misplaced mama

True Self.

Please tell me what that means. Why do we talk about finding ourselves? I find coins on the ground, or a cool pair of shoes at the thrift, or my kid under the cedar tree, playing hide and seek with me. But myself? All this talk, these words and what does it mean? Finding? Stumbling upon it and keeping it? True Self? Lost and found? I am beginning to hate all these words, the ones that have no meaning anymore, blurred lines and squiggles that spell out Paradox. Tell me. Please, what does it mean to be true, to live in truth? When my words can bruise down to the bone? Or when they shot up veins with ecstasy? Either or? Neither?

Truth? Un- lie.

What about living a lie?

Un-truth.

So are they just opposites?

Depends. Sort of but not really.

Depends? Sorta? I beg you. I can barely wrap my head around waking up tomorrow and making that same bowl of oatmeal, washing those same pissed on shits and dragging myself for the same walk down the same road. Writing the same old shit. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I am. Clearly, I am an ungrateful questioning bitch.

Esoterica: be gone. The reality just flickers and fades. There must be some absolutes, somewhere, no? Questions to god that can reveal behind the masks? I usually leave god alone, allowing her to live in a nice little comfort zone, uninterrupted by my tantrums and whines. I tend to just sing and stretch and laugh and love to god, basking in thankful sunlight of the soul. Until I live travel to the chthinic , the flip side, the inside. I start being really awful to god, abusing god. Not feeding or watering god, not putting god to bed at a decent time, or exercising god. Not celebrating god. And so then, like now, I have to step and get out of the way of my own right hook and say: Here I am. [it’s better than the urge I am fighting; stealing the neighbors horse and the hunter’s bow and arrow and taking an unofficial sabbatical from mothering to go on a vampire hunt]

You know. I’ve waited long enough. Haven’t I? Hello? Haven’t I? Okay. Fine. Patience isn’t my virtue. Really. But I’m done, totally, completely. When say I’m done. I’m done. This chapter looks to be just. about. over. My feet are sore. My right hip has totally given out on me and when I walk it sticks and cracks. I wince in pain. My belly has never jiggled quite this much. My shoulders live at my ears. My hair is dark and natty with miles of history. I stand here in front of you, begging you for some company, because all I have are 10,000 questions. My Self. Finding it. Honestly. With all my mortality and fragility: I am here; unzipped. Unbuttoned. Unwrapped. Nothing neat about it. Who am I now if I’m not what I had been before? How do I live with this, the unmasked? How do I die?

Silence.

You’re fucking kidding me, right? A hand to hold? A chaperon as I walk this path, holding together taped up sheet of constructions paper with letters that say: destruction and creation! Enjoy! A red and white blinking sign: CRACK UP? A hotel room and a full bottle and stick with a sack tied at the end leaning against the wall? Anything. Your god for god’s sake! Aren’t you listening? Snap out of the silent teachings and scream it in my ear! Coward!

Silence.

I howl like a hungry wolf.

I press my feet in the ground.

I get up and suck down a beer. Watch an episode of Californication on the computer, which has approximately 10 sex scenes in one half hour, including a drug induced doggy-style and naughty-girl’s punishment and spankings. I try to seduce my husband into waking up. These days my abilities in seduction are pathetically lazy. He snores louder and drools me another puddle to wash out of the pillow the net day. I roll tobacco and sage and sit by an open window and smoke to the sky. Lifting my hand north and exhaling the cloud of spirit outward, an offering. For a moment, I loose it. I can’t sit inside my body anymore. The discomfort is itchy and heavy, an ache in my belly, a pain in my shoulder blade. I cry and shake and think I am way too close to death and all I need is a midwife to hold me as I cross over. I am angry because I am alone and god isn’t good company.

Glowering. My brows move towards the other under-plucked partner, my forehead pulls into wrinkles and a bulging vein, just one, sculpted in blues and purples adorns across like a river in high season. If it were letters instead of pulsing blood under flesh, it would say this: Scalding. Solar Plexus concaves. Cannibalistic hunger; on the verge of growing hair and claws and running straight for the thick, thick forest behind my house. Yet my third eye opens, begging for some kind of useful matter to pour in. Come one, come on in, please. No matter how much I hate you god, I am still you. I know you are there. I see you. Be with me. For a moment. I melt.

Finally.

It depends on how you define truth or a lie, I guess. It depends on what you think Self is. I can’t believe I am going over all this with you. Again. Get over it. Get. Over. It. Give in. Who cares.

But you just told me that truth meant something that is not lie and lie meant something that is not a truth.

No, I didn’t. It’s dangerous to look through the words. Your a better listener than that, aren’t you? I said a lie is an un-truth and a truth is an un-lie.

I would have swore you said…

Are you arguing with me?

Yes.

Good. We’re getting somewhere. CACKLE, CAW, CAW, SWOOP DOWN AND IN MY FACE mimicking: . Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Stupid girl! You are you. Now forget it! Maniacal laughter that only god can play so perfectly.

Bitch! WITCH! Let’s all stop beating on each other, shall we? For us? Please. Each moment I’m challenged in authenticity. I am writing here and how do I write with truth? I don’t live in it, the paradox, and I can’t write it. Can I?

Even better. You’re getting closer. Definitions in books make no sense to you. Your brain is too slow to remember just a word and a meaning. I always told you that you were borderline learning disabled.

That’s so mean. Do you like it better when we’re mean?

No, you do. Anyway, try and listen:

A distraught man approached the Zen master. "Please, Master, I feel lost, desperate. I don’t know who I am. Please, show me my true self!" But the teacher just looked away without responding. The man began to plead and beg, but still the master gave no reply. Finally giving up in frustration, the man turned to leave. At that moment the master called out to him by name. "Yes!" the man said as he spun back around. "There it is!" exclaimed the master.

There what is? His true self? In that moment when he gave up? And that is his true self? How trite.

Chew on this one then, What was your face before your mother and father were born?

Huh? Stop talking in fucking Zen Koans. And if you might as well address duality, the us and them, the me and you, the tree and the sky, the mother and the daughter.

That’s easy. Roshi said, ‘The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there’ Instead of wondering about the truth, tell me this, What color is the wind?

It must be the same color as my daughters breath, which warmed the side of my face while I passed out cold. For an hour.

***

I woke up drooling on my notebook, my spit smeared some blue ink. My pen inches from my uncurled hand and touching the baby’s face. The girls stolen night light was laying down across the pillow.

What stupid shit. Really.

What I write here. Unlies? Untruths? But, you can see through me, quite sure of that, I’m not brave nor witty, my craft lacks and my stories grasp for air, strangled by my own ego. Don’t think I would ever bare the wounds that have been sizzled into my flesh, branded with smoking hot pain, nameless and sourceless, useless and petty. I don’t share the love either; for the most part, I haven’t figured out how to love so I can’t write about it. Instead I write what I wish it could be and so it’s not the truth but it’s not a lie. I write about the possibility of becoming my words; or forgetting all of them. If by chance you are sure you have found me in moments of my honesty, when I have revealed all the stuff, from poison to passion, if I have risked it all for you, given you the key to the darkest matter, that means I truly love you.

***

I look at the paper. Scribbled under the hue of a light green glow, under the influence of helplessness humanness. My handwriting is close illlegible.

But does anyone really have any inkling who they are besides my mother-in-law who once said to me:

I don’t need any of these self-help books or classes or teachers on finding my voice business. I already know it. I pretty much am pretty sure of myself, if anyone knows themselves it’s me.

And the bullshit and fear seeped through her clenched jaw and smirk. How can anyone claim to have an answer? She didn’t know herself, her truth, otherwise why did she have to tell me she did? Say you know anything and you know nothing. If I write about something I hate, it’s because I am saturated in fear. If I write about love, it’s because I am suffocated with hate. If I write about the high on the full moon, it’s because I am petrified for when the moon fades into nothing, black, and what could I loose along with it’s light?

But I know better.

So I figured all this time, anybody reading this space, for the past two and a half years, would know Misplaced Mama wasn’t just about wanting to leave Arizona. It has little to do with finding this home, a place where walls and a throw rug and a painting on the wall are all owned by me, where the mountains grow around me and the ocean throws her salt just over the hump to my west and makes my hair dry and curly all in the same. It has little to do with this speck of the valley I call home, a home I speak little of while I figure out how much I should protect it’s smallness, tininess, it’s 200 person-ness. It’s gorgeousness and perfection, I somehow just don’t want to share. Perhaps because it’s not really mine and I am just in awe of it all and for now it’s locked safely in my children’s smile. But now that I am found, here, among more eye- popping, fantasy-like, tear triggering beauty, more than my heart even knows how to process, I have never been more lost. Never so lost. And this is good. Indeed, so good for me. I savor it, every last juicy bit of the untruth and the unlies and the glossy flash of life I form in between.

What else can I do?