Returning

I have these boxes
in my garage
titled
“Emergency Writing Box”
1, 2 and 3
Not good
to have your life’s mission
in boxes
in the garage
and numbered
but
no apologies
for my mothering and career life
swamping
my creative life.

Only
a determination
to return
to it.

And so
I picked up
Emergency Writing Box 1
and found
tucked neatly at the bottom
Coco’s and Feliza’s thesis
and memories
of Santa Cruz, La Habana, Albuquerque, Berkeley
-quiet conversations
storm my mind.

Bound and hardback
more than one hundred pages of ideas and passion
and years of research
contained between the covers,
I flash back to our present.

Is me, standing, in my pajamas at 2pm
with gold slippers on
in the musty garage
holding the Emergency Writing Box #1
while
baby sleeps softly in our bedroom, six-year old
plays online Kirby games, and husband, weary from
the Holiday bustle, retreats to the NFL website,
a metaphor for
the condition and challenges of my writing life?

Knowing that Leo
crosses his fingers
every time I head for the garage
to not bring in
one more book
to our nine hundred and fifty square foot space
I defiantly
tuck my girl’s theses
under my arm
and stride across my backyard
into my house
with certainty
that I will clear a space
for their work
as a symbol
and reminder
that our creative work
has a place
on the front-burner
of our lives.

para Coco y Feliza

Longing

I don’t recognize my life.

I don’t recognize my men, whose life I am committed to.

I don’t recognize this wooden bungalow that I’ve occupied for 8 years.

I don’t recognize the work that I am wholeheartedly committed to.

I don’t recognize the stack of bills that I pay every month or the ones that come once or twice a year and ask me for thousands.

I don’t recognize the routine.

The mediocrity.

The predictability.

The standing-still.

The same faces.

The same time of year that keeps coming around and finding me in the same place.

I feel trapped,

I tell Leo.

We are.

But only temporarily, the tone of his voice matching the gentle rain.

I want to run.

Hard and fast.

Want to look at a map

and plan my get-away.

Too connected to my daily life.

Too, too connected.

Longing for novelty

and unfamiliarity.

I’m 38

and when I was 28,

I was on the road

with a backpack, a map and

on foreign soil.

Today

I am at home

with my feet on the ground

and my obligations

pecking at my feet,

and I want to be flying,

high in the sky.