Chasing snakes.

I flat out lied to my ex today.

I know. I have been complaining about him forever. Trying to move past all the dislike and creepiness I feel in his presence. Put my best foot forward and remember I love my children. But today, that high road wasn’t anywhere with in my reach. No map to get there. No GPS to even locate it.

So, I lied.

The lie might seem small, in the reality of the world. No one will die. No one will be disappointed or have their life ruined by a terrible secret. It is completely on me. Complete avoidance because I can’t believe him capable of any request being anything but manipulation.

The lie? That I was already in town, did not want my children brought to my house by a third party because I was already on my way, and that no, I did not want to have dinner with him (and presumably his wife, and his mother since they will be there) because I already had plans, thanks anyway.

The truth? I didn’t want to be in his presence for any amount of time that would require more conversation than “Where are the backpacks?” and “Baseball is at 2pm.” I didn’t want it with him. I didn’t want it from his mother. I definitely didn’t want it from his wife. I was completely okay with it meaning I did not have an extra hour with my kids if it meant I did not have to endure that. I am just not that strong.

For the record, today, in my past life, would have been Corned Beef and Cabbage Dinner Day. I don’t particularly like corned beef and cabbage. Actually, unless the corned beef is cold served on rye with horseradish, I don’t like it at all. Boiled potatoes and soggy cabbage rate even lower.

But each year, for the 11 years of the days before St Patrick’s Day that my ex and I were together, this day was special. It was the day he cooked. It was the day the pot boiled all day. It was the day family and friends came over and ate the crap boiled tradition with us. It was as day he stayed sober until right before everyone arrived, and then got drunk fast, on Irish-type coffee in mock ethnic participation of some sort. There is not a drop of Irish in either one of us, so it is actually pretty funny.

I know from his first ex wife that the boiled dinner at this time of year was a tradition for them, too. I don’t know if their tradition turned into the same melancholy drunkfest mine always did with him after everyone went home, but for me, it was just one more on the list on the many evenings spent like that.

Until the invitation arrived, I hadn’t remembered it at all. I have not had that dinner in four years, and I don’t remember ever missing it. So as the invite via text message dinged my phone, the entire history of the ritual came flooding back. It hit me in the back of the head like a two-by-four. Why would he invite me? What was the game? Was there even a chance this invite was legit, and not some way to throw me? Could he not have remembered any of the terrible stuff? And just be having crap boiled dinner? And thought, since I was picking up the kids anyway, to throw me an invite to be polite?

So I lied.

I don’t have any desire to be in the middle of my old world. I left it. I don’t want to go back. I don’t like boiled cabbage and potatoes, and I hated each and every one of those dinners and did them over and over again anyway. I think I was insane. I am not insane anymore. I don’t ever want to be again.

So this lie was for me. So that I could write this all down in the time I could have been eating corned beef. This lie, to do something for myself, and not give any other explanation, is so much better than the lie I told myself for so long that everything was fine in that smelly, boiling pot I called home. I am good with it, because maybe it wasn’t a lie after all. I mean, I did have plans after all. I just didn’t know it when I said no.

It is harder than it looks.

These are my short stories. I had them published in a 101-word contest that happens annually. Writing a complete short story within the confines on 101 words is challenging, especially to someone like me who likes to write and write and write, expaining things over and over and over, forever and ever and ever (got it?). Every time I have remembered to enter, I have been fortunate to have at least one story published. In 1999 I won the contest. In 2009 and 2011 I had all three that were entered (three is the limit) published. Here they are. Read. Enjoy. Share.

Listed by year
Then the link to the published site.
Then the title and each story

1999:
Link to 1999 Story

Memories
She remembered the way he tasted. Salty. Warm. Of coffee and brandy and toothpaste and cigarettes. She remembered his coal-black hair falling in his eyes. Short and slightly curled above the ears. She knew his eyes. The color of new jeans just washed and damp. Damp, the way his hands were as they touched her face and shoulders and neck and breasts and stomach and back, and between her legs. She remembered every moment. Every detail. Every movement. She remembered. She knew him. Even as she identified him as number three in the rape suspect line-up.

__________

2005:
Link to the 2005 Story

Poetic Justice
A friend of 20-plus years borrowed $500 two years ago Halloween. Having never known her to be a welsher, it was an easy check to write. Until today, I thought she was dead. Turns out she is living in Pismo Beach, and hosting her own Web site and beach blog on self-help and financial independence. She always wanted to be a writer. I guess she writes fiction. She has a link on her site to paralegal services. I wonder if I should use them to sue her. I wonder if she remembers how she spent the money.

__________

2009:
Link to the 2009 Stories

Freeze Frame
The last painting hung, as always, on the south wall, corridor 6, gallery 17. The curators removing exhibits took down other paintings, placed them in sleeves, then crates. What remained, proving the painting had not been alone, were faint square and rectangular scuffs that ringed the room. It was as it always had been; paintings coming, going, enhancing the last painting’s beauty by their meager presence. The last painting’s perspective never changed. It only saw the north wall, the velvet stanchions, the admirers. It longed to be stolen, taken to a home in some no-extradition country, just to change the view.

Young Innocence, Old Guilt
“Mom, can I tell you a joke?” “Sure, honey.” “Why did the barbeque cross the road?” “I don’t know, why?” “To get to the CHICKEN!” I laughed again, thinking it was just as funny this time. My sweet 4 year old crawled up on my lap. “Mom, when is dad getting here?” It was Wednesday night, 30 minutes past the scheduled pick up time. “I don’t know, babe.” I did know. It was why I’d left. He called at 7:30, after bedtime. I’m sure he would explain. “Hello.” I could smell the brandy before the first word was said.

Family Style
My ex-husband’s mother, and her charming, but unrealistic spouse invited me, and her grandchildren, to spend Christmas Eve at their house. Having spent every holiday there, being offered punch and English toffee, for the past 10 years, you might think I would have been delighted at the prospect. But here, in the sanctity of the house my children and I rented alone in May, away from alcohol-induced tirades, and words seething with cruelty and humiliation, we have a new tradition. It’s called happiness. I have been told they are inviting everyone, including the new fiancé. I’ve heard she likes punch.

__________

2011:
Link to the 2011 Stories

The Closet

For my eighth birthday, my mom bought me a new pair of purple Converse All-Stars. My old shoes were worn, and too small. I put the old shoes in the trash. I found them today, in boxes in her closet, with one-hundred-fifty other pairs. I’d moved out when I was eighteen, escaping, leaving behind everything I was now sorting, plus twenty-five years more. The 42-year-old in me wondered how my mother’s hoarding had gotten so bad. The eight-year-old in me touched every pair on the shelf, searching for the purple birthday shoes.


The Loss

The week before had been joyous, until the ultrasound showed that the baby’s heart had stopped beating. She’d been unable to call him from the doctor’s office, she had said, shaking, and the nurse had called instead. He remained calm. Two days and a stillbirth later, she had taken her few packed possessions and left the hospital. “I’m going. I can’t come home until the bedroom is an office again.” It had come down to a choice between flying elephants and pastel crayon scribbles. Sitting on stacked paint cans in what would have eventually been the nursery, his emotions overwhelmed him.


The List

Her current partner, a sweet man with sparkly green eyes, knew a thing or two about sex, but lacked a little in the erotica department. A future “erotic memoir” entrant, but only just. She wanted the tingly feeling on the surface of her skin, just because the object of her longings was in the room. Tingling not from touch, but from knowing. Desire. Warmth deep at the core, that a person knew you, even if you never met. She wrote his name down as the last on the list, sighed, and then added the next number and left the line blank.


__________

2012:
Link to the 2012 Stories

About Face

I knew you didn’t expect me to go. Not after all this time. As you sat there. Staring. I knew I wouldn’t save you. Couldn’t save you. You didn’t want to be saved. Not really. And I had long since thought saving you was beyond my ability. It was true. I could only save one life. The life would be mine. If I could get it right. I knew the bottle in my hand would be mourned. Not by me. So I spilled the amber liquid. Purposefully. On the sidewalk. And I, for the first time in years, walked away. Sober.


By a Hair

She’d cut her hair “flapper” short, dyed it fuchsia, when the vomiting first started, grateful no one had to hold back her hair over the toilet. She’d shaved it completely when the tufts left after chemo reminded her of a neglected Chia-pet, and kept it that way, alternately choosing to wear a Santa hat or bunny ears as the season dictated. Her reward, on the last day of her life, was a little girl of 7, also baldly fighting cancer, using her head as a canvas with colorful body-paint crayons as the pair laughed, sitting by the koi pond.


__________

2013:
Link to the 2013 Story

Ground Up
It wasn’t enough, that casual piece of affection, given daily in the form of a perfect foam heart on top of his latte. Maybe “enough” would have been an extra stamp on his frequent drink card, or a free mini-scone. But having given all that at one time or another, it still wasn’t enough for him to read her badge correctly. So when he spoke while taking his change, “Jordy” came out as “Judy” and her whole world fell apart. In the reality of completely unreturned love, Jordy quit her job, went home, and smashed all of her coffee mugs.

If wishes were horses...

I have been wishing for a long time that I could find the time and energy to write more. Now, I understand that everyone (and their mother) has a blog, and why would mine be any different? It was when (this week) I realized that I did not have to have it be different, just real, that the title, and the time, and the energy mystically appeared.

I have been journaling for years. For those that don't know what journaling is, it is like blogging, but with a pen, and paper. Some may remember it as writing in a diary, or keeping a slam book, or, for the visually inspired, a scrapbook with captions and quotations and little thought bubbles. Me? I just had a spiral bound notebook, and a really good pen, and some spare time every day. And by every day, I really mean whenever-the-hell-I-felt-like-it. Sometimes that was all day on a Sunday. Sometimes it was on the third full moon of the month. It didn't matter, just that I would write. A few months ago, the writing was just not enough anymore. It was not enough of a catharsis to have any impact. It had become routine. It was a "Dear Diary", except I knew no one was listening. I wasn't even listening anymore. The words were cold. I was hiding.

So I put myself out there. I wrote a "note" for facebook, published it to a group, and sat back, crying and shaking and terrified and embarrassed and excited, and in more pain than I thought I could bear. I got exactly what I needed. Someone read it. It was not the who, or whether or not that person commented (they did, but that is not the point). It was that I transported myself outside the realm of wishing, and into the scary world of feeling. I existed.

I haven't been truly letting myself feel things for long time. Ten plus years by my calculations, about the time that Seth died. And by now, I have gotten really good at keeping going, and putting my emotions in a little box to be dealt with later. I was really good at doing that as a child, and it just kept me safe and sane into my adult hood. I would write everything down in whatever journal I keeping at the time, and then never read it, never acknowledge it, never think about it again. I had dealt with it and that was that.

So why now? Why write a blog, and post it where the world can read it? (Ok, I am not vain enough to believe the world is reading it, and will be grateful if my best friend reads it, but you get the gist.) My reasons seem tied up in allowing myself to remember that I exist. I had been told for a long time that my existence in this world was dependent on the size of my body, the cleanliness of my house, the amount of money I brought in, the happiness I publicly displayed even when I was in a total state of panic and grief on the inside. I can't try to fake it any more. I can't drag myself along, not even knowing what happy is, and settling for less than feeling everything.

I will write. I will write here. I won't edit beyond grammar and spelling. I will scare myself. I will revel in fear and praise. I will find gratitude and anger in the silence. I will exist. Along that way, I will learn to let go. I will remember that letting go of bad stuff does not make the good stuff go away. No babies with bathwater. I will remember that wishes are a good thing. Working towards the wishes is even better.