The Only Warm Breath at My Ear

I haven’t been to a Party City in decades,
but I remember the entire Over the Hill aisle
from when I was a child—
pitch-black paper plates,
balloons stamped with gravestones,
cake toppers already half in the ground.

Having never been
to an Over the Hill party,
I used to wonder
who decided this was festive.

Now forty has snuck up on me,
tiptoed behind my back,
hands over my eyes,
warm breath at my ear,
Guess who?

Over the past few weeks,
four people have told me,
“You’re still so young!”

None of them my age.
Most much older—
to which I can only laugh.
Of course I look young to you.

And one—
younger by a decade—
who texts it quickly.
Of course you’d say that.
You’re studying a book
you haven’t read yet
peek at my bookmark page
and return to your prologue.

Despite all this, I know
we are all on death row.
So what is it
tugging at my shirt hem—
death, finally impatient,

or the decade I walked into
alive, reckless with options,
and am now backing out of,
hands half empty,
unsure what next month
even wants from me?

Mother Tongue.

She likes attention.
Was that all it was with me?
Perforated paper, torn clean—
just a strip in the binding.
A reminding—
of notes exchanged
when we were strangers
in a foreign land, sharing
the same mother tongue—
just familiar noise, warm spit,
slick on the pages
wrapped around me.

But I like attention.
Maybe that’s all it was for me.

Off Page.

    When you read a book—even a biography—not everything is included. Perhaps they don’t mention FDR going to the bathroom or eating a single meal, but you trust that, off the page, he ate and shit his way through the presidency. The editor decides these details don’t add anything to the plot, so they’re cut.

    But life isn’t like a book, and these little details actually do matter in making a life. Eating a solid meal to fuel your body, working out and feeling blood pulse through your veins, breathing fresh air—having moments just inside your stupid, human body, far more animal than any of us care to admit—matters. This is what makes up the bulk of living.

Ninety-nine percent of life is off page.

    We spend far more time washing dishes or taking showers than having life-changing moments. And yet even life-changing character development can occur off page. Say, in the last chapter, the main character has a particularly difficult day, and the next chapter opens with: “Over the past five years, Anton continued to regret this behavior, replaying that day in his head and all the things he could have done differently.” Five years occurred off page. Anton has clearly grown and changed. The author decided you don’t need the details—just the end result.

    When this blog started, I often went months without posting anything. There was so much off-page time. In 2015, I posted only three poems. At the time, I was a full-time caregiver to my first husband. I worked part-time. I taught him how to walk and talk. I emptied a shit bag daily. I bathed him. I cleaned an open wound, careful not to move too quickly. I was busy. I assure you, there was much going on off page.

    I barely even have a journal entry from that period. I was simply too busy with the next task to think—much less daydream, much less feel emotions, much less consider what I wanted or needed. I was consumed by a to-do list of care for another human being. My body shrank quietly while everything else demanded more. I reached a new adult low weight.

Being off page then was not a philosophy. It was survival. It worked.

    At some point, when I wasn't just surviving anymore, I became significantly more “productive.” I leaned into the blog. I leaned even harder into being on page. And for a while, it was fun. A challenge.

In hindsight, it felt inevitable.

As if by design, I turn everything I enjoy into something punishing.

    It happens slowly, through my own actions. I move fast, go deep, overcommit. I did it with alcohol. I did it with drugs. I did it with work. I did it with love. I reached bottom quickly, and then—just as quickly—scrambled toward relief. Only drank 5 years before I clung to sobriety and yet I still sit next to people in AA meetings who lived that life for decades. I don’t know how they survived it. My intensity makes me look like a fraud, even to myself.

    I don’t like hurting. I don’t like wanting things until they hurt to want. Over time, you would think I’ve learned how to leave before desire turns on me. But it's always hindsight, baby. One could say this was the primary reason for my divorce from my first husband.

    This blog has always been a repository for some of my darkest, most negative thoughts, and for a long time it felt like a relief to share them in a safe space. It was exciting in August 2024 when I wrote thirty-seven pieces. The productivity felt limitless. I’ve always been productive in some fashion—obsessive, overwhelming, too much. Or so I’m told. I only really notice it occasionally. A few weeks ago, I noticed it clearly.

    I tried to confide in this blog, my longtime confidant, but could manage only a few vague, petulant sentences. Cryptic posts. Fragments better suited to an AIM away message soaked in teenage hormones and quiet rage—as if I were daring the internet to notice me.

    I hope you understand this as I mean it: sometime around 2020, I became an obsessive documenter of my life. I can tell you every book I’ve read in the past five years. The tarot cards I pulled on July 19, 2022—Three of Wands and The Star. How many times I read the AA Daily Reflection in 2024. How many letters I sent, and to whom. I’ve even saved every letter I’ve received.

On shelves and in boxes: the Caroline Archive.
Curated. Cultivated. Composed.

    You’d think I were a U.S. president building a presidential library. As if historians will one day analyze the inner life of Caroline, minor figure, no body. As if I’m a bird Darwin is studying. Even though no one will read my planners or journals but me, the truth is clear: I no longer live off page.

I haven’t been off page in a long time.

    Not like I was in 2015—when I wrote only three poems but also threatened divorce, and my first husband threatened suicide. Eventually, we both followed through. So much can happen when you aren’t tracking, writing, documenting, cataloguing, talking, explaining yourself into coherence. Maybe if I get a little more off page, my life could begin moving again.

    What if I just made dinner, ate dinner, shit and pissed—did the things that happen off page—and lived without worrying where it was going? That strange, luscious, beautiful breadth of living I keep circling but never quite entering.

What if I simply took my two prescription nasal sprays twice a day?

Worth a try, for a bit.

The Mosaic of My Life

 

"I pray that the little stones that I put into the mosaic of my life may make a worthwhile pattern. I pray that I may persevere and so find harmony and beauty."

I was an only child. I suppose I still am, in a way. Without many friends, I spent most of my time watching TV, reading books, and studying how people acted. Not really people—characters is more accurate. In all that solitude of my formative years, filled with fictional stories and fictional lives, I suppose at some point I split.

I knew, fundamentally, at some deep inner level, that I was not like my classmates—my peers—who so easily befriended, so easily talked, so easily moved through hallways and classrooms, who so easily completed assignments without a disdainful questioning: Why? Why am I being asked to do this? This worksheet. This project.

In elementary school, during a unit on Native Americans, we were tasked with choosing a “totem animal” to represent our family and explaining why. My father was in prison for child molestation. My mother was absent, working full-time and going to college full-time. I did not give two fucks what my family’s totem animal could or would be. The girl next to me chose wolves because they stick together and are pack animals. I don’t care. I told my teacher as much, loudly. I don’t care. Can I choose nothing?

I was difficult. I was a difficult child. I have no doubt the teacher planned to discuss this in some third-grade parent–teacher conference my mom did not attend.

As much as I felt different from my peers—loathsomely different—I also felt desperate for their acceptance. I still do.

For as long as I can remember, I have lived a fractured life.

There is my “real life.” Right now, that includes my marriage, my job, my friends. It’s tangible. It’s objective. Others would confirm that how I perceive it is how they perceive it. If you showed them a picture of my husband, they would say, “That’s Caroline’s husband.” I even have a paper from Madison County stating such.

Then there is my “inner world.” Mostly fiction, built on a handful of small moments I’ve twisted through funhouse mirrors and stretched again and again, like taffy. This is why, for years—years—I believed myself in love with someone who, at most, would call me a friend. If you showed a picture of them, others might say, “That’s someone Caroline knows.” Not even friend. And this is in a post-social media world where everyone you know is called one.

It was obsessive. Scanning pictures for hints of who they were, what they liked, what we could possibly have in common. Looking for the small gaps where I could fit—like a scarf tied around the neck at the last minute, technically present but not necessary. Something that could be removed without consequence. 

I filled those gaps however I could. I am just checking social media again. I am just liking a post. I am just sending a thumbs-up emoji. I am just the sideline screaming for attention I know I will not get. Not really.

It’s impossible to completely ignore someone screaming from the sidelines, and on some level these crushes—I'll use the word for lack of a better one—encouraged my indelible vulnerability. I’m not completely embarrassed. As a split person, I know that while internally I crossed too many lines—drowned in my lack of emotional boundaries—externally it likely read as nothing more than normal interaction. A moment of poor judgment. A brief impulse. An awkward phrase. 

I just don’t really know how to human. It would be easier if I could follow a script all the time. Even inside my head.

So I pull myself back from the past and return to the present. I had a few rough weeks. Rough is the only word that fits. Externally, my life is a well-oiled machine by design. At most, there was a brief hiccup. But internally, I was face-to-face with the stark reality of who I pretend to be.

I pretend to be a romantic. I genuinely believed this was about desire.
Yearning. Want. Even need. 

But, it was fear all along.

Fear of being alone.

At fourteen, I discovered that while I wasn’t very good at making friends, I was plenty good at attracting boyfriends. By then I had developed a 38DDD chest, and with my childhood training, I knew how to feign sexuality. I had seen enough movies to play a top-tier manic pixie dream girl to any guy who was, fundamentally, not in my league. Two to five levels below me. That was what made it easy.
And all those guys came with families who loved me.

I don’t know what it’s really like to be alone anymore. Not since I was fourteen. I have always had my left foot in the next relationship as I pulled my right foot out of the last.

I need to be frank. I actually like my life. My real life. More than the pretend ones I tried to plan with these crushes. And that scares me.

At seventy-four, I can assume my husband will die before me. Though arguments can be made that, based on family history, I may die first. Or maybe genetics don’t mean anything. Yeah. Science isn’t real.

Sometimes, the idea of dying before my husband is comforting. I would never be faced with being alone.

So where am I going with all this? I wasted time, energy—even money—on crushes in the vague hope that I could partially set something up now, in preparation for when my husband dies, so I could minimize my time alone. To prove that I could still find and trap someone. That someone other than him could love me. Whatever. Whatever!

I did not care whether this was wanted by my crush. The more I reflect on what I once framed as harmless, juvenile fun, the more I see how selfish, self-serving, and manipulative it was. In fear of losing what I have right now in some imagined future, I turned my back on my real life to force something that was not meant to be—forcing my will, psychically, onto another person, with complete disregard for their feelings and for my husband’s.

I was running from a future that looked like my lonely childhood.

Let as get real. If I genuinely wanted these people....I would have left my husband. I would have considered it. Leaving my husband for them was never on the table. It wasn't in the room. It wasn't outside the door. 
It wasn't a thing.

This blog is one of the few spaces where I have allowed all pieces of myself to run wild. And run wild they have—feral, in all directions. I don’t delete things, but I don’t want this to be the only place where I am fully myself anymore.

I believe my inner world can—and should—fit into my external world. That I don’t need to attach myself to random people in some parasocial emotional contingency plan. That my time, energy, and obsession can be devoted to those who are devoted to me, now.

Ignore the future. I’ll probably die in eleven years anyway. My husband will probably live another twenty. I can’t keep living in contingency plans. I can’t build a life on fear.

A life built on fear can never feel whole.
A life built in fantasy will never feel real.

I am taking a break from this blog. Not forever. A break—to give myself time to weave what I share here into my real life. A break from social media so I only see my real world: the dinner my husband made, the mortgage paid, the air in my lungs, the shampoo I like, the ritual and flow of our days together, the small laughs and inside jokes.

I have faith in the possibility of a real world I am fully in.

The depressing combination: wishing the past was different, hopeful the future will be different, and knowing you must endure too many presents to get there.

My need so great I fear it would swallow your soul whole.

death

Put an ear to my chest—

hear my heartbeat?

Will I die like my grandfather

and two aunts,

a heart that suddenly gives out

when you’re too young?

But at least it’s fast.

Ask my heart its plans.

Tell me what it says.

If it says it’ll stay strong,

I’ll know my fate is much worse—

cancer, which slowly gnaws away at organs

until they can’t sustain life anymore,

like my mother, and her mother,

and her mother before her.

Which organ do you think

it will start in? Perhaps the liver,

or pancreas, or breast. Too many organs

to find my Judas within.

I’m so terrified of death,

but more scared

I don’t know how to live.