Esta como Elena.

Well.

I quit my job.

I went home to Montana.

If you asked me why, I am not sure that I could put all of it into words. If 15 different people asked me why, I would likely give them all very different reasons--and I think they would all be true. My last day was bittersweet. I had hated night shift. It made me crazy and lonely. I was always switching from nights to mornings and back again. But I loved the community that was morning shift, even though I was the only white woman and I usually had very little idea what was going on. I had chosen to love the people there even though I knew I would leave quite soon. I invested a lot. Actually, I invested a lot more than I realized. I cannot think of a word to describe how I feel in thinking about the way they took care of me other than "blessed".

Elaine is a difficult name to pronounce in Spanish. It has too many vowels. But when I told my Hispanic co-workers that it is "como Elena", it stuck. After 4+ years of Spanish class, if you call me by my Spanish equivalent, there is 90% chance that I will answer in Spanish. My confused 3 year old efforts in their language pleased them and I learned a new kind of humility. I lived on heavy servings of their grace and patience.

Sharing that vulnerability only made me feel that much closer to people with whom I could only talk with about my family, food, t-shirts and boxes, and (if my vocabulary held out) maybe a sentence or two about what I did on the weekends. On the days that were very Spanish heavy and I was overly tired, I would come home unable to sort the languages because, in the warehouse, I did not have to. We made our own language based around what they knew in English and what I knew in Spanish and how available one of the bilingual people would be. I did not always transition out of that so easily. But I am not Elena anymore. 6:00am does not bring me Spanish love ballads and it has been a full week since I have been greeted in Spanish. Leaving was quite possibly the hardest decision that I have ever made. Not the hardest thing I have ever endured or survived, but the most difficult act I have ever committed independent of provocation.

I hope it was the right thing. I hope it was, at least, a good or healthful thing.

I realize now, that I have left behind my main community and support. As frustrating as it was to be unable to communicate so much of what was important to me, these were the people who gave me their time. They taught me Spanish and spoke with their hands and their eyes. And they kept talking slower and slower the more exhausted I was until I finally got whatever obvious thing I was overlooking. And if I had asked for anything, they would have given it. With joy.

I would like to think that that is true of all of my spheres of community past and present, but I am not convinced. So often, people are busy and distracted and they act like you are going to break through their thick wall of self-sufficiency and scheduling in order to tell them that you are vulnerable and needy. As if you have that kind of energy by the time you are damaged and drained. They act like you are going to chase them down to ask them to take care of you. Because that feels healthy and not at all codependent...right. And dignified. Turns out, human beings cling to a sense of human dignity long after the size of their need tells them it is not the most efficient way of filling needs. At the core of being human is a profound lack of efficiency that makes me wonder a little.

Anyway, I am going to miss that community. It would have been soooo much easier to let go if I knew at all what was coming next. If I had somewhere to go after I left. But I do not. I mean, I am here in Montana, but that is to stave off the loneliness...not to actually choose a direction. Unless I come back here permanently. That is an option I guess. Everything is an option and I am as of yet committed to no thing and no place.

All I know is that Elena is no more and that carries a heavy sense of loss. I will miss that community, but I have no words to tell them why or how much. Just as I had no words to answer the constant porque Elena? Porque?

I come back to my Israelite metaphor that I began living in after I got fired from HAI. I am still in the desert. At different times in the last couple of months, I have thought that I had left the desert. Every time I was surprised to learn that I was truly in the desert with a God that I am well aware could, and possibly should, abandon me here forever. He already got me out of Egypt and I have been so ungrateful. Besides, the Angel of Death leaves a particular impression on a person. And the desert. It just keeps going. The topography is always vaguely familiar and vaguely foreign.

wandering

I am taking a Spanish class.
I am finishing a Spanish class. On Wednesday.

Much better.

However, the final for this class requires me to tell about my life up until now. I have to fit my life into 8 photos and 10-12 minutes.  Admittedly, I only have to make sense of 21 years and yet... I am proud and ashamed to say they have not been an empty 21 years. It takes a good deal more time than 12 minutes to make sense of them. I am struggling because, the point is not to make sense but to use the past tense of Spanish. And because I have only just finished remembering that the way I remember things is gone. Where I come from exists in fragments and it would not matter how many times I rewrote my past and what adjustments I made. The past is always just fragments. This crisis is not unique to me.

But I want so badly for it to make sense to these near strangers. I like my life, all of it. It is the tangled knot of yarn and time and memories and people and other broken bits that may not look like much one apart from the other, but that maybe, just maybe, might add up to something all together.

All of this would not matter so much except that it feels like the most disrespectful thing I could do, this condensing of life and accepting that I will misrepresent a good amount of it. Not disrespectful to me, though I guess that is likely to be true as well, but to life itself. I think there is a certain amount of respect due to things just because they are alive and even more so a certain amount of respect due to life.

Living is tough sometimes and it takes a lot to hold on. But life, life is a tenacious thing with strong hands and maybe even claws that dig in deep into living, whatever living is made of, and do not let go until it is time.

I do not understand whatever pact Life and Time have made, but it is not one to take lightly. I see them, in my mind, shaking hands. And if I had the time and the ability, I would draw for you what that looks like to me. It is terrifying and beautiful and just about comforting but not quite there. I promise. You will have to take my word for it because words are all I have today.

I am constricted to 26 characters and a handful of punctuation. Twenty-six characters to explain to you that I am homesick and day dreaming and not altogether here because everything that I want to touch is not in the least bit real. Some of it was. Some of it may be... and a lot of it never has been and may just stay that way. And that may even be ok.

26 characters to communicate the sort of pictures that my mind sees which is tricky because my mind knows no language only picture after picture after picture. Today, my translator is broken, both of them. And so I say too much and draw and paint too little and never get the right thing out, never say what I meant, always wish I could take back what I said even when no one is hurt. It's still a waste of words to say anything other than what you mean. Anyway, I am lost and currently untranslatable. Don't expect me to make sense; and please, send my apologies to my Spanish class after I try to explain myself for 10 minutes and leave them to wade through my verbal debris.

A picture and a poem.