feels like letting go

what does it mean to let go? to forgive, to forget, to make amends? sure, all of those things are included in the act. but i think it runs deeper than that and that if we miss this very crucial last part, we are missing the truest lesson of it all. to let go also means to give yourself permission to be happy again, severing in your heart the negativity and hurt of whatever "it" contained for you. the severing is not for the "it", it's for you. accepting the freedom into your soul that comes from saying, "ya know, it's ok. i'm ok." it's trusting yourself first, your journey second, and carrying with you those pieces of it that will forever have their impact. i once heard something that sticks to the back of my mind like a salve - love hard, then love deeper, for that is when you are at your most authentic.

words to live and then forgive by. so, it's ok...i'm ok. my love to you always...

safe deposit box

it was mid-afternoon on a tuesday. i answered my cell phone and very calmly my dad at the other end said, "i think you need to come now." i drove home to collect some things in a bag, and i remember how absurd it felt as i placed my black funeral dress and heels inside it just in case my brother didn't make it. 4 1/2 hours later i pulled into the parking deck of mission hospital in asheville. my dad called again as i was walking into the lobby and said where to find everyone, that they were all just sitting there in the waiting room on the 4th floor, but he gave no indication that anything was any different than when i spoke to him earlier. the doors of the elevator opened and over the hospital intercom a "code blue" was being called. doctors and nurses were running down the hallway and i almost collided into one as i stepped off. i could also hear the intense wailing and sobbing of someone off in the distance. i rounded the corner and at the end of the hallway i saw my dad trying to hold my stepmother up onto her feet as her weight was crumbling in agony against him towards the floor. i then made the connection that the wailing i'd just heard wasn't a poor stranger's...it was hers...and that the code blue was in my brother's room. his heart had stopped at the same second the bell of the elevator dinged. i froze and then took a step forward to enter a chaos that will never seem any less surreal as long as i live. the sounds accompanying that moment and my body shaking due to my heart pounding with such force will be forever burned in my memory. she was still wailing, "oh God, oh God, no!". my dad released her from his grip long enough so that he could crumble too, and then it was my arms she fell into. with both my bags still on my shoulders all i knew to do was just hold her while she wailed and say "it's OK, it's OK, its OK" over and over like i believed it was going to be. i yelled at my aunt to sit with my dad because his red face and sweat told me that he too may have a heart attack if we didn't calm him. and then just as fast as the chaos had begun, an icu nurse burst through the automatic doors and said they'd gotten josh's heart back to a rhythm. i think my stepmom had wailed out all the energy she had because all she could do was sit wide-eyed and motionless at the news that she hadn't just lost her only son afterall.

the realization that i've become a shell of a person, and that it's no one's fault but my own, sinks like a brick of panic in my gut. i use the word fault loosely, realizing that life just happens, but regardless of that fact no one is responsible for who, or what, i become but me. i don't want to be 45 and wondering where the last twenty years of my life went simply because i was too scared to leap. because i was too afraid to be happy. happy like "my cup runneth over" kind of happy. life is shorter than short; it's sometimes unpredictable and not to be put in some safe deposit box for tomorrows. because what if? what if one day you're not so lucky to just be the one getting out of the elevator?

in the balance

you think you know yourself well enough to know how you'll feel about something...until you have to. my entire life up until this point has been purposed by the same recurring theme: find balance, and maintain it. but what do you do when even equilibrium becomes too much? when you'd give just about anything for the scale to tip slowly over in an actual direction..any direction? instead, it hangs there...bobbing in midair...teasing fate like a donut on a string to a fat kid.

my brother's fate lies in the 4th floor icu of mission hospital, a road map of lines and tubes, and one life supporting machine after another running out of it to an unknown point out in the future somewhere. a point we hold our breath to for fear of also possibly finding out. i've never hated balance so much until now, nor do i find it amusing that the one time it has been the most tangible is also when it's the ugliest and least wanted.

and until now, i have never been ashamed that i would be willing to let someone go just to be able to have my feet touching the ground again. i want to scream out in sally field-like furor an earth-shattering 'why', only i know that as long as questions hang there silently in the balance their answers will too.

thread

around the table at a restaurant in downtown London sit a small group consisting of several Brits, a Serbian woman, an Irish woman, 3 Italians, a German, and 3 Americans. as bottles of wine, various tapas dishes, and “walked into a bar” jokes are being passed around, I sit in astute observation, for it feels oddly reminiscent of a bag of Scrabble pieces. you reach in, pull out a handful of letters, each with different number values (which, for the sake of argument here, would be the different nationalities and geographical locations). in the end, though, each letter comes together to form the same word. this theme is on my mind a lot, actually, but never have I witnessed it in such a refreshing, outright manner: no matter where we come from in this life or where each of our fibers began, the one connecting thread is that we are all simply trying to live our best lives. essentially, to make the best of the mixed bag we’re given. so much of this world contains a conscious focus on the numerous ways one group is set apart from the rest. yet as the laughter and affection pass through this table from one end to the other like a current, what I also witness reaches much farther than any longitude or latitude could ever stretch. in this world we are all so much more similar than we ever are different. the Irish woman next to me throws back her head with a hearty chuckle at the most climactic part of her story, simultaneously patting my back and grabbing my arm. as she does so, a wide grin spreads on my face from one cheekbone to the next, but not from how charming her story happens to be – which it indeed is. rather, the smile is more or less the recognition of the moment itself, that here deep in the basement of a Spanish restaurant in a continent resting in far away coordinates, one kind soul feels the same value in another and it isn’t remotely dependent upon which brogue we happen to speak. she pours wine into my glass and we clink them in cheers to what would be another round of many that evening, both of us thankful to feel a sense of home far away from the one we typically know.