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January 10, 2017

What They Never Tell You

There is something
no one tells you
while the guests are still there,
while the cake watches,
uncut,
while the rings still feel
unfamiliar,
slippery,
like something stuck between
your teeth.

What that thing is,
what no one tells you,
(during the toasts or the speeches
or the dancing)
is that you will need to
say those two words
again
and again

and again.

The preacher makes it sound
like it’s once-and-done,
but it’s
not.

After the first fight,
for example,
the one that catches you
off guard,
you will have to say those two words,
and again after the twenty-seventh
argument about the same thing,
your tone, maybe,
or the smallest rolling
of the eyes.

And again
after the one hundred
and fifth
disappointment.
Or
when you’re sitting on the floor
of your office
in despair
and she is in the room
fuming,
or despairing, too,
over things you cannot name
and never could have foreseen.

And again
this time gladly
on nights when your hands
touch
under the covers, live wires,
or when your child leaves
the room, and you
smile at each other with joy
because
there goes the two of you
and so much more
in one body.

Or when the little strip just won’t
turn. And the months pass
marked by what arrives
and what does not.

Until sickness and health
are behind you
and death has parted you.
One hundred
thousand
million
times
in every little way and every big way
in every glance and every sigh.

I do.

You know,
I say those words
every day, every minute.
I peek into the room and see
you sitting in the sunshine,
eyes closed, tired from every little thing,
and I whisper it to myself, though no
one else is there
to witness it.

No one else,
still,
I do.

You can get my ebook of poems for FREE today: We Might Never Die.

January 9, 2017January 8, 2017

The Most Awkward Passengers I’ve Ever Had #RidesharingConfessional

The man waved me over to the curb. He was fifty feet ahead, so I pulled front and to the side. He looked like he wanted to tell me something, so I rolled down my window.

“We just, uh, need to wait. For my wife,” he said.

“Okay, no problem,” I said. But before I could even put my window back up, I heard a voice shouting from the other side of the parking lot.

“What, are you leaving without me?” she screamed, and at first she was so animated that I thought she was joking, but as she got closer, I could tell she was not joking. Not at all.

“What, you can hold the door open for someone else, but not for me?”

He left his door open and walked around to the other side.

“No, no,” she said, still shouting. “Don’t bother.”

The hatred on her face is difficult to describe. It was an anger that did not care who watched, who witnessed. It was pure hatred, welling up out of deep hurt or disappointment. She flicked her cigarette away in contempt and climbed into the car, still fuming, still angry beyond reason.

“I bet you hold the door open for her, don’t you?” she said, accusingly.

“No,” he said.

“I bet you probably carry her purse, don’t you?”

“No.”

When he spoke, there was patience, and there was also a sense that he somehow deserved it. I don’t know. It’s difficult to describe. After that there was only silence, the kind that stretches flat and wide with nothing to break it. A silence at once deep and sad and full of first lines that never happen. Breathing seems like an imposition.

I am just the driver, I tell myself.

Ten minutes of silence. We approached their neighborhood.

“Should we stop at the gas station on the corner?” he asked.

She erupted again.

“Why? Do you have someone you need to meet there? Maybe someone to hold the door open for?”

“I thought maybe the kids might want something,” he said quietly.

Silence. We skipped the gas station.

I pulled up to the curb at their destination and stopped the car. They each climbed out a different side, and she was gesturing at him all the way up the sidewalk. They disappeared inside their house, behind a door that looked like every other door in the neighborhood. Hundreds of doors, all alike, and behind them, hundreds of different situations. Arguments, kind words, the sharing of grocery lists, the delivery of good and bad news. All of it, there, behind all the doors.

I drove away. It was warm, as if the new year was too preoccupied with other things to remember what season it was.

January 6, 2017January 5, 2017

The Weight of it All #RidesharingConfessional

I got a call to pick someone up, but they were twenty minutes away. I normally don’t accept those fares – either they want to take a super-short trip or they cancel when I’m only halfway there. But it had been a slow night, so I clicked accept and drove north, away from the city, into the dark.

This guy lived in a very quiet, unlit suburban neighborhood. It felt like about the loneliest place on Earth, maybe because I drove so far, or maybe because all the lights on all the houses were out. The winter trees leaned in over the grid of streets, bare and still. I pulled up along the sidewalk and this guy came limping out to the car.

He was big, and my car was not the perfect size for him. He pushed the seat all the way back. He smelled of cigarettes and booze. He was probably in his late twenties with a scruffy beard and a ball cap tilted back on his head. He wore a camo jacket, jeans, and heavy work boots.

“Mind doing a round trip for me?” he asked, leaning out the car door to spit out his wad of tobacco.

“Sure,” I said. “No worries.” I was relieved I hadn’t driven that far for a minimum fare. I filled him in on the NPR interview I was listening to – a fascinating piece about an Iranian who was tortured for treating women, then spied for the government, then finally turned double agent and provided information for the US.

It was a quiet, ten-minute drive.

He directed me to a small line of shops. He went into the liquor store and came out with a few bags. He put them in the car, and the glass clinked. Then he went into a burger and wings joint and came out with a brown bag that smelled amazing. We drove back towards his house.

On the way, the show changed to something different, and we listened to someone who had grown up in a US city. They made the comment that, “Where I grew up, once you went to jail, you were cool. That’s when you really hit adulthood, after your first stint in prison.”

The guy beside me, quiet until that moment, burst out with a cynical laugh.

“Whatever,” he muttered. “When I went to prison, it was not cool. It was humiliating.”

He went on to tell me how he had a few DUIs, got into some other trouble, ended up spending a few months behind bars. He talked about it the way men talk about some long ago affair that ruined their lives: he was objective, but there was a wistfulness there, something that pointed toward a major loss the imprisonment led to.

He talked and talked and talked the entire way home. It was like I had pulled the small plug out of the dam. When we pulled back into his dark, lonely neighborhood, he shook my hand.

“Thanks, man,” he said, and I took it to be a thank you for talking to him, or being okay with his ex-con status, or maybe for just listening. “I don’t go out anymore – can’t risk that kind of trouble. So I get a ride out, buy some drinks, buy some food, and spend the night here, on my own. Friday nights used to be for bars.”

He laughed a laugh that said he couldn’t believe what his life had become. It was the laugh of an old, old man who regretted his entire life, except this guy wasn’t yet thirty.

“But now, this is it. It’s okay.”

He got out of the car, retrieved his bags of food and booze from the back, and walked quietly up the cracked sidewalk to the front door, his shoulders bent under the weight of it all.

January 5, 2017January 4, 2017

I Must Confess

I must confess
I painted the green table
and the yellow chairs,
the ones
we bought when we were first married
fifteen years ago
when my stomach was flat
and we didn’t shy from starting movies
(and other things) after 11.
When sleep was commonplace, like mis-
matched socks,
and silence was everywhere in the house
so thick you could trip on it
or get lost in it.

Of course,
you asked me to paint the table
and the chairs
but I didn’t
think it would take so many coats to cover
all the gashes
and scars
left by a thousand Scrabble games
hot pans of Rice Crispy Treats
four years in storage while we lived
in England
unsecured trips in moving vans
then teething children gnawing and racing
their matchbox cars past bowls
of cereal that left little pale rings
like the wispy ones that circle planets.
And then there were the permanent markers
that bleed through sheets
of multi-colored paper
or the demanding bang of miniature
forks and spoons chipping away.

But the new red paint will never cover
over the way we sat on those chairs,
elbows on the table,
and cried
after two miscarriages. Or the lost
friends. Or the pain
and joy
of moving on
to new places.

There are some things paint cannot cover.

Like conversations unfolding from
“Now
what do we do?”
or
“How could you say that?”
or
“I’m not doing well.
Not well at all.”
But also
“I’m pregnant,”
or
“I got the contract,”
or
“I couldn’t do this without you.”

Someone already scratched the table
despite my many warnings of the incredible
wrath that would fall from this
August sky
but when I saw in the middle of the new
scratch that the original dark green
was still there
under the red paint
all those years
just a thin skin away
I must confess.
I was relieved.

Because these years of ours
may look like a pock-marked tabletop
scarred and scraped,
but they can never be covered over.
And that is one thing in this world
that is exactly as it should be.

You can get my ebook of poems, We Might Never Die, for free HERE. Enjoy!

January 4, 2017January 3, 2017

He Told Me He was Ready to be a Father #RidesharingConfessional

As an Uber driver, driving the same person is rare. It’s happened to me exactly twice. The first time it happened is a ridiculously strange story I’m still trying to figure out how to tell. The second time it happened was on a rainy, January day when the year still felt like a blank journal.

He wanted to try to cram a six-foot carpet into my poor little Mini Cooper. We wedged it through the trunk and into the back seat. He climbed into the front and thanked me. He wore work clothes and talked about how he happy he was to be making double-time-and-a-half. I thought I recognized him, but if it was the person I thought it was he didn’t look the way I remembered him looking. If you know what I mean.

Anyway, it was him, and in fact I wrote about meeting him a few weeks ago because the first time I drove him made such a big impression on me. He was the same African-American guy I drove right after the election, the same one who was feeling fearful after the results came in. He told me he still felt uneasy. I asked him how his year was going. He smiled, big.

“Well, we have had some news since I saw you last. My girlfriend’s expecting,” he said. “I’m going to be a father.”

He told me he was taking on all the hours he could. He remembered when his brother was little, eight years younger than him, and he had to raise him because his dad was always at work. He used to get up early and help him with his homework. He taught him how to play sports. He kept him in line.

“I’m ready,” he said, smiling. “I’m ready to be a father.”

January 3, 2017January 3, 2017

An Honest Reflection on Self-Employment, Canceled Contracts, and Hope

Ride with me for just a moment on this roller coaster called self-employment, in which I try to provide for two adults and six children. This is how it often goes: I live a life of relatively uneventful days and sleepless nights. Poppy is five months old and highly skeptical of the benefits of sleeping through the night; Leo likes to come and say hello early in the morning; Sam wanders into our room in the middle of the night and sleeps on the floor. I do not set my alarm clock. I rarely work outside the house.

This is how I make money: If I can land two book projects per year, we’re a little short. At three we are doing okay. At four we worry if we have put enough back for taxes. We have sometimes gone months with no income. I only tell you this so that you understand the thin sliver of a line between a life where we eat at restaurants and a life where we don’t fill up the gas tank the entire way.

This is the life of this self-employed, freelance writer. I am not complaining. I am just telling you how it is.

* * * * *

We approached 2017 with very little confirmed work. We always know the month when the money will run out if I don’t land any new work. For a little while, The Month was January, 2017. And it marched ever closer.

We don’t look directly at The Month anymore. When I first started freelancing, The Month was like a spotlight in the eyes, far off but still blinding. It’s difficult to live that way, constantly shielding the eyes, and we learned to look away, to look at the here and now. This is the best way to live.

But as we approached The Month – January, 2017 – I couldn’t help but notice my pulse going up. I started driving for Uber to buy a little time. The flexibility is nice. The people are interesting.

Then, relief.

A job. A verbal commitment. We would meet the week after Christmas to finalize the deal, sign the contract, receive the deposit. This was one third of what we needed to pay the bills in 2017, and it was a relief. The blinding light of The Month dimmed. Between that job, Ubering, and other odds and ends, 2017 was well on its way to being covered, financially speaking.

Then, the sucker punch.

A two-sentence email. The customer changed their mind. They’d had second thoughts.

I am not complaining. I am just telling you how it is.

* * * * *

In 2010 or 2011 or any of the early years after I started writing full time, this is the kind of news that put me in full resume update mode. I’d start perusing job sites. I’d make a few desperate calls to friends. And for a few short hours last week, I was back there again.

Why do I try to do this for a living? What kind of a loon am I, believing I can make a living as the sole earner in our house by writing? Wouldn’t a regular income be better, even if it meant long hours away from the family, even if it meant doing something I didn’t love doing?

Why did I think this good thing could happen?

This is the question we ask ourselves when it feels like the bottom has fallen out. Most of us have been there, in one form or another. This is the question the single person asks when yet another relationship fades without fanfare, the question the entrepreneur asks when the financing falls through, the question the couple asks when her period arrives again.

These are the questions we ask ourselves when we are losing hope.

* * * * *

Don’t feel ashamed if you’ve misplaced your hope. It happens to the best of us. Sometimes this planet, with all that happens on it, can feel like a God-forsaken lump of dirt hurtling through the universe.

But also remember this. Hope is not simply something you keep your eye on. “Don’t lose hope!” people say in those saccharin voices, but hope is not something that can easily be kept track of. Hope is not like a set of keys or a tooth brush.

Hope must be wrestled to the ground. Having hope takes serious effort. It’s a slippery little devil, and if you don’t insist on grappling with it, it will slip away from you.

* * * * *

Deep breath. Exhale. Deep breath. Exhale. Deep breath. Exhale.

* * * * *

It’s 2017. 2016 may have taken your lunch money and kicked you to the curb. 2016 may have disappointed you in a thousand different ways. 2016 may have filled you with doubt and uncertainty and cynicism.

But it’s not 2016 anymore. Wrestle hope to the ground. Prepare to be surprised for good. Don’t give up.