Forward: A New Year's Eve Audio Blog

Background: my painting Across the Universe

(Highlight the text below to see the transcript, if your computer can't play sound clips)

Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you for your care, concern and support in 2011.
xoxo
bru
Strange creatures, we, who begin our day in the middle of the night.

Instead of days turning over with sunrise, light thrown upon the land and all among the trees and hills and rivers and mountains upon it, we strain to see the morning in the blackest dark of midnight.

That makes no sense to me. But then so little in this world makes sense to me.

You’d think it would be better to start a new day, let alone a new year, when you can see where the hell you’re going.

But we don’t. We seek daylight in darkness, even as we seek hope in darkest days.

Twelve AM arrives in waves across the globe, sweeping past already in my heart where it lies and leaving my body lagging behind in another time zone to follow.

We light the night with artifice, beautiful, glimmering color that can (and sometimes does) consume the thing that holds it.

The canvas upon which we paint these colors is still darkness.

Most drink they say to celebrate but I’d wager more to try to forget.

Some like me face the dawning of the new world without the comfort of such dangerous and impossible company; as sober as one with a mind wired for fireworks ever can be. We (I) live in our (my) own perpetual, internal intoxication; a gift and curse, a magic that defies both hope and description though treated with equal parts prayer and prescription. They may try to scare or medicate or therapeutically manipulate it out of us but it remains.

At least, for me.

The new year begins in the darkness of the last night of the darkest year of my life.

It’s already passed by, where it matters to me.

With the coming of midnight in the Eastern Standard Timezone I hope to be sleeping.

Gathering from my dreams, if I can, the strength to find a way forward in the new day, because there is no way back.

Regardless the numbers on the calendar, for me time seems to stand still, frozen on a point from which I must free myself, somehow; repeating to myself again and again six simple words: Forward, for there’s no way back.

Wishing you a year of momentum moving forward in all the right directions in 2012

~bru

Keep Shining On

I have no words right now, my friends.

I'm trying to find them again, but tonight they're just not there.

Neither is my voice, or I'd sing to you.

So since I can't find it right now- I'll share what may actually now be my favorite Christmas song of all time.

Watch until the end- the fireworks are beautiful.



Happy Holidays, whichever ones you may be celebrating.

I'll try to post something real tomorrow, if I can.

love,
bru

PS To Steve Parrish: I'm still trying to come up with the 'how and why'. Nothing could touch what you wrote. If you guys haven't read this- read it.

An Open Letter

Dear Toys for Tots Recipient Parent,

Thank you.

Thank you for working so hard, day after day, to keep your kids clothed and fed.

Thank you for the countless, thankless jobs you do, every day.

For the meals you skip, so your child won't go hungry.

Thank you for not giving up.

Thank you for the fact that you keep on trying, even if putting one foot in front of the other feels impossible and some days you don't know how you'll find the strength to do it.

I know many of you are trying to raise your kids on your own- without the benefit of a partner.

Times are so tough, and there's so little to go around.

Some of you have made choices that most people would find unimaginable-- like going without your own medications so that you can fill your child's prescription.

I wish there was more I could do for you.

I know it is so little, really, in the end- an armload of toys to be distributed to children I won't ever meet.

I know it doesn't solve the big problems, which, frankly as a disabled person myself I don't always have the answers to for myself, let alone for everyone, like I wish I did.

But it is a joy beyond my ability to explain to you that I am able to choose and send a toy for your child, and I'm grateful for the chance to do it. For the chance to be reminded how lucky I am to have a roof over my head and food in my fridge.

One thing I have to ask, though. I want you to do something for me.

When they bring in those toys for your kids this Christmas, hold your head up high. Know that though you may not have been able to buy them yourself, you earned every single one of them.

Know that this formerly single mom (who once had to adopt out beloved pets because I couldn't feed them and my two year old) understands a tiny bit of your world, even if not by far the whole of it.

Know that people do care.

And please know what an honor it is, for me, to be able to buy a gift for your child, because I can't buy them for my own anymore.

You see as of last year she's rejected the holidays. Her birthday, even, and for the most part, me along with her 'old life', with her new teenage religious values.

I won't even get to see her this Christmas, on her sixteenth birthday.

But I love her just the same-- more than she'll ever know. And I will be remembering how we burned (okay, how I) burned the cookies and she laughed because I ate the burnt ones anyway. How she decorated the little dollhouse with beads and strings of ribbon. How she used to squeal with joy at the sight of all the pretty packages.

And so for her, and for your child, I did what I could do. I wish it could be more. I wish it could be toy stores full.

All I ask in return is this.

Please hug your child an extra time for me, this Christmas morning.

When they wake you up at the crack of 'oh my god is it morning?' and you don't even get your slippers on let alone coffee made before the joyful ripping of paper is begun.

Treasure, and savor it knowing that there is a mom out there who would give everything, just to have her child back again.

Our children are the true meaning of the holidays- whichever you celebrate.

May we give them a world more peaceful, and hopeful, in 2012.

Sincerely,
February Grace

PS to all my friends and readers- it's not too late- please consider tossing an extra toy in your cart this year for Toys for Tots. I met a woman earlier this year who told me a story about how, as a child hiding at a women's shelter with her mother, the doll she got from Toys for Tots was not only her only Christmas gift that year but one of her only toys in her childhood- and she loved it dearly. I won't ever forget that story. I ask you to remember it with me.

The Third Brightest Object

When viewed from Earth, Jupiter can reach an apparent magnitude of −2.94, making it on average the third-brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus. (Mars can briefly match Jupiter's brightness at certain points in its orbit.) ~Wikipedia

A few months ago, the primary care doctor who has had the misfortune of calling me one of his patients for the past dozen or so years looked at me and sighed.
Aside from the day he informed me that he believed I was in the process of having a stroke, so many years ago, I don't think I've ever seen him look so worried.

"You scare the hell out of me, you know," he announced, as he assessed the swelling that had ballooned me up into something that looked like the ill-begotten offspring of a marshmallow and the Michelin Man. We didn't realize yet it was the first sign that serious side effects to new medications was setting in.

I told him the medications scared me. That I didn't like them, didn't want them.

"You're bipolar. You don't get to be afraid of medicine anymore," he said. "You've been up there, on Jupiter, for a very long time now, February, and it's time for you to join the rest of us down here on Earth. You're not going to like it. But it has to be done."

I don't like it.

After my body went toxic mid-November from that first medication and I had to stop taking it immediately (which is not recommended but was necessary) I was sick, really sick, for about two weeks. Then the immediate slam of the new med; which has slowed my brain down so much that I don't feel that I recognize its workings anymore.

One day I woke up (literally) and looked around my house as if it was somewhere I'd been before, a very long time ago, but that in no way could ever be called home.

Nowhere in this world feels like home.

The closest thing I can compare the experience to is the way it feels when you come back to your house after a long vacation; you observe things about it that you didn't realize about it in your day to day life before you left.

How long has that pile of (clean) socks been on the armrest of the couch? Why does he always leave them there until they accumulate? When did I paint that painting? I don't remember using those colors.  Why is everything so blurry?

Why is my head so quiet? Where is the music? Where is the flying, continual stream of words and thoughts that rush through my head under such pressure, like water from the end of a garden hose when you press your thumb down over it? Where is the sound? Where is the spark?

Where am I? Who am I?

I spoke about the fact that I don't know who I am anymore to my therapist. About the fact that, since I began taking the lithium that I don't--can't-- write the same way--except for poetry and in very short bursts.  That I am not the same person that I was and I do not know who I am and it scares me.

She said, "You're going to be someone different now, but someone better. Someone healthier."

Healthier? Maybe, if you define health as eating, sleeping, and staying alive.

Better?

As I stare at the open draft of my still unfinished, beloved novel--I am entirely uncertain that's so.

She told me to go ahead and call the doctor, about perhaps reducing the dose. I'm waiting for a phone call..

I am, it seems, forever waiting.

And I'm tearfully homesick for Jupiter, though I know I can't ever go back.