written august 2024.

At the end of my dream, in the Dallas airport waiting for the last leg taking us back downunder is the chance to reflect on this ride.

The sisters holding me the way I came to them, all strange and funky, wired, and emotional and with a husband in tow they had never met.

The beach wedding and the dancing that failed to materialise there but did happen later at the 42^nd BlissFest under our hot northern sun.

   

My parents. Worrying me and comforting me and feeding me and sharing their lives and sadness and coffee. 

My brother in his other world, one I cannot enter, even though I try. 

  Coming back was better and worse than I imagined. 

My country is better and worse than I remembered. 

As confusing and infuriating and welcoming as ever. 

 

The memories are all there, this time I can confront more of them.

The road had me remembering all the way back to the first time I left my parents, and all the people and mistakes.

The road had me in tears, the first time we drove into the mountains and stopped to smell the ponderosas I was overwhelmed with love and regret and longing and gratitude. 

  The land I loved first. The land I now realize that I love most. 

The government, the people, which happen to be reflective of each other in ways we do not like to accept, are both obstacles and bridges back to this land. 

  To say I miss the culture is a gross understatement. 

I pine for it. 

Like a child with no perspective, I focus my discontent to the country I must wait in until I can come home for good as if it is a prison I must endure. 

From the first moment we landed, I realized that Australia can never compare and maybe I can stop trying to compare them and let go of that anger. 

   

My parents.

So much of the angst has faded. They still drive me crazy, but I enjoy it now. 

 I am proud of them. 

 

Right now, I am simply overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with gratitude. The kind of gratitude that knocks me down and leaves me face planted in the grass. How?? How have I been so lucky??? 

Lucky for my family and my hometown, lucky for my body and mind, lucky to be given such a country at such a time. Lucky for my husband, lucky for my friends. Lucky for my opportunities, lucky lucky, lucky. 

   I don’t know what to do with this. The depth of not deserving this, the knowing how few humans have ever had this luck. 

   And so that’s where I find my mind. That’s where I find my heart. 

Yes, I cried when I went in my last American grocery store. Yes, I cried when I said goodbye to my friends, yes, I cried saying goodbye to my parents, yes, I cry thinking about how long it may be before I see these mountains and oceans again, before I hear these wild rivers and swim in these great lakes, before I hear this country music in the bars, before I drive on these roads. 

Does that make it sweeter?

I said as such to anyone who would hear me. Be grateful.

Be grateful for the Rockies, for Yellowstone and Rainier National parks, for the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Colorado rivers. Be grateful for Dodge Challengers and Dually trucks and wolves and bison and coyotes and salmon and grizzlies and black bears and Canada geese and robins and Chicago and Denver and Austin and New York and Boston and Seattle and Detroit and Las Vegas and Los Angeles and Albuquerque and Durango and Fairbanks and New Orleans and for the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico.

Be grateful for the Bill of Rights, for our good neighbors Canada and Mexico, for jazz and hip hop and country and folk and rock and roll. 

Don’t stop there. Keep going. And going. And going.

Leave behind the fear of Republicans and Democrats and the Supreme Court. 

Leave behind fear. 

I say it to myself and to anyone. 

Be grateful. 

she carries the bones of my ancestors

she is most of what i think about these days. she is my brother and my two nieces and my two nephews.

she holds my mother. she holds my father. she holds my best friends. she hold my grandmothers house and bones. and her grandmothers also. 

she hold my dreams. 

i am not sorry for her anymore, time and distance and perspective has faded my anger and resentment. 

 i am her. 

i can no longer blame us for trying our best, imperfectly. 

i am her failures and successes, i am her mistake, i am her shame and beauty. 

the melody of her mountain breeze in July is my breath. the lakes kissing Michigan's peninsulas are my blood and lymph. the wild ones who soar and gallop and climb and swim are my heart. 

the grey winter midwest skies and bright blue desert summer heavens are my eyes.

my feet are the superior lake stones, the great sand dunes and the grassy plains, the red clay of Georgia and the flat California beaches. 

the autumn maple leaves, the Spanish moss draped along Florida Oaks, the fluttering leaves of Colorado Aspen, my hair. 

i am her.

i hold the bones. 

she taught me to love this earth with May dandelions and July weeping willow and October sassafras and January white pine.  

April fawns and September does, December eagles and March robins gifted me time. 

i like to dream of us holding each other again.

together at last. 

 I haven't let myself feel deeply painfully sad in a very long time. So long ago it must have been that I have forgotten how to cope. 

 Today, I was unable to dodge the darkness. 

I am married to a deeply traumatized person. The depth and sharpness of his painful experiences is so stunning that I have never been able to really imagine what it must have been like for him, or the ways that it must feel for him every day. 

  I have taken cues from him to not poke at it so much. 

Unable to resolve his own painful past, makes it nearly impossible for him to tolerate me being in pain. 

When I lost the pregnancy, he couldn't handle my tears, even hours after. 

I think I have begun to treat my own feelings like he treats his. 

  While we were making love a couple weeks ago, I realized I would never be pregnant. 'Realized' not like intellectually understood, but like emotionally felt. I teared up a bit but then put my feelings away. I am already struggling with doing the right thing raising Avan while he contends with having immature parents who seemingly cannot properly take care of themselves. I have used this hardship as my crutch for thinking it's a great thing I don't have a child of my own. It sucks. They take so much and make life hard and then society makes it all even harder and I have worked myself to exhaustion for decades anyway, just on my own. It's a good story. And it's even true. 

But this month, my period was late.  And my breasts kept getting sorer. And there was the tiniest blush on the toilet paper once but then it went away. After 2 days, the terrorizing fucking feelings came back. What if? After the third day, I was starting to imagine myself accepting my fate and buying a test. On the fourth day, my period came. In the morning. As we were preparing to go for lunch to a friends house with 3 young kids and meeting Amelia, who has the most beautiful daughter that I love  dearly and that I have wished I could have once exactly like her. 

  We had to stop to buy gifts for our hosts and I spilled a hot tea all over myself in the store and I was sticky and tired and had a headache and when Sattar asked me. simple question, I snapped "I don't know!"

I apologized a minute later, but he wouldn't have it. We picked up Avan in silence. 

   I tried every face I could make to not cry at the lunch in our friends homes as literally everyone there attended to their beautiful children. 

  I went into the bathroom to cry and to tell myself I hated my husband, that I couldn't and shouldn't be raising his child and that I needed to leave this country. 

   I wiped my eyes and thought about Greta and Andrew Tate to distract myself as I couldn't think of a single good thing in my life that didn't make me want to cry. 

I came out and we talked about the Greta and Andrew story. 

   I need to resolve this and it should involve my husband I think. But I also don't believe he can give it space. His pain is too prevalent. 

 Suppose I am glad I can afford a therapist.

  

 unsure if today is opening or closing.

unsure if i am hearing the song or the silence.

when i moved into this rental house, there was a baby tree, no bigger than a garden weed

growing in a tiny square of green space near the street. 

i often thought of killing it, (in that i imagined pulling it out of the earth and always knew i could not enact that violence)

but i just watched it grow. i hoped that i would live in this house long enough that the next resident would 

have no choice but to believe it was purposefully planted. 

the baby tree is now more than double my height. 

it feels strange to plant something in these times, to let babies grow while watching fires begin

to burn down all the living forests. 

i know that this cycle is perpetual and so much larger than my individual consciousness as to seem

infinite. 

but something inside me wants to burn along with the forests. 

family of separates

 I met him first.

he was alone, wandering on miniature unstable legs stomping clumsily. 

he did not seem to belong to anyone. 

for this, or for possibly a dozen other reasons that i have long pondered, i followed him. 

into the darkness of night, away from the celebrating people he led me. 

his mother was a statue of stone.

his father was a distant cowboy. 

years later,

i love the cowboy

and i pity the statue

but what i feel for the solitary child is beyond my understanding. 

i have resent for the way he must restrict my freedom and my future. (and knowing my history i wonder if i can endure it) 

i adore him for the ways he resembles his father. 

i have loved him inexplicably since i first held him. 

i feel responsibility to protect and nurture and guide and teach

and i have deep frustration for the constraints on the quality

i dream of providing. 

the cowboy has a vision

the statue has a vision

i have a vision

the child has a vision.

none of these visions agree. 

we are a family of separates

experimenting with sovereignty on a human soul.  

yet. 

i ask myself:

is this simply parenthood? 

inexplicable love. 

deep and constant frustration.

disillusionment. 

conflict. 

responsibility. 

there were toddler questions.

did i come from your belly?

are we a family? 

my answers explain little 

and nothing seems as true as that

we are a teaching circle

bound by love

leading one another through through life. 

leaking

 the ceiling is leaking in this old house that i can't afford

the toilet leaks, the cupboards are falling down

the bathroom sink leaks, the fence is falling down

doors don't close or open properly

nobody checks the smoke alarms

the oven regularly smokes for seemingly no reason.

there is an ant infestation.

the rent is so much we have been late for two years.

but the house is worth millions. and the neighbouring houses are worth even more.

this city is hell for me. it always has been. different levels of hell, slight variations. 

my friend warned me in the first month "this place will eat you alive" 

and it's true.

i can barely feel anything to assure me that i still live.

in this moment, at the end of two years of border closures on this fortress island prison,

my parents have come. we cried together at the airport and then i saw myself quickly stuff away those 

feelings to navigate the traffic home.

there is a part of me, smiling and warm and relaxed and hugging them

but i can't reach it most of the time.

aware of this confusing distance, i cry at night when everyone sleeps.

why does this life feel like forced regret and wasted time? 

there are more emails about how i need to fill out more forms to start a job i don't want that pays far less 

than a person needs to survive here. 

and emails that the rent is going up.  

i don't even want a break anymore as i can't remember having a break that helped anything.

i know it can't stop. 

i know i just keep going until, like the Joad's, i am stranded, after losing everything, as the floods rise

it seems that it is not the wear of use that breaks our bodies down, but knowing the weight of sadness that 

replaces the hope of youth and the body cannot carry this understanding long before crippling. 

i love them so much, more than anything. 

and yet i cannot bear to live this love somehow 

i find that i am praying for more time and hating the moment i am given

 Dear Australia

I have disliked you since before I ever walked into your sunshine. 

When I was young I read about your indigenous persecution, your convict beginnings, your racist backwater mentality. And I guess I came to see it all up close. Did a deeper awareness draw me here to a desert island when I hate deserts? I came with a broken heart and a confused mind, decisions coming from that place were all unconscious.

I was planning to leave you before I even landed on your shore. I had a 4 year plan that turned to 5, that led me to a personal dead-end, which led me back to you. 

  I have Reasons To Stay now, as big as my Reasons To Leave.  I swear once again that this will be the last year. 

  I realize now that whether I stay or go is not entirely in my control. 

Here is one valuable thing you have taught me: my comings and goings and plans are like bottles in the ocean. I can launch them, but I cannot know when and where they will reach their destination. 

  On this Invasion Day 2022, I think of you, your national insecurity, your lack of groundedness in place, your beautiful beaches and opportunity and restaurants that close too early and your love of fines and rules and alcohol, your strange accent and bizarre slang. 

I can't wait to miss you.