Back when I was special, I believed in Hell.

These days, when the Nothing is being tossed into the center of a Chicago barroom table between half cans of cider at closing time, I hope that I’m not.  This is where the fear sets in.  With no Hell, no Heaven, no reincarnation– with only the Nothing to drift silently or screaming into, floating around while our matter decays and our consciousness flits one last second before it’s gone, I think I’m going to vomit.  The panic lurks somewhere on the back of my ears and reaches down to give the bottom of my heart a tremendous wedgie before sending the shakes to my sweating palms.  Somehow, to my Windy City friends that night, the Nothing calmed their heaven-or-hell jitters, consoled their long-time-guilt-ridden-religious selves to a place they could believe again in a benevolent God.

Maybe I’m not enlightened enough, yet.  Maybe I’m not certain of the terms.  Maybe I’m confused as to where the love we create here goes, or how the Nothing could possibly fit it all.  Mostly, I’m worried that I’m special, and like the one in a trillion that anesthesia doesn’t take for, I would be the one conscious soul floating in the nothing, fully aware, fully alone, fully missing out on my Nirvana or zen or whatever it is, panicking eternally at the gaping loneliness that sits forever in front and behind me.

Maybe I just tipped the Devil off as to how to create my version of Hell.

And this is where I run into the trouble of believing I might be special.  That even the Devil himself thinks enough of me to make me my own, insular Lake of Fire.  Which, sometimes, sounds better than a big God who thinks only enough of you to let you into his house, but then you will spend forever meditating or prostrate or glowing with hundreds or thousands or millions (depending on the exclusivity clause in your religious contract) while you turn into the Faceless who sing always in key and never have to work out a crossword puzzle again since all of our questions will be answered and all our sicknesses will be gone and all our hardships that make us different and special will be forgotten.  The trouble I run into with Heaven is that it feels an awful lot like the Nothing.  And somehow, between times I am dodging lightning bolts from the sky, I want Heaven to be more.

I remember this tidbit of embarrassment well: a 15-year-old with sweaty armpits and outrageous hormones holding court on the church gym floor, crying about the possibility of Heaven.  Sure, I wanted to be saved.  Sure, I loved to sing.  But choir practice?  For forever?  What would we do with the time?  The forever time?  It was time to go home, and I was causing a scene.  A well meaning and patient deacon simply took a knee next to me and spoke as if the answer was right on my face all along.  “As soon as you get to Heaven,” he said, “God will wipe your brain so clean, you won’t even realize the time is passing.”

Of course!  A celestial lobotomy!  All of my crying and carrying on, my questioning and my disruption will be eliminated upon entry.  I will be the Jack Nicholson of Heaven’s Ward, pattering and mumbling and drooling about while the rest of the cuckoo’s nest rested safely together worshiping the holy throne.

And then I become afraid that I am the one in a trillion for whom the anesthesia won’t take.

Today I am not feeling the tug of the Nothing, the lurch and the panic and living a full life only to be spit into an endless black curtain of phlegm-y zen.  Neither do I feel special as Satan fluffs my pillow of nails.  Today, I just have to believe that I am loved, even if all signs are pointing that I am not.  Even if the sunshine is too bright to my dull boxed wine headache, and the perfectly temperate weather seems more like an insistence that I don’t deserve it.  Even if nothing is clicking between me and my Someone, even if my dog keeps barking and scaring the shit out of everyone who walks this sidewalk, even if I am homesick for a place I’ve never been, even if the home I do have has a bent axle and an attitude problem, today I have to believe that there is a God and he/she/it loves me.  And I have to believe it here, on this side of Heaven or Hell or the Nothing, not because I am afraid of my limited options.  And I am too tired of the theological and post-life-placement-plan contingencies of love to think any more about them.

Heaven and Hell and the Nothing have eternity to wait for my arrival.  Now, I think, I choose to be loved right here.

I had the dream again: the one where I meet my ex-in-laws again by some form of tragic accident– a flood, the apocalypse, earthquakes.  And we sit down to discuss the matter of me being not forgiven before the potential end of society.  Through a few indistinct words and mutterings, my ex-mother-in-law dutifully concedes to not hating me forever, and I am taken into a warm embrace by my father-in-law, who is now about a foot taller than I remember, and I cry and say I wish we had all been friends all along.  This is the way in which my brain has been telling me that I am tired of enemies.  This is the way my brain is telling me to take heart and to learn something.  This, and the birds.

Like a purebred hipster, I have been noting the rotation of birds as I touch my feet from one ocean to another in these months with the pinprick of an idea to commemorate them in tattoo form.  This week, it’s orioles– the contrast of their bright mark to their otherwise ominous tiny crow exterior.  A few weeks ago, bluebirds.  Magpies consumed nearly an entire season last year (and maybe still do).

My father had a blue heron as far back as I can remember.  Early in the morning, I would catch him walking around the pond he had dug himself at our cabin in the Allegheny Mountains.  Swaggering slowly, he would stop, turn his eyes, and stare still and struck at the tallest dying oak that contained the heron’s perch.  The heron, responsive to my father’s courtesy, would arch its neck and showily circle into a dive in front of him into the water, gliding out with an imperceptible wink into the woods.  Occasionally, the bird would show itself as we sat watching from up the hill.  My father, the ringmaster of this prehistoric looking bird, would hush the crowds and speak only in whisper, narrating with the earnest anticipation of an Olympic games commentator pre-winning jump.  The concentration nearly ripped my guts in half before the heron, deeming the situation proper, would take its dive.  We would delight in its descent and applaud its catch, and then I would happily move on to trying to coax a baby deer into being my pet.  But for a minute, my father’s bird taught me silence.

To my father’s regal blue heron, I got myself a fluffy brown bird.

My porch wren came back the day I cancelled my marriage subscription.  Her round, crouched body faced beak to the corner while her soft feathers fluffed into a mousy fur ball.  We had met the previous summer, when her first appearance got me up on a chair to take a closer look.  I named her Bird, and she named the ledge on my inner porch column her own through the summer until late in the fall.  She occasionally brought home a friend, a nearly identical wren who slept on the opposite column of my Craftsman house and erupted in a drunken flap when the front door would slam.  I named her Birdie, Bird’s louse-of-a-friend who was often kicked out of her parents’ apartment due to her taking to the bottle too often.  Bird was generous to Birdie’s crashing, and would occasionally scoot herself so they could share the same corner.  Heads together, tail feathers out.  How Bird could stand the boozey musk of Birdie all night was a mystery of loyalty.

My sleep had been dwindling by this time to nearly four hours a night, so I began leaving the porch light on to monitor my new roommates.  Bird was always responsibly in by 10PM and gone by 3AM– I assumed to get the worm.  Birdie’s sporadic visits generally began around midnight, but would dutifully leave when Bird did, hungover and begrudging.

When Bird didn’t return the following summer, I was convinced that she knew– with the yelling and the slamming and the long nights of pacing, it would be nearly impossible for a bird to get a good night’s sleep at that residence, anyway.  I grieved my tiny companion’s absence, as I grieved being left alone by anyone in that house, as not even a set of Venetian blinds could cover up the crumbling mess inside.  Then, after the pen strokes were completed on the papers, a mound of cigarettes still smoldering and two empty glasses on the front porch table, she came back.  She left, again, the day before I did a couple of weeks later.  My humble fluff taught me the value of knowing when to leave, however gracelessly.

My friend Kelsey once old me that when an elephant falls down, she can’t pick herself up.  It takes the entire herd to turn and surround her to lift her to her feet.  Kelsey moved back to Michigan shortly after, as I nestled myself in the Blue Ridge Mountains to sort out my early 20’s.  That was when my mailbox took to filling with elephants, return address marked by the mitten state.  You have a herd, she was hollering at me through the U.S. Postal Service.  You have a herd, you have a herd, you have a herd…  

And sometimes, I am finding, the herd is a bird.

I miss their squishy half dinosaur faces, bellies pulled taut and cherub-like, always with outties instead of innies.  I miss their pointed gargoyle beaks, or their wide, silly, sharp-toothed smiles.  I miss the twinkling mischief and their phony fingernails, and the way they accidentally set off sparks as they skidded out the doorstep into the cover of darkness.  I miss the fearful hide-and-seek of their glowing eyes between fan blades on long winter nights, or their shadow cast creatures more ominous than themselves streaking across car lit walls.

I miss the demons.

For being the goodliest of all the goodly Christian girls there ever was, I had a curious tendency to tamper with the wrong side.  It was early on by accident– like purchasing a pretty pendant from Claire’s alongside more Hanson paraphernalia, finding out through the horrified gasp of my parents that I had, in fact, acquired a pentagram (and more Hanson paraphernalia), of which long talks and informative videos on Satanism and Wicca ensued (as well as a calm bargaining for just a few of the boy band posters to be removed).  But the tick in my fiery imagination had been tocked, and the funny creatures started to seek me out, instead.

Some will tell you that this is precisely how the Devil works, and, affirmatively so, I was terrified.  They would creep in the back yard just as the train rolled through, before bedtime was called on early fall nights.  This particular night, I didn’t wait for the call.  I rushed into the kitchen tearful and wallowing how the demons had flashed a light before my eyes, and when I turned around, the beautiful flowers leftover from summer had been instantaneously smothered to brown crisps.  In seconds.  I could still hear them crackling in death and defeat.  If they could do this to an entire garden of flowers, how much more could they do this to me?  My parents, patient and soothing, assured me the flowers were long dead before this (my mother does not pride herself on a green thumb), all while exchanging questioning and disturbed glances to each other.  I found no consolation.

The fear grew bigger than perennials, and slithered up dark sanctuary stairs until it culminated into a minor hysteria among my ragtag group of church friends, authored nearly entirely myself, but empowered with an eager audience.  We spotted them after youth group hours while we waited outside on the small city’s church steps, at the bottom of swimming pools, in the backs of cars.  These insidious creatures knew no bounds, and we were on the front lines of scouting them, with little game plan for their extermination.  We were Ghostbusters with Bibles and only the canisters of our fearful little hearts to hold these detestably anti-Jesus monsters.

The night that my particularly persistent demon fella gazed unblinking from my ceiling fan, I had enough.  I had warned my co-devil-catchers that there would come a time when they would do more than just scare us– that they would try to take us down.  And I was curled to the corner of my bed, preparing that my prophecy may start with me.

I made a break for it.

I pounded down the stairs and around the corner at the midnight hour and cried at my parents’ bedroom door.  And there, I told on him.  I told on the demon to my mom and dad.  Jesus Christ would have done the same.  In fact, I think he kind of did.

Dad walked me back up the stairs, voice low and strangely understanding.  Even in the height of my panic attack, I still anticipated a stern talking to and a negotiation that would end with, Now go back to bed!  But it wasn’t that at all.  My father, needing to be awake in 4 hours for another 15 hour work day, glided over to where I slept and sat attentive at the end of the bed.  I sat next to him.  And then, he pointed at the possessed ceiling fan.

“There?” he asked, pointing at exactly the spot that had previously housed the glowing red eyes of my enemy.

“Yes,” I said, amazed at his certainty and precision.

And then my father, who grew up in the same house, proceeded to tell me about the demons who lived there, how they haunted him when he was my age, and how he knew where they slept and where they watched us from.  He told me how they would keep him awake at night, but how they had never been able to escape to touch a hair in his nose.  We followed it up with something super Biblical, and I weighed in a nervous prayer in a shaky voice to his confident soldierly one.

My father is the master of getting children back into their beds.  But maybe, he believed me.  And that’s enough to get this kid to daylight without peeing herself.

Those little shits kept popping up all the way through my teen years, through high school, through early college until… they stopped.  And now, I miss them.  It’s not so much the intense paralysis that overtakes my intestinal tract and the sudden feeling of having a bat lodged in my throat, flapping its way through my bloodstream, as it is that these creatures are meant to scare me.  It’s their job.  And they animate and grow big ears and pop into comic books and Neil Gaiman novels.

What I am afraid of now is not their tiny, mutilated faces, but the bearded face of a man 14 years my senior who took advantage of me as a fifteen year old.  And the smooth face of an angry ex-husband who won’t love me.  And the faceless push of time who tells me I am nearing ever closer to the end with nothing to show.  And masses of faces who are killing each other on TV.  And car accidents.  And syringes.  And a world without super heroes.

And with a list like that, I wish more than anything to have those little underworld buggers back again.

“I don’t know what it is,” she told me, “but I just feel so damned rich when I have a package full of dates in my pantry.  That, and a rack full of wine.”  Sherry had been teaching me how to be rich for months, toting clementines and apples, blending dates with lemon juice and cinnamon and leaving these feasts on the table as we worked.  And she rarely put them away until the containers were empty.  Being the newest employee at our little vegan kitchen, I was hesitant to partake.  I didn’t want to seem grabby.  I didn’t want to offend.  Or maybe I didn’t want to share my own stash.  I was still learning how to claim what was mine, and I was busting my bank to keep the giant refrigerator at home stocked.  That was how I was rich.  Endless options for endless meal possibilities.  And it was breaking me.

I don’t believe in my parents’ God, anymore.  We split a while back on issues of loving your neighbor, although I’m sure that’s always the issue that separates someone from their respective God.  I’m pretty sure that makes my parents richer, because this particular strain of deity is one who thrives on exclusion.  He is what gives them permission to do good deeds for people in Haiti and for children in their church.  They have been storing their riches in Heaven for years, which means that they can’t bask in their golden ponds until after they die.  I like this spiritual squirreling away– intangibly hiding each charitable donation in the nook of a tree just beyond the clouds for the Later.  I worry that their unwavering silent standoff with their son and daughter-in-law will demerit their strong sycamore storage down to a thin birch’s cranny.  It’s too much for me to wonder which deed will win me a bigger crown, and which will potentially send me packing, ragged and homeless, to the pits of Hell.  I keep a safe distance from knowing my eternal destiny, and maybe it makes my parents richer.

Instead, I trail myself around the regions of God that the damned and confused seem to also be, concocting possibilities that may be a solution to poverty and eternal damnation.  I am testing theories over campfires or in Walmart parking lots at night with my Someone, trying to crack the firmament that is encapsulating a place where everyone can live after we die and be rich.  And choose to be rich.

Maybe when we are born, for a split second, everyone sees life and finds the one thing that makes them most curious, and they have to try and resist it as long as they can, because as soon as they learn it, they die.  Curiosity killing cats and stuff.  It could be anything– candlemaking, or the name of the fourth Beatle, or who their true birth mother is.  This way, always, we have a small idea in each of our brains that we will one day be wealthy– that our final itch is still unscratched, and when we scratch it, we can be content with all we’ve been given.  Which may explain why so many of us are afraid to learn something new.  It could be the death of us.

My friend Bryan and his love recently became rich with a decision from the Supreme Court.  I celebrate with them, because it makes them richer, which makes me richer.  But it seems to make much of the Republican party feel poorer.

Maybe it is like this: that all this time that we have been supposed to store our riches in Heaven, God has been storing them in us. S/he places tiny bits of what s/he wants to remember in our brains.  As we forget those things, someone else remembers them for us.  For every death there is a birth, a new memory keeper, a new storehouse of riches.  So many of us have to remember that the sky is blue, because the sky is so big, and God needs as much memory for that as possible so as to keep it from crashing down on us.  And these sort of things make us rich together… if we take the time to share them.

I still keep our refrigerator stocked full, but I shrank the vessel to 1/5th its original size.  This has made me exceedingly wealthy, particularly as people enter our little camper and are greeted with a home.  The day that Sherry traded me a bag full of dates for a Yonanas blender I was hoarding, and now needing to get rid of as I made the transition from house to full-time camper, I became rich, too.  Sherry’s rich was not abundance, it was in the belief that there is enough for everyone.  I keep our pantry stocked with dates, now.  Because they make Sherry rich.  Which makes everyone rich.

The age of these mountains does not astound me.  I am not impressed this morning by the looming darkness of the Black Hills of South Dakota, as I perform a stare down of the pokiest one across the reservoir.  The years or centuries they have seen does not shake my yoga pants off.  Their long secrets don’t make me sit back in wonder, gaping small and open and synchronized with the presence of presence.

This is how I am still so young.

Mountains don’t make me ask their age because it isn’t a surprise– most things I know are older than I am.  Also, it’s impolite to ask.  And I don’t seek out their age, because I wouldn’t know how to hear their answer.  I can only count to 29 at this juncture.  In a few more months, my ability to measure will only be at a measly 30.  And I can climb only in these small increments year after year.  Even my longest day brings me only to the end of one day.  30 minus x plus another day.  It’s the best I can do.

The black fly on this boulder that partially blocks my view of my face-off mountain each time I downward dog– that life I can’t get over.  If I remember science class, this little vomit machine is my age minus my age plus a day.  And he will be gone before I close my eyes tonight.  If not by the speed of aging, then by a frog’s tongue or by a flyswatter built just to do the deed or by a windshield of a speedboat below.

This is how I am becoming so old.

Black flies don’t make me ask their age because they can’t spare the second.  We stare at each other in a panic of time climbing on itself and curling up and flying away.

And then there is me, caught in a rack focus between black flies and mountains, pushed by a fear of death and rattlesnakes, and pulled by a love of love and cute snails and dirty gin martinis.  Here, the black flies are making me feel so small and the mountains make me only bigger.

My mother just told me she’s getting chickens put in her knees.  This has evidently happened before, and will likely be an annual event until they run out of chickens, or she finds something that feels better.  Like tofu crumbles.  This inspiring occasion has provided me with an hour’s worth of chicken jokes that I have the humility, even if not the tact, to omit here.

But this occurrence is just pecking the surface of my lately.  As my Someone turns thirty and I tag along ten months behind, each of our friends discovering the importance of buying houses and pursuing careers and adopting dogs, then finding dog walkers they can afford with their steady careers for those neglected dogs with the arrival of children, those moments I’ve been waiting for since age 5 are happening.  Regularly.  It is the way in which I am counting my grown-upness.  Now, it is how I choose the word grown-up over adult for the sake of keeping the inner child alive.  As if every day I am dusting off her tiny porcelain face, soon to be placed on the mantle and spoken as someone dead and gone, instead of the living creature  inside me who still cries every time her head gets bumped.  Or how I use the word lately with sighs and groans to accompany the fact that, any further back in the timeline, and I will get my memories mixed up due to my suspicion of early onset Alzheimer’s.

Yesterday, I counted my grown-upness in tomatoes, putting them to my nose to inspect dutifully, just like my mother did.  And for once, not for the show of being a superior tomato-picker-outer, but rather in the humblest attempt to pick the best one for the most delicious sandwich.  This was in tandem with counting out only one onion, because even in spite of a sale, we would have room only for one.  These are grown-up decisions.

Two months ago, I dove head first from grown-upness as we moved into a little camper, selling what does and doesn’t matter in exchange for a tiny taste of freedom, only to be set squarely in the responsible decision of doing the living.  I eat foods from farmers and trees.  I concern myself with the rights of others.  I make metaphors for families, and throw my hands up in a grown-up exasperated sort of way at the state of the world we live in, and I read books from top selling lists.  I forget all of my passwords.  I am finally afraid of dying.  I decide when I sleep and when I eat, and I think less about what it means to be a grown up, and more about what it is to be a human.

Maybe having rooster combs in my bones is the way in which I will count my more grown-upness.  Maybe it is next the fight against the aging.  Or maybe this business of growing up is remembering that we do not grow out of ourselves like discarded clothes, but grow up, maintaining each of our ages like the rings in a tree.

Now, my center ring is oldest but most sensitive– a newborn’s perspective to my changing environment.  Everything terrifying and wonderful.  Every word simultaneously holy and plain chicken scratch.

What is it that they are all doing over there?

I read recently from a famous author quoting another famous author who said that the hardest part about death is the first night.  I picture myself in a grave or turning to ashes or having those ashes loaded into a firecracker and shot up into the sky to be scattered at the finale of my funeral.  Maybe the funeral is the easiest part– when your friends and family and people who you forgot loved you gather into one room and wish they had more time.  Maybe the spirit or the soul or the presence of the dead lingers, abiding by each cultural norm, waiting in the aisles and the walls for the priest to call the final Rest in Peace– the metaphorical shotgun blast that can send them racing, finally, to the next place.  Or to the Nothing.

But then, what is it that they are all doing?  The dead, that is.  With all of the science and history and tarot cards and religion we’ve acquired to this point, how is it that we have no idea what’s going on over there?  How is it that their whereabouts and goings ons are wrapped up in the same sleeping bear mysteries such as what day did Earth begin and where is Amelia Earhart and what the hell is a 401K?  And how, with all their suspected suspension from time, have they not thought to send a nice card or phone call or telepathic message?  What is it that they are doing after the dying is done and the mystery is gone?  Do they spend their timeless days bettering their deadness?  Do they worry that they are not getting everything out of death as we worry whether or not we are truly living?  Do all of my dead know each other, now, and meet at boutique bars where they discuss the benefits of consuming raw worm heads compared to the glistening, manufactured sparkling star juice that’s so popular right now?

I had a belly full of waffles and a head full of pop songs as we drove to Scottsboro, Alabama last Saturday morning.  We didn’t say much about Uncle Bob and Aunt Joanne as we catered bottled water and homemade candies to my 2-year-old niece and 5-year-old nephew.  I didn’t ask many questions about the car accident that took their lives four days earlier, or really want many answers to the questions I did ask.  I wanted, more than anything, to believe this was all on purpose.  That two people who loved each other more than anything, who realized they were aging faster than living, who were well into their 80’s, decided that they couldn’t take the thought of being without the other.  I wanted to believe they made themselves an unspoken pact at that tree, and let the car crumble so their hearts wouldn’t have to.

When we visited them late last summer, Uncle Bob toured me through the family history and the steel industry as we sat, gnawing on black licorice and letting the thick smell of cigarettes saturate our clothes like it saturated the carpet, his pack of Freedoms resting beside his easy chair.  There, he introduced me to their wall of death.  Their parents, their children, their spouses, all gone and able to watch from photographs as Bob and Joanne watched their television.  It is far easier to believe in secret death pacts than to imagine one or the other of them adding a picture of their beloved to that wall.

We sat in the last row marked for family, behind the many unfamiliar faces of our family.  I had practiced in my head how I might introduce myself, “Hello, I am Uncle Bob’s great niece.  Jim’s youngest granddaughter.”  But all my practicing was foiled by mild blubbers and mumbles as I watched Joanne and Uncle Bob sleep endlessly, her fingers still bruised, his silver pocket watch wound and ticking by his head.

I fidgeted while one souped up Alabama theological doctorate dressed as their consoling pastor prattled off three fun facts about each of them before spending the next 25 minutes converting a grieving captive audience.  I imagined him prepping for the service, strategizing his move to the weeping jugular of collected souls.  I imagined even Jesus Christ being able to put aside his impossible agenda for a day to celebrate two lives instead of his cross.  Then I imagined Jesus Christ picking up his cross and walking out, shaking his head, and maybe whapping the young Christian buck on the back of the head as he turned around.

Later that night, I imagined Bob and Joanne in the grave.  What is it they were doing down there?  Tapping out secret messages?  Waiting for the other to collect their things so they could leave?  Were they open and afraid, minds washed blank, waiting on the waiting…

But this is how we live with the dead.  We stand in the confusion of a missing person.  We walk to these open caskets and we wait for a response.  My niece, Saffron, says hello.  She wonders why they are sleeping in a full room.  Then, as she is carried away, she waves her hand over her mother’s shoulder and whispers, “Bye-bye!”  She played in the pew while I fidget three people down.  And then, when the preacher has quit preaching and everyone stands, she looks alarmed.  “Where is Uncle Bob?  Where is Uncle Bob?  Where is Uncle Bob?”

This morning, I miss every book I’ve ever read, every scrap of paper I ever drew on, every toy I’ve ever and never owned.  This morning, I find myself in the wake of the meanest letter I’ve ever written, but didn’t send.  A twenty-nine year accumulation of grievances stored up into one poignant document, written in the riddled poetry of liquid anger.

I don’t miss my home.  I don’t miss my family.  I miss the part of this movie when estranged bloodlines find their way back to an unfamiliar place of forgiveness and do-overs.  I don’t miss the holiday gatherings, but I do miss all the laughter and running jokes that weren’t at anyone’s expense that never happened.  I miss when Scrooge turns for good on Christmas morning.  I miss when the dead no longer speak.

I miss when the dead spoke only to me.

This morning, I miss this time as it is passing.  I miss my Someone while he sleeps.  I will miss our waking time, too, because it moves quickly through our days and may one day end up in a letter, 29 years from now, that will accumulate every undocumented moment that has made me who I am then.  I miss that woman, too, waiting for me in that time to catch up.

I hope this is not the dead speaking.  I want the chance to miss a thousand more books before then.

This is the sixth day of the coldest part of winter in Nashville, and we have no home.  Our landlady says it will be any day now that she will make good on her promise to fix the heater that went out a week ago, but each day we are told one more day still.  Who can account for an ice storm in the south?  Who can predict a city transformed to abandoned cars and wandering zombie hipsters post apocalypticly scattered on every street?

A northerner, dumbasses.

Now we find ourselves huddled under the charitable roof of people who love us while the trees outside bend their tallest branches down in a seeming effort to replant somewhere warmer– like the molten lava we hope is in the center of it all.  A particularly malicious limb has already fallen and impaled the back window of one car, and every crack and rattle outside the tightly sealed front door takes us to the window to ensure another vehicle hasn’t succumbed to a similar end.  We are pacing longer strides as the days stretch, wild as circus tigers, waiting for our proper moment to turn on the ones who are caring for our misplacement.  Here, we are warm, the dog is fed and has friends, we can watch all the Netflix we want, we are fed and have friends… and we just want to go home.

I am the most ungrateful of beggars.

Being tucked away in a haven with enough elbow room for everyone, enough goodwill to go around the city twenty times twice, there is an element I miss more.  It’s not a nostalgia for the heydays of sled riding down Great Uncle Paul’s hill, making last second rolls to keep from oncoming traffic in the persistent neighborhoods of Western PA.  It’s not for hot chocolate or chicken soup from a packet mom added the right amount of hot water to, sipped from Strawberry Shortcake or Keebler Elf mugs printed with our names.  I don’t want to build a snowman or ride my bike around the halls.  I want fewer options.

One day, when the city falls into a coma of ice and danger, I want to heed the mayor’s urging to stay off the roads.  I want to pace less.  I want to not think about what I am missing, how a day of work lost is a bill less paid, how guilty I feel for wanting to spend the day reading.  I want to not think about how few these days are.  I want to not immediately scatter my brain to think of how best to use the time, and when the brain reconvenes, I realize it is 5 o’clock with my hands still wringing.

It seems I am already making a list for next time this happens, as the trees have not even started their dripping thaw.  Who can lay everything down for a day and sit still with the cold on one side of the window and a hot kettle on the other?  Who can stop their pacing long enough to remember the ice storm of 2015 as it is happening, instead of as a hopeful hindsight months down the line?

A southerner, you dumbass.

I come from a long, healthy line of mild insomniacs.  My father, alert and awake by– what my mother begrudgingly informs me– 3AM.  4 on good nights.  Not a single hour was left unturned.  Our house, calm and dark and sure of itself on its hilltop perch each night, had the rattle and squirm of a termite infested doll, its eyes asleep while its inhabitants move to push through the seams.  Whether it was my brother on his late night Nintendo 64 addiction, or my father’s just-past-midnight toss-turns-to-WWII-mini-docs on the History Channel, my mother and sisters’ bathroom runs, or my own spark of 2AM inspiration that found me lamp on and awake with the pen and paper I kept religiously by my bed for exactly these divine moments.  I’m not sure a member of my family knew what REM cycles were.  And what we didn’t know may have hurt us, but we didn’t miss it.

The charade of early-to-bed-early-to-rise created a strange sanctity of sleep, more appropriately found in phrases like let-a-sleeping-dog-lie (which, most often, actually referred to our dogs), and don’t-poke-a-sleeping-bear (which always referred to our father snoozing in his La-Z-Boy, the only place other than church he seemed to get good rest).  These paired with mixed messages of you-can-sleep-when-you’re-dead (my adolescence) and you’re-going-to-sleep-your-life-away (my teenage years) birthed the confusing and guilty relationship I currently hold with the nightly slipping of consciousness.

Insomnia accompanied me most of my life, until the introduction of whiskey and Nyquil and late-night-early-mornings.  Never mind the years it had aided in journal scrawlings and half-writ songs and solutions to world hunger and decisions to leave home.  I could squelch that 3AM involuntary wake-up with the clink of a glass or an unproductive evening of late night shows I’m too embarrassed to watch during the day.  Post college, I was nearly ahead of the sleeplessness by several days.  By the time I got married a couple years later, I was sleeping through the night like a Olympic gold medalist of Snooze.

And then, like a good fairy, the night of my wedding, it returned.

When I opened my eyes to the beautiful Western North Carolina B&B at 2AM, my ankle throbbing from an attempt at ironic dancing at my reception, my brand new husband snoring next to me, and hours before a plane to our honeymoon, insomnia reached her thick wisp of a hand around my head.  We have some work to do, she seemed to say.  I had made a terrible mistake.

When the panic subsided, I respectfully submitted to her.  Whether I stayed or went would need to be decided between us, in those quiet moments between midnight and dawn.  She awoke me nearly every night, save those times on the road away from home, for the three years of my tumultuous marriage.  Early on, I was alone.  Even my dog learned to ignore the incessant 2AM pacing and 3AM research on Eva Braun.  I spent the time writing, willing myself to love the life I was in.  Later, the sleeplessness felt more like a defense mechanism, waking at midnight to escort my drunk husband back to bed.  In the last days, she stirred me like a cry from the crow’s nest, opening my eyes in my separate bed to find him hovering over me, angry, and waiting, the tiny room thick with whiskey vapors at 1AM.

When I moved in with my sister shortly after, I slept more than I was awake.  We had made it, and Insomnia moved to someone else’s wide eyes for a change.

I have resumed a very adult idea of sleep since.  I have come to terms that it is necessary, even though a comedy podcast once told me that scientists have no idea why we do it.  That not having enough is inconvenient.  That when she returns on nights like these, I should bitterly turn the pillow to the cooler side and punch it down for dramatic effect, to tell the universe that I am a functional human being that adheres to the natural light-and-dark-means-awake-and-asleep convention.  I tell myself I’ll be miserable in the morning without it.  I down another cap of Nyquil.

Whatever she is trying to tell me can wait til morning, I think.  But the quiet that lets the ears perk inward, that lets the heart tell the brain tell the body tell the heart in the should-be-asleep hours is vampiric in every way, waiting for my invitation and running for cover at the first hint of dawn.  I want to believe there is no healing left to be done in the midnight hour.  And as I kick the old bag out with still another cap of Nyquil or a healthy dose of nicotine, I realize I am ungrateful… but I’ll worry about that after I sleep…