This is a poem about rape culture. I found it poignant and accurate. Some of you shouldn't watch it because it will hit too close to home. Some of you really should though. When minorities ask the majority to listen, it is things like this that they are asking to be considered because things like this can help create understanding. Poems are rarely flawless arguments, but they can share a wealth of valid experiences. Also, a word to everyone who has ever told me that rape doesn't happen that often: as I get older, the number of people (men and women) whom I can count who have not been raped, sexually assaulted, or almost raped dwindles. If you can find evidence for sexual abuse being infrequent, you are among the privileged.

I have met regret and she looks an awful lot like me.

There are things that no one told me about being engaged. To be fair, I do not think a warning would have prepared me.

As promised, I have been invited onto an emotional roller coaster and I am clearly not the one driving. 

People told me that making a guest list is the hardest part. I think they meant because you want to invite everyone but can't or because you and your parents AND your fiance and your fiance's parents all have different ideas of how big of a wedding and who is important. This has not been my experience. Rather, I am finding that in the last 6 years, I have lost people who I thought would share this day. Best friends in high school, my grandfather, and even a few college friends. 

It is a new aspect of an old grief. My friends from high school have been the hardest. We dreamed up fantastic and purposeful lives for ourselves together. As I pass mile markers in my life that used to only exist in the future, I miss them. I want them to see how things turned out, to laugh at how wrong I was about some things mostly. To marvel that somehow this or that did not cause the end of the world. And I want to know where they are at in the process of becoming themselves. But, I do not know anything. Some of them, I do not even know what city they live in much less how to contact them. 

The dreams and the nightmares are the worst part. It is ridiculous, I know. But that guest list has brought up untold guilt that I did not know how to save that friendship, did not try harder, was not wiser or stronger or more patient...that I did not love them tenaciously enough. And that I could not protect them from the trauma none of us have ever recovered from. My two best friends were assaulted in high school. And it is as much a part of this world's curse that it didn't happen to me as that it did happen to them. What I mean is this, there is no reason why I survived high school unscathed and they didn't. People try to tell me that God protected me which just about boils my insides because I cannot understand why God would protect me and not them. All I can figure is that the curse of Eden is made complete in the injustice that falls with unequal weight on us. The fact that I am made alone by surviving and that I had to watch them shrink into themselves is another injustice in and of itself. It is the same curse, but it falls uniquely on each of us and often makes us believe that we alone are cursed or that we deserved it.

I thought I had grieved those years already. I thought I had forgiven myself and moved on. But for the last few nights I have dreamt of high school. I have relived things that I could not stop even the first time and I have loved good friends that I could not save only to wake and find it all long gone. The curse remains though. For the first time in my life, I have found something I regret enough to wish that I could talk to my younger self, touch her mouth and give her better words, let her look through the lens of my memory and see if she can't find the solution that escaped me. And so I dream. About the attackers. They stab me and, oddly enough, I recover better from that then from the dreams that come next. In them, I know I am dreaming. I am hanging out with my friends doing nothing in particular, but it is excruciating because I know it is not real. I cannot wake up but I cannot accept the dream. I don’t remember what happens in the dream, only the last scene before I finally open my eyes. When I wake up, we are all strangers who used to be friends and reality seems just a little bit cruel.

I have been living in a fog these past few days as I have tried to piece together why I am dreaming these dreams. The emotional weight that I awake with is immense. I feel old and worn out. It must be the guest list. The roll call of important people that should be. That and, I miss them.

Tonight I am home alone in my tornado of a house with something akin to free time. So I pulled out a basin, filled it with soap and warm water, and moved everything out of my kitchen so I could get a good honest look at the floor. It is a little odd, I know, to enjoy washing the floor as much as I do. However, there are few household tasks that I enjoy more than mopping the kitchen floor with a rag on my hands and knees. A lady I nannied for gave me her electric mop…it just was not the same.

The kitchen is servant and slave to the rest of the house. The floor bears the bulk of this inglorious business while the household takes and takes from it. My floor in particular is speckled with tea and wine, the occasional run away pea, and grains of rice that managed to escape. I find smatterings of frosting and batter flecked from the mixer that got away from me. There are foot prints from every shoe I wore these past few weeks (more honestly, months) as I dashed in and out for this or that; they are outlined in cranberry sauce and cumin, pie crust and cilantro leaves.

I forget that I like this. I forget that I benefit from this ritual, this washing of my kitchen’s feet. It is silly that I forget because I so often tell people that a person can tell how I feel by the state of my kitchen. If it looks unused, I am not taking care of myself. If there are stacks of unwashed dishes, I am trying desperately to keep up and remember all of the pieces of my health. If you cannot see the counters and the sink, well…pray for me because there is likely little else that you can do to calm my brain and heart once such a tumult has taken center stage (unless you are one of the few who can roll up your sleeves and help take care of the mess without stepping on my toes or putting dishes away in the wrong cupboard).

Anyway, this is my way of managing to do more than live on the surface of my environment. Somehow that is really important to me. To live deeply rooted in a place without destroying it. I do not know if that makes sense.  Let us just say for now that I have taken care of my house and it has taken care of me in return.

These last few weeks have blown me in every direction. Tyler proposed and I accepted. I feel like that shouldn’t have changed anything all that much. After three years of dating, we knew we wanted to get married and we were working through all of the many things I was afraid of or unsure about, rational and irrational. Still, I was surprised and it seemed that my brain had fallen out the back of my head. Any ability to analyze, sort, or prioritize information was crippled and metaphorically bedridden for a little over a week. I am indeed delighted but, if I am honest, that was not the singular emotion riding my synapses that first week or so. Some days, it was not even the dominant emotion. I am such a timid creature until I am certain of something. I struggle against an inner compulsion to meet every expectation put in front of me and I shrink back the second I realize I was not made that way or do not wish to meet that standard or might not be totally capable. Marriage terrifies me in a deep and unsettling way.

Tyler and I have been examining this fear for awhile now. Basically, it is the same pet fear I keep around all the time but amped up with a new mask and a thousand extra expectations that I have no intention of meeting. I know I as a woman am supposed to want to be beautiful, but I do not. I mean, sure, being beautiful sure beats being ugly. But I have always felt beautiful excepting the intermittent trespasses of the unhelpful man or ignorant woman. I do not want to be more beautiful enough to fear failing. What do I want? To be capable.

Can I tell you something? 2014 hit me hard where it counted. Evicted. Fired. Four months of unemployment. Folding t-shirts. Largely unable to communicate to my coworkers because I couldn’t remember all of the Spanish I had learned, couldn’t relearn fast enough. I was in and out of depression. I couldn’t explain to friends what was wrong or why I needed them. When I went home to Montana, I spent so much of the time explaining myself and defending my beliefs it was exhausting. I was just following God around a desert that I often felt like was made out of my own ineptitude. And the gut punch? I have no idea how far away or how close flight school is. But I took most of that in stride…kind of a drunken stagger really. But, I was upright and still trying. Marriage is extra terrifying because of my fear of not being capable. A fear that, after 2014, seems a lot less irrational than it did previously.

I have heard all of the quaint things that people can say about how no one is good at marriage and so on. Odd as it may seem, those statements *are not helpful*. I am more likely to panic than to be comforted. In that panic, I have found just a few friends who are truly helpful and a partnership with Tyler that continues to encourage me that marriage does not have to end in disaster.

Tonight, as I clear the clutter from my kitchen, I feel like I am coming home to myself. I have no idea what the next few days or weeks or months have in store. Quite certainly, the Panic will find me again. But it will also leave again. Each time, it stays a little less long and I am glad for that. I know myself to be mostly capable. If I can add humility and grace to whatever skills I have, I think marriage will be good. 

Coming up... A month of drawing. I guess it could be construed as a New Year resolution but really this was bound to happen and I just happen to find myself in the first month of 2015. My biggest problem in making art (besides finishing projects) is just getting myself to sit down.

Hopefully a dedicated month of drawing will help. If not, well, we will have to see.