Trying not to leave before I leave...

I'm trying not to leave before I leave. I'm talking about my home, of course, and moving which I must do.

I'm trying to remember before memory is all I have, what the lake sounds like from the bathroom. It sounds like wind. Not water.

As I walk Meander out the back door and down the steps, past the cement duck, the pot of two year old grass broken during the blizzard, around the stairs and on to the gangway, I try to see things. Is Pepper the dog on his porch? What is the water like today? The sky? Has anyone left anything new on my potting bench, the one that will likely remain when I am gone?

On the beach, chucking-the-ball-chucking-the-ball-chucking-the-ball, I imprint the nature of the waves on something etchable inside me... and notice how the lake bed seems to have changed in one place and sends the waves south, instead of west.

Back home, my porch ceiling is Reva's porch floor and I try to imagine with an open heart what it will be like, months from now... sitting above my old perch while visiting her... knowing that I can no longer go back down the stairs and into the home, that housed me as I went, without a desire to... from inside out to outside in.... twisted and burned and nearly extinguished and then came round again.

As I come to terms with old friends who are now strangers and the anger and hurt they have engendered, I try to remember that we were all damaged early and come to reckoning late... and I don't write the cruel words that match their bitter silence.

Yes, trying not to leave before I leave... because that's what I do. Well, did. Always did. And it's time, now that I may have some inkling why that for fifty-four years I've done it, to stop.

I wrote this in an email to my Dad several days ago..
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"I heard, not long ago on the radio that until the 1960's doctors believed that newborns couldn't feel pain, and so didn't give anesthetic to them during surgery.

That explains a lot. Why I'm terrified of doctors, pain; why I leave so abruptly when hurt. Why I am so unforgiving.

Still, once you see that, you can't use it as an excuse. You have to factor it in, but I have to take responsibility for some of it."
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Born with a cleft palate in 1956. Surgery on day three.

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That's not to say that my leaving some people and situations were wrong decisions. But there have been 'leavings' that have always had me wondering.

When Keith and I left Kentucky to come to Chicago, I think I slept as he and Carey packed the truck. Though Chicago was where I wanted to be, Kentucky was all I knew of home.

When the apartment on Bittersweet went south (the home I've loved most), I did my best (Jay was not helping) but I remember laying down at the end of moving day on my mattress on the floor and going to sleep wrapped around Casey the Golden Recliner as if he were a lifeline. Keith and Kevin were left to deal with the aftermath... as I drove a petulant husband north to a cabin in the woods. I didn't see it then, but I had long before left before leaving.

There are people I've left. Much more serious situations, where I've left. To some extent, I'm ashamed. But now I think I have a clue to lead me out of the fear.

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My mantra lately has been to face my fear. So far, 'whatever' fear (as the adage goes) has been far greater than the true situation.

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I've always felt there was something that happened when I was young that set me on my peculiar path. Therapists are always quick to ask, "Were you sexually abused?".

Emotionally abused, yes. Sexually, physically.... no.

But I believe my body and psyche has remembered all these years what must have been a tremendously lonely and terrifying time in my life when 'superpowers' created great pain and I had no voice, just a cry like all the others so misused.

And so now, I'm trying not to leave before I leave but instead to mark the love of something before it's time to say goodbye.