+ 95

“I’m so happy I can’t stop crying.” – Sting

Ugh, this is a hard one.

So now I cry almost every other day. For a while there, it was even a couple times a day, face down on my yoga mat in the corner of the showroom, where I hope people will come stand soon to look at the pots that are still too hot outside in the kiln. Pretty sure that was on five, down from ten, and that it was entering “jags” territory. Like once I’d turned the key, now I couldn’t go back through and latch it again. Back at ten it feels useful and healthy; at five it felt a little unhinged.

Let’s see: should we do the What, now? What is pretty much all of it: I cry about the lost time, the regrets, the missed memories, the wild flailing at a dead Dream. That it took me so fucking long to find this one little lever to start my rock rolling uphill again. How could I not see that before? How much of that suffering was needless; more than I could learn from? I don’t know; I might never know. I cry, now, too, about that one other thing. Sometimes mostly about that. But that’s a story for another day. Or never.

Today I’m trying to understand why I didn’t. Like, not a single actual tear for almost an entire decade. Maybe longer. Like all the other bad ideas he whispers, so convincingly — this is just normal, the world really is this dark, and it’s just that other people can’t see it, you’re too weak to escape — the Dark Angel talked me into thinking tears and the occasional sob were not only optional, but not worth the risk.

I think — I mean, my current working theory — I was afraid. Afraid I might scream, and maybe not be able to stop. Fear that if I let it loose, my mind might just split in two. Fear I’d become my father, and abandon her when she was two. At Christmas.

That’s right, I said it. Come and get me. I’m not afraid anymore.

I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t really afraid of any of those things; maybe I’m just grasping at the idea of fear now as a comfortable scapegoat, or a simple, plausible explanation. At the rate things are changing in here, it is entirely possible that in a week I’ll know it was something more, something else, something fractal and more complex. But, just now, it sure feels like I was afraid. It felt like territory I used to roam that was now closed off to my exploration; a part of myself embargoed, or sacrificed on the twin altars of fatherhood and obligation.

OK, we’re closing in on it now. Nowhere to run. Ninety-nine is coming, and unless you’re going to pull a fast one and miss six, you’ve gotta start figuring out how you’re gonna get there. It helped to describe it to Aunt Nell yesterday. See seemed to both get it and ratify that decision. Pretty sure I’d trust her to just make the decision for me; maybe that one and a whole bunch of others.

Because look where it got me, making all of them for myself. Almost nowhere; but finally here.

OK, I’m posting this before it gets light and I come to my senses. Still 6:08 on the blogging machine. Still in my glasses, stove still cold in the studio, and still on scarcely even one cup of coffee. Because I will wuss out in the daylight, if I don’t hit it now. FILDI. “You look like him… Frank.”

You’re welcome — and sorry — and thanks. Thanks so much.

“I was brought to my senses. I was blind, and now I can see. Every signpost in Nature says…”