Gone

I am left waiting on the hill

shaking with knowledge of

lost connections

I am left on the pier with 

memories of the dead

their sorrow pointed toward

the horizon

Hindsight

Brutalized by

hope

and expectations

where have I been?

What I thought was a beginning

was the beginning of my

end

 

The Unravelling, Chapter One

 

Chapter One

The apartment was listed on a website for the local independent newspaper, the kind found in every college town—full of anti-establishment ire and pornographic personal ads to cover its operating costs. Normally I was too embarrassed to read anything with half-page ads for the local “adult” toy store, but after days of fruitless searching, I didn’t know where else to turn. I had run out of time.

When Ethan said he needed to talk to me a week earlier, I’d thought he was going to surprise me with a romantic trip to Hawaii. While cleaning out his coat pockets at the dry cleaners I’d found some glossy brochures from a travel agent tempting tourists with snorkel expeditions, whale watching trips, and some of the most beautiful beaches I’d ever seen. Filled with love and gratitude, I returned home to discover I’d only got it half right. Ethan meant to go to Hawaii, all right—just not with me.  

During his many nights out with his friends he had met someone new and fallen in love with her. He insisted he hadn’t meant to—he certainly hadn’t been looking—and he didn’t want to hurt me. But after fighting the truth for as long as he could, we both needed to face the facts. We were over. He and his new girlfriend, and not us, would be island hopping for the next 10 days. It would give me time to find my own place and to be out of the house before their return.

Why?

 “We’ve got nothing in common,” Ethan told me. “I always knew something was wrong, but I guess I needed to meet someone I clicked with to figure it out. Don’t get me wrong,” he added, all exaggerated kindness, “you’re a nice person. I like you. But I’m not in love with you. We’re just too different. To me life is meant to be fun and exciting—an adventure. What makes you happy…well, to be honest it bores me. I’ve found someone more like me. Now you need to find someone more like you.” 

More like me. What did that even mean?  I’d known from the start that charming, outgoing Ethan ran at a different speed than I did, but that he needed me—and, after twelve years together, I flattered myself that he did—mattered far more than whether or not we shared every single hobby in common. I never stopped him from living his life how he wanted to, and he claimed to love the fact that I wasn’t clingy. I laughed at his jokes, got along with his friends, and I cared about his life. We’d even had what I thought was a decent sex life. He, and not I, had been the one to suggest marriage; his formal proposal two years earlier had come out of the blue on my 30^th birthday, during a romantic dinner at my favorite restaurant. Even as our engagement became a long road to nowhere, I’d been happy to go with the flow and wait for him to show some interest in planning a wedding. The strange unease that crept into our relationship hadn’t put me off—I’d simply assumed it was another one of those things we would weather together, like every other couple in a committed relationship.

I should have known better. Somehow I never did.

I’d met Ethan my sophomore year of college at a house party. We’d both been a little bit at sea at the time, without any long-term plan, and we instantly bonded over our shared fear of the future. In an increasingly desperate attempt to discover what I would both like and be good at, I was taking the usual smorgasbord of classes, while Ethan confessed that he’d avoided the issue of what to major in all together. “You don’t have to worry about that until at least your junior year,” he reassured me. “The first couple of years are supposed to be about experimentation and figuring out who you are.”  His interpretation of that included skipping classes and going to parties, but I was sympathetic to his lack of focus.      

Within a month we were officially a couple. He was everything I had ever dreamt of in a boyfriend: funny, handsome, and willing to include me in his whirlwind life. Sometimes he joked I was too nice for him, but he would always add that I made him a better person. In turn I appreciated his hands-off attitude toward my life. Unlike my mother, he never hassled me or gave me advice; when I drifted into an art appreciation major, he shrugged and said that as long as I liked it, he had nothing to say about it.

My mother, on the other hand, had plenty to say about it. She insisted over and over again, even after it was too late for me to alter my course, that I’d never get a proper job with that degree. In truth I shared her fear, but the kind of degrees she advocated—business, education, even speech therapy (“There will always be people with lisps,” she’d argued)—made me feel tired and depressed.  Maybe I would never get rich in my chosen field, but as long as I didn’t have to move back home again I would consider it a win.

She shouldn’t have been so surprised by my choice. As far back as I could remember, art, or at least the pursuit of it, had been my greatest passion. In my insatiable need to recreate the world around me, I worked my way from crayons to more sophisticated media, until I settled on acrylic and oil painting. Afraid that I might become too “bookish” otherwise, my mother indulged my obsession: she drove me to city art courses, and bought me the supplies I wanted instead of the designer clothes my younger sister preferred. “It’s better than chasing after boys and taking drugs,” she told her husband. “At least it keeps her out of trouble.”

That cherished belief died a violent death on Parents’ Night my junior year of high school. Mr. Snyder, my art teacher, meant well. I’d been hugely complimented when he’d told me that I should attend art school, and I’d promised I would discuss the idea with my parents, but I had no such intention. I knew exactly what my mother would say to such a fanciful career choice, and anyway, I’d decided I wasn’t good enough. Better to remain a hobbyist than to make a fool of myself. But poor Mr. Snyder took me at my word, so when he pulled my mother aside, he had no idea that offering her some pamphlets for various art schools was akin to an act of war.

She blew home afterwards with more destructive power than Hurricane Andrew. “Why didn’t you tell me he was trying to corrupt you like this?” she raged, as if talking up art school was the equivalent of filming porn videos. “How could you even listen to him?  I know you’re naïve, but really!  He probably thinks it’s wildly romantic to die penniless and drunk in a New York alleyway!” 

It hurt to hear her vocalize all of my fears. In the end, though, I agreed with her. Just the thought of putting my work out there, into an unforgiving world full of rejection and judgment, made me sick to my stomach. When I explained this to a shell-shocked Mr. Snyder, he said I could direct my talents into something more commercially viable and thus less emotionally damaging, but I refused to be moved. Even a safer option was too terrible to contemplate.

I therefore chose what I believed to be the wiser path. At college I shunned all practical art courses, and a month after my college graduation I took a position as a secretary in the university’s English department. It was no dream job, but I assured myself it was only temporary, and trusted in the universe to lead me to where I was meant to be.

The wait for enlightenment proved a long one—so long, that I fell into a sort of torpor. It wasn’t a bad life. I worked with nice people, the pension plan was magnificent, and the hours couldn’t be beat. Once in a while I toyed with the idea of pursuing a masters so that I qualified for museum work, but I could never quite make myself take the required steps. When Rosemary, the head of the English department, said that I would make a fine office manager one day, I adopted the idea as my career goal. I wasn’t miserable, and even my mother felt I’d done okay for myself. I could live with the direction my life had taken.

And then one morning, quite without any intention on my part, everything changed.

University departmental offices offered little privacy for the obvious reason that we were there to help students and professors. That said, my situation was better than most: my desk enjoyed the twin benefits of two cubicle walls and a placement in the farthest corner of the front office, making it impossible for anyone to sneak up on me. This allowed me to spend my coffee breaks or the occasional quiet moment doodling in a sketch pad. On the rare occasion someone got wind of what I was doing and asked for a look, I would beg off and squirrel my notebook safely away in the bottom of a particularly cavernous desk drawer. At home I could paint and draw to my heart’s content, but given that I spent nine hours of the day at a job I would never love…well, it was nice to know that I could satisfy my artistic urges at least a little bit during working hours.

For seven years I got away with my clandestine art sessions. Nothing about that particular morning suggested that disaster, or miraculous intervention, awaited. I was just sitting at my desk during my coffee break, engrossed in a silly little jungle scene, when my concentration was shattered by the belligerent ravings of a particularly nasty professor shouting about the fax machine. Given that this was an almost daily occurrence, I tried to ignore it and wait for Lois, another member of the office staff, to step in. When that didn’t happen and the professor directed his rage at our poor student helper, I ran to her aid.

Ten minutes later I returned to find Rosemary paging through my sketchbook. As I went rigid with horror, she looked up at me, her eyes alight with terrifying inspiration. “I had no idea you could draw like this!” she said. “What are you doing working as a secretary?  It’s ridiculous!”

“I—what?”

“Well, I’m not letting this stand,” she declared, as if I’d actually said something intelligible. “I’m going to copy these and send them to a friend of mine who works in the publishing industry!  Nothing annoys me more than to see talent go to waste!”

Rosemary steamed off, taking my sketchpad with her.

I ran after, desperate to stop this diabolical plan, but she cheerfully ordered me out of her office. “I know what I’m doing,” she said. “Just you wait and see.”

For two days I waited, all right—for the rejection now speeding toward me like an ICBM. When the letter came, I thrust it into Ethan’s hands and watched him read it. “Well?” I squeaked out, unable to gauge his expression. “Is it awful?”

“Huh,” Ethan said, still scanning the letter. “Dude wants you to illustrate kids’ books. Interesting.”

I snatched the letter out of his hands, sure he’d misunderstood, but Ethan’s reading comprehension skills hadn’t failed him. Rosemary’s friend Jack Dexter owned a small, independent publishing company that was growing by leaps and bounds, and his need for illustrators was never-ending. In my sketches he saw a pool of untapped talent. Would I be willing to take on the occasional project for his fledgling children’s division? 

After a sleepless night in which I considered all the ways this could go wrong, I called Jack and accepted his offer. Two weeks later I received my first package in the mail—a counting book for preschoolers. I was absolutely terrified of failure, and the learning curve was steep, yet when I finished that project and it was accepted, I knew I’d found my home. Not only did I enjoy the work, but my ego was also far less engaged that I’d expected. Whether this was because Jack was a good teacher, or I considered myself a hired contractor rather than a bona fide artist, I don’t know. Whatever the case, I had finally stumbled into a career I could love.  

 “It’s all good and fine as a side line,” my mother sniffed, “as long as you don’t lose your mind and quit your real job for it.”  She needn’t have worried; I wasn’t that stupid. Although Jack promised that eventually he’d have enough work for me to go full time, until that beautiful day came I was perfectly content to keep my day job and confine illustrating to my off hours. Ethan was thrilled when the extra money I earned allowed him to buy the used Audi he couldn’t afford on his lab job. “It’s nice that you’re getting to do what you actually like,” he said, a little wistfully. “It will be great when you don’t have to be a secretary anymore.”

I didn’t allow myself to hope for what felt like an impossible dream. Yet after two years of juggling my full-time secretarial position with an ever-increasing number of illustrating offers, that dream became a reality. At Rosemary’s urging—“You found what you were born to do, so you’d better do it”—I left my safe university life and became a self-employed illustrator. My mother was predictably horrified (“Think of your pension, darling, and that lovely health insurance policy!”) but my accountant assured me I would be fine, as long as the work kept coming in.

I almost couldn’t believe it. To be a paid artist, working from home with my dog Daisy at my feet…well, I felt like the luckiest person alive.

I now wonder if in my euphoria I missed the warning signs that Ethan’s enthusiasm for my career change had begun to wane. Or maybe I just hadn’t wanted to see them, because I was so happy. But the day I got nominated for an industry award, and he only grunted his congratulations, I could no longer deny that something was wrong. His unwillingness to talk about my new projects made it clear he now resented the direction my life had taken. For the first time I questioned if I’d done the right thing. Being an illustrator wasn’t worth losing my relationship over.

“Don’t be an idiot,” my sister Christine told me. “Of course you did the right thing. He’s just shitting on your success because he feels like a loser. Which he is,” she added, not that I agreed. He was just stuck, how I’d been a few years earlier. With no defined career goals, and no prospects for advancement at his lab, he must have felt lost in space. I suggested he get his Ph.D., or at least a masters, but he wasn’t interested. “I’m too old for that,” he said. “It’s not going to happen.”  When I argued that all sorts of people went to grad school in their 30s, he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to hear anything, at least not from me.

That left me no choice but to leave him alone and allow him the time he needed to work through his depression. I assumed it was just a temporary thing. I never thought I would lose him over it.

But I had. Not because he felt like a loser, but because I was so unbelievably dull he couldn’t imagine a lifetime with me after all. It took three days of increasingly fraught phone calls with Christine for me to believe a 21-year-old student named Suzy had just ushered in my own personal Apocalypse.  Ethan was gone—and the house I’d lived in for the last eight years, no longer my home.

From my new release The Unravelling, now available on Kindle! Click on the following link for details: The Unravelling

Journeys

No one is going there with you

the grey lady ghost

hijacked memories on

the side of the road 

and the girl in the rear view mirror

the last truth you never wanted

to know

Another Beginning

Chicago/February, 1980

What do I remember about that day? 

Julia crying in the kitchen. Alex hiding upstairs.

A tall, dark-haired man in Julia’s living room. Telling me, I’m your brother. You’re going to live with me now.

My own terror.

But when he smiled and held out his hand, all I knew was love.

 

 

Time

This slippery skin

her fingers slide off it

a doomed grip on the moment

screams into forever

its gorge yawning time

again and again and

again

The Empty Grave

You were gone
Not like you never were
but as if you were meant to 
be a part of

everything