for me as a Taurus to let go of the past, which my dreams have also been telling me. It’s time to fly, if only I knew where to.

I recently dreamed my ex-husband met me in the driveway when I was picking up my dog, which is a thing I do nearly every day, because our two dogs are best friends and hang out together at his house, which is my old house, while we both work. We have an amicable relationship and tag team letting the dogs out to pee, an arrangement that’s worked well for years.

He came out of the house and walked toward my car, the dogs following along, sniffing at every inch of ground. His face was a familiar mask of coldness and purpose that set me on edge as he got closer to me. This was the same expression that was on his face the day he told me he didn’t want to work on our relationship anymore—saying that I’d killed his love for me.

You also visited me in a dream, and I can still feel our kiss. It was strangely free of shame, unlike all the long kisses we stole from the universe in your guest bed because you were still too raw to bring me into your broken marriage bed, and that was fine because my marriage wasn’t yet broken out loud, and I deserved those dusty curtains and the open, empty closet at our feet.

In the driveway, I felt the nervous need to fill the air with sound, but my dream self recognized my lifelong pattern of fawning and didn’t say a word. It’s wonderful to see how much I’ve grown, at least in my dreams.

He reached where I stood and stopped. I smiled at him, said thanks for letting Ginger hang again. He grimaced and told me to go away. He said he didn’t want to interact with me anymore, that he had nothing left to say to me. He spoke calmly, in a measured tone, which he always has, “I’m done with you. Just leave me alone.”

Instantly, I remembered the day I’d stopped by his shop to drop off his lunch on my way to pick blueberries with our daughter for her birthday pound cake and to fill the freezer. He’d taken the container of leftovers from dinner the night before, his mask in place, avoiding eye contact. I’d placed my hand on his arm, and he shook his head no and said, “I’m done”. There it was, the answer we’d both been waiting for through the spring and into summer—him sleeping at her house or on the couch while I tossed and turned on the raised center of our ten-year-old king-sized mattress and punished myself by letting go of the person I craved now that I could possibly have him. In the dream driveway, I recognized the message I had already received on that long-ago sticky July day. There it was all this time, curled inside my chest like a dead baby bird in a dry, brittle nest. I smelled smoke.

It’s embarrassing to still think about your smooth skin, so pale and tight, yet porous, and the way my body absorbed all the unknowns that flowed between us like a serum. Each cell asked me if I could afford the cost, and all I could do to answer was write another poem. I wonder if you asked yourself questions about me. In the dream where we kissed, you had four children, and I wonder if in life you’ve have more than the one I know about, the one I never would have been able to give to you, and that you probably didn’t want with me anyway. It’s good we drifted once my husband said he wanted out of our marriage. I couldn’t imagine opening myself to you under those circumstances—rejected because I was too honest too late.

That’s what you tasted like: sweet honesty tinged with the distilled bitter poison of our intoxicating lie.

I felt the memory of bruised and bloody nubs on my shoulders pulsing in the setting sun as I stood in the driveway—once again receiving the message that he was done. Had I been hoping for a different outcome all these years? I didn’t think so, but dreams are stories our unknown parts get to tell. Our shadows stretched out parallel to each other, not touching, and these shadows contained the decade that had passed, and mine held the silhouette of those very wings I’d once let tear my nest apart and then refused to fly.

I had no response to his “I’m done”, only a strange sound that rose from the burning bowl between my hips. I opened my mouth, and a howl poured out like a death song, but he didn’t hear it or see its dark shape in the air between us. He pointed at me and said, “Go.”

My pillow was wet when I woke in the dark with the dog whining at my feet, the salty pine of tears in my mouth. I slid my hand across my chest to touch my shoulder, expecting to find an open wound. Later that morning, as I rolled up the driveway to drop the dog off to hang with her bestie, the heaviness I’ve carried every time I arrived at the property was gone from my body. I looked around at the house that was once my home, the gardens overgrown and choked, the fruit trees untended, and instead of the usual sense of regret and sorrow, I felt free. When I got home to this house I’ve felt so unhappy in, I mapped out my options for staying or going and came to the same old conclusion—I have no idea what the next right thing is. But a wet, feathered question is emerging from the space where the heaviness used to reside: what if I invest in this house and create a home where a woman with wings lives?

I’ve been standing in my garage at different times of day to observe the light through the two crumbling windows, to feel what it might be like to live in the space. It’s a one-car garage with raw walls and a worn out rolling door that needs replacing. Plus, my car doesn’t even fit in it, and there isn’t a man door (or a woman door). I know, I know, I’m lucky to have a house. And this house feels like a cage.

Remember how you touched your thumb to the blue vein on my wrist and told me you were applying for a new job, one where you’d have the chance to make a difference in the community. Your voice was uncertain, distracted. I imagined the distraction was because of the field of light dancing between us. I wanted to be part of your new life. To be one of the ways you discovered what it means to be earthbound in the hours spent gazing into each other’s eyes, with each other’s breath in our lungs.

Do you still smoke? You made me love cigarette smoke for one year, asthma be damned.

I fantasize about finding a partner with land or finding land and forgetting the partner. It feels like that moment has passed. The idea of taking on a new mortgage at nearly 60 years old when I don’t have a mortgage payment at all is daunting, and in light of the way the systems that shape this world are collapsing, probably also foolish.

My big complaint about this house is that it’s dark with most of the windows facing north. The windows are one hundred years old, and the frames are falling apart, so I can’t open most of them. The rooms are tiny, disconnected boxes, so you can’t really see anyone in another room. There isn’t anyone in another room, anyway, but still. I also can’t see my gardens unless I go outside through that goddamned garage door, and the garage itself is attached to the dining room and kitchen, blocking the westerly view of the backyard. This lack of light and access to my plant friends has been slowly breaking my heart for a decade, and all this time, I’ve been waiting for my next right place to reveal itself. Still waiting.

My equity could turn the useless garage into a room. I see sliding glass doors, a little greenhouse and potting shed extension, a wood stove, tile floors with electric heating coils running beneath them, and a human-sized door to the driveway. It has a closet for coats and shoes, and with the wall between the room and the rest of the house removed, the light shines all the way through. And if I take down the wall between the dining room and kitchen, I can reconfigure this ridiculous one-butt space so it’s set up for cooking and gathering.

I already know what it would feel like to watch the tiny slice of the sunset over my backyard neighbor’s house, to feel that warmth and light while making supper, to watch the slow movements of the ancient oak next door without having to stand in my upstairs bathroom window, to see the sparrows splashing in the bird bath, the hummingbirds dipping in and out of the monarda patch, the groundhog munching on clover as the day comes to a close. Could this be enough of a prayer to life, to these wings that have been waiting for me to remember their existence?

Thank you for giving me poetry. I know that it traveled from your accidental touch through my hand onto the page. More than one hundred poems that year. I gave you the best ones. I hope you burned my hand-stitched chapbook in a fire in your backyard and put the poems’ strange magic behind you, my words about lying under the stars on your friend’s land in the Sangre De Cristo range, our hips and fingertips touching. We never found a way to take that trip. I hope you and your wife have even more powerful ways to map your love. I hope there is so much love.

I see myself painting in this new space filled with sunshine. I am napping on an ocean blue velvet couch, a book on my chest, the dog at my feet. I am sitting at a blonde wood desk writing my novel about the way we can love the world even when we’re in pain. I am feeding houseplants that finally grow with south and west sun exposure. Maybe there’s a partner now that I’ve let the light in. Maybe we take turns stoking the fire as the snow piles up against the sliders and the neighbor’s lights slant a glowing warmth across the tiny patch of yard. Maybe we make out and don’t pull the shades.

Maybe you will stop visiting me in my dreams.

Maybe I, too, will meet someone to dance with in a field like the one that bloomed between us. Our strangely familiar bodies will be the warm vessels that hold every moment, our eyes and mouths the portals into something we will never have words for—a bruised grace that always flies us home.