Yellow Violet

My poems all had windows in them. That is the comment the famous poetry professor had to say about my work. He was brilliant and I felt so terrible about never writing anything until the very last minute before class. I felt awkward about all the terrible poems I wrote but really I had nothing to say. I was eighteen and had no voice of my own. I kept my real thoughts secreted away. I felt so lonely all of the time and words were my lifeline and books became my company, the story lines my escape. It was most vivid with poems, a concentrated dose of what I needed. I loved the class because I loved his work and how he read, the sound of his voice. I had met his daughter and she was brilliant too. She had inherited his fingers and tongue it seemed. A girl that wrote the word fuck and made it sound like a symphony. She wrote from her experiences and opened herself up with a brutal honesty. My brutal honesty sat in a chair and looked out the window.

I wanted to write about important things but I didn’t have a grasp of what was important at that time. I was adrift. Getting by in my classes at university but not excited about much. I had trouble sleeping but my dorm mate liked to go to bed early and any light in our room at night made it hard for her to sleep. So I took to riding my skateboard all around Tempe late at night. I liked it best when the bars had shut down and everyone had gone home. I liked the scent of the orange blossoms at night, without the distractions of day they were heavier and more potent. I liked the quiet of the night with only the sound of the train or the rhythm of my wheels hitting the cracks in the sidewalk. I never worried about my safety because I didn’t care. But despite my fearless adventures something finally did put an end to them.

I was friends with many of the homeless regulars that lived around campus. Mostly because I have always felt deep compassion for the homeless, but I was also a young girl with no sense of boundaries. So if someone that was mentally ill or unstable sat next to me and started up a conversation I wouldn’t jump up and go my own way. I would sit and listen to what they had to say. Perhaps nod my head at the appropriate times or voice my opinion restating their opinion just so they would remain calm or happy or so they would believe someone felt and thought the way they did.

One day my dorm mate came back from class to find a homeless man and his dog watching our tiny television. I never knew his name. Before that day we would usually sit on a couch at the student union where I would do my homework and this very old man would watch television. No one else would sit by him so I was always assured a spot in a very crowded area. His homelessness was as obvious as the old black wing tip shoes he wore without socks. One day the student union that had this room of comfortable couches and chairs had some sort of television malfunction. Suddenly this quiet little man started talking to me. He was so distraught that his program would be on and he was going to miss it. He had never spoken to me before. We had always been silent partners on the couch so to hear his voice startled me. He sounded sane, just an old man down on his luck. So I told him he could watch his program on my tiny black and white television. He was so moved he started crying. I walked him back to my dorm with his dog that I had not known about and he sat on the edge of my bed and watched my t.v. while his dog stretched out on the carpet happy to be inside. My room mate walked in and freaked out. I knew she had every reason to be angry, but I begged her to let him just finish his show and I promised no more homeless people in our tiny room. They still often sat with me at lunch because I shared my food with them, but that was in the student union and my room mate never caught me.

Elvis was a homeless man that I did know the name of. He was a very short and thin man, but wiry. He had jet black hair that looked dyed often combed into a pompadour. He dressed like a rockabilly except he looked like a homeless rockabilly. It was difficult to guess his age but I imagine he was in his late forties which seemed very old to me at the time but it was hard to tell he could have been much older. He rode a bike everywhere and collected tin cans. His basket had crazy artwork on it that had his name Elvis written out with drawings of himself or maybe the real Elvis it was hard to tell. I had often seen him biking around and tried to ignore him but he would always stare at me. He was popular around campus in a strange way, the star of the homeless people. He was a novelty with his eccentric clothing and bike. I did not like him. He reminded me of the main character in Elizabeth Bowen’s short story Demon Lover. He was very stealthy and seemed to sneak up on me but in truth I was often distracted or daydreaming or just not paying attention. He always called me animal names like kitten, or rabbit,  or little bird. Suddenly he would be next to me hands on his handle bars calling me his kitten. I did not like him at all.

Sometimes I would take a blanket or pillow and go to a building on campus that was right next to my dorm. It was offices during the day so at night it shut down but there was a secret passage way that led to an inner courtyard with a giant vessel and very nice landscaping. Some of the offices had fire escapes with small balconies and some nights I would climb the fire escape and watch the stars and enjoy the night. One night as I was camping out, up on the balcony, I suddenly heard something and through the passageway into the court yard came Elvis with his bike. I stayed very still and quiet while he walked his bike to a bench and sat down. He started whistling some song and lit a cigarette while I held my breath. It was very dark but I knew it was him by his white shirt and bike. I was afraid to move, afraid he would suddenly run to the fire escape and come get me, afraid that I would fall asleep before he left. So I sat for what seemed an eternity until he finally stood up and put out his cigarette. I could hear the sound of his tires in the grass and just as he got to the inside of the passageway to leave the courtyard I heard him whisper, “Good night little bird.”

Now I was afraid to come off the balcony. I was afraid he was waiting for me. I thought of trying to climb to the roof to escape but couldn’t do it. I tried breaking into the building through the window but it was locked tight. I was trapped and I was paralysed with fear. I stayed up there all night trying to stay awake and listening for him. Imagining myself falling asleep only to wake up and find him leering at me on the tiny balcony. I stayed alert until sunrise when I finally gathered my courage to climb down the fire escape and go through the passage way. I didn’t want some person looking out their office window and find me sitting there. I ran back to my dorm room and fell into a deep exhausted sleep. After that I started to try to go to bed early like my room mate. I stopped skating around the town at night and I never went back to the little courtyard. My freedom to roam became limited to daylight hours and I suddenly found myself becoming more aware of my surroundings while trying to stay as far away from Elvis as I could.

I was never able to answer why I put windows in my poems. I had no idea that I was even doing it until it was pointed out to me that every one of my poems had a window in it somewhere. But looking back windows were so many things to me. A window was a precarious position to be in. Trapped inside only able to look out a spectator not participating, but windows are glass and can be broken easily. They offer no real protection from the outside world if it wants to get you. Trapped or stifled and yet unprotected. That is how I felt the year I wrote bad love poems with windows.

My feet are marsh-mellow sometimes. I will go to take a step and suddenly it is as if I am walking on a cloud, and I fall through it and up into the sky I go. Sometimes I catch myself, sometimes not. I remember falling so much as a small child and getting up and dusting myself off and running away, off to fall again. It never seemed to hurt that much. I was made of rubber and bounced back. And then I stopped falling, and I remember thinking to myself how nice it was not to fall anymore. No scraped knees or hands. Now it seems I am a pillar of salt and crumble to the ground for no reason other than gravity and my defiant feet and wobbly brain. The doctor diagnosed it as fibromyalgia, a textbook case. I went to a specialist, a rheumatologist. I didn’t know I would have to get partially undressed and wore hot pink underwear that day. I was embarrassed. I no longer cared about the gnawing pain I was in, but was wracked with mortification that this small older man in glasses should see me, in boy short hot pink underwear trimmed with lace. I wanted to bolt out of the office back to my car, but I could barely walk. So when he finally got a peek I explained how humiliated I was. That it was washing day at my house. I blushed and as I rushed to explain that I never would wear this underwear in front of him had I known, he started laughing, and his nurse practitioner giggled, and so I laughed at myself too.  I laughed until I got into my car where a bushel of tears fell ripe from my eyes. How would I get out of this? Fibromyalgia. A word I had never heard of or cared about before. At first I googled it and read blogs and worried. Some of Kevorkian’s patients had this disease. So my doctor was wrong, there was a cure, the Kevorkian cure. It made me feel better for some reason. To know the ending to the story never ruins it for me. I think I actually prefer it. However that cure is not an option for me. This is a really, really bad time to off myself. I have so many things to do. I am going to have to ride this pain to the end. Chronic pain forever and ever no cure, nothing. They don’t even know what the cause is. Maybe a car crash? Yes, I was in one of those. Or a traumatic experience, I’ve had my share. Or possibly a combination of viruses, check. Or the best is… it is all just my imagination and my pain doesn’t really exist. Yes, I like that one best, vivid imagination. Sometimes I still don’t care and I push myself past the limits of my body. I can feel the vibrations and rumblings of a volcano that lays dormant inside my spine. My anti seizure drugs plug up the hole that pours out the lava. I turn to ash and I get ashen. Everyone asks me how I feel and the buzzing in my head makes their lips move in slow motion and I smile a fake smile. I lie because I don’t want to discuss the burning raw feeling my body creates, or my brain, or perhaps how they work in tandem. I get the warning of numbness and then tingling and then it hits me in waves. I was knocked down by a wave on the California coastline during a childhood vacation with family. Or really, knocked high into the air flying in seawater. I was terrified and exhilarated at the same time as my body, spiraling out of control, took me up with the wave and then I didn’t know if I was falling up or falling down. Somehow my father grabbed me by the strap of my suit and saved me. I cried because I didn’t want to leave the ocean or it’s waves walking back to our beach towels. Now my safety comes in the form of a little tablet. I take three white tablets a day and two green. It seems to be working most of the time. Most of the time, but not all of it. My feet not working is one of the first signs. I choose to ignore the signs and then I pay. I want to live as I did before the f word. If I have a flare up I am again the girl spiraling not knowing up or down. Only thinking about breathing or not breathing not really aware of the place I am in. Ocean water, clouds, fogginess, a place that is not a place but that seems endless until it ends. Everything ends eventually and falling down or falling up at some point you hit the hard thing that hurts you. The ground, the rocks, the truth.

I broke up with my first true boyfriend my Junior year in high school. It was on our one year anniversary. I am not good with dates and so while he was getting ready to give me a small gift to celebrate our first year together I gave him the gift of a terrible heartache. It was horrible, I was cruel. I was angry that he wouldn’t make it easy to break up with him. Unhappy that I felt guilty for leaving a boy whose girlfriend before me had died in a tragic car accident. I was furious that he would not just let go of me and I felt trapped and terrible, because I knew that he really did love me and would always love me if I let him, and I didn’t love him or myself for that matter.

Until last night I was convinced that I had cursed myself for eternity with my mindless mistake and my cruelty. I have disliked Valentine’s day ever since and therefore every Valentine’s day has lived up to my every expectation. Either wishing desperately that I was not with the person I was with, or thinking how I was alone and lonely and would be alone and lonely forever.

The next morning after our breakup as I went out to my car I found it filled with flowers, literally. I opened the door and flowers poured out of my car. It started raining and I was late to school. My sister and I were running back and forth to and from the car trying to find things in the house we could put all the flowers in. Most of them went into the bathtub. He had driven to every grocery store he could find open, and had bought tubs of flowers to fill my car with in the middle of the night. He never had a chance. All the flowers in the world could never have filled the emptiness I felt inside myself.

Looking back twenty something years later it seems terribly romantic, but at the time it was embarrassing and cumbersome. On the steering wheel was a card that told me he loved me. I was only seventeen but I felt a timeless rage. How dare he love me. How dare he fill my car with flowers on a rainy day. I took all the anger and hatred I felt for myself at the time and at the things that had already broken me inside and I directed it all squarely at him. His last conversation with me was that some how some day he would love and be loved by a girl named Kristin who was an artist and wore glasses. Eventually with time everything he said came true. I said nothing, but inside my head I was screaming out that I would never find love and that I would rather die alone than be loved. It turns out I am terrible with dates and predicting the future.

What my seventeen year old self could never imagine is that I would give birth to love. Motherhood would become the steep path to accepting my past, my mistakes, and myself. It is as if all the love I had secretly stored up inside all those years came flooding out, just like the carnations from my car, just like the baby girl from my body. I found all the leftover love that I felt for my daughter soaking into the wounds that were made before her birth. Falling in love with my child taught me how to be kind to myself, how to cherish myself, how to love myself.

Now I think, “Would this be good enough for my girl?” If it doesn’t pass that test it is not good enough for me and I try to avoid it. She has become the barometer to the compassion I wish I would have shown myself in my youth. The thing that I was always missing or was somehow misplaced one day. The beginning of the end of self-hatred.

Every day I feel closer to that elusive relationship with a man and I am no longer afraid. We will work to create something selfless, kind, trusting, relaxed, lovely. Someone I can look at with love and who will return the favor. I can imagine him. He will be bad with dates and we will both ignore things like anniversaries, diamond rings, ceremonies with vows, and Valentine’s day. Flowers will be shared for no reason and come and go like the rain.