Another Thing I Do Not Know How to Say

Going outside
Shoveling snow in the driveway, driveway
Taking our shoes
Riding a sled down the hillside, hillside
Can you say what you want?
Can you say what you want to be?
Can you be what you want?
Can you be what you want?

Our father yells
Throwing gifts in the wood stove, wood stove
My sister runs away
Taking her books to the schoolyard, schoolyard
In time the snow will rise
In time the snow will rise
In time the Lord will rise
In time the Lord will rise

Silent night
Holy night
Silent night
Nothing feels right

Sufjan Stevens: That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!

http://www.kssos.org/images/Backgrounds/summer/paintedprairie.jpg

Sometimes I catch myself in a mirror. Right now, I am surprised by how tan my skin remains in mid-December. Often, I am caught by how old I seem, still in my youthfulness. I don’t know if I am a woman or a child.

I am in my mother’s house, though not the house I grew up in. I am here in Kansas, and it is always hard to know how to be here. Always hard to be here, always heartbreaking to leave. I sleep in the basement, on a daybed next to exercise equipment. The ceiling is unfinished, not yet insulated, so I can hear the cats running across the kitchen floor above and the television talking in the living room.

Last night I was at my father’s house, my childhood home. I played virtual games with his wife’s children and felt sick from overstimulation and had to lie down. I stayed in my parents old bedroom, the south room upstairs in the original part of the farmhouse. Every time I forget how dark it is out on that gravel road. I forget how quiet it is, except the way the wind howls across those eighty acres.

This time, as other visits to my childhood home, I am lonely at night. Somehow the darkness never seems so dark as when I am trying to sleep in this wide open middle of nowhere country place. I try to go to bed early and sleep long through the night. Instead, I lay awake in a foreign bed, thinking about my life, my parents, how near or far we feel from each other. I think about my finances. I think about my career or lack-there-of. I think about how nice it might be for my parents to be able to tell their friends and neighbors that their youngest daughter has settled down, chosen a clear path, married a nice stable man. I wonder why my phone isn’t ringing as the west coast is two hours earlier and surely someone over there loves me and wants to tell me so at 8:45pm on a Monday. I wonder why no one is calling.

I try to convince myself that none of that matters. That I am okay. That I am doing just fine.

I am good at talking about my life, even, or especially the ways that I do not quite feel okay or the ways things are hard, the things I am learning. I am fueled by the details of each day – the way the sun moves through the sky, the colors of morning and evening, the way the dog follows me through the garden. These details make everything a story, everything an event. My life has been and is an adventure. I treat it that way. I approach each day that way. I lie awake under stiff covers wondering why everyone always lets me leave and why no one ever asks me to stay.

There are things we know we can’t do. I cannot live in Kansas. It is too desolate. It is too lonely and presents challenges I do not want to meet, and maybe I couldn’t even if I did want to. The world has become larger to me – it has also become a place with more fresh vegetables. I am amazed and somewhat jealous of my friends who still live here and are really very happy. I wish I knew what that felt like – to be contented, to be happy and settled, but progressing along as well. Life is just life here. It is not the grand thing of possibility I wake up in every morning – that is equally as terrifying and paralyzing as it is invigorating and joyous. I wonder what it would be like to wake up here, in Kansas, next to a partner, in a house with a dog or a cat, kitchen cupboards full of dishes, laundry machines in the basement, and move into a day that has a long-term trajectory. What does it feel like?

It is possible that I will never know. It is possible that I will keep myself from it forever – because I am scared of what it feels like. Because I am scared of this cold, barren, earth. Because I am scared I will get too restless. I have to remind myself that this is okay. That actually, I do not really believe in the single-family home. Although I am a product of the American Dream, the possibilities of a boundary-less society, I do not necessarily believe the individuality of the American Dream is a worthy goal. I am comforted that my childhood and college friends have happy Midwestern lives -- that they have careers and continued higher education, that they own or desire to own houses, that they have babies and live near their parents and families. I do not necessarily understand their happiness, but I am beside-myself glad for it. It is also possible that I assume too much, as we only see each other once a year and even then, for a very few hours. I know very little about their lives or how they feel in them, what they want or what they are striving for and dreaming about. Again, we get so little of each other.

Still, it is a difficult thing to describe a great happiness for seeing their lives and, equally, not an ounce of envy. They might say the same for me. I guess that might be a solid key to friendship -- to enjoy and be proud of one another, in all our different choices, however little we understand them, without envy or judgment.

I struggle to sleep as the winter wind whips along the siding of the house. I struggle to feel any sort of sense of place, as so many contradictory places are alive inside of me, and no one is really asking me to stay in any of them. I want to believe that home is a thing cultivated in the center of my chest. I am not there yet, as I flip through the atlas and plot a course through small towns in western states.

It is clear that this is not merely a question of life logistics: where to live, what to do, who to live with. It is a bigger question that follows me like a ghost, that I do not yet know the words to ask, how to utter or how to listen for an answer.

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