We Are Water

Today my father, Si Houshang Azar, would have been 80 years old. All day I have felt a heavy and complicated weight. And then I remembered today's date. It is strange, and not strange, how tangled and timeless grief can be.

I have wrestled with demons. They have not let me rest. They have raged and cornered me, smoked me and screamed me, pinned me down and bullied me. They have tried to convince me that I am worthless, messy and a terrible trouble for anyone who tries to love me. They have pulled at my lower lip, gut punched me and kept me from water. They have punched holes in my arguments that everything is different now, I have grown, I have healed so much....they laugh and call me hopeless and stupid.

I have not let them win.  I will not sleep it off or talk it off or walk it off or curl into a ball and surrender. This time, I call on soul.
My Soul. My Divine. My Wild. My Wolf. My Wilderness. My Fire.
And I write and write and move and agree to feel it one molecule, one bitch slap, at a time.
And I wrestle and stay in the fight.
And my knees bleed and my teeth fall out and patches of my hair lay in my peripheral vision. But, there is skin underneath my fingernails and gristle in the teeth I have left and I can see, with the one eye that is not swollen shut, that I am still in the game.

vulnerability.
honesty.

this is what I am feeling. this is what I am ashamed to see or say or have seen. I take responsibility for that, this. I hear you. I own my part in this. I set a boundary. I will not agree to hold your share of the rope. I'm in this with you. I will not retreat from you. or this. or us.

and, then I remember the date. and I tell him. and then the glorious flood of pain comes surging and sea is in motion again. My ocean rocks into his own tethered harbor and he swings loose, too, with his waves and crashing. And the seas are in motion again.
And we are water.
And we are water.
And we are water.



*it was unintended and unplanned, but that last line, and now the title, are tipped hats to the novel by Wally Lamb that I just finished listening to on audiobook as I drove to and from the Blue Deer Center in New York. Thanks Mr. Lamb. It is exactly the way it is for me right now.