That Moment

When you realize your quiet, sweet, baby chile has a blinding spirit with a brain to match.

It's pretty awesome.  

Not that I didn't already know, but unless you make a concerted effort, sometimes our quiet ones tend to slip through the cracks.  

Do you know how NASA is able to photograph objects in the farthest reaches of our universe?  Aside from the fact that they are actually traveling back in time when they do this, which is truly one of the most badass things I can imagine.  Beside the point.  Do you know how they do this?  

The space photographers (which I will one day change my last name to, so that I can actually sign my name as Aimee Davis Space Photographer)  have to isolate their light.  And they do this by blocking out the light from all of the celestial objects in the space between. 

Sometimes you have to isolate the babies.  The quiet ones.  The ones who are content to sit in the background observing, taking notes, soaking up life like a sponge while making as few ripples in time as possible.  Sometimes, we need to block the light from our Jupiter babies so that we can explore our Kuiper Belt.

Perhaps you might find that, unintentionally, you've dismissed him as the quiet kid who likes playing video games.  Or that, "he's just not a talker."  Perhaps not as astute as his older, louder, camera-hog of a brother. 

And that is when your little Kuiper Belt likes to sling a comet in your direction.  Suddenly, all the telescopes on Earth are swiveled to zoom in on this little unassuming rock hurtling toward us.  

That's when you find yourself entrenched in a conversation with this child about philosophy.  No, really.  He suddenly wants to talk about things like how to find a balance between staying a child and being an adult.  And how he doesn't think (insert name of family friend) is doing it right at all.  And how most kids think it is such a romantic notion until the bills start piling up.  (His words).  And why girls are so emotionally dependent on boys and how he is supposed to handle it.

And....  "I'm not like other kids my age.  I'm much more tender-hearted.  I just seem to feel emotions differently." 

And then you find out that the reason he is so quiet is because.... ahem.... "most people can't keep up with me in a conversation, so what's the point?"

Shit.

No.  HOLY SHIT.

On second thought.

The Kuiper Belt is probably an insult.

He's more like Nibiru.

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Story Beneath

A mother cries for her child

without sanctum.

She cries for herself,

betrayed from birth,

Oneness with her kind broken.

Yet, a foreign heart

offers honor with grace

a gift, pure as life.  

* Katy No Pocket, Emmy Payne

  

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Trifextra Week Twenty-Two- "This week we're revisiting an early Trifextra prompt: retelling.  This time, we're asking you to retell your favorite book.  In 33 words.  Nothing like a challenge.  We are sure you're up to it."

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Superbitch, Smartass, and now Guest Blogger!

I am beyond excited that Kelly asked me to guest post over at Naked Girl In A Dress.  She's been around the block a few times out in bloggyland and is one of the faces behind Studio 30+.   So it means a lot to me that she asked. 

I'm honored!  It's almost like I'm famous!

Now go read my shit!

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Hot Momma

"You look like a baby.”

I glanced at the phone.  Raised an eyebrow.  Placed it back to my ear.  “Huh?”

“You can’t be my girlfriend, Aimee.  You look like a baby.”

Ahhh.  Fourth grade heartbreak.   A strange place for a girl like me to find herself.  The prettiest.  The smartest.  The best!

That’s what Mom told me, of course.  I’d not yet reconciled how superlatives work in a sibling group of 3, but my momma never lied, so she clearly knew what she was talking about. 

To make matters more confusing, I had a hot mom.  I could write volumes on the peaks and valleys of that, but in my current situation, it meant that the boy on the other end of my phone must be blind.  And dumb.  And stupid. 

I had a hot mom.  And she was as tiny as me.  She had dates!  She went to the movies with boys!  She was itty bitty.  Long, curly, brown hair.  Bright blue eyeshadow perfect and sparkly.  Skin a deep golden in an era when it was absolutely acceptable to slather yourself and your offspring with baby oil for a fun-filled day beneath unobstructed UV rays.   Needless to say, by the end of each Alabama summer, we were little white-headed baked clams.

There isn't a 4th grade boy on this silly blue marble who would dismiss a tiny white-headed baked clam as non-girlfriend material.  It's fucking blasphemy!

But apparently, the knucklehead on the other end of my phone was doing just that. 

Is it a testament to my bourgeoning ego that I did not tumble into the wistful, blue void of childhood rejection?

Perhaps. 

But with my mother as a guide, I was quite aware that tiny girls grow into tiny women. 

And tiny women get any damn thing they want. 

I was almost positive that I'd gotten the last laugh. 

Until I asked my own boys their thoughts on having a hot mom. 

Their response? 

“We wouldn’t know.”

Fuckers.

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Trifecta week 32- Blue

3  a : low in spirits : melancholy
    b : marked by low spirits : depressing <a blue funk> <things looked blue>

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A Love Story

She wasn’t what I imagined.  My memory just would not settle for it.  I remembered strawberry blonde hair.  I remembered green eyes.  I remembered skin the color of eggshell.  The smell of sugar cookies.  Barely-there freckles.  Long dresses she wore to hide her frailty.  Her silent restraint laying in contrast to the neon rave that seemed to follow me everywhere.   

I remembered the way she held herself like a dancer, a ballerina, though she was not.  When she spoke, her hands danced with her words.  She would fan her fingers and roll them on her wrists.  When she made a point, she would extend her index finger alone.  When she spoke of fairy tales, she used her hand as a singing mouth.  When she hinted at deviousness, a Friday night jaunt into student housing at the university or a costumed midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Fox Theater, she smiled with lips closed, touched my shoulder with a finger, drew it down my arm, over my elbow, down into the palm of my hand, before fitting hers perfectly between my fingers.   That meant the plan was sealed.  Smoke a bowl.  Steal a couple 20s.  Shove our feet in some shitkickers.   And we were gone. 

With her, I felt like an elf in the shadow of a princess.  A twisted knot in the trunk of a willow tree. 

But as I saw her on this morning.  As we met on the pier.  I saw a changed girl.  A broken thing.  A willow tree bent by the ugliness of misplaced trust, heavy with the burden of heartbreak.  A princess locked in the highest tower of her own disenchanted spirit.  For so many of these 18 long years, she’d tried to live a crafted life.  She had become a dancer, but not the kind her hands dreamed.  She saw things beyond the Main Street we haunted, but so few memories broached the fog of intemperance.  And it was back to that very Main Street that she now returned.  But with a magical, dark-eyed doll sitting on a hip I never knew existed.  My wispy ginger ballerina stood beside me as a mother.  With bones of one who has borne a child.  Eyes that have cried, watched dreams crumble, sought shelter, and yet looked into me now with a dainty sliver of joy as she ran her fingers through her son’s perfect black ringlets.

He looked just like his father. 

Though I would have to take her word for it.  

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Studio 30+ prompt- We met on a pier

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Sentence

One of the coolest chicks I know, Marie Nicole at My Cyber House Rules quoted Clare Boothe Luce- "A great man is one sentence."

And she asked, "What is your sentence?" 

It's so much more of a question than those five words belie.  

Most people will indulge themselves and say that they could never describe themselves in one sentence.  I will be honest.  That was my first thought, too.  

And then I was suddenly struck by the endless lists and questions and blanks to fill that would keep me busy for hours on end.   

Aimee is _____

Aimee loves ______

Aimee hates  ______

Aimee knows ______

Aimee wants ______

Aimee needs ______

As humans, we feed on filling in those blanks.  Defining ourselves.  Carving our place, where we fit.  Giving our souls a face and a voice.  We need for other people to see in us, not what we see, but who we want to be.  

We love these kinds of questions.  These kinds of exercises of awareness.  It gives us a chance to search ourselves, dive down in there, in the extremes of light and darkness, cold and burning, tagging ourselves with words and phrases.  

It's such a temptation for us, when we are asked to talk about ourselves.  Even the most self-loathing among us will dream enough beauty to balance the ogre wearing our clothes.  

I began to think.  The typical fare.  Aimee is a contradiction, a storydancer with two left feet, a woman with hairy toes, an ex-90s grungy punk rocker who refuses to grow up, a mother against her own better judgment who wishes she could be a stripper for a day to see what it's like.  Aimee is not an ocean, but more like a swamp- a collector of life, stagnant in some places, in others a breeding ground for the brilliance that grows in wicked and slimy things, beauty that pulses in swarms and ugliness waiting to attack, a mating call of desire from nowhere in particular, a threatening heckle from dark corners, shock of energy exploding to feed, languor of death as the chain comes full circle.

Oh yes.  I could say all those things.  I could sprinkle some semicolon pixie dust and make it one sentence.

But it is not each individual grain of sand that makes a great man.  It is the castle that is built by them.

And so I thought to myself.  What is the common thread that binds me and builds me and helps me to reach as high as life will let me in spite of the swelling tide?  What is it that makes my castle tall, my turrets sturdy, staring into the horizon among the clouds of greatness, longing to swim among the gods breathing life into stars?

And I knew then that there was only one answer.

Aimee is real.  

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Side Effects

At times, I wonder if it is when we are the farthest from au courant that our true nature appears.  Those times when we are with least control of our countenance, somehow sans complete awareness, whether a medicated fog, twilight sleep, concussion.  Those times.  Are perhaps when realness has the best chance of finding its way into the light.  

It was not my first surgery, yet the first time I'd ever experienced the actual stages of general anesthesia, as I was dancin' pretty tight with death during my only other experience and have no memory of it.  I should have expected something strange.  My mother has awakened from anesthesia during every surgery she has ever had.  Fully conscious.  Moving and talking with the surgeons.  Yet in no pain.  No fear.  She asked for pie during her hip replacement.  And asked the surgeon would he be so kind as to play Bob Seger instead of Huey Lewis and The News.   I should have expected something.  

It took an enormous amount of medication to shut me up.  I talked well into the prepping and draping.  I asked if they were going to use 5 mg of Versed IV push.  The OR staff laughed.  I asked if they would be using cautery for hemostasis, or would I have sutures?  Would they be 5-0 plain catgut or Ethibond?  More laughter.  They asked me to count backward from 100.  I made it all the way to 45.

I awoke while I was still in the OR.  Just as they removed the mouth gag used to keep a patient’s mouth opened during oral surgery.  I began talking immediately.  I asked if everything went okay.  I asked if there were any complications.  I asked if the surgical tech was married.  And then told him he was a quite beautiful man, and were I not married, I would like to recite Invictus for him over coffee. 

“Do you know Invictus?” I asked.  “Everyone knows Invictus!”

“Ma’am, you’re going to be really sorry in about 15 minutes if you don’t stop talking now.” He replied. 

My husband was waiting in the recovery room as Mr. Beautiful wheeled me in. 

“She’s all yours, bro.” Sigh…. and so Mr. Beautiful walked out of my life forever.

That is when things began to get wonky.  As I saw my husband, I immediately became acutely terrified that my children were not okay.  I was overcome.  Completely overcome with panic.  I made him call home to make sure. 

I then remembered the man lying in the bed next to mine before I was taken to the OR.  I remembered listening to his conversation with the nurse about his injuries and the surgery he was going to have.  And suddenly, I became overwrought with worry about him.  I began to cry.  With sobs.  I asked the nurse if he was okay, if his surgery went well.  I needed to know. 

“The man!  The man with the broken leg.  Is he okay?  Please find out if he is okay!”

0.5 mg Ativan IV stat.  

“The woman!  The one in the other bed, in the wheelchair.  Is she okay?  Did her surgery go well?  I need to know!”

0.5 mg Ativan IV stat.

The nurse asked if I had pain.  I was talking and crying and panicked. 

But I did not have pain.  No twinges of sharpness from my macerated throat.  No burning.  No roughness one would expect when vocal cords vibrate so close to the abraded skin where one’s tonsils had just been.

I asked for my jewelry.  My nose hoop and tongue bar.  I replaced them in their respective holes.   

My husband stroked my hair as he choked back his laughter.  I could see the nurse hiding hers behind a clipboard. 

The Ativan began to soothe my pulsing neural pathways, acumen slowly edging above hyperlucidity. 

I felt a bit silly.  Just a bit.  

For the self-proclaimed queen of nihilistic misanthropy, to lose myself with worry for two strangers, whom I only saw and heard in passing, perhaps Henley was far more valiant than I.  The menace of my years certainly seems to be finding me more and more daunted within the mire of the human condition than I would ever freely concede.

An empath, I am not.  Yet sentience is inherent. As it is with humans all.  And is it not a requirement for the most effective masters and captains to, at the very least, have a fondness for their people?  Anything less would be a dictator. 

I went home and ate a cheeseburger.  And pretended I needed the Roxicodone syrup shit just so I could get high. 

All in all, it was a pretty good day.  

 

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Slut Snore Metaphor

Sleep-

a two-dollar whore looking for her next fix.  

She crawls in bed with me

wriggles herself between my ears

mumbles in her hardnock voice

singing her own praise for her many talents-

her 50-cent blowjobs

and buck-fifty quickies against the brick wall

just outside the back door of the pool bar on her corner.

She settles on my ear lobes

tries to shove my hand into her panties-
a freebie with the promise of a dreammaker space opera. 

Sleep. 

Hell no, she ain’t a tease. 

She ain’t got nothing I want. 

A bleached rainbow and sandpaper tigers

won’t even scrub her off.

A gift that grows a nightmare

A song-scraping chalkboard

digging her hardknock finger

in that spot behind my ear.

“Sleep, little funky angel.

Sleep, if you can,

while I hump your angel wings

like a bitch in heat.

Sleep, if you can,

little buttercup devil,

while I shove my sugar

in your buttercup nose.”

I give up.

The sleep slut wins. 

I sleep not.   

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dVerse Poets- Open Link Night #47

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It Is Called Thanatophobia....

Trying to pinpoint when it really started to spin out of control, the best I can come up with is maybe sometime last November.

I've never been too keen on the subject of death.  I don't go to funerals.  And I mean that.  I don't.  I can't.  I did not attend my grandparents' funerals.  They passed away almost a year to the day of one another back in 05-06.  I made up an excuse when my grandfather died.  I didn't bother a year later, when Gramma H passed away.

No.  I don't go.  I can't.  Selfish, yes.  I know.

But it wasn't until recently, the past 7 months or so, that this problem has ramped up a few degrees of intensity.  To the point where I believe the definition of "phobia" is probably pertinent.

I've never had one.  A real phobia.  I have never known what it feels like for a pathological fear to affect my ability to live normally.  I have jumped out of airplanes.  Wandered down dark alleys in foreign countries.  Often get way too close to potentially dangerous animals with a level of nonchalance that can only be described as utter stupidity.  Like what?  Held black widow spiders in my hand.  Rescued rats from certain death.  Apparently, a couple weekends ago, I was close enough to a water moccasin to send my husband into full-on "oh my fucking god" mode.  In my defense, I do not recall actually being THAT close.  

Anyway. 

Fears have never really been my thing.  

Until now.  

And as I sit here attempting to give it a voice, the best way to explain it would be.....

Uhhh.....

Absolute. Paralyzing. Terror.  

I hesitate to say that it is caused by a medication I take because I have been on this med since 2005, with the dose only having been increased once, a couple years ago.  But what I find strange is that this panic only happens at night, after I have taken it.  

It begins with a feeling of being very, very small in a very, very big now.  And I say now instead of "world" on purpose.  

The "world" means nothing inside of this fear.  It is not a big "world" I am thinking about.  It is the vastly more unimaginable enormity of EVERYTHING.  This little planet hanging gingerly in a thing called "space," but not the definition of "space" that simply describes any place, but space on a scale whose understanding is unreachable by the human mind.  

This now is a reality in which life is considered to have originated on Earth early in the planet's formation- and early is considered a few hundred million years.  Hundreds of millions of years is "early" in this space that is now.  Digesting that is to be lost in ones own swamp of incomprehension.  Assuming one would even try.  I try.  Perhaps that is where my fault lies.

This now is a thing and a time in which a measurement of things in billions is the norm.  A measurement of billions of miles, billions of planets, stars, nebulae, time, light-years, all of those things- and we have not even left our own galaxy yet.  

That is the now I find myself in each night.  Right around midnight.  About 20 minutes after I take this medication.  It has never done this to me in the whole 7 or 8 years I have been taking it, until 6 months ago.  

And as I ruminate on the smallness of the things I care about, and the vastness of a now that lies in a place and time measured in billions and hundred-billions in every direction outside of my own understanding-

...... that is when I lose my breath.  And my heart quickens.  And the periphery of my vision turns black.  My head swims.  My eyelids begin the flutter thing they do when you are desperately trying to hold back tears.  I try to grab hold of myself, yet I begin racing around my house in the dead of night so that I can put my hands on tangible things and sleeping bodies.  Looking for tethers, surities, to keep my feet grounded as my head begins to pull itself off of my neck.  

I gather myself and crawl into bed.  I hide under the covers.  And reach my hand out to touch my husband's back.  Close my eyes.  

The neverending fall from the sky behind my eyelids is a sleep tease.  You know, right at the moment you begin to drift.... BAM.  There is a gutteral noise then, a scream sometimes, I've even heard the sound of my own voice screaming "WHERE ARE YOU?!" and my husband says, "I am here...." 

The sleep tease.  It happens a few times before it lets me be.  

I've begun thinking about it during the day now.  Dreading the evening that most folks relish.  Hoping for dreamless sleep as a best case scenario. 

This now- all of these things I once thought beautiful.  Thermonuclear fusion of life, glowing unimaginables, rivers of plasma, and leaps and loops and spots.  The brilliance of gravity and statistical dreams standing in for numbers and amounts and distances and probabilities humans will never be able to quantify.  The silliness of the Drake equation and all of its hilarious faults, yet the closeness with which we keep it held- hope on a string with a wad of gum on the end of it.  

That, all of that, was a now I once thought was beautiful.  

But now, this now is just a monster in my closet.....

The thought that I am nothing.  It will all go on without me.  One day, I will not be here.  Me and my and I  will be nothing.  Nothing at all.  Now will still be now.  But I will not be.  Anything.  What will I think of in those last few seconds?  Will I think?  Will I lose my dignity and beg not to die?  Why am I thinking about this?  Who will miss me?  

And then, one day- this now that will swallow all of us- One day, it will be gone, too.  All of this.  All of us.  All of time and space and energy and mass.... all of it.  Gone.  Just gone.  Now will be nothing.  Nothing has no mass.  Nothing has no amount or distance or time.  Nothing... the fact that it is even a word, makes it an oxymoron.  

It is not just the word 'nothing' that is an oxymoron.  It is the existence of the word 'nothing' that is the oxymoron.  Can you understand that?

Because nothing is not a thing.  It is nothing... and saying it is nothing.... makes it a thing.  Because you have named it.  

FUCK ME.

And believe it or not, this is Rational Me.  This me who is typing right now, this is the Not-Panicked Me.  This is Daytime Me.  I'm fine right now.  The fear hasn't woken up yet.  As evidenced by the fact that I am able to talk about it at all.  Tonight.  Right around midnight.  That's when Oh Shit Me comes out.

I'm keeping a sense of humor about it, though.  Mainly because that is just what I do.  It's who I am.  I can laugh at myself a hell of a lot quicker than I cry for myself.  I naturally float toward smiles and simplicity.  I laugh a lot.  Anger is so rare I forget what it feels like in between times.  I can count heartaches on one hand.  Fear is an alien standup comedy act opening with a "yo momma" joke.  It just doesn't happen.  With me.  It doesn't.

And so I find myself in alien territory.  Oddly so. 

When this picture evokes absolute terror and uncontrollable fetal position snot-crying, it's time for a different med....

.... methinks.

Which seems to be causing quite a problem.

All this pesky thinking business!


BOOBS!

Whew.... now I feel better....


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Ischemia

It wasn’t the first time

yet the elephant, as ruthless.

Flutterby dysrhythmia mocked sweet sinus quo.

Shatterfall, song of glass -

An arm wrenched within morbidity's precious quagmire

“Say, oh God absolute-

Say she knows I love her.”

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Trifextra Week Nineteen- "It wasn't the first time"

..... in 33 words.

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