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.

just a stupid blog

If I ever stop posting to this blog, it will likely be because I am dead and can no longer speak. Since 2013, it has been my friend, my family, my lover—my truest confidant. At times, it is all I have. I would not abandon her unless I had no other choice.

reality check

I haven’t been sleeping well. I keep waking up in the middle of the night—though honestly, the waking up is normal. It has been for over a year. What’s new is not getting back to sleep. Now I have an hour of being alert, fully awake, unable even to lie in bed and pretend. So I sit in the living room, on my phone or reading.

Last night, at 2 a.m., I wondered why this might be happening. Maybe the new medication I’m taking. Maybe the new moon in Capricorn. Maybe it’s because you’re awake too—I know because I see the green dot hovering above the circular profile picture of your face on Instagram. ACTIVE. Like me.

But that can’t be it. That’s a ridiculous thought. I’m consciously trying to live in reality. I know you stay up late all the time. It couldn’t be that, because my sleep disturbance is new.

I google the medication. Goddamn—restlessness and sleep disturbance are listed as side effects. I knew it. I swear I never doubted it. It would have been the New Moon before it was you.

When Jeopardy be naming the shit I can't stop thinking about.

Category: Word Salad

Answer: It's a seven-letter synonym for one of the seven deadly sins: COVETOUSNESS.

Question: What is avarice? (or Avidity).

Demolition.

I live in a military town just a mile from an Army installation where they develop and test rockets and missiles and whatever else. Near-constant in the sky, a helicopter—not the kind that monitors traffic or airlifts people to hospitals, but Chinooks and Black Hawks. Military aircraft ferrying big-time generals in to witness the tests. And then the explosions. Just tests. Almost daily instances of shit blowing up, so frequent that the local subreddit has a tag—Loud noises scare me—meant to both mock and normalize how often someone posts: “Loud sound shook my house… arsenal test?” or “Did anyone else hear those five loud booms (Southeast End)?”

Normally, there isn’t any warning from the arsenal. The booms and blasts are just part of the city’s milieu—part of the soundscape of someone’s hometown. Lucky for me, I’m a transplant. I know this is not normal, even though the sounds have faded into background noise, like traffic from the parkway or cicadas screaming in the summer. Sometimes I don’t even realize there was a noise until a Reddit post hits my feed. That’s the worst feeling: knowing my nervous system has adjusted to explosions, that I might not feel concern if a war started right outside my door.

I know these are war sounds because my husband lives here with me, and he says it sounds like Vietnam. Insanity—the only answer we both can come up with. Moving here.

I read on the internet that this city is in the top five targets if the U.S. were attacked. If it’s a nuclear bomb, I’m in the zone for instant death. I guess that’s nice, compared to a former coworker I’d like to call a friend who lives in the horrific full-body-sunburn, lifetime-cancer, guaranteed-disability-for-life-but-not-death zone.

But this isn’t about that—not about living in the heart of war sounds, not about how I could die fast in a nuclear strike. This is about something else.

Last week, the arsenal did issue a warning. There would be two loud explosions on Saturday—one little one and one really big one. They announced it because these would be louder than the usual tests. They were going to demolish two launch pads built in the ’60s, back when the space race felt like humanity reaching for the stars instead of perfecting the efficiency of killing each other. They said Saturday before 9 a.m., so I was ready all morning, waiting.

I see now why they don’t warn us about testing. Waiting for the sound is worse than being surprised. Even with the warning, it was still a surprise.

I was in the kitchen making soup. This winter, I’ve been on a huge homemade-soup-from-scratch kick. I was cutting carrots when the first explosion rocked the house. From the living room, my husband yelled, “Daayyyuummm.” My heart raced. My body stiffened. I panicked. That had to be the big one. It had to be. It felt like I’d walk outside and see no other houses, like I was standing in the eye of a bomb—if bombs worked like hurricanes, where the center stays intact while everything around it is destroyed.

But no. That was the little one.

The big one came thirty minutes later, as I was dicing ham into cubes. It was so loud I jumped. The chef’s knife I love for how sharp it is sliced straight into my thumbnail, and blood gushed out. Fuck. Fuck me. What a shitty injury to have—cut right through the nail into my nail bed. Not a normal little cut. I washed my hands and accepted my fate: band-aid thumb for a few days until half my nail falls off.

I don’t know much about demolishing structures—buildings, launch pads, what have you. I suppose sometimes you just can’t repair. You can’t move forward to the next phase without destroying the dilapidated structure holding you back. But if I’m being honest, those launch pads had been sitting—unused, untouched—for decades. Longer than I’ve been alive. It seems like we all could’ve happily waited it out, let nature slowly reclaim the concrete and steel beams.

Not because I think launch pads are sentient beings deserving of peace and respect, but because when we go nuclear—decide to destroy it all—we get too focused on the intended destruction zone. We forget the circles of effect radiating outward. The cut-thumbnail zone. The sunburn-and-cancer zone. Bystanders who were doing just fine.

For days now, I’ve been mournful. Sad. Crying like a little bitch—and it’s not my thumb, though it does hurt. It’s that, as much as I love the life I’ve built, there are all those lives I had to give up for it. All the lives I could have lived if I’d made one or two different choices. Sometimes I want to blow it all up. Throw it all away. Go find something new—exciting, different—passionate, captivating, loving, intimate, physical, unpredictable.

Maybe it’s ingrained self-sabotage. Maybe it’s my true self calling out. I don't know. Sometimes, I think I don't know anything. But I do know I’ve done that before. Burned it all down. I’ve destroyed so many lives just to rebuild, and I am so tired of starting from scratch. That’s fun for soup, not for a soul.

I know I want to see it through. I know that, like those launch pads, time and nature come for us all. This life I have will slowly erode at the edges, and I can live within it until the day I move forward—without reverberating pain onto bystanders who are just trying to cut ingredients for soup.

Everyone who would be trapped in the crosshairs is someone I love. I can’t do that to them. Not with a clear conscience. Not on purpose. I do know love. Love enough not to harm. Not willingly at least.

So I cry and wait, knowing that when you make no choice, eventually one is made for you.

Straight-laced: Practice Makes Perfect.

I keep telling myself to use this time

to become the person I want to be

when I meet you.

Reading books and books and books—

self-help, pop-culture favorites, psychology,

history, classics, obscure indie loves—

in case that’s what you’re into.

Music too, all the genres.

Maybe I can bewitch you

with the mind I’m building.

Self-discipline. Denial.

Becoming that stoic bedrock

you can latch onto.

I could be working out, crafting

a body that might catch your eye.

I should use this time to get better

for you.

But right now, I’m just sad that I’m waiting,

that I’ve neither met nor confirmed

you’re even real

in this web of possibilities.

Tonight I cry in the shower,

mourning a perfectly fine life—

perfectly fine because I made it that way.

Tomorrow, I’ll tie myself up tight

in Boy Scout knots—

square, clove hitch, alpine butterfly—

just to name a few,

and sew my patch back onto the vest I wear.

I’ll be an Eagle in a year.

Just give me enough time to study.

I know I’m getting better.

Cause these bouts used to last a week.

Now—

Just a few days.

Practice makes perfect.

Right?

Will you also be ready

when it's time to meet me?

You know I’d destroy this part of myself if I could. You know that, right?

Touch You Like a Tiger

I hope he touches you like a tiger—
soft and rough, the way I imagined
you like. Yes, I want the next man
you make googly eyes at to take action,
decisive action, the way my horoscope
is always telling me: Dear indecisive Libra—
shit or get off the pot. But the stars know
I am purgatory-cursed, waffling in limbo,
torn between two incompatible wants.
I can’t have both, so I choose the closest,
most convenient, guaranteed option:
the one I am already in.

But you—
you sit at a buffet of choice,
gargling sweet drinks, tasting everything.
I hope he—whoever he is—kisses you
in a way that resurrects forgotten childhood
fantasies: playground dares, nervous giggles,
secrets whispered after dark—
that sudden feeling,
the click of remembering
what life is for,
how it lights itself.

Yes, I pray
he will do all the things I hesitate over,
never once drafting a pros-and-cons list.
Let him touch you like a tiger again—
not caged, not pacing,
not choosing safety over teeth.

For your sake,
he should be everything
I was too careful to be.

I pinkie swear I know right from wrong—
and of the two, I want both.

My willpower is coming undone like Tibetan prayer flags, thinned by wind, rain, and snow, surrendering one thread at a time to the fantasy.

Sabbath

I don’t need Jesus or church—

I sleep in on Sundays.

My dreams are sermon enough,

my husband snores the hymns

I believe in.

Double Cazimi Conjunction of Venus and Mars

Twice the stars burned our names into the sky;
I am yours through every lifetime.

We escaped the underworld, which looked eerily like the Deep South. Between hot, humid summers and deep-fried food, we grew closer. Hades was all smiles—big hair, high-heeled hooves. We survived demons in oversized trucks, tires squealing, smoke curling from spinning wheels.

We emerged changed in all the ways that mattered, losing nothing and gaining one more cat. Like Persephone returning from the depths, we carried new light inside us, even after being swallowed.

A good woman can make a sweater from wool and two needles. A good man can bring home meat with only a knife. We are a good woman and a good man—a union that feels cosmic. I needed to follow absent-minded girls to learn that everything I wanted wasn’t waiting in the future but already here—right time, right light. You needed to descend into the dark abyss of your mind. We needed to be trapped in Alabama to discover that home had been within each other all along. We needed to be lost to find each other.

That day, we both looked up. Our eyes met. Hello, there. I know you. You know me. Oh my God—I had forgotten how good it felt to be known. I had been a stranger in a strange land. Now I see you were too.

We rediscovered each other in a winter without snow. You were in the cold sky, and I was at the bottom of the ocean. We had been pacing the same circles until we looked up and saw each other again. A fated alignment: for the second time in our lives, we fell in love. How rare. Rare like the double cazimi conjunction of Venus and Mars that happened this week. Me and you. Most people only get one.

A meeting of planets, a meeting of husband and wife. A house is built brick by brick, but a marriage is built day by day, meal by meal, laugh by laugh. We spend our days like a shopping spree—Taco Bell and the library—we feast like kings. Clink glasses with me. Cheers to a new year, a renewed us. We tussle and nip at each other’s ears like animals again. I smell your breath. We circle each other, tails in the air, moving toward an infinite future.

Twice the stars burned our names into the sky.

I seal this chapter of our lives with a kiss.
I wouldn't be me without you.

Gone Without a Trace

Last night, while cleaning the kitchen after dinner, I thought about what my life would be like if I had never met you.

It is strange how much space you once occupied, considering how little remains. Had we never met, almost nothing would be different. I would have eaten the same dinner, cleaned the same kitchen, used the same soap in the same bathroom, watched the same movie, and gone to sleep in the same bed beside the same man.

Did knowing you change me at all? The conversations, the intimacy—where did they go? And you—are you any different? Would your life look the same if I had never existed in it? I assume it would.

The only real difference is the time I lost believing otherwise.

Did you lose anything?

I’ll never know. I’m awake, my sheets just as fresh as if we had never met.

Each day I grow older on the outside, and older on the inside too.

Totally Touching

For the fourth time that night, Martha traded the pillow in the bed for the one on the floor. When she turned thirty-seven, she began to “run hot.” To counter it, she slept with three pillows: one under her head, two in rotation—one in the bed, one on the floor. When she woke overheated, she grabbed a cool pillow from the floor and pressed it to her body. For twenty-five years, it had worked perfectly. Menopause, who? She only had to wake every two hours to retrieve a pillow from the floor.

Her husband, Bret, didn’t mind the movement, though it always woke him. He had been a light sleeper since the war—perhaps his whole life. His mother used to say he was the baby who wouldn’t stay down for a nap.

He thought of his parents, nearing their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. That’s what happens when you marry young and live long. He had seen a strong, stable marriage and never fell for the fairy-tale version.

In the dark, Martha ran through tomorrow. It was the fastest way back to sleep. Feed the dog and cat. Scoop the litter boxes while Bret made coffee. Unload the dishwasher while he took out the trash. Pack lunches. Work. Come home. Make dinner—steak, because it was easy. Bret would probably mow; he’d said the grass was getting too tall.

Bret remembered asking his father about proposing to Martha. They were at his younger brother’s football game, watching the marching band at halftime.

“You see that band?” his father said. “How they know where they’re going? They move in step, don’t collide. Together and apart, they become one thing. Up close, it’s thirty individuals. From the stands, it’s one unit. That’s marriage. That’s what you’re signing up for.”

He hadn’t understood it then. He knew marriage wasn’t cinematic romance, but until you live it, you can’t see how the pieces separate and align to form a whole.

He thought of how empty and quiet his life would be without her as he smoothed sleeping Martha’s hair. She woke often, but when she slept, she slept deeply. 

Martha felt his hand and stayed still. She had always pretended to be asleep when he touched her in the night—his palm warm on her back, his fingers in her hair. It was comforting. After all these years, she didn’t want to break the illusion. She was a light sleeper too; he just didn't know. There are some surprises in marriage after all.

Remember: when you pluck a flea from a dog and crush it, the blood you see is the dog’s, not the flea’s. So it was when you split me in half and your blood poured out.

You are the spoke which keeps the wheel that is me from flying off.

Have Everything I Need

My past self provided all the tools my current self needs. Why, just look at this playlist of songs I listened to when we were falling in love nine years ago.

Listening now, I feel exactly the same as I did then. You haven’t changed. This—you and I— still gives me everything I wanted then—but at some point, I began to expect a life so good that I forgot to enjoy it.

Semantics.

During my first marriage, I started speaking in the plural. When asked, “How are you?” I would answer:

“We are well.”

“We are struggling.”

“We’re okay.”

And so on.

I might then expand. When my first husband, David, was in grad school, I’d talk about assignments, teachers, grades, projects. Shortly thereafter, when he was sick, I’d talk about treatments, hospitals, surgeries, symptoms, doctors—evidence to support my assessment. Yes, we are doing great; David got a 4.0 last semester. Yes, we are not well, because David refused the cardiac chair this morning.

It’s what made my second husband, Paul, stand out from the others. He asked, “How are you?” and I replied with how we were doing—what David had or had not done that day.

“No,” he said. “I’m asking about you. I don’t care how David is doing. How are you doing?”

I just sobbed.

I didn’t know.

But I knew it was not good.

Now you might think David is some terrible guy who made me so enmeshed in his life. He did have a propensity for it, but I can’t blame him fully. Something about me—maybe for the first few months or years—we are separate entities. But eventually, inevitably, irrevocably, I will merge with whomever is closest.

It’s not all bad.

But it’s not all good either.

I suppose my life’s challenge is to find a balance between me and others—a faint line in the sand, a tiny membrane that shows where I begin and they end.

Recently, I started to message someone, “We have COVID,” but changed it to, “Paul and I have COVID.”

I know it's just semantics.

It’s not much.

But it’s something.

Were not wars started and ended by words?

Is the Declaration of Independence anything more than words on a page?

What are we if not the words we say?

I am me and he is him.

wake up every other hour

She sleeps lightly

On a plain, main street—

The future grows heavy

As as a storm fills rainpails.