Tuesday, December 27, 2011

I Do...

That thing we both said we'd never do again...yeah...that...
Yesterday, Nic took me to a labyrinth that i like to frequent here in town to celebrate a special day we don't normally celebrate. 3 years ago, we committed our lives to one another. You'd think I'd celebrate that but its just too much to try and add to December with both kids birthdays, Nics bithday, my Namaws birthday , & my grandparents anniversary.   Too much.

I knew something was up, but I wanted the magic of the surprise so I convinced myself it was just Nic being Nic...romantic, sweet, kind of scatterbrained. So we went to walk to path, but mother nature was against us...it was covered in leaves. This labyrinth is flat with the ground so there was no way to walk it, though I tried a bit.

Then I heard Nic ask me where I thought we'd be in three years. I didn't have an answer past "Right here, I guess"..because really...how do you answer that when you've both talked about being "home" and settled on a family farm? So we walked some more and I sat down on the rock in the middle.

Then Nic looked away from me and said "I know where we will be in three years...Married."

I'm pretty sure I stopped breathing just like I did 3 years before when I realized what the significance of what s/he was doing was. Shocked...doesn't even begin to cover it.

Of course I said yes. :)

The ring is so over the top to me...It's beautiful and perfect and I am so very much in love. :)

Much love,
 Gayla

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

December Madness

Dec 14th, 2011


"Blue Willow: Persephone Falling"


 “Depression is hidden knowledge.” —James Hillman


 You think it will never happen again.
Then one day in November it does, the narrow,
dusty boards of the trapdoor you fell through
twenty years before cracking apart, a black grin
opening its toothless mouth, darkness seeping out
to fill the dead cornfields rattling around you.
That sound’s back in your head again—
like angry bees or static or rubber bands
breaking. And beneath it a distant hum
you remember being scared was voices
till the doctor explained it was your own brain,
working overtime to understand its disordered signals.


And meanwhile, every sadness on NPR is yours—
from the African country where 30% of the childbearing
women have AIDS, to the Appalachian mother
who sells her great-grandmother’s Blue Willow china
for fifty bucks to feed her kids, to your own
mother, who dies again every autumn, something
wrong when she didn’t come home for Thanksgiving
the way she promised, the torn-sheet dinner napkins
you’d embroidered—“M” for “Mommy”—with ordinary
thread, wrapped in tin foil under the bed, melancholy’s
blue index finger pressed into your forehead, choosing
you for its team. Where it seems you must play for life,


whether you want to or not. Though that’s not
what you’re thinking as you hurtle
through the night, jittery as the rabbit
you swerve to avoid, your head filled
with chattering fog, a glass door sliding shut
between you and the world, that feeling of being
outside yourself so loud you don’t seem real.
Though you are. As you maneuver the car carefully
through the dark, remembering how you willed
yourself to live this way for two years,
synapses flashing like emergency lights
you thought you’d never see again.


But here they are, the medication you’ve ratcheted
down for a year necessary after all, the biochemical
net too small, the darkness you’ve pushed away
for twenty years with what your doctor calls
one hand tied behind you suddenly back.
As you remember setting out your mother’s
Blue Willow on the table every night
as a child—blue people in blue houses
under blue trees—each plate a story you can
walk into, where everything is fine. If it weren’t
so dark inside and you weren’t so scared.
If you could only think how to get there, and what
treasure you are supposed to find when you do.

I'm sure I should write something here... December is the hardest month for me and this poem spoke a little too close to home in some ways. Luckily, I suppose, I'm either very good at hiding it or swallowing it down and sucking it up. That's just what I do. I'm not good at leaning on people so the most you'll ever know is if I quietly slip off to take my meds or whisper quietly that today isn't a good day...then allow the subject to be changed because I don't really want to talk about it with most people...and most people are absorbed enough with themselves and skittish enough to allow it happen


I hate December...no really I do. I shouldn't. It's the month of many birthdays that are special to me, holidays, friends and family...yet every year I watch the calender turn to the 12th month and I dread it's coming. Like clock work, the depression is going to be fast on it's heals. The anxiety of Thanksgiving  is just a teaser of what's to come. 



I laughed at the NPR line..I stopped listening to it after thankgiving for that very reason. 

17 days and counting....


Much love,
 Gayla