Week 7 with Dakota
On Roots
I didn’t go far this week. I stayed in Virginia, going only an hour west for a trip to Middleburg. It was a week of questioning, everything, and I hardly had the time to travel. I was going places with my mind, places that were far harder to reach. I was traveling out of two decades worth of habits built for reasons that were no longer there.
For the first time, I felt as if I could come out from under the rubble. The second missile could do me no harm. I was beyond touch. No one could come to me from where I stood. My family’s anger couldn’t reach me anymore. Even the past, which lived in me, couldn’t follow.
I was Aiyah, as I was meant to be, before my family packed their bags and built their cities in me. I suddenly had all the space I needed. I emptied my empire of them. I crushed the other that lived on the shoulders of my silence.
I’ve begun to speak of what I don’t have permission to speak of. Nothing, I realize, had been stopping me before. It was my head tipped against a brick wall. The wall was long, but thin. I could have stepped right or left and went around it, But I saw the wall and only that, not the miles of open land on either side.
So I’ve begun to realize I no longer have to travel great distances to move far away the pain. If I managed to do so while I stood in its birthplace, then I could do it anywhere. I would travel for reasons other than escape and distraction, and, it’ll feel like traveling for the first time. But in realizing I no longer have to bind myself to a permanent state of migration, that I am strong enough to face it now, I’ve begun to think seriously of where I’d like to build a life for myself. Of course, I will always have the urge to drift and wander and remind myself of this freedom that will always feel new to me, but I’d like to put my roots down somewhere, to have a home to return to when the urge to travel finds me again, a place I’m not running from, but leaving with an eagerness to return.
Aldie, Virginia
“You review the accidents that brought you here, and the intentions.”
A Stranger in this World, Kevin Canty
“…always pressing onward, believing that if he drives far enough, happiness will be waiting for him around some curve.”
A Stranger in this World, Kevin Canty
Something feels wrong
I can’t say what it is, only that it is there, that it’s growing, that it nags me at every moment. I can’t figure it out. It follows me constantly, and it’s strongest in the morning. Of course, it could have something to do with where I am, and the job I can no longer bare, but I’d be mistaken if I believed that leaving both will spare me. I’ve done it many times before. I’ve left cities and jobs, plenty of them, thinking that whatever I’m running from stays there and won’t follow. So I can’t run this time. I have to figure out what it is, face it, sit down with it, gives it its time, until it passes, or I pass it.
Pain has to make sense to me. It has to have obvious reasons. I can’t stand the subtle triggers that the unconscious parts of our mind respond to. And maybe this is a western impulse, to give that pain a source and a name rather than letting it be. Why can’t I let it pass through me, without my doing anything to it? It could be as simple as a passing storm. Nothing the town can do to avoid it. The skies don’t mean harm. Neither maybe does the pain. And maybe this time I could let it stay until it does whatever it does that it came to do.
Then, I go back and tell myself the reasons remain important to me. I almost feel as if I have a duty to discover it, or what else would be the purpose of suffering through it? I think of pain as a letter sent from God’s office. It’s encoded and subtle, the way I imagine it should be, but the effort to decode is worth it, if only out of respect for the wisdom of its writer.
For me, I know my pain has something to do with the fact that I am subjecting myself to what I hate and limiting what it is I love. If I paint, I try to get through it quickly. If I write, I time myself. Sitting on a script for more than 2 hours begins to wear on me, and a poem that won’t come together quickly begins to make me panic. But I could spend 7-11 hours at a job I hate, make the money I care too little for, give hours and hours to tasks and errands that mean nothing to me. It makes no sense to me at all.
I know that the pain is a signal for change. Worse, sometimes it feels like the body’s begging, in the only silent ways it knows how to. But with the fear still present, I can’t leave the place that’s holding me back (it will only follow); I can’t lose myself in my craft; I can’t write for fear that it will all turn out horrible. I would rather not do it than do it badly. And that, right there, will kill me unless I learn to kill it first.
“It’s a different kind of art that’s healing”
“I can’t be healed.”
The work to come
I’ve been praying to God that He show me a way, not the way, but any road I could take to get out of this. I can’t stand more of the life I’ve built. I don’t have the courage, yet, to build any other. All my attempts haven’t strayed far enough from what I’ve wanted to abandon ever since I was little. All the constraints, the voices, the warnings, all of what I’d dismissed a young girl is still very much in me. With it, I am nothing. Without it, I could be anything. But to face it here, where it’s s all before me, is far easier than battling it as an idea or memory in my head.
I could turn from the shouting and say no, I won’t have more of this in my life. I can hear the fear in the other person’s voice and say too that I won’t have this either. It is all outside of my body again, as it was when I was younger. I can defeat it easier that way. The possibility for change is higher than it ever was in (ironically) the very place most resistent to it.
But I have already changed more in the month I’ve been back home than I have in the three years I’ve been away. I am not happy, but my misery doesn’t appear so permanent either. There is a fine line between despair and hope, and not a wide and gaping rift as I’d assume. One step here, a little step there, and you can migrate between both a thousand times before the end of the day. But in creating lasting change (the change that matters), I am trying to establish more stable footing on the side I’d prefer to stand on. I am tired of this permanent migration, of body and mind, each day, each month, each year. I am almost ready to change enough. I’ve only fooled myself all this time by making those slight adjustments here and there along the way that really were nothing at all. I am almost ready for the final severance, and with it, the beginning of an unyielding pursuit of a dream I will no longer fear for its potential to fail.
“It wasn’t so much that I wanted somebody to kill him, I didn’t care if he was dead or not. I just wanted the weight off me.”
“I was just going to walk away. I was just going to let his life be his own.”
“the mother lived a life of fear…what she called “love” was only an ability to take care of herself. When she said to Tina, “I love you sweetheart,” what Tina head was, “Help me, help me, help me.”
“All you had to do was reach out your hand and try for it.”
“If I can’t get it any other way, I’ll just take it.”
A Stranger in this World, Kevin Canty
Late weekday night in my van
“I am the son of people in trouble — I carry this sickness with me.”
A Stranger in this World, Kevin Canty