Crazy buffet

Crazy can't be crazy by itself.  Crazy needs a partner.  

I am not that partner.  I go with quiet interludes between passionate hours.  I pair well with honesty and humility.  On every third breath, I can match up with the best of the ornery.

But I don't do crazy.  I don't fight over things not worthy.  I don't search phone records looking for reasons to leap the line of sanity.  I don't blame the people who didn't know.  And I don't hurt people to feed my own ego.  

Some people need the drama.  Some people can't feel wanted unless there are two otherwise sane, fully functioning adults chasing them as though they were the last pleasure on earth.  Some people crave faked pregnancies and blocked numbers.

I am not one of those people.

I don't need my phone blowing up to feel sexy.  I don't need threats of murder-suicide to make it through my day.  And I certainly don't need to drag someone else into a mess of my own making.

One crazy person cannot sustain themself.  They need an equally idiotic partner.  Maybe they even need a third helping of insanity to complete the buffet-o-wacko.  

I will not sit at that high school table.  Keep the crazy where it belongs, gorge yourself on it even.  The rest of us grown folk will be over here, bored and peaceful.  

No vacancy

I don't have room for this hole you think you left me.

I have every moment I spent at my grandmas law school desk on summer vacations.

I have the echoes of rain on tiny apartment windows.

I am filled with the lyrics to every song I heard in my little Hyundai Excel running streets I wasn't supposed to be on.

I can remember the jab of my mothers chin in my collar that one time she hugged me so tight I thought she squeezed a little love into me.

This hole you imagine won't fit between the scent of rain when I left my best friend to move across the country and the sound of the first breath I heard my oldest child take.

There are spaces filled with the bad hair days of high school and those of the poor judgement days that followed for miles.

There are vast areas filled with first words and wobbly steps and long naps on my breast.

There is no room for that hole.

Of course, there are boxes in closets in rooms in me that are overflowing with real sorrow.

I watched my first soul take her last breath in a hospital room as I held her toes.  I can still hold the shape of his hand as the first little boy I truly loved struggled to come back to life.  I have been abandoned by too many people to remember their taste, yet I can recall the weight of the air that drowned me as their doors closed.  

I have made room for the struggles each of those things recall for me.

But you and the insignificant tear you made in my fabric?  Won't even leave a scar.  Not because I didn't care while you were pulling me in at three am, but because the one word message you left proved it wasn't real.  

Only the truth can leave holes inside.  And you, sweet boy, are a lie drawn in sand.

I do not have room for the hole you imagine leaving behind.  I am too filled with significance to notice your trail.

Oh, you're looking for the spark

Well.

Sometimes - most times in my experience - that feeling you're looking for isn't really a spark.  It's a warning flare.  A goddamn forest fire.

Run!  It says.  Bad idea!  It screams.  Come on, not again!  It pleads.

No one feels the spark with the nice guy because he isn't going to break your heart and leave you wondering.  The spark is for the bright blue eyes that saw you falling four steps before he even asked your name.  The spark crackles in plenty of time for you to lace up your running shoes, but it's that sound that glues you to the trouble instead.  

Like the first idiot to fall when running from the zombies, you walk up the stairs rather than out the front door.  Because the ever-storied spark is danger.  It is embodied in the urge to tear clothes from defined shoulders.  It is the heat that melts all your good common sense.  It is every self-preserving notion leaving your brain and headed straight to your ....well....you get the idea.  And the spark will be your downfall.

Because it doesn't last.  It can't.  Even if he isn't the Don Juan of Forgettabletown, USA.  Even if he doesn't have a revolving door installed next to his pool tabled living room.  Even if he's a good one.  Of course, the spark fizzles.  It's supposed to.  That's just the hook.  If you don't want to still tear those clothes off of the man who forgot to take the trash to the curb on Tuesday morning, than maybe you should stop searching for a spark.  When you come up for air - because you always have to eventually - and your returning good common sense tells you to fake a terminal illness and change your route to work, than stop running toward the fire.

Give the nice guys a chance.  There may not be a spark, but there probably won't be a required clinic visit either.  

Here wasn't on the map

This wasn't where I was going to be.  Not this table and chair in this art class-covered kitchen in this humble debt clouded house.  Not this lonely town in this passing through state.  Not this thoroughly used body in these well worn shoes.

This isn't where I ever dreamed I would be.

I remember like I always have.

I was headed to rain.  I was on a single lane road to pounding quiet and soaking emptiness.

From the days when other girls were dreaming of kids and houses on hills, I knew that wasn't my story.

I knew it like the broken sound of my voice.

And I made every turn I needed to get nowhere.  I shook myself out of every moment of maybe.

I was purposely lost.

And still.  I find myself here.

Where there should be dusty corners, there are soccer cleats.

In every darkness, there's a giggling dance.

Where there is supposed to be silence, there are eyelashes brushing my shoulder.

It still rains, but oh my the light show I am treated to if I just look up.

The storm rages in my chest and behind my eyes are waves held back by trembling hands, but this house is covered in the dreams of bright smiles.

This chair is not where I am supposed to be, that is certain.  I am made of too many wrongs to end up in a space so imperfectly right.

And yet.  I can be found, on any given day, staring at this art class covered kitchen table wondering how I got so lucky as to be witnessing the start of the three most gifted journeys the world has ever seen.

And yet.  I am found surrounded by the only three things I ever got absolutely right.

And yet.  Here is where I am.