Once I sat on the sandstone cliffs we call the Rims, by myself, in the rain, with my headphones—
Apparently my sister is an alcoholic and her husband could not let their daughter watch her come home drunk anymore. So while they figured it out, I had a little, very sad seven year old in my home who called me Aunt.
The rain is the best part of this story though, pushing mascara down my cheeks, mixing with salt and the metal of bad jewelry around my neck. It was muddy before it even hit the rock beneath me. It could not run fast enough; ground water is slow.
I used to smoke. Not in a rebelling-teen way, but in a young-adult-with-all-their-decisions-made-for-them way. I didn’t even like it, not really. But it was something him and I did. And then it was something I did because he quit, because he did it in a rebelling-teen-with-no-choices way, and I did it in a now-I-have-something-to-show-for-my-anger way.
One night my niece asked me about all my weird dead things, like the European mount of a deer skull above my bed. I told her the truth, that he protects me while I sleep.
My father used to tell me this analogy about ripples and water and the consequences a small touch can have.
When you’re twenty, hiding from passing cars and spread out on the fortress that encases the city you grew up in, a wall of gilded rock, pressed for centuries beneath water, it’s not hard to imagine that maybe you’re just a little insignificant and a little melodramatic. At least, not until you’re standing and the ego takes over and you’re wishing for a cigarette or a hand.
She also likes my bells on the door. So I told her they catch all the bad things and scare the rest away. She touched them every now and then, gently, and whispered to them when she thought I wasn’t looking.
My dad knows I call him father when I’m mad. I’ve done it since I was ten. That’s wrong though. It’s when the emotions are so strong they blur and I can’t see and red isn’t the color. It’s muddy gray instead.
He quit and that was good. I was proud. I quit too when they changed the law. You have to be 21 now and that’s good. It stopped my habit. Made my life longer.
A little finger prick to the surface of a still pool, it’s the same as a single choice, that’s what Father said. It disrupts the stillness, ripples indefinitely long, and holds the memory of that choice and its consequences.
I know those comforts are just a phone call away, but listen, I’d lied and said I’d quit and he can’t know I didn’t. And he especially can’t know that I stand so close to the edge. Being semi-suicidal means that people get scared when you do that. So I watched the muddy rain instead and oddly enough, a very wet lady bug had stuck to my matted hair.
She said goodnight to my dead guardian and then when she woke up with nightmares, she came crashing into my bed and we lit a little candle when the darkness was still too bad.
Hot showers, the kind that blister, are what people use to punish themselves sometimes. Yet cold showers are what are used to shock the system. Ice baths are beneficial and hot water is bad? Therapists tell you to dunk your head in ice to stop panic? That seems like an odd choice, a gateway choice, an I-use-dry-shampoo-instead-choice.
I have this little altar. On it sits small things I’ve found, candles I burn in offering, herbs and feathers I pick up in odd spots. It also holds my favorite piece: the chalice. A chalice in pagan culture represents the woman’s womb, the Goddess, rebirth, and new choices. It is often used to hold an offering of water.
She hates showers too, so one night we said goodnight to the deer, lit a candle and brushed the bells, then took turns in the shower, braving the water together.
I have a favorite smoke spot. He doesn’t know it exists. It’s a little park with the river underneath it. I go when my panic is at its strongest. Often I forget even getting in the car, but it is better than standing on a sandstone cliff with a little ladybug who is very wet and very dead and somehow stuck in my matted hair.
Make the right choice. That was Dad’s point. But he misses my favorite part. The middle, where you touched first is still, well…. still. In fact, it is stiller than anything else. It is the consequences that feel the impact, not the choice. So I have this theory, if the choice was final and you became that choice, then you would never feel the impact.
Cigarettes make you very thirsty, but this is not about cigarettes, I don’t even like cigarettes. It’s just that vaping is too hard to swallow, and I hate it in a new-age-is-bad kind of way; in an old-things-are-cooler kind of way; in a hard-rock-sucks, but-dad-rock-is-oddly-good-and-pop-music-makes-me-wanna-drink-and-I-hate-drinking kind of way.
Months later when the rain was snow instead, I found a ladybug again. A different one. It was dead and dry, very dry, in the bottom of my neglected chalice. I hadn’t meditated in months.
She went home when my sister got a little better, and I gave her some bells for her door. A joke was made about drinking water and my sister laughed with me, promised she would and I should too. We both knew what was in my pocket and her, in her purse.
I put the new dead thing of a ladybug in a small airtight jar next to my bed and I filled the chalice with oil-blessed water.
Once I stood at the edge of the small hill above that park-riverline. My cigarette had died in the wind and headphones were doing badly at their job of bursting through the mud. I wrote a terrible poem as I stood there. It repeated over and over in my head. Matted hair and battered logs, choices and memories, dry or wet, lifetimes of cliffs and fathers over dads, quitters over fakers, addicts over alcoholics, and rivers over rain.