Blog Archives

All the World's a Stage

10/30/2017

When you descend the stairs to the Metro, you are signing a contract, invisible yet binding.

Your eyes, windows to the world, must be instantly battened down and shuttered. Do not show emotion or react - not to the woman carrying a limp baby and sign asking for food nor to the man, barely out of his teens, skeletal, strung out.

Swipe your pass and shed your true self at the turnstile. No sorrows or struggles. No joy. Especially no joy, no smile, not laughter, unless you are high and, if you are high, your contract is unique and ironclad. Follow the lead of your homeless brethren and shrink within yourself. Hide your stink, your filthy clothes.

Find your mark behind the yellow line. You are a play actor who must exist in caricature form only - the businesswoman, the junkie, the hipster.

Enter the train and get out your props. Your phone, your book. Tolerate the noise and the smell and the taste of despair as if all your senses are lost.

Whatever you do, do not break character.

Ascend the stairs only to sadly discover that the contract remains, its language more ambiguous yet equally irrevocable.

Execute the terms until you become your part. Method act until you are faceless and empty of all humanity.

Do it. Day after day after day, all the while awaiting the contract's end.

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October 22

10/22/2017

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Today is my mother's birthday.

There are no balloons or cake. No gifts or decorations.

My mother is dead and has been for almost six years.

But today is still my mother's birthday.

I see the date on my computer - October 22 - and I feel a rise to my throat and I swallow down hard.

I will cry, but not yet.

First, I want to - let me correct that, need to - swim through this pain that I am feeling. I must bathe in the mixture of guilt and sorrow and sadness and loss.

I force myself to imagine what my sweet gentle mother's birthdays must have been like when she was locked away at Rockland Psych. I hear the screaming down the halls and human smells and violence fill my nose and I see her little body, not even five feet, on an iron bed collapsed into itself.

There were no balloons or cake. No gifts or decorations.

I need to feel what my grandparents must have felt on their daughter's birthday, their baby's day, year after year as she descended deeper into her schizophrenia. The pain that hits me is too real, too present. I shove it back to the past, a coward.

Instead I let self loathing wash over me for not knowing my mother's favorite flavor cake or asking her what her birthdays were like when she was a child, still free. For not flying out from California. For thinking sending sneakers and t-shirts via Amazon were the same as being there.

I swallow again.

Today is my mother's birthday. Today will always be my mother's birthday. And today I will look for her, as I have done every day for the past five years and eight months, in the skies and on the ground. I will call out to her, silently and aloud. And I will pray to God, as I always do, that she will answer.

Happy birthday, Mom. I love you.

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Photo Synthesis

10/21/2017

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My plants speak to me, softly yet urgently.

"Judy," they whisper as I walk by.

"Yes," I say.

But they do not seek my words. My words are useless to them, to their survival, to their happiness. So I say nothing more.

Instead I feel their need. Their thirst. Their drowning. From sunlight. From water.

From neglect and from decay.

I stand silent with them and they completely fill me with their desire until I feel their thirst, their drowning, their neglect, their decay.

Where do they end and I begin?

I caress their leaves - for just a moment - before mercilessly tearing away at any sign of death. I fill them with water or empty their vessels, dry.

I turn them toward the light or shield them from its burning.

I leave them, their rotted leaves staining my hands.

"Judy," they whisper as I walk by.

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Bare Bones

10/9/2017

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do not avert
your eyes
my wounds, fester,
centuries old

peel them away!
with indelicate hands
expose
smothered marrow, dying

swim in my blood
promise
and excise me
from this facade

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Breaking the Chain

10/8/2017

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We don't know how Daisy ended up at the city shelter.

But there she was, four years ago, leaning against her cage, staring, silent.

Her age was a guess as she was found on the street, a stray, maybe a runaway or maybe discarded. She was young, younger than the age on her card, as it turns out, and certainly younger than the shelter volunteer would admit.

I learned a valuable lesson that day. Never tell a shelter volunteer what you are looking for in a pet. In their desperate eagerness to get the animal adopted out, they will try to convince you that the old, white Chihuahua snarling at you is in fact the young, sweet black Labrador you've been dreaming about.

I made it clear the minute I walked into the shelter that I wanted a full-grown, medium-sized dog. No puppies and certainly no large dogs. Hershey - our first family pet ever - had just died two weeks earlier and in his long, protracted dying I would have to lift his 65-pound shaky frame into my car to take him to the vet and every day I would have to clean up the mess left by his failing body in much the same way you would a gigantic sad puppy. I made a solemn promise to myself that nothing would ever make me go through that again.

"Yup, she's full grown."

Anyone with an ounce of puppy experience would have seen Daisy's sparkling sharp teeth and big floppy head disproportionate to her adorable little 38-pound body and would have replied "Nope, puppy."

But Hershey was our only experience with a dog and he came with rotted teeth and a previously fractured femur that left his back leg forever dragging behind him. We just didn't know from puppies.

We didn't know from puppies and that's why, for the past four years and almost forty pound later, Daisy is out of her cage and in our home.

Her teeth aren't as white anymore and her body, stout like a barrel, is now in proportion to her head. She's only five, a verifiable five, but you can see her slowing down. She doesn't get up -- or into the car -- like she used to. There are no battered bones, just back hips beginning to betray her.

There are days while sitting on her bed next to the couch, she will lean her thick body against mine and stare, silent.

On these days I allow my hand to rest on her soft solid head while I stare back, equally silent, for just a moment.

"Don't worry, girl, there are some promises that are made to be broken."

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