loss

I miss my dad today. I've been going through boxes of my parents' stuff, and reading an article on a camp for kids who lost their parents on 9/11.

My dad and I were close. He was the sane one. Flawed, but infinitely better than my mom. She was supposed to die, she was thisclose to tripping off this mortal coil. Somehow she clawed her way back, and in the interim of hospitals after hospital Dad and I became close.

We ate at the Chinese restaurant near Bellevue, he'd get the cashew chicken while I preferred the crispy orange. Even though I was too old for it, I'd sit on his lap and he'd tell me about his time in the war. Every story being one of high jinks, not tragedy. He gently told me that I needed to work harder in school, or else I'd lose my scholarship. He woke us up everyone morning with a hot breakfast, giving me a couple dollars for a snack after school. Money I always spent on my walk to the bus.

There's something unfixable when you crash into mortality at an age too early. When you're family dies in a heart attack, and you're left to call the relatives. When you're 25 and just want to be able to ask your daddy what to do... but he's not there.

poor, unfortunate, souls

I'm sorry to have not published* anything in awhile. I've been working on things, but most of the time I leave the house before 9 and don't come back till 12 hours later. This leaves little time to unravel the web of my thinking and weave into something presentable.

It is no help that I've become increasingly critical of my writing as of late.** I consider mining old journals for material, but am scared of what I would find there. Some of those pages are from such painful times that I'm reticent to relieve them in the reading. I think of a friend's post regarding the emotional state of so-called "creative people". In it he relates in interaction with a woman who asks whether creative people are just tortured souls.

Well, I think some pain and anguish in one’s life provides for a heftier mouthful to chew on. Sustenance for the creative machine. Each genuine experience can provide energy and material for creative expression. Maybe the sad thing is that genuine experience is so often cloaked in the guise of pain.


*Blogger's term, not mine.
**I say increasingly, though truth be told I am always critical.

blindsided

What do you do when someone reads the cards you thought were so well hidden. When you realize all the work you've done was on your head and there's so much more to do on your heart. I wasn't expecting this in a work day, for someone to notice and make me feel anew the hollowness within me. At least its been identified, this reason I've felt adrift. Validated and recognized by an outsider, next on the agenda in caring for that which is me.