Honeysuckles, past & present
From Feb 23, notes app.
Behind the school, up the hill, honey suckles grew along the fence cleaving school property from the outside world. plucking the stamen out from the honey suckle we looked for nectar at the base of the bloom. Sometimes we found drops a tenth of a thimble and tore through each honeysuckle until no more flowers were in bloom. Floral carcasses scattered on the dirt path. The fence, bloomless.
I forgot the taste of the nectar. I forgot those memories of standing on the top of the hill, finding sweets in the nature of the fence. I breathed in deeply in my mask, the scent of my breath deeply coating the inside of the K95. Part way through another work out, 11 months into this pandemic, I smelled my breath. “Honeysuckle.” I tasted honeysuckle.
I have hit a wall in this pandemic. Frustrated and angry and itchy. I have no focus and instead my mind is a blurred scribbles and lines on a scratch piece of a paper. In the grocery store I cannot believe we’re still in this thing. I can’t believe this is our normal.
I cannot do anything after work except watch tv or lift and watch tv. Or therapy. Lots of therapy. I am exhausted and there’s no creativity flowing through me. I am a dull point of a pencil. Filled with lead and no point.
I realized previously my writing had traces of emotions but nothing pulled from my soul, my heart. Before recently I was aware of emotion but had not gotten in touch with my own. All this therapy has begun to shine spots on my shell and the cracks are forming. I feel it. The thin shell. I feel the compressed emotions from 31 years starting to come out. Not in a volcanic expulsion from my heart. But the primordial ooze, slow. And that amount of energy, the slow ooze, it drains me.
I’m starting to see the hurt unfolding.
A week ago I had to research an alcohol brand for work. It hit me in a sudden moment of clarity another lie my philandering ex had told me. The brand of alcohol was in his refrigerator and it was a drink he would have never have consumed. It hit me — oh another bread crumb. Or is it a version of reality like an impenetrable wall? Another version of reality of the other woman he was actually living with.
I felt the hurt. I felt hurt. I felt sad and angry. My face got hot and my chest warm. The heart and stomach and smallness of my body against the fabric of reality, warm. Out of all the betrayals and lies, the booze in the refrigerator and the meaningless lie he must have told me at the time, now I felt sad almost 9 months post break-up.
When I wrote about the break up I described feeling like everything had fallen away and all I could see instead were the things still connected to the ground. The things that stayed. “Flowers, flowers all around.” And now I taste them. The grief and sadness of childhood mixed with the grief and sadness of adulthood. But in both the breath and nectar of life. Just as sweet, just as present.
