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.

Here we are again.

I have a lot on my mind right now. There are lots of pieces threatening to come together, to resolve. The suspense is killing me, but the next 2 years are going to determine so much of the course of my life. And there are lots of questions that refuse to be answered. Mostly, I want a lot of conflicting things that God has little interest in helping me sort out. Instead, I am processing things that I thought I had long since finished the grief process for. But it turns out that you can start the whole process over in a moment's notice...and that has been a hallmark of my life.

I get angry when I realize that I am back in this familiar place. I have a lot of bad poetry from the first few times. I am not here to contribute anymore of that tonight. Mostly, I am here to write until I understand myself.

See, I loved my growing up. My running through the woods of Montana under the watch of mountains and sky. My making candy in mom's kitchen. My long ago friends with our silly adventures. These are all precious pieces with specific pictures of people and places.

And yet there is this haunting feeling of loss. I don't know how to explain it except that in psychology it is often referred to as abstract loss. It is the loss where you know that things as they are do not quite qualify as normal, something is missing...even if you don't know quite what the name of that thing is. It is not that something physical was taken away or stolen. For me, it is that I grew up so fast. I went from 7 years old to 18 and from there to 30 years old. Or something like that. From child to adult and from adult to parent before I ever turned 10. More or less. It is not an exact science. I cannot say that I was paying much attention to the details of the experience when it was all happening.

And now I am trying to explain what it means to have lost so much of your childhood, to grow up so early. It is not as though I can try to be 8 years old again. The best I can do is be the age I am. I get flack for that sometimes, for really holding onto being just my age and no older. Our society is so good at praising those who mature quickly. I loved being 19. It was horrible year of life filled with abandonment, but it was the first year that I got to deal with my problems as a 19 year old, my actual age. And I will never be 19 again because I grew up. But there are ages that fell into the chasm of survival. I never was those and it wouldn't be healthy to try to reclaim them now, ten or more years later. How do I explain the loss I feel in knowing that? There is no good comparison because I do not know what I missed except by the quiet envy I experience from time to time.

Looking back, I think I made the best of a bad situation. I think I chose well. I think it was all that could be asked of me and I would give it all again. The anger and hurt rise though when some secret wind whispers, it didn't have to be that way. The game was set and the odds were stacked before I ever had a chance. It is then that I remember that I live in a world under a curse. Most days, I am fine and grown up and unaware of the damage done. But then something small happens and all of the walls of the rooms that I have built inside myself crumble under a torrent of emotion that I wish I could control. Then the feeling of loss overwhelms and I wonder if healing is possible, if it ever really stays. And I think it does. It is just slower than I am patient.

But then that whispering wind hands me more discontentment as it howls around the ruins inside me.

You may heal but you will never be restored.
You will always be just a little bit

broken.

 It helps when I remember that we all have lost something in this curse, that we are survivors of a heavenly war that we chose the wrong side in. It is best not to compare pain and loss. No one wins that way.

Mostly, tonight I hope that healing is still possible. That restoration is a bigger miracle than I can imagine. And that eternity can provide things that are impossible amongst the mortal, cursed, and dying.

And that all of this grieving really will be turned to a celebration that is not forced or false in anyway.

If we believe these stories...

I was sitting in church the first time I followed that thought: "If we believe these stories..." And my black pen met my black book because I liked the sound of those words and I wanted to inspect their truth later. It has been a month or two or three since (not more than three though) and I still like them.

The sermon was on Psalm 105 and it asked us "why do we focus on the one thing that God has not done and ignore all that he has done?" Verse 14 talks about how God has moved kings for his small group of sojourners. It was good to be sure, but I think the most I got out of it was this phrase that would follow me..."if we believe these stories..."

I look at my Bible and I tell the world that I believe the words written in it. I promise to live by them and, perhaps, to die by them. But I forget.

Tonight is heavy. It doesn't have to be, but there are forces and people beyond my control making decisions, and they do not care that I am wrapped up in their story. They do not grasp the depth of their own significance, especially when one names them family...and that is ok. It is not good; but, quite simply, it is not the point. It is a symptom, not the problem itself. And so, tonight is heavy because I am waiting and hurting and trying to guess at the end. And because I am human. A woman living on a planet under a curse.

And I want to know what to do. I want to know how long this will last. I want to catalog all of my complaints and deliver them to heaven with a final request of answers in the same orderly fashion. Most of all, I want a promise that life wont always be this way, because, quite honestly, it has been just this for such a long time.

So I am sitting again, this time, weeks later, in my room. And just like that, I am holding that black book and looking at my Bible and hearing those words, "if we believe these stories..." Then what? At the time, the first time, I wrote: "If believe these stories...we should realize that we do not stand upon the shoulders of giants only, as the saying goes. But we stand and fall by the breath of God. A God of ancient goodness. We should have fallen a long time ago; but we forget our frailness and think ourselves invincible."

I wont get all of my answers delivered to me in bullet point form--that's hardly a way to live. But I get what I most want. It's truth. And it's a promise that life wont always be this. I forget what has been done and I get so afraid of something I know is not true. "There is a time for everything, for every activity under the sun." "Hope that is seen is not hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?"

If I believe these stories, it changes everything. There are hundreds of people in that book who have fought their way through living. It is not a plan in black and white with diagrams, but it takes care of the bigger issues. It makes itself useful to all people in all places at all times...and it answers my fear and my humanity. It gives me just enough.

perwinkle

A few years ago, I looked at various pieces of prose I had written and I realized how much pain there was. I wanted so badly to write something different, but every time I wrote it came out the same--or worse, it sounded forced. It is only now that I see how dark a time I was living in my life. Having come out of that time, I see that I longed to write about what I did not know. I could not write with the honesty I desired when my desired subject simply was not my reality.

I had been asked why I thought it was that it is easier to find dark poetry that is good. I did not have a real answer then. Maybe I do now. It is likely to be because pain forces us to be real. Humanity is seldom happy long enough to record it and deep enough to communicate it genuinely and deeply. It is a world at war, and, when we are honest, we cannot pretend any differently. We all carry our weapons beside our wounds in one form or another. Even those who find true joy, cannot honestly deny the evidence of an inherited curse. It weighs on us all, but it is not eternal.