Sit Still. Close Your Eyes. Wait for the Bloom.

Are we still in the game if we've played every hand?

I wrote this story a couple of years ago and five people read it. So, I’m sharing it with you here, now, because I read in today, in the midst of poking needles into my cat, arguing with vet techs, and learning our team lost out on a project to another fancy agency because business is a dirty business where sleek trumps substance every time. I read it because I’m in a place where I feel every hand has been played. But maybe not. Maybe there are some stray cards under the table. Maybe I can shuffle the deck. Play a round of Spades.

Stay until the end because I’ve got a Felix update and a question for you fine folk.

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Licensed from Adobe Stock // lassedesignen

If you asked me what brings me to my knees, I’d tell you this: I hold my hurt. I cleave to it. Carry it around like a blanket even when the threads come undone. I’ve never had a problem holding on to things, I just don’t know how and when to let them go. Maybe it comes from a childhood where the trash was picked up faster than the bodies. At eight years old, I stood over the body of a woman I knew sprawled out on the linoleum and felt nothing. I remember kneeling down and stroking her white hair, her soft cheek. She felt like a sweater that had weathered old age.

Do you know what it’s like to carry your mother down six flights of stairs and into a taxi and through emergency room doors and onto a seat where I’d complete the paperwork and watch the late shows until snow filled the screen? I’d put her into another taxi and entertain the driver — we’re fine! nothing to see here! Do you know what it’s like to have to be a fully-functioning adult straight out of the womb?

It felt as if every day was a series of tectonic plates constantly shifting beneath my feet.

No child should know darkness — the depths of it, the full stretch of it — before their life has even begun. Junkies with their jaundiced hands and eight-ball eyes, a body quaking from crack, the junk sick weaving their hands into your pockets, the smell of Bacardi everywhere, the sofrito, the gossip on the stoop, the thumping on the floorboards and against the walls, the blood on torn shirts and white sheets, the blare of sirens — all of this was home to me.

And when you live a life that lacks certainty and stability, you grow up into an adult determined to control everything. I spent half my life waiting for the ticking that was the bomb and the second half making sure the ticking ceased to exist.

I controlled my weight. I controlled my job. I controlled people’s perception of me (or so I thought). I was nothing if not the architect of the fiction that was my adult life.

Eight months ago, I said fuck control. Fuck comfort and the ties that bind. Fuck sleeping through my waking life. So I forced myself out of my apartment and into a yearlong adventure where I’d roam my adopted home of Southern California, trying to undo the damage control had done. I lived high in the snow-capped mountains, scaled rocks in the terracotta desert, and slept by the sea, and everything was fine, just fine until a virus threatened to ruin everything.

How could we know? How could we possibly know the uncomfortable comfortable life we were wedded to would irrevocably change?

Moving cuts me to the core. I should be used to it, I think, this peripatetic life. Eighteen apartments in nearly twenty years. But still, I quake. I hate the feeling of being in the in-betweens. Today, we drove four hours from Palm Springs to Ojai — but wait.

Let me rewind the tape.

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I met Michelle on a Lyft ride to CVS. She’s 61, feisty, acerbic, smart, and in a span of eight minutes, we hit it off. She gave me her number because she rides off the app. While the control freak in me screamed do everything in the app, by the book, I bypassed all of it and booked her for a round-trip ride from Joshua Tree to LAX when I flew to New York for work back in February.

At first, I thought we couldn’t be more different, but we filled the car with laughter and conversation, and I soon realized we had a lot in common. We are both mixed race (though she looks darker skinned and I’m white-passing), eccentric, bold, assertive, and always doing things before our time. We both launched online businesses back in the late 90s, and we joked about the struggles of owning a credit card machine back to process online payments.

She turns up the volume on the radio and we sing The Delfonics’ “Hey Love” loud and off-key. Funny how I can’t remember what I ate yesterday but I know the lyrics of a song I haven’t heard since childhood.

Ever since that trip, she’s been with me for my last two moves. Patient with my need to control everything and the anxiety I experience when I realize I can’t and my cat who believes howling in a car for three hours is the best use of his vocal cords.

Today, we drove from Palm Springs to Ojai. From my cat having an anxiety attack in his carrier and shitting everywhere in a five-mile radius and poor Michelle trying to find a bathroom in Los Angeles where public bathrooms state-wide have become verboten to the 115-degree heat, I nearly broke down in the middle of a 99 cent store while buying disinfectant to clean out cat shit in the carrier.

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In 2016, I scheduled an appointment with a psychic because I wanted to know things. My mother was covered in gravel, dirt, and rock, and I didn’t know where she had been buried. I was ravaged — unable to reconcile feelings of love and hate for a woman I hadn’t seen in two decades.

I didn’t know where to put myself. I passed days mind-numbingly drunk in a beautiful home by the ocean watching Salò and laugh-crying through the sadism scenes. I taped bedsheets to the windows because the sun was an assault, and ordered razor blades off Amazon, contemplating my exit strategy. I wrote stories, upon re-reading a few years later, that frightened me. Had I always been six-feet-under dark?

All I wanted was to go home to her. It’s strange, this want. Wanting to return to the country you swore you’d never revisit. The last time she saw me I was fresh-faced and twenty, but she was home to me. And I hated myself for feeling that. We built a relationship where we refused to relinquish power, and here I was acquiescing in her death. I can still hear her voice — never cry. Never be vulnerable because vulnerability is weak.

We weaponized control. And maybe this is why I crave control, it somehow brings me back to her.

But back to the psychic. Before that call in 2016, I mocked all things woo. I was a pragmatist, a rationalist, I didn’t believe in anything you couldn’t argue or prove. I abandoned Christianity because I couldn’t fathom the whole of the world, its grandeur, and wonder was reduced to a guy who seemed abnormally aryan considering the geography. Complexity I can buy. Give me Shintoism, Hinduism, Buddhism. Deliver me your gods of land, sea, and sun. I walked into this conversation assuming this psychic had scanned the internet and read the basics about me. I wouldn’t learn anything new.

Until I asked her a small, seemingly insignificant question — something I only knew. Something I’d never written about. It was a test, really. What’s my mother’s favorite song? Without missing a beat she said, “Gimme Shelter.” And with those two words, the air was wrenched out of the room. I was five, eight, ten, and twelve watching my mother in her leather jacket, clapping in time to the music. Those familiar opening chords. The dire guitar. How she lifted the needle at the end of the song and played it again. How she smoked a cigarette down to the filter, lit another. Closed her eyes. Snapped her fingers in time.

For a moment, I was cloaked in her reverie, wrapped up in all that was her.

The psychic became a torrent. Revealing all the small details no one could ever know, and believe me when I say I spent weeks trying to reason it out but couldn’t. How could she know these obscure facts? She couldn't have read everything I’d ever written and committed it to memory. What kind of business model was that?

I walked away from that call unsettled. Considering there were things beyond science and reason. And while you couldn’t get me to believe in visions of Mary in a bodega window, this — wonder — I could believe.

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We move on the roads in silence. Michelle grips the wheel and tells me stories about her guardians, about hearing voices — her youngest son hears them too. At first, I think I’m in a car with someone who’s schizophrenic. Hearing voices. Seeing things. Science has diagnosed this yet my gut tells me otherwise. This is a rational, grown woman who believes she’s been guided by benevolence — even through her darkest times of homelessness, abuse, violence, and death — and it feels cruel to have my skepticism invade this space. I listen without judgment, without waiting for my turn to speak.

I believe in the possibility of what she’s saying is real. This is not to say I believe in visions and voices and all that jazz, but I believe in people seeking wonder, and the way in which we uncover that wonder marks our individual journeys.

I’m not a vulnerable person by nature. I’ve been trained to believe laying your heart out to bear opens you to ridicule, scorn, and shame. But I tell Michelle I am tired. I feel rooted in a place in which I can’t grow. Deadland, weeded. I stare at the freeway and tell her I keep trying. I try so hard, I say.

Michelle nods and says, maybe you should stop trying and start being. Maybe you’re not supposed to be doing, but being. Not every inaction is inaction — tremendous movement can happen when you’re sitting still. It’s frightening to stop moving because then you might realize the life you’ve built for yourself isn’t the one you want to be living. What happens when you threaten the very foundation you’ve assiduously fought to build?

While she’s talking, I push the button to make the car window go up and down because I need to control something. I need to occupy my hands. I hear what’s she saying, but I don’t want to hear it. I think of Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays. Maria driving toward nowhere. BZ surrendering — someday you’ll wake up and won’t feel like playing anymore. Of Maria’s nihilism — I know what nothing means and I keep on playing. I think of inertia, a body at rest. A snake uncoiling. A disagreement over succotash. I think of a small girl watching her mother move to “Gimme Shelter.”

I always thought of not playing anymore as a surrender when it could be the moment before a becoming. A time of quiet where you’re gathering your tools and strength to prepare for the harvest. I never considered not doing anything as doing something mammoth — that standing still is one definition of staying in the game.

I walk into my temporary home in Ojai and the casita is smaller than I imagined. Compact. A studio with a soft bed and ambient lighting. An English mother with an American daughter who has tattoo sleeves I marvel over, love. This is not what I expected, I say to Michelle. Quietly. Under my breath. But maybe it’s what you need, she says. Maybe I need to go within, get small and still. Compact.

I wait for the blooming. Reminding myself new life always springs from that which has ended.

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Postscript:

• Felix has diabetes. This week has been stressful because I’m not at my regular vet, the vet techs are possibly catatonic, and Felix is shedding more hair than a high school jock vying to relive his glory days. We’ve had a full day at the hospital to determine his insulin levels to determine which dosage makes sense. And I have to bring him back tomorrow for part two, and I honestly might lose my shit but I’ve promised to calm myself with “Memories of a Murder”—a South Korean masterpiece. (Not to be confused with Memoirs of a Murder, which is a worthy film)

• Speaking of which, is anyone interested in film, book, and art recommendations? Or food I love and have been making? I have eclectic tastes and I’d love to share the films I’ve been loving, books I’m reading in more detail.

• Finally, I’m raising $$ for Felix’s vet bills by offering sales in my clothing closets. Share my links on your socials, tell your friends, pets, etc. Selling clothes makes me feel as if I’ve earned it since I don’t always do well with donations. Here are links to my Poshmark & eBay stores.

• Thank you, Christine (brilliant poet, btw), for sending me kitty diabetes supplies. Thank you, JP, for believing in me.