From texts with a friend...

There is taking - hard, and fierce, and violent like I need.  And then there is loving - real and intelligent and authentic and evolving.  And sometimes I feel like never the twain shall meet, and so I shall die of loneliness.  But really, how are you?

After the New Year

It seems like after the (secular) New Year things got better, somehow easier.  My resolution was to “enjoy the ride, worry less about the scenery” and although I forgot it more often than I remembered it, it still popped up in my mind from time to time, bringing a sense of ease and of “Chill out, you got this.”  But I spent a lot of time – a ton of time, really, dating and mating.  I threw the bright candle of my being into each new lover, each time with a sense of release, and relief.  And hope. 

I had – have now, this is now – a sense of imbalance, but it’s more mental than visceral, and so hard to do something about.  I *know* I need to sleep better, exercise more, make more money.  I *think* I’m too old to spend this much time chasing romantic rainbows.  It would make so much more *sense* to focus on me and on mine, and let the love chips fall where they may.  But in these insomniac nights, and the warm solitary mornings in bed, and the stressful or boring days at work, and… well, you get the idea: it’s hard to maintain that logical discipline.  I’ve taken to leaving my phone in the car so I won’t check email, won’t check dating sites, will focus more on what I’m supposed to be doing.  But then half the time I go and fetch it anyways.  This era reminds me a bit of those times before I quit smoking.  I knew I had to make a change, but I wasn’t yet inspired to get there.  What will the change be?  How will it come?  When will it get here?

And yet, despite or in addition to this, I feel OK.  Ok with a capital O, actually.  Some of it is always having someone around to love, some of it is that it’s been over a year since my life blew up.  Long enough to make a new life and dig my heels into it.  Most days I’m a quirky, Miriam-esque mix of joyous, curious, horny, exhausted, entertained, loving, and longing.  Most days, or many days, I really do enjoy the ride.

Yom Kippur

So many poems were written today - of songs, and love, and gratitude, and friendship and community, and wholeness, and soul.  However, this is the one which got committed to paper, and it, of course, is also true.

"Yom Kippur"

Sometimes I am so lonely and so full of longing
That I am longing, encased in a tight, dry skin.
And what if that's true for many of us?
What if our frantic couplings
are just the frottage
of sarcophagi?
Hoping to fuck so hard,
so fast, that we catch fire,
burn the cases and fronts, and
let out the kindred spirits
inside?




c. 2013 m.sachs.martin

All she wrote

It wasn’t exactly like I said in “Someday Summer”; it was far better, and yet much more difficult.  

All of a sudden one day it was 7/7 and I came home from visiting Abuela and the lovely nieces, and there were two Early Girl tomatoes red on the vine and I picked one and ate it right there in my yard.  And I picked the second one and chopped it up with some cucumbers still warm from the sun and served them with olive oil and lemon to Analuz and Mikha.  And we hung around my beautiful house, and yes, the fart jokes did fly. 

On this hot July day, I was not 'cured of the relentless urge to re-mate', but it was more like a blessing than a curse, as I flirted with cute girls via the Internet, and spent plenty of time cleaning the house, loving my friends, caring for my garden, and riding my bike.  I wished I was ready to fly solo, or I wished I had found my other half, and neither of those were true, and that was what I had to work with.

In Piera's leaving, there was a lesson – or probably more than one – but the one I deeply felt was the need to HEAR the other person in what they said.  Not to just listen, or answer, or say “yeah I got it”, or try to fix it... but to still and quiet my whole self, all the thoughts and needs, and HEAR.  Truly HEAR.  So I worked on that, and worked, and will continue to work some more.  And I worked on all kinds of other stuff, managing my emotions, my self, my teeth, my life.  Yes, there was a lot of work involved.

Yet on this July day of First Tomatoes, my new cat-boy, Grizzly, jumped the fence to see what was on the other side.  He came back in all good time, and was amazingly patient with Mikha as she stroked his dense, soft Siamese fur.  “Gentle with Grizzly.” I said.  “I’m very good with pets.” she answered, knowledgeably.  He will never be Georgia.  Georgia’s place is claimed and unchanged, first and last, and ever-only cat-son.  But Grizzly is a dear, my new companion, my rescued angel, so interesting and quixotic, comforting and lovely.  The Leopard hates him, is hissy-pissy in her old-tabby way, but I hold high hopes that she will some day come around, and I’ll get home at night to see them cuddled together – or at least not hissing – on the couch.  Her health is holding strong and I make sure to brush her and tell her she is my special girl.  And she purrs, and drools and falls asleep in my arms.

This summer day, I wasn’t so chunky as I had been, but I definitely had a tummy.  Even the shadow of gauntness was gone.  My face had filled out, and was tan, and I had added some laugh lines that weren’t there during the awful winter before.

My house was everything I could have hoped for and more.  It was light and bright and lovely.  I kept it clean and filled with fresh flowers.  It had heard love echo from the bedroom, and some tears from the couch where I liked to drink and read and look at old photos; and laughter, I think, from every single room.  It was still new to me, and I to it.  There was some art on the walls, and not too much clutter on the table.  There had been one huge party, with hopefully more to come.  The little wind chimes from the previous owners harmonized beautifully with the big ones that my Realtor had given me, a soft counterpart to daily living.

Really what happened, is that I didn’t live happily ever after, but I mostly lived well.  I went to choir, sometimes, and Salsa, sometimes.  Sometimes I was so tired I came straight home and cracked open a beer.  Sometimes I dreaded work and other times I came home all revved up.  I gardened.  I slept.  I was a good cat-mom.  I wrote the occasional blog post, cut flowers for my friends, tried to keep best practices in my dating life and created the highest quality day-to-day that I could.  I worked on HEARING. I kept on, and then I kept on keeping on.

And that, for now, is all she wrote.

The last load

I did not leave my key, and I did not take the body of my cat-son of 19 years, but I took, or left, everything else.  I took my leftover lonely female cat (I think for a second she was worried I wouldn’t) and all her toys and food and brushes and various accoutrements.  I took the bed, since it was mine to begin with, and the table, and the bookshelves too.  I came with a ready-made household, and we used to joke that Piera’s dowry was her salad spinner.  I left the salad spinner, even though I really did love it.  I left the couch, bought for us to share, on which I would always remember her sleeping with my boy-cat.  I left her white end table, and of course her own things; her bicycles and boxes and special chair.  I took my mustard.  I left her ketchup.  I took the frames I had bought, but left her some pictures, to remember.

I left tears, so, so many tears, I hope the new tenants don’t float away.  I took my books and my clothes and possibly some day some lessons from all this, and a scalded, scalded, broken heart.  I left a love, a life, a quixotic family of two girls and two cats.  I took some questions, a lot, actually.  How?  Why? 

I sorted through the household, and my tears, in the very best way I knew how.  Erratically, sometimes drunk, kept standing only by my family and friends, I took and left until I thought I would go mad with grief, and then I got another box out and kept going.  And now, today, the last load has come.  The car is packed, and I’m sitting on the living room floor, hoping to finish with tears, for now.

I took her decision (what else could I do?)  And I left our life.  Now it’s time to lock up the house, and take off.  

Someday summer

Someday summer will come, and I will be cured of the relentless urge to re-mate, because all of the world will be mating then, and I will live vicariously through her many manifestations. 

Summer will come and the days will stretch long and hot and sweet.  I will buy or grow, and then cook: summer squash with basil and peppers, corn and oregano and greens.  I will eat it all by my lonesome, or I will share it with another human, and it will be delicious.  I will smile up at the sun, sitting out on the patio of my new home in East San Jose.

Someday summer will come and hopefully I won’t be as thick as I was before, but neither will I be so thin as I am now, where everyone who sees me comments on my changed face and shape.  I am sick with grief, and it is the dead of Winter, but the dead of Winter shall also pass.

Summer will come, and the all the women I desire now will possibly pass too, and the grief at losing my life mate will pass, but more slowly, or in nuances, somehow.  There is one woman in particular I like today, or rather am compelled by, and if she could stick around, in a good way that heals both of us, I would wish for that.  But whether she does or does not, I can hope and suppose that when summer finally gets her azz over here, there will be Analuz DeLeon and funny, quirky Mikha.  Mikha and I, in the summer or even in the dead of a dying Winter, can make fart jokes and laugh hysterically.  By this summer she will be six, and I will be forty.  I think that’s a good ratio.  And hopefully she will have not correctly learned how to pronounce my familial title, and will still scream “Marrina!” and greet me with a flying tackle. 

There will be (hope of hopes) beautiful centered Jen Johnson and brilliant Ben and adorable Becca, with Scott rumbling in the background.  Friend of my heart and unofficial, amazing, godkids.  There will (my G-ddess willing) be sweet, sweet Josie, the mothership, now with Tadeo and Joaquin too, and perhaps by the time summer has come around, I will be out of this crazy funky freaky space enough to have spent some serious chunks of time with them, and to know them, and for them to know my silly Tia face, if not by heart, then at least quite, quite well. 

And in the summer I think I will still have a lovely family and nieces, and call my Mom often, and pet the fat, purring, hopefully-reasonably-healthy Leopard until she drools.  And the body of sweet Georgia Brown will either have been brought to my new home, or left in this old garden of fatal grief, and either way it will be OK.  This summer, I hope that I will still work with that fierce tender red fox Stasia McGehee, and the days will pass far more quickly than they do now, in a haze of weeding and sweeping, and laughter – not like they used to, exactly, but not like they drag this Winter, either.  And we will be dancing-working-everything friends, like we were, and are, but with more happiness involved. 

And my beloved Perfessor Cindy will possibly still love me via Facebook and perhaps we’ll have gone for another intensely connective outing.  Who knows.

I can hope that by summer, I will be this strong, but much healthier, and this smart, but much happier, and that I will have taken even some teeny tiny slice of this crazy, debilitating, drooling grief, and turned it to my advantage.  Maybe I will be in a choir, or a band, a relationship, or a new school program for a brand-new degree in fabulousness.  Maybe I will just work and read and drink wine like I do now.  But I would like to be able to mention home, future, or partnership without the tears sneaking in and shredding me.

Hopefully I will have learned something, grown somewhat; I could imagine a day of basil stir fry and laughter when I look back on this pulverized, powerless winter and it feels far, far away.

And some day, in the heat of summer or thereafter, I may take walk with the woman who once was my mate, my wife without need of vows, my partner in love and in home, and ask her what happened, and how she left, and why.  And she may not be able to explain, because some things are beyond the explanation.  And I will accept that, since the lack of acceptance, is, perhaps, a small part of what caused the need for explanations in the first place.

Today of Christmas 2012 feels endless, obsessive; sick, and bad and doomed.  But whatever else I may or may not be, I am indeed an ecologist, and I know that someday, someday, SOME DAY, the summer will also come. 

Animal survival

I am operating on the animal plane, a female coyote, instinctive.

My life mate has gone, is gone, is sick, will not come home.  She broke the den, she left the nest, she hurts but will not return.  I dream of death at night, and my sleep is shattered.

I move my bed for the safety of the heart.  Sleep outside on the patio until the rains come, and then downstairs on the living room floor, pillowed with blankets, awkward.  Upstairs, the expensive queen sized nest sits, betrayed, scentless.

It is freezing cold but I feel it little.

I have lost the joy of eating and my breasts are small and my pants hang.  I am driven to re-mate and I circle relentlessly, sniffing, looking.  I am driven to find a new den, and I push and push and scout until I finally buy a new home to hole up in.  I wait for the current owners to leave, tail curled around my paws, panting.

My new Winter mate is tall, and smells like my tribe from her mouth to her cunt.  At first she moves recklessly, relentlessly lovely in my broken nest, making coffee and lighting a fire in my fireplace, laughing a deep gravelly laugh.  I am drawn towards wholeness, and towards her.  But in a month, she says to stop taking her t-shirts to sleep in, that she does not want to be claimed by me, and I am broken down, again.  She dons lilac-scented lotion and refuses my kisses, and I am furious, and confused.

My pack worries.  They whine and lick my face, bring me choice tidbits.  A prominent member, sick with grief?  No, no good, this is not good.  They circle on sweet paws, hemming me in, endless, comfort, community.

But thin and lean, it’s good to be this lean – I am light on the hunt for yet another mate and my muscles for moving my belongings stand out against my ribs.  Wintertime coyote trots endlessly through the frozen air.  The new den will be ready soon!

My mother has come, and I can relax.  She is small, curved and restless, a comfortable graying energetic queen dog.  We go out to eat and I eat and eat.  We come home to sleep and I sleep, through the night, into the morning, the den is being guarded, I am safe.  My new nest is finally ready so the alpha queen and I go to the paint store and discuss shades of off-white.  She and the painter laugh at my desire to have white ceiling, white baseboards and white walls, too.  The den must be clean, open, uncompromised.  It must have integrity and wholeness.

The Winter solstice is in two days and it’s cold enough to snap a finger bone.  I starve and trot and circle, I move and paint and make do.  I continue.  I carry on.  I survive with this animal instinct.