Draft 3 - New

We're standing in my driveway when you begin what amounts to the second apology I have received from you in nearly 20 years. It is the same as the first and just as insufficient. You are a new person and are sorry about what the old version of you did. Truthfully, you don't have very many memories from the time before rehab. Truthfully, I think about how much I'd like to talk to the old you instead of new you. We have some unfinished business.

Maybe I'm petty. 

Maybe I'm bitter. 

Maybe I'm just a bitch. 

All I can think is, "it must be nice."

It must be nice to be new. It must be nice not to be able to remember. 

I want to be new. I want to forget with such totality. I have asked God, but even as I asked, I knew the answer. 

This is my inheritance. Your mistakes live in my bones. While there is so much more to me than this inheritance, it is still here and still mine. 

So I guess the only thing that I have left to say is this: 

If you don't want to remember, leave me be. 

I don't hold these memories because I hate you but because I cannot forget. If you keep asking me for forgiveness, acceptance, or reassurance, your sins will come spilling from my lips. Your regrets will tumble off my shoulders. Your mistakes will surface from behind my eyes. So keep your distance. Leave me be. 

Because I am not new. I am the same. 

And I don't think I will ever be new.

Draft 2 - New

It must be nice to be the new person instead of me, the same old person with the same old hurts. Instead of me who has been working for 12 years to get better--whatever that means. It must be so nice to be new and to not remember. But your newness doesn't give me those years back and it doesn't undo the damage. 

Sometimes this "new you" feels like a gag in my mouth and throat telling me not to be who I am. Your newness says don't speak of the past. It didn't happen. It didn't hurt. I didn't survive it. I wasn't formed by it.

When you apologize, I feel the weight of your expectations. How you want me to accept you, how you want me to hold that newness in my fingers for the fragile thing that it is, how you seem to need me to protect it as impossible as that is. When you apologize, I see how badly you want me to be new too. 

And this is what I cannot quite work out: how do we put the new you and same old, raggedy me into the same space without exploding? I am vinegar. And you are baking soda. And we are definitely going to bubble over. I am abandoned gunpowder and you are a fresh match. There is only one thing that I can do. I want to be water, cool and life giving. But I am not new. I am tired and old and damaged. 

I am the boxing gloves you don't need anymore. I am the armor that I don't need anymore. I am the set after the play is over. I am warehoused weapons in peacetime. I am the booby traps after the pirates have already taken the treasure.  I am the watermelon rind after the picnic, bite marks still visible and all of the good parts consumed.

I do not want to be this way but what I want has never seriously mattered, not then and not now. If you want to apologize, start there.

Draft 1 - New

The problem is that I don't' feel like I have a place in your new life because I am not new. I am the adult who was the child who was formed by the choices we made back then. And I will be living with those choices for the rest of my life. I cannot tell you how badly I want to be new with you. But I am not. I am tired and damaged and raggedy. I want to forget but I do not. I want to start over but I cannot. I want it to hurt less but it does not. 

The apology is always for the drugs and the alcohol and whatever may have been done while under the influence. I do not know how to tell you that the influence was only a small part of the problem, that those years were the easy years because there was finally a reason that made sense. How do I tell you that the worst scars are the ones that I gained while everyone was sober? Nobody is apologizing for that.

Visiting home earlier this month was hard. Ever since I moved away, I have been feeling a slow severance from the place that raised me. If the last decade has been a slow stretching away, this last visit was the snap when the rope gave way. I have read about this shift. For some people, it is immediate. For others, it drags on and on. I call Montana "home" now as a sort of respect for the elder that raised me, but it hasn't truly been home for a long time now. Twelve years. Twelve years as of this week that I have been away, uprooted...re-rooted. Transplanted. 

And I love my city. I don't think of myself as a city person. But I am also not a country person. I'm a "grow where you are planted" person. I had plans to leave Portland after graduation...but then I didn't. I stayed and stayed and 4 years of college suddenly turned into 12 years with no plans to leave. Portland is a city of contradictions. Maybe every city is. I don't know. But my contradictions agree with Portland's contradictions and this is the city, the place, the home where I feel most myself. Portland made room for me at several critical points in my life when I wasn't sure where I belonged or who I wanted to be. It is a city of contradictions, conflict, and maybe even chaos. But it is mine and I am Portland's.

I would be nicer if it made me feel better. 

But it doesn't.

Being nice is what got me into this mess and it definitely is not going to make the way out. 

The truth is that I would burn down every world if it kept the abuse cycle from starting over. 

I know you are waiting for my fire to burn out before you approach me, but I should tell you that you will be waiting for a long, long time. 

I would be nicer if that kept me safe. 

I would be nicer if I wanted to. 

But I don't. Not now and probably never again. I don't even recognize the girl who used to think being nice and patient and communicating politely would solve all of the problems. And there is part of me that wishes the hurt never happened and that I could still be her.

However, anger is better than despair. 

I've learned that sometimes anger is what keeps you alive. 

I would rather be alive than nice. 

I've had a book rolling around inside of me for the past 10 years, but there were things that I needed to learn before I could begin. There were questions whose answers I needed to live before I could pick up my pen. Suddenly and slowly I feel like maybe I have something to say. 

Whatever else it might be, it is a story about rebuilding and remaking yourself as many times as you need to because every life is yours if you are the one living it. It's about dreaming and choosing a new dream. It might be about giving up. And about how journeying and how if it really does matter more than the destination, it's ok if the destination changes...even if it changes frequently. It's also about prophecy and the way some truths resonate in your bones. About knowledge, how it changes you, and what you do with it. It might be about the role of the prophet and how there is never one around when you need one the most because so many important truths are by nature inconvenient. It might be about growing up. Not about a youth becoming an adult, but rather about transforming from one adult into a different adult and all the sacrifice and blessing therein. 

I want to write the kind of book that could be a metaphor my younger self might understand about the future and how it doesn't always go as planned even if you have a very good plan and are a very nice person. Sometimes the world tilts sideways.Sometimes you get handed loaded dice. Sometimes you have to make choices with far reaching consequences based on nothing more than a hunch. Sometimes your dream threatens to destroy you. None of this is making sense. But I'm writing a story for my younger self so she'll know that when everything goes wrong, it's not her fault and even though she has to build a new set of wings fast, she will do it. I'm writing because I drank stories in like water. I used them to raise myself and make a definition of success that few around me shared and I wish that I had known more. But only a little more.

I wish I had known that sometimes people choose to be your enemy for no reason other than they need an obstacle to overcome. I wish I had known that you are not going to win over those people and that it's ok to tell them to F* off especially when they try to ruin your life for God knows what reason. I wish I had known that being very good at guessing the future won't save you from the unknown. I wish I had known that rebuilding is a skill that everyone expects you to have but no one teaches. I wish I knew anyone who could speak on the paradox of celebrating successes that you've found even as you grieve the Dream you didn't achieve. There are not enough hands to hold all of the complexities of human experience.

There's the way a garden looks, say, in a picture and then there's the way it feels. We use more senses than we think we do at a given time. The goofy birds that will never let you photograph them playing. The swaying breeze. The way the cool air pools around your feet in certain areas or how the stepping stones stay warm after dark. The herbaceous, clean smell. The background hum of bees. Damp dirt. None of it photographs well. But it all weaves together into a certain ethos.

Every garden I've ever planted has been at least 50% chaos, but it gets there gradually. From sleeping seed pod to high summer, my garden and I take steps toward unrestrained chaos one or two at a time until it is a full gallop. I'd be lying if I said anything other than I love it. It makes me feel like I'm part magician, part mad scientist. Manicured, well behaved gardens are for someone else.