Velvet Verbosity

I’m just wondering what content you’re reading that I’m not writing. I’ve thoroughly checked my blog, and I just can’t make the connection between my content and the ad you’ve most recently placed on my blog with a half-naked woman selling Skid Steer Tires?

Blink blink.

Could it be the entire category labeled “Feminism”? Because feminism and women selling tires in their underwear must be somehow related. Now I happen to know that you have some amazingly ginormous brains working for you over there at the Google complex. Perhaps you could set them on the task of creating algorithms that actually interpret my content to produce relevant ads. Maybe you know something I don’t, but I don’t think that you’re going to sell many tires to my readership. I know I mentioned Goodyear a few times, but apparently you’re only reading half the conversation.  I think you missed the part about fair pay for Lilly Ledbetter?  Maybe my brain is too small to comprehend your mysterious ways, because I was equally confused at the Muslim dating sites, the diet plans, and the mail order bride ads. Maybe that’s all you got over there? Yeah, that must be it. How else to explain the complete disconnect between my content and your thinking you’re going to sell women on my blog. I’d send you a memo, but you wouldn’t get it.

Maybe Ima fire your a** and switch to Blogher ads.

Dear Shirty McShirty,

Was it only yesterday that I met you? Is it a dream that I once fancied fantasies of becoming the perfect, serene and infinitely organized counterpart to your beautiful madness? No. It wasn’t just yesterday. It was more than a year ago. Funny thing, time.

It was, however, just yesterday morning lying next to your blanketed warm body that I had a dream of a man with a handsome face and a gentle light in his eyes. I was at a garden party, chatting with an old friend who I meet only in dreams now. The handsome, gentle-eyed man smiled at me and I was hopeful, in a dreamy way, that such a man could exist. I read into his face integrity, honesty, loyalty, a capacity for love.

Seeing that I was engaged in conversation, he turned away, not wanting to interrupt. It was then that I saw he was not what he seemed. On the back of his neck was etched a serial number. That neck was old, weathered, and destroyed by time and something else I could not name. The hair was thinned and tired. The clothes were not so polished and unassuming as they were from the front. They were worn, careless, and dirty.

I was just pointing this man out to my friend when I stopped, realizing his face did not reveal the truth. I stared, wondering how this was possible, that his front was so very different from his retreating back. My friend turned to look and I said, “Never mind. It’s not who I thought it was.”

When I woke you asked me with a smile if I slept well, and I told you about the dream but I didn’t have the heart to tell you that you were that guy. I think you knew anyway, and didn’t have the heart to tell me you knew. So now we both know and neither of us are telling. The trajectory of lives can shift and veer significantly in the passage of a year. Truths are often revealed in the soft light of morning.

I hope your day is as flawed and beautiful as you are,
Velvet Verbosity

Image from http://www.jetcityorange.com/barcodes/tattoos/tattoo_31.html

Dear God,

It’s me again. I know I can be a pest but I’m confused about some things. I’m hoping you’ll write back, just this once, to clear these things up.

I’m not happy and you and I both know it, yet you’ve seen fit to hand me a situation I would like to change, but shouldn’t for some time. You’re asking me to make sacrifices for others. Is this a test? Because if it is, I’m just wondering how many I have to take in one lifetime?

That leads me to the next question. As far as I can tell, you approve of decent people. You know, people who try to be honest, loyal, and hardworking. People who stop at the red light even when it’s the middle of the night and NO ONE ELSE IS AROUND. Yet, I’ve noticed this tendency for you to throw more tests at those who are really, really trying. I don’t want to make a case for the devil here, but I can’t help but notice how those who have made a pact with the flaming red dude seem to smile a lot more these days than those of us taking test after test. By the way, I’ve never gotten an official score, but I’m quite sure I’ve passed every test you’ve given me. Do you think you could send the results with your reply?

I’m not complaining. Honest. I know you could have given me much harder tests. Like when you gave that woman cancer who was just about to realize her lifelong dream of finishing her college degree. She died one semester too early. Yeah, that was harsh. I’m glad you didn’t give me that test.

My friend tells me I just have to get more humble before grace will come into my life. Funny. He’s far from humble much of the time yet you don’t test him too much. He’s plenty graced.

I’m just wondering God, what is the point of it all? I wonder how you sit up there, wherever there is, and can watch while some children are born into poverty while others are born into privilege? How you can stand to see some children abused while others are spoiled? Doesn’t it pain your benevolent heart to see some of your children endlessly struggle while others start out ahead?

Maybe I’m just not being faithful enough. That is what my friend, born into privilege, would tell me. Is that what you would tell me too? I don’t know, because I haven’t heard from you yet.

Pardon my boldness. I’m sure on a better day I would see a blessing in every day my roof doesn’t cave in. I hope you understand, God, why this would all be so confusing to a mere mortal. It’s a big world and I need some answers down here.

Sincerely,
Velvet Verbosity

Dear Son of Mine,

You are a young man now. Still creative, still easy to cry when you brush against nostalgia, still angry and suffering. Only now we know it might be bipolar.

“Bipolar”. What does that really mean? Is it just a bandaid diagnosis we slap on the knee of behavior we can’t explain? No, I know better than that. I studied the brain for too many years. Your therapist thinks it’s highly likely and treating accordingly could bring much relief to both of us.

By 9 a.m. I’m exhausted with you. Trying to get you up in the morning is like trying to raise an angry dead. When the school complained of your excessive tardiness and pointed a bony finger at me, I just sighed. I wanted to say, “YOU come over in the morning and try to wake this kid up. Let’s see how you do.” But I didn’t. I swallowed the blame, the guilt, and the shame. Yes, I thought, I could do better.

When the school called for the umpteenth time complaining of your behavior and pointed a bony finger at me, I cried for the 30th time that year. Yes, I thought, I must be doing something wrong. Not enough structure, not enough discipline, not enough home-made meals shared under the warm kitchen lights, not enough oversight and monitoring and talking. Not enough, not enough. I tried harder. Twisted my spine into unnatural shapes while yielding every tool of self-punishment. I must do better.

When the police officer reported to me that you were intoxicated beyond dangerous levels and you had been outrageously verbally abusive to those trying to help you, I hung my head in shame. He asked me, “Is this how you raise your kid?” I wanted to say, “Yeah, we have an anti-authority, binge-drinking, training camp in our basement.” Instead, I talked softly and reasonably tried to explain that I was “working on it” and listed off the laundry list of professionals on the case. He looked on suspiciously and filed his report. I brought you home, stinking of vomit and tears, muttering incoherently on your side of the car.

When one guidance counselor told me you were the worst case he had ever seen, I said, “I know”. When another told me that you were interesting and complex and genuinely in touch with your emotions, I said, “I know”.

So far you’ve been diagnosed with:
Depression
Borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder
Oppositional-defiant disorder
Generalized anxiety disorder
Addictive personality disorder
Temporal lobe disorder
Conduct disorder
Just being a punk kid
and now
Bipolar

You are so many things. Bright, interesting, funny, thoughtful, kind, creative, vastly intelligent and fiercely loyal to your friends and family. What label do they have for that?

Today my friend writes to me, “I wish he didn’t have to have so much suffering in his life!”.

Me too.

Me too.

Dear young man,

I know you like me. I notice the way you look at me when I come in, the way your heavy eyelids raise to reveal the light in your blue blue eyes, and how they send sparkles my way. You must know you are much much too young for me. Still, I am flattered because I see the gentle intelligence inside you.

When you smile at me, I think it sad that you don’t believe in yourself more. It’s evident in the way you dress, that ridiculous hat worn sideways, the tattoes on your arms, the sloppy clothes.

You deserve more than this night job, and somewhere inside you lives that spark. Get out of here. Take off that silly hat, comb your hair, take classes, and make yourself who you were born to be. More than this. More than shy smiles offered to the woman 10 years older than you. You deserve a young woman who will love you sweetly, and who knows how to receive all that light in your eyes.

Don’t smile at me with that feeble hope. Take that hope and polish it, make it burn, and then swallow it so that it sets fire to your belly, spreads to your limbs and moves you. Get out of here while you still can.

The next time I walk in here late at night, a small stop on my journey home, I don’t want to see you. I want to look up and see instead a young boy with transluscent flesh and dull eyes. I want to wonder if you read this, and took my advice. I want to think of you building, block by block, the life that you deserve.

She read the love letter she had written to him just hours before. She felt nothing. Less than nothing. She read the words again, intently willing herself to feel something. Regret, preferably hatred, anything to reassure her that she was still capable of emotion. Nothing. My dearest love,

The letter began earnestly. It had been her hand (had it not?) that had written those words. She peered at her handwriting, coolly examining the words forming sentences and stacked into paragraphs down the page, and wondered at them. Wondered how she could be so indifferent to her own professions of love. Was she a liar after all?

She did believe these things, these words written in her own delicate, careful hand. She must believe them or she could not, would not have written them. Her heart remained a dead stone inside her ribs. A dead, flat, smooth stone. In her mind’s eye, she poked at it like a curious child, turning it over with a stick and examining the underside for any signs of strange and alien life. Perhaps she would even find something ugly, something grotesque and hideously pale, squirming against the intrusion. She hoped, but her hope was nothing more than a hushed, feeble spark.

I long for your return, to feel your strong arms around me, to rest there for such a long time.

She thought of him, of this picture of the two of them embracing. He was an extraordinarily beautiful man, fine-boned with honey coloured skin and hair, perfectly proportioned and strong. An image of his naked form floated in front of her. What grace and power. She tried to see his face too, to remember clearly his eyes shot through with sparkling light and mischief, but she could not. Above his strong shoulders was nothing but a dark fog that stubbornly and lazily refused to part.

So it was like that then, she thought.

to be continued…and edited…