selkie's place

Settling

It seems to me that there is an awful lot of “settling” going on around me – both online and off. In my own limited sphere, I see several bloggers I know settling for what crumbs of time and attention they are accorded by men who have other lives. I see other bloggers settling for less than they desire in their primary relationships. I see people whose lives are far less than they envisioned and others who seem perplexed and confused as to how they ended up where they are ...

In real time life, I am conversant with various relationships, the sum of which is one partner has “settled” for what the other partner is willing to accord them. And I’m not exempt, of course, as witnessed by my recent whining, I’m settling myself for less than what will make me truly content. And truth be told, it is something I’ve looked at long and hard and realized in the end, that I’m settling because the history of my dynamic with him always has been and probably always will be, I take him on HIS terms. Making me, I suppose, weak-willed and ineffective....

I accept, however, that it is, ultimately, ALL about choice and ALL about compromise. The trick of course being that you have some self-awareness of what that compromise will cost – in terms of comfort, in terms of emotional equilibrium, in terms of what you will gain versus what you stand to lose.

I think in one sense, the nature of life is all about compromise. It is neither realistic nor possible to assume that each of us always gets our heart desire out of life. We whine, we cry, we shout and yell and demand and scream that we MUST have it this way or NO way ... and in the end, we have to make a choice – whether to compromise, accept, walk away or deny.

“Settling” has such negative connotations- as if we accept less than that to which we are entitled; as if by accepting that we can live with less than we really want, we are somehow diminished, weakened.

In the end, most of us settle for what we think, in the end, is the “lesser” evil (Christian dogma aside, I think the intent is clear). Ultimately, it comes down to the individual own sense of preservation, self-esteem and desire.

Yet....and yet.

There is for most people, however, the hard reality that time and experience have etched on lives; a knowledge that the grass is often NOT as green ...a comprehension that dalliances, short-term experiences, limited exchanges in the end are not indicative of what a full-time life would encompass.

There is also often the hard-won knowledge that desire does not equate need, that want does not equal must and that what works in the short-term may not survive the long haul. There are so many adages that preach the whole concept of `settling` ``a bird in the hand``, ``be careful what you wish for`` .. a myriad of home-grown preachy sayings about settling for what you do have rather than yearn for what you may not.

Should you or shouldn`t you? Hell, I don’t know.

What I do know is anyone with a modicum of intelligence will think long and hard before making a life-altering decision about anything. One must weigh the consequences not just on your own life, but on those whose lives are entwined with yours. For very few of us come without our own set of complications, our own Gordian knots of worries and confusions. The choices an individual makes impacts not just them but those with whom they are entwined. Further, no one comes to a new relationship unencumbered ... each of us brings our own baggage, some of it battered and torn, bearing history and hard-won lessons.

I think one of the most prevalent scenarios I see are online relationships where individuals equate reality with the stolen moments online; where pixels and visuals confuse fantasy with reality and where fulfilling what is ultimately a role is confused with living a life.

The bottom line is that living a real life is not the same as creating and maintaining an online one.

And if you are content with that, then more power to you. BUT, what i see more and more are people equating their fantastic twitterings with real living

In musing about this, I realize too that the online worlds created with the advent of the internet are really just Marshall Mcluhan’s vision brought into being ... for snatched moments online are really not all that different from the more cerebral and sometimes flesh on flesh “affairs” engaged in before electronic wizardry.

In fact, on a re-reading of some of his work, I realize what a visionary this man was!

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.

And laptops, computers are most definitely ‘media’. And the “creations” which appear on our screens are – as often as not – simply a form of media.

And this is fodder and discussion for another blog ....coming soon to this space.

I am Canadian...

the topic this morning in work was invariably the weather .. specifically, the frigid, -30 temperatures which have descended on our city

it was SO Canadian! What would we do without our weather, we Canadians? What in the world would we talk about?

Each person to whom I spoke had a usually amusing story to relate about their forays into the arctic air. From the lawyer talking about how his shoes freeze, thus making him walk like a clown as the soles refuse to bend to the individual whose nose suddenly began gushing blood as she took a deep breath and frozen water sliced into the tender mucus membranes with a vengeance.

This morning at 4 a.m. I was crunching through the morning dark with the dogs frisking ahead, oblivious to the cold, kept warm by their enthusiasm and sheer joy in being alive.  Encased in my dad's parka (bought in 1958 when he first came to Canada and was working up north in Bear Island), I felt quite cosy but as the walk progressed, as the frigid embrace of dark arctic need insinuated itself into the vulnerable exposed expanse of skin and licked fire into thighs covered only by thin work pants, I felt the beginning of the Canadian "sting"...

My legs began aching, licked by fire and breathing hot stinging want...until I slipped into the warm golden light of the house and they erupted into ache.  Laughing, I pulled down the pants and grinned at the flaming crimson of my thighs, reminiscent of those high school days of micro minis, knee socks and coats with linings removed and never closed (because you might look FAT)... when pale fleshed legs flamed red and even purple and frostbite was a thought away.

Rubbing feeling back into their frozen length, I slipped up my pants and put on a coffee, slipping out quickly to start the reluctant car (and feeling a small sting, quickly extinguished, of remorse at my contribution to global warming!) and then completing my ablutions continued into work ... where I gloried in the myriad tales and stories of my workmates and laughed again at the Canadian obsession with our weather.

Despite dealing with what many from outside our country consider untenable situations, we Canadians remain united and strong in our passion and secretly (and not so secretly) relish our crazy temperatures as a uniqueness which defines who we are.

 

Need

 lI ike my body when it is with your
 body. It is so quite a new thing.
 Muscles better and nerves more.
 i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
 of your body and its bones, and the trembling
 -firm-smooth ness and which i will
 again and again and again
 kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
 i like,, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
 of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
 over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big Love-crumbs,I
 and possibly i like the thrill
 of under me you quite so new

e.e. cummings

I  am so restless these days.... moody and intense, capricious and contrary. 

Anxiety rides my back like an angst-driven hag from legend, digging sharp claws into the tender line of neck and nipping at my restlessness until I feel like throwing my head to the sky and howling like a rabid dog into the grey of a winter sky ...

I prowl in the complicated passageways of time and memory and sniff out the nuggets of possibilities that could have been and wonder at the complicated byways of thought and desire.

The flesh on my back tingles with remembered sensations while  the tug of Want sends reverberations of need along nerve-endings I thought dead.  I want to be controlled.  I want to be mastered and used and abused.  I want to choke on  the hot muscled need in my mouth the salty tang of desire and demand trickling down my throat.

I feel bereft, lost... a trailing shadow of what once was, a “palely loitering” spectre drifting on substantial thought towards oblivion and the end of days.

Thoughts thunder in on cloven hoofed  steeds , snorting and pawing rage into the rivers of despair etching arroyos of want through the frozen landscape of my id.  The Need rides me harshly, slashing Want into the soft pale flesh of my straining flanks, twisting lust into nipples crimson and swollen with frustration and memories. 

Not for me softness or sweetness and the soft, butterfly hovering kiss of tentative questioning pleading.  No... the Want lusts for hands gripping curls, tugging at the roots and inciting thrashing rage.  Need growls for teeth fastened in taut shoulder, the hot, wet battering realness of personified demand thrusting harshly into swollen softness and clinging hotness.  I want to be breached, taken, conquered, no quarter given, no surrender possible.

I want to feel the slash of desire against my back, etching ownership into pale flesh and feel against the delicate, throbbing line of neck the exquisite lick of cold, hard steel.   I close my eyes and remember the hot aching sting as steel licks acquiescence into the proud resistance of my warrior’s heart and feel the soft sweep of delicious agony as flesh and spirit sigh their submission.

Instead, I sit quietly in the arid, frigid wasteland of my thoughts and remember  .... once I was wanted.

And this is why I soujourn here
alone and palely loitering
Though the sedge has withered from the lake
and no birds sing.

(La Belle Dame Sans Merci, John Keats)

things about selkie

I am one of those who always reads the "100 Things about _______" so for fun, thought I would start my own. As a proviso - if you are curious about something, email me and I may or may not add the answer to your question ...

1.                   I lived in several countries between birth and 13- born in Ireland, to Canada (briefly) at 5, then Grand Bahamas, the States and eventually back to Canada at 13.

2.                   Although I feel strong ties to Ireland, I am Canadian by choice and in my heart.

3.                   I have four children and my longest labour was 3 hours - I left the hospital right after birth with all of them.

4.                   I am 5'8" and consider myself large and unfeminine.

5.                   I have small breasts and HATE the fact I do.

6.                   I have two university degrees which I don't use - Undergraduate in English and Classics from University of New Brunswick and Graduate in Communications from Concordia in Montreal.

7.                   I put myself through University and had no help doing so.

8.                   I worked in my field (journalism and media) from 19 to 31.

9.                   I had my first child at 31 and my universe changed. I left a career for a job typing at night and had 3 more children by the time I turned 36 and forgot I had a brain.

10.               I met D. when I was 15 (he was 18).

11.               I fell in love with D. when I was 15 .

12.               It took 2 years before I could convince him to go out with me.

13.               Our relationship has NEVER been calm.

14.               I grew up in a family of women - 3 sisters and a female, much beloved cousin.

15.               My father never wanted a son, my mother did.

16.               I don't sleep much and never have. A "good" night is around 4 hours.

17.               I broke my back (EARTH) (crushed 4 verterbrae, cracked 3) when I was 15 and got run over by a tractor on a visit to my cousin's farm in Kildare.

18.               I was in a brace for 1.5 years and still went dancing.

19.               I drowned (WATER) (declared dead) when I was 5, just a few months after we came to Canada. A WW I vet put me in a lukewarm bath and brought me back to "life" - (in hindsight, hypothermia when you go into a coma).

20.               I caught on fire (FIRE) when I was 10 and found my baby sister on the stove with burners all on high - my baby doll pjs caught and went up in flames. My mother rolled me in the snow and I survived with no bad scarring.

21.               I figure AIR will kill me which has never prevented me from flying or going up in a kite. I also intend to sky dive one day.

22.               I am a risk taker and confront things head on which frighten me.

23.               I love cooking, especially baking and am very good at it.

24.               I love writing but know my words tend to be over blown and trite - my father called it "oral diaharea".

25.               I have problems maintaining ties with people - I tend to compartmentalize and move on (I think due to frequent moves when young - I went to around 12 schools between kindergarten and grade 11).

26.               I live in my head a LOT and have problems verbalizing.

27.               I am by nature, extremely sensual and sexual but the past year, due to rejection and denial, have subliminated my sexuality and wonder if I can get it back.

28.               D. was my first lover and the first in every respect for any sexual exploration.

29.               I love sex in the morning, it is my favourite time.

30.               I have no recollection of the last time I had sex in the morning it has been so long.

31.               I love travelling and did a fair bit before I got married and almost none since.

32.               I did the backpack Europe thing for 8 months when I was 24 and it was the trip of a lifetime.

33.               I love the ocean - I need the ocean - I crave the ocean ... and intend to live out my later years beside it.

34.               That's how I got my name "selkie".

35.               Giving oral is my favourite tthing.

36.               I haven't in a long time, because I need to be in a positive head space and am not.

37.               I tend to tilt at windmills and am a sucker for causes. I have been to many demonstrations and participated in many campaigns.

38.               I was almost kicked out of university for exposing a university president.

39.               I am a leader.

40.               I hate working in teams.

41.               Red is my favourite colour.

42.               I had two marriage proposals (and no, I'm not including D. - we got married, he never asked me, I told him).

43.               I was fond of both men who asked me, but they were submissive and I didn't love them.

44.               I've only ever loved D. in all these years.

45.               I've only ever hated D. in all these years.

46.               I own all 7 seasons of Buffy and continue to think it brilliant. I like Spike not Angel.

47.               I adore animals - all animals and if D. didn't keep tabs on it, we would have more than the 2 dogs, 4 cats, guinea pig and rabbit we DO have - all rescues by the way.

48.               I volunteer at the Toronto Humane Society becuase I need to serve in some capacity and I could't handle dealing with people - I love it and love walking the dogs there, even the mean ones.

49.               I have problems identifying faces and forget them really easily.

50.               I am HORRIBLE at math and am embarassed that I am so stupid.

51.               I am an amazimg multi-tasker.

52.               I've worked since I was 12.

53.               I speak French badly and understand it pretty well and read it even better; in hindsight I think I probably have a facility for language I never explored as I picked it up just by being around Quebec for a few years - and spoke Spanish when I was in the Bahamas through the same way.

54.               Two of my four children are completely fluent in French.

55.               I like rough sex.

56.               It is very difficult for me to turn "off" - I am usually on and in a take charge mode.

57.               I HATE the heat and it makes me physically sick - I have to stay out of the sun.

58.               I have NEVER had a tan- I only burn (thus why I stay out of the sun).

59.               I love gardening and am just sad that work and other commitments don't give me enough time in my garden.

60.               I am very strong.

61.               Autumn is my absolutely favourite season.

62.               I grew up a nomad and am still one. I had no extended family around and still don't - I have one sister in Sierra Madres, one sister in Pennsylvania and a mother and sister in Montreal.

63.               I love all my sisters but we would probably kill each other if we were too close to each other.

new year, new page

new year, new page ...

 

I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to be nice ... placating people, soothing situations, the peacekeeper and the one who keeps her mouth shut.

 

I’ve bitten my lip so often over the course of my existence that there are, I think, permanent indentations in my full lower lip (just mentioning my lip because while I have a (in today’s world, an unpopular) small mouth, I think my lower lip is sorta pouty and sexy, just saying).

 

I have spent a very large part of my waking moments NOT saying what I think, not expressing my perspective nor venturing my opinion; in large part, I think, because I knew full well my opinion doesn’t count for a whole lot in the scheme of things to the people who purport to care about me.

 

And there truly is nothing quite so devastating as opening your mouth and hearing the words come out and the ears for which they are meant are not hearing them....

 

My emancipation from the shackles of my own prison is ongoing and a work in progress.

 

I think too a lot of individuals who “know” me would laugh at the thought I am reticent or in any way, a peacekeeper - as fighting battles is something I do extremely well  - but then, if they really looked at things, they would realize, those battles I fight are inevitably for OTHER people.

 

The reality is, I cannot STAND to be helpless nor can I tolerate being helped.

 

I literally go into a frenzy at the thought of needing something from someone and find it almost impossible to accept even the most simplistic offer of assistance.

 

I am fiercely independent in just about any way you might imagine – financially, physically, mentally ... and have been for as long as I can remember.

 

It is one reason I obsess over staying healthy.  As I am a type 2 diabetic, I am fanatical (or have been in the past) about dealing with the disease in a way which will retard its progress as much as possible.  Only recently, I recognized some very bad choices I made over the past year which seriously impacted the course of the disease were fuelled by rage and a despair so implacable it was almost suicidal in nature. 

 

And the result is I have now spilled over the line into serious territory insofar as my blood sugar is concerned.

 

I’m now committed to trying to undo – or at least slow down – the damage I’ve inflicted on my body over the past year of hell. Which means back to the gym, back to healthy eating, back to testing.  I don’t fool myself that the path will be smooth or in any way easy – I’ve been down this path before and there is a certain part of me that scoffs at the thought of doing it yet again and doubts my ability to complete the course.

 

When I watched my father die from complications of Type 2 diabetes 6 years ago, I swore I would NEVER be in a position of helplessness like him – EVER – and my will has never wavered for ONE second in that regard – I would far rather be dead.  So I need to refocus and ensure I don’t end up in the position of seeing if I really mean that (and I know I do).

 

But in my life anyway, the ties between the physical, the emotional, the spiritual and yes, the mental balance are so entwined and co-dependent that one thread can’t be pulled without a resulting vibration along the tenuous lines of other self .. (god, now I sound like I hear voices – hell, I do, all day, every day, but I’m really usually very good about drowning them out (NOTE: THAT IS SARCASM incidentally)).

 

The bottom line is I have a lot of reassessing to do ... a lot of naval-gazing and decision-making to tackle ... because terrible experiences from the past five years have left an indelible and profound impact on who I thought selkie was ... have changed to the core my awareness of self and shaken to pieces what I thought was a solid and very real foundation of belief.

 

and one of the changes is I’m not biting my lip anymore.

 

And another change is I’m working damn hard at accepting I don’t believe in a damn thing anymore, not in god, not in memories I thought real, not in truths I thought unwavering and I know now were lies.

 

And seeing where that takes me from here...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank god it is almost over

In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an 'Annus Horribilis'. I suspect that I am not alone in thinking it so. (On 24 November 1992 The Queen gave a speech at Guildhall to mark the 40th anniversary of her Accession. In it The Queen referred to recent events as part of an 'annus horribilis'.)

I'm with the Queen on that.

Thank god the year is over.

Oddly, my spiritual death began this time last year, on this very day.

Although not optimstic, truth be told, one can only hope (lessly or not) that 2009 promise some small improvement ...

s.

Sleep

I awake abruptly, completely.

My jaw aches, the grinding echo of my anxiety throbbing in the closeness of the room.  I reach, knowing, and feel you gone.    

I lie quiet in the smothering embrace of an empty room and feel hot acid tears etch their way down the softness of the skin at the outside corner of my eye, and snake, tickling into the curls at the side of my head.

My jaw aches, my teeth throbbing and sore.  I realize that I don’t sleep really, that part of me, like a feral animal lies awake ever watchful, cautious, hiding behind the facade of rest, crouching in the shadows pooling at the back of a hidden crevasse, anticipating, waiting, for the next attack. 

Instinct is like that. 

Rationality can debate and argue certain realities, certain apparently inescapable fact; but instinct is from the reptile part of our brain, the ancient, dark primitive part; in its own way, uncontrollable because instinct removes itself from emotion and rationality and instead just reacts... and ultimately instinct bases its cautiousness on the realty of experience and thus, in the cloying embrace of darkness, I await with a despairing knowledge of the inevitability of your wrath.

At the end of it all, my rest is shallow, any true sleep escapes me.  I sense your presence leaving and then the hot breath of your body when it returns. 

I wonder where you wander in your midnight excursions.  What thoughts and emotions cloud and roil in your mind and heart and where your fingers bring you in your angst and despair.

I think of G. and how we shake our heads in disbelief at what we perceive to be his delusions and yet, here in the lonely expanse of bed, I see that delusions are something each of us embraces.  We dance, you and I, around the seething mass of rage and suppressed emotions that ooze like a putrid puddle of silent screams in the corner of the room.  We wade through the noxious clinging excretions every single day and like G., smile and pretend the burning, acid tendrils of regret and accusation, of belief and knowledge, do not exist, surreptitiously, frantically, brushing off the sticky, cloying folds of its implacable reality.

I have never managed, despite all my struggles, to free my voice, which flutters beneath the pale column of my throat like a captive spirit.  When the small trilling of the possibility of escape has sighed through my want, I have felt your fear batter it into a frightened retreat.

Like the flesh which smothers me in noxious folds of rejection, I feel the swelling blister of unspoken words roiling beneath the prison of your frantic deafness.

I think, like him, you hide behind a facade of normalcy and cling with desperate fingers to the splinter of fantastical fabrication you have created to survive.

My tongue, unbidden, seeks the hollow of the crumbling reality of my anxiety made flesh and I find it in myself to marvel at the complexity of the human spirit and its ability to weave lies into the fabric of reality as if the truths were real.

 

 

Time waits on no one ...

 

Time Waits for No One ...Rolling Stones

How do you define yourself?

 

Do you perceive and accept your faults and foibles? Do you reject the little quirks that are so essentially a part of your nature that to suppress them would be to change the essence of self? 

 

The older I get the more I realize how intricate a creature is the human species.  Rational in many ways, our irrationality (also an intrinsic part of our personalities) drives us into behaviours we abhor, controls us like puppets, binds us about with self-imposed rules and isolates us from what our emotional and spiritual beings crave.

 

Our sexuality, for instance, is such a compelling part of our basic makeup- probably one of the most fundamental urges is to procreate and engage in pleasure ... yet from time immemorial we have bound this natural urge about with rules and strictures, hung emotional angst on its basic need and created sometimes insurmountable barriers to the simple enjoyment of sex.

 

The reality is that influences in our lives create a want and need in us – and in the way of the beast, we second-guess, decipher, deconstruct and create issues about our “wants” until we have created in our minds a dysfunctional creature to be suppressed, denied and derided...and in the process, destroying an essential part of our psyche, thrusting it down deep into the innermost recesses of our minds and denying it egress to the daylight world.

 

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

 

Time clicks away the moments of our lives, one second at a time, eating away the fabric of our realities and nibbling into oblivion and chaos the moments that might have been. 

 

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

 

Every moment we live disappears forever in the unwinding ribbon of reality which vanishes behind us.  It cannot be recaptured nor relived; memories only are the legacy of risks taken and efforts made.  Time is fluid yet inevitable.  It erodes our possibilities as surely as our failure to seize the moment which lies within our grasp is a monumental mistake that cannot be rectified ever.

 

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

 

For every inaction there is a reaction.  For every reaction, there is a consequence.

 

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

 

Constant naval-gazing and introspection can provide a semblance of movement that in the end, proves misleading and eats time as effectively as the rotation of the sun. 

 

And the other truth is that with the minute erosion of time against the reality of your soul, there are changes- overt and subtle – the flux of dynamics which are inevitable and insidious.  “Truths” themselves are not inviolate but subjective – and how your perceptions arise, play out and then flow into oblivion are as real as the ticking away of day into night.   And perhaps the very worst thing is not to do anything at all.  For as you stand frozen, life flows around you and the flux and eddy of other lives crash up against the stone of your obliviousness and then part and find another path ....for that is the nature of the river of life ...to find a path and flow ...

 

I grasp the rich tapestry of my sexuality to myself, pulling the crimson swollen want around me like a cloak, enveloping and comforting, but in the aridness of its embrace I sense the echoing of lost opportunities.  I gaze ahead and dread the bleakness of a future where erosion of want and being wanted creates arroyos of despair and austerity.

 

 

reindeer dogs ....

Storms

Snow stings colour into cheeks flushed from the exertion of morning routine.  Night clings, its charcoal breath glowing in the refracted paleness of fresh snow which crunches beneath my boots.  Despite the arctic breath of winter which exhales stinging sleet against exposed flesh, I breathe deep and relish the nip as frigid air slashes into my lungs reminding me I am alive.

 

Memories.  Random thoughts of time and remembrances of past times of good and bad. Odd how certain tastes, smells, visions trigger them.  Many of mine, oddly, are winter memories.

 

Like a mantra, my mind revisits certain scenes of my youth.  I close my eyes and raise my face to the snow which spills down in a glittering rainbow of cold light which shatters against my face and arches into the roiling storm of wind to be whipped up again into the grumbling dark sky.

 

A quiet moment on a pristine Maritime night when the snow lay deep and untouched and the sound of our boots in the frosted hushed midnight hour created such a painfully poignant sense of our isolation in a world of our own that to this day, I remember his hand in mine, the warmth of his breath against the cold of my cheek, then his tongue, hot and fervid against my mouth.  I remember the feel of the cold clapboard of the house against my back as he burrowed beneath the tattered, ratty fur of my ancient, Salvation Army coat, his fingers cool at my waist, making me shiver.  Then his cool palm against the aching, swollen tip of my warm breast, cupping and squeezing the soft, firm flesh, pulling the aching need from between my trembling thighs, his body against mine, his breath hot and moist and his teeth against my neck ….

 

We were young then, he and I, with all the complicated, interwoven threads of our lives still to be lived yet already with a twisted skein of memories and experiences already shared, reaching back into a past unravelling into thought and belief.

 

Life is not static.  It is not silent nor simplistic.   The apparent sameness of days which roll one into another and leach away the spontaneity of thought and movement are an illusion for each moment of time which ticks away the reality of existence and nibbles another second from my mortality are unique and in their static brilliance, endless.  Each brings with it a drop of possibility and pushes its nanosecond of reality into the weave of what becomes the now.

 

I find it curious, affirming even, to see that others struggle too with the tumbling stream of time and the vistas which each twist brings to our wondering eyes.  

 

The simple reality is that we cannot put ourselves nor others into motionless moments of existence and expect those moments to be always.  The nature of life itself is change, endlessly compromised and created second by second, impacted and shaped into uniqueness by our own experiences and the impact of our lives with others in this odd world in which we exist.

 

Which is always why I found it so questionable when I saw absolute statements being made.  When people created chess pieces out of the throbbing, complicated reality of a human being and thought determination and desire and hope would make that piece move in the direction desired. 

 

So many times over the years have my hard-won belief systems been shattered, leaving me disillusioned and broken among the detritus of broken dreams.  Yet somehow, you pick yourself up and painfully piece together the remnants of thought and emotion and as the glue hardens, the essence of the individual sparks new possibilities and hope and in the quintessential nature of the human beast, slowly moves forward yet again.

 

The reality is that there are no absolutes in this world; there are NO promises that can’t be broken nor dreams that can’t be destroyed.  Perfect relationships do not exist and perfect people are an illusion and to my way of thinking, an abomination.

 

My eyes sting as the arctic wind licks hurt into their green depths.  I release the leashes and the dogs bound up the steps to the door, gambolling and prancing and nipping each other’s flanks.  I stand in the gloaming dark of the early morning and slowly unzip my coat.  My hand goes to my waist and feels the soft flesh of my belly then pushes up and under the wire of my bra until I cup the hot warmth of my breast and staring out into the glittering river of snow, rivulets of snow streaming from a roiling sky.  I feel my flesh in the cool of my palm and watch as the pale tip reddens then contracts into a hot aching need and remember other nights and sighing, release my flesh and turn and follow the dogs into the warmth of the house and to him.