Today I was walking around downtown doing some errands

and found myself walking behind a girl who works at the news and magazine store where we pick up our coffee beans twice a week.

I have always noticed this girl because 1) downtown Santa Rosa is not a big place, and you see the same people over and over again even if you don't frequent the businesses they work at, 2) she is really, really pretty and 3) she looks ethnically ambiguous with a South Asian lean, like me. Or maybe she's Filipina, I'm not sure. But there aren't a whole lot of ethnically ambiguous brown people like me here in Santa Rosa, so I take special notice of each such person when I spot one.

Today this girl was walking with an older woman who I knew at once was her mother. I could tell because of the way the girl leaned slightly away from the older woman and the way the older woman leaned slightly towards the girl: it was a mother wanting to convey something that seemed important to her daughter and a daughter not wanting to hear it. The mother looked a lot more East Asian than the daughter, but they were definitely related--they had the same walk, they wore their exasperation with each other with the same body language, and they were exactly the same height.

I am having a good day with lots of good news and beautiful weather and everything; Jam Guy drew a happy face on my egg and rice this morning with Sriracha; our fruit trees, which have struggled through a winter of weird extremes (for Northern California, anyways) are covered in tender little springtime buds. There is no reason not to have all the hope in the world today. But seeing that mother and daughter walking together made me feel so lonely so suddenly.

Going through old drafts of stuff, I found this from last January

Letter to my unconceived child


Every so often, in the lull that follows things like crises of faith, yoga classes and earthquakes, I remember you by the little flutter you make in my abdomen, curled in an unmarked tissueless organ that yawns deeply somewhere among my viscera. I feel you in the moments that I resolve to be a better person, to give everything I wished to be given, to treat my self like a temple of succor and protection. Mysterious little fish, wholly unknowable tangle of electric desire, when I am doing things right, I do everything I do so that you may swim in waters that are clean and calm.

I don't know how long I have wanted you or when you came to be part of me or which came first. I believe that I have a spleen and a pancreas and a liver because I am told that I do, but I have never felt them like I feel my heart, or like I feel you. You are a part of me that, like my heart, marches in a fragile, steady cadence, mostly unnoticed, except for knocking hard when it is time for me to pay attention.

At once so much less and so much more than my biological imperative, at times the entire reason for my existence and at others the fiercest face my self-doubt can wear: do I, can I, deserve something as whole as you? I am filled with discontent watching my body move in a mirror when I think it is the shallow reflecting pool that is only mine; but when I think of it as your little swimming hole, your oasis, then I am filled with reverence for it, with the need to be careful and gentle with it.

You are loved. You are your own. You are a link in a chain that has meaning because of you.

Sometimes eavesdropping is depressing

Girl at table next to ours in a sushi restaurant: I have this, like, phobia. Of tsunamis. For real. I'm serious, I seriously have nightmares about them.

Boy, seriously: Seriously?

Girl: Yeah. Like, every night. I don't know what it is.

Boy: Do you know, like, maybe, what started it? Or like, were you involved in a tsunami, or something?

Girl: Well, you know that tsunami that hit Thailand that year?

Boy, wide-eyed: Yes?

Girl: It happened on my birthday.

Boy: ...

Girl: I hear it's really pretty in Thailand, though.

Irony

Today I spent a couple of hours doing battle against the mold on our windowsills, grown during the rainy season here in its groping sort of way; I was armed with six quarts of bleach, a big steel pot, hot water, dish soap, a scrubby sponge. I spent about the same amount of time today learning how to cultivate oyster mushrooms in our home, carefully cornering away the bag of sawdust and mushroom spawn sent to me by Jam Guy's dad. Kill the fungus! Culture the fungus! Apparently I have ambivalent feelings about fungus. I am sure there is a good metaphor here.

Awesome quote of the day:

Jam Guy, laughing at the delighted face I make when he hands me the beer I couldn't reach because it was across the table:

"You're like a four-year-old! But drunk."

Find me where you are

There's a theory that exists in yoga, acupuncture, massage therapy and various therapeutic forms that you can hold emotion or emotion-based memories in parts of your body--actual anatomical, physically locatable spots. In acupuncture theory, the locations will vary based on the types of emotional memories--memories associated with grief may be located along the Lung meridian, for example, whereas fear-based memories may be located along the Kidney meridian. In yoga practice, I've been told we hold our emotions in our hip joints.

This morning I took a completely fantastic end of the year power-yoga class immediately followed by a "Renew" class--one a fierce, faster-paced practice where I watched sweat rain off my head onto my yoga mat, and the next a calm, joint-opening, reflective practice. In the Renew class, we did a lot of hip-focused poses.

I was in a crossed-legged seated forward fold, trying to relax into the pose, and realized my jaw was tight. I opened my mouth to stretch it, making funny faces at my mat in the dark little cave of my own curled body. I remembered then that I'd been woken by Jam Guy in the middle of last night because I'd been grinding my teeth. He woke me up by stroking my cheek softly; I knew I was safe before I opened my eyes. I woke up in the complete certainty that I would open my eyes and see him blinking at me in the dark, his quiet face a study in gentle, sleepy concern. I woke up in the complete certainty that the hand on my cheek and the eyes watching me meant I am loved.

This waking-up-feeling-safe is a new thing for me. I am not, historically, a good sleeper; I am an even worse waker-upper. Often, I wake up with a panicky start, scaring the daylights out of whomever had to wake me. (My sister, on the other hand, could fall asleep on a guided tour of a noise factory, and trying to wake her up is like trying to get a cat out of a patch of sun by offering it a bath.)

So anyways, I was stretching my jaw in my sweaty yoga cave and remembering how sweet it had been to open my eyes with Jam Guy's loving hand on my cheek and his sweet, so-beloved face facing mine. And then I was hit with another memory with such suddenness it brought tears to my eyes.

It was a day when I was about seven. I was awake and my sister was asleep, maybe napping. My mother went to wake my sister up. I was watching closely as she moved near to my sister and stroked her cheek gently, murmuring her name as chimes of love, telling her tenderly it was time to wake up. This is what I remember. I remember that at that time in our lives, when my mother needed to wake me up, she would call to me from the doorway. It was a time in our lives when, for many reasons neither bad nor good, I felt that disparity in tenderness was evidenced in other ways. This is only what I remember, and these are old memories from the perspective of a child I am not anymore. I remember I asked my mother later if she would wake me up that way, too--by stroking my cheek and saying nice things. I remember her voice and eyes softening, and I remember she did wake me up a couple of times that way, but I don't remember it sticking. I don't know if she made a habit of waking my sister up that way either.

More than anything I remember feeling an ache watching that open demonstration of love. I was glad for my sister to be receiving it. I was. But I wanted it for me too.

As an adult I know now my parents were struggling with a lot of their own demons, and I know they loved us even if they didn't always show it in ways we could recognize. I know, too, that all I have wanted really in this whole life is to love and be loved back without parameters.

But maybe I am still that child. Because I know that my heart bloomed all over the place when I realized the full circle my life has drawn from that lonely pigtailed little girl to this woman who is soaked in love like a bit of cake in a rum trifle. Then, as now, I had dark and delirious dreams and craved a loving hand on my cheek to coax me out of them. The difference is now it is given to me, and I don't have to ask for it.

This year is closing, and I am having a little bit of a hard time letting it go. It has been so sweet to me; so many dreams have come true for me in the last twelve months. Remember when I wrote that this was going to be the year of abundance? It was for me. I am grateful to it, I bowed daily with that gratitude to that abundance. And I feel certain that we were building foundations for abundance, too, this year. I feel like 2010 will be a time to build towering structures on those foundations. We are good and married. The clinic is open. My sister's beautiful work is on the L.A. theater community's radar, my father has glasses that help him see far away. Dear friends have gotten married, have gotten engaged, are moving back to California, are moving into a sense of self. With an open heart, I look forward to what we all will build, out of our love, out of our ambition, out of our desires and destinies, as the new year rolls open.

Day after Christmas thoughts

I think the reason I loved Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs so much was: you know how the people in the protagonists' hometown had been trying so hard and for so long to think of sardines as good, desireable food, and then all of a sudden they tasted really delicious food, food that literally fell from heaven, and their disbelief and then joy when they realized that food could be that good, that nourishing, and then how they immediately wanted more and realized how hungry they were and how greedy they could be? That is how I am, but with love, now that I know Jam Guy.