On the Wings of a Dragonfly

I've worked my entire adult life, and I've never had a full week of paid time off. Not one.
I've missed work because my children were sick. Because I was sick. Because there were school functions, field trips, appointments, and a thousand little things that needed me to be somewhere other than work. But those days weren't simply days away from work. They came with a price, and sometimes that price was something I couldn't afford to give or get back.
Worrying about how I was going to tell my employer that my child was sick. Leaving in the middle of the day. Wondering if I could afford to miss another, would they understand? Would it be weaponized? If they'd be angry, or if this would be the time they decided my lack of reliability would outweigh my value. And the guilt. God, the guilt. Feeling guilty for leaving work when my children or a family member needed me, and the guilt of worrying, when I should've been able to give my undivided attention to those that needed it. I couldn't afford to lose another job, but I couldn't afford to stop being a good mother either.
And I can't tell you how many employers told me, "We're family here." If you need time off, take it. If your family needs you, that's what we're here for. We're like a family. It wasn't just the big corporations, either. Sometimes it was the little mom-and-pop places, the businesses where you'd think people might understand a little better. I wanted so badly to believe them, especially as a single mother with no real fallback, no one I could consistently count on to care for my children when something happened. Including their other parent. Especially their other parent. I can't begin to explain how deflating it was to discover how conditional that understanding could be. They'd give a little, sometimes even make you feel grateful for it, and then take so fucking much. And worse, they'd weaponize it. The time they'd graciously allowed me to take would find its way back into conversations about my attendance, my reliability, my commitment. It would show up in performance reviews, in conversations I was called into, sometimes even in a write-up. It didn't matter that I'd stayed late when they needed help, that I'd worked off the clock, that I'd come in on my days off. Those things never seemed to count. They never factored into the equation. Somehow, the hours I gave freely belonged to them, but the hours I needed for my family became something I owed.
Sometimes I lost pay I so desperately needed. Sometimes I worked with a fever, or a broken tooth, or a migraine because I couldn't afford not to. And sometimes, when I was allowed to, I had to make up the time missed. Those hours didn't disappear. They were waiting for me. I'd spend the day taking care of a sick child, then spend the rest of the week working what felt like even longer hours to make up for it. Already tired, already stretched thin, and now somehow expected to find more of myself to give. The time wasn't free. I paid for it with loss of sleep, sheer exhaustion, more time away from being a mother, with whatever little bit of myself I had left at the end of the day.
There were years when I worked one, two, sometimes three jobs at a time. How do you call out sick from one job and then show up for another? How do you explain that you aren't well enough to work one shift but can't afford to miss the next? And all the while, friends and family would say things like, "You can't keep missing that much work." As though I didn't already know. As though I wasn't terrified of that very thing. But when I needed someone to help with the children, there was always another obligation, another schedule, something else already planned. Nobody seemed to have the time I so desperately needed, and somehow I was expected to find more of my own.
Sometimes I had no job at all, and the days stretched endlessly before me, and there was no peace in that. Just the awful uncertainty of not knowing how I would pay my bills. I robbed Peter to pay Paul, leaving one bill unpaid so I could catch up on another, only to fall behind somewhere else the following month. I applied for assistance and was denied because I made too much money. Imagine that. Never enough to pay the bills, but somehow always too much to qualify for help. Even the days I took to chaperone a field trip or attend something important came with calculations. What would I lose? Could I make it up? Would asking for the time off put my job in jeopardy? I don't remember ever being able to simply say, "I'm taking the day off," without wondering what it might cost me.
And today, with all this time to think, I find myself remembering the things I missed. Not just the school functions or the little moments with my children, but entire pieces of their childhoods. My oldest son helping raise his younger siblings when he should have been enjoying his teenage years, figuring out who he was and what he wanted from life. My daughter telling me she didn't want to have to work the way I did, and then watching her work two jobs while putting herself through school, earning scholarships and building something for herself. My youngest, who has depended on me for so much. I wonder what they think about those years, what they remember, what they might resent. I don't know. And maybe that's part of what hurts, because I can only see it through my own guilt. I wanted to give them so much more of myself, but I was always working to give them what little I could afford.
And then there's the guilt of remembering that I wanted time for myself, too. God forbid. There were days when I was so mentally, physically, and spiritually exhausted that I would spend an entire day on the couch doing absolutely nothing. And I would feel terrible about it. Absolutely fraught with guilt. There were errands to run, children to take to school and pick up, things that needed cleaning, bills that needed paying, people I hadn't seen, people I hadn't called. Even when I said I was taking a day for myself, it rarely belonged entirely to me. And if I spent time with one person, I wondered who I was neglecting by not spending it with someone else. There were so many layers of guilt that eventually I don't think I knew how to do anything without feeling I should be doing something else.
Until this week.
For the first time in my adult life, I have an entire week off, and I'm getting paid for it. My employer even asked our entire class to take the week. And the strangest thing is, I haven't known what to do with myself.
There are things I want to do. Things that need cleaning, organizing, fixing. Things I've been meaning to get around to for weeks, months, maybe longer. I have the time now. I could do them, and part of me really wants to. But I don't have to. And if they don't get done today, or tomorrow, or even this week, somehow it's still okay. I keep coming back to that. It's okay.
Nobody is sick. Nobody needs me to call my employer and explain why I can't come in. I'm not losing a paycheck. I'm not wondering whether I'll still have a job when I return. I can wake up in the morning and decide what I feel like doing, and if the answer is nothing, I can do nothing. It's such a simple thing, isn't it? Something so ordinary that I imagine most people wouldn't give it a second thought. And yet here I am, in my fifties, trying to figure out what to do with a week that doesn't require me to justify having it. Or a week that is mapped out caring for everyone else.
I don't think I ever understood how much fear was attached to taking time off until I was given this week off. How many years I spent asking permission to take care of the people I loved. How many times I worried that doing the right thing for my children might mean losing the very job I needed to provide for them. And how many times I came home exhausted from making up hours I'd missed because somebody needed me, only to find that somebody still needed me.
And now here I am, with a whole week that belongs to me. There are things I could be doing, things I probably should be doing, but for once they can wait. I'm not entirely sure what to make of that. There's a strange kind of sadness in realizing just how unfamiliar this feels, how many years I've lived without ever knowing what it was like to have time that didn't come at the expense of something else.
I've been crying today. A lot. I'm happy, genuinely happy, and so grateful for this opportunity, but there's a sadness sitting right alongside it. I know this is a new job. I haven't even begun doing the work I'll eventually be doing, and I'm sure there will be difficult days. But something about this feels like a turning point in my life, and perhaps that's why all these memories keep coming. I have the time to think about them now. To remember the things I missed, the sacrifices I made, the things I wish I could change. And the woman I was through all of it, who was so busy keeping everyone else's world turning that she barely had time to stand still in her own.
And then, in the middle of all this remembering, something else came back to me.
I remembered a day when I called out sick from work and went to one of my favorite places, Veterans Memorial Park. I had stones and rocks in my pockets, silver and pearls on my body. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot through the grass, then through the water, and back through the grass again. Eventually I lay down and watched the dragonflies hovering overhead. The flowers were beautiful, the bees were bumbling around, butterflies drifted through the air, and there were wasps nearby that I was a little afraid might sting me. But they didn't. They just let me lie there.
I remember feeling as though I were suspended in the air with the dragonflies, hovering and turning with them above the grass and flowers. I wished I could be one. So carefree, so happy to be flying around that beautiful little place. I watched the sunlight catch their wings when they stopped for a moment, watched them chase each other, and wondered whether perhaps the ghosts of people I'd loved and lost were somewhere within them. I didn't know how a dragonfly spent the stages of its life. I wasn't thinking about how long it lived or what came next. I was just watching those moments when it hovered above me, wishing I could be part of that little world.
It could have been the hottest day, and it was still the prettiest fucking picture. The butterflies, the birds, the clouds, the flowers, the dragonflies and the bees. Even the wasps. I didn't care about anything or anybody for those few moments. I was just there, being held in something peaceful and beautiful, and I remember how wonderful that felt.
I'd almost forgotten that day. Or maybe I hadn't forgotten it so much as stopped allowing myself to have days like it. I can remember thinking about going back, and then thinking about the gas it would take to get there, the money I might need for something else, the errands I should be running, the people I should be spending time with instead. Even something as simple as lying in the grass became another calculation.
And today, after remembering all of this, after crying over the years and the time and the things I can't get back, I walked outside to my porch to have a cigarette.
And don't you know, a chubby little dragonfly, the prettiest burnt orange, came scooting right past me.
Almost on cue.
I stood there smiling at the timing of it. That funny little autumn-colored dragonfly, appearing just as I'd been remembering how badly I once wished I could be one. I don't know what to make of it, and I don't particularly need to. It was beautiful. It made me smile. And for a moment, I wasn't thinking about everything I'd missed or everything I still needed to do. I was just watching a dragonfly.
I've had plenty of time off. I've just never had a week off without wondering what it was going to cost me.
Until now.
And I think I'm beginning to remember what to do with it.

I'm pulling on the edges of an essence, that's just waiting to drip its way onto the page with words.

What's the Last Thing You Remember?

What's the last thing you remember?

It feels like an accusation. Like I need to come up with an alibi, only I don't know what I'm being accused of. I don't know what it wants from me.

It's a thousand haunting memories scratching at the inside of my skull, raging to be written on paper and remembered. No, not even remembered.

Expelled.

Is it the things that happened, or the things I never got to say?

A bit of both. They're tangled. And that's why I'm struggling for that jump off. I don't know where one begins and the other ends.

What's the last thing you remember?

It's the sentence that thumps harder than anything else inside my head. And I don't know what it wants from me. It's like I've reached the end of a game of hopscotch without remembering where I started. Somehow I've arrived at a conclusion to a sentence whose intent I don't yet understand. And it's been holding me underwater for days.

A few days ago, I woke up with this sentence, this question in my head. Not a voice. Not a dream I was trying to remember. Just six words, already there, waiting for me to wake up.

I carried their weight all day. Eventually, I wrote them down. I thought perhaps if I put them on paper, they'd tell me what they wanted.

But nothing followed. Just silence.

And the next morning, there they were again.

What's the last thing you remember?

I'm listening to my son mixing chicken tenders with lemon pepper seasoning in the kitchen. A vampire movie, Blood Red Sky, on the television, and the echo of that sentence hovering between everything in the room.

I can feel the question. It's not just something happening in my head. I can feel all its movement, stirring inside me with both teeth and tenderness. Scratching when I'm not looking. And when I reach back, I know it's reaching for me.

It doesn't hurt. There's something almost comforting about the way it holds on. The cradling warmth of that bite.

But it won't let go.

Thousands of memories that want me to grab them by the hand and walk them out of this graveyard I can't seem to remember.

I try to feel something as I reach as far back as I can. I know they're there. Looking at me. Waiting for my hand. Patiently waiting. The air thick as fog with waiting.

And I wonder what they're doing there. Why can't I feel them? Why can't I recognize them? Am I supposed to remember them, or am I meant to let them go?

How do you let go of something you can't remember holding?

I keep reaching. And the farther I reach, the more the question folds back into itself.

What am I supposed to remember? What have I forgotten? What's the last thing I remember before I forgot? And how the fuck am I supposed to know what I've forgotten if I can't remember it?

It's almost maddening, trying to find the boundary of forgetting when whatever lies beyond it is precisely what I cannot remember.
I walk farther into the graveyard. There are no names I can read. No dates. Nothing to tell me who these figures are or why they're waiting.
Only the fog. And the hands. So many hands.

I want to take them all. I want to walk them out of this place, whatever this place is. I want to know why they've been waiting so patiently, why they haven't simply gnawed their way out.
But nothing. Words on paper and the weight of scrambling for an alibi.

We're all reaching for somebody. Nobody touching. And something about that feels familiar. Terribly familiar.

What makes this place a graveyard if nothing in it seems willing to stay dead?

I hadn't thought about that. What if these aren't things I've buried? What if they're things I've been trying to find?

I look at their faces, searching for something I recognize. Some expression. Some small flicker of knowing. Something that will tell me why I've come here.

But I can't remember.

What if the most frightening thing isn't what I might find, but that I might find nothing at all?
Nothing. After all this reaching. All this waiting. All these years.

And yet they're standing right in front of me. I know they're there. I can feel them. But I can't attach that feeling to anything.

Not a name. Not a face. Not a moment.

And then an errant thought. A small, almost accidental disturbance in the fog.

What if I don't recognize them because I've been looking for memories instead of myself?

Oh, fuck.

Maybe these aren't the ghosts of things I've forgotten. Maybe they're not memories at all.
Maybe they're me.

Every single one of them.

The little girl. The young woman. The mother. The lover. The woman who laughed until she couldn't breathe. The woman who cried when nobody was looking. The woman who kept going because there was nobody else to do it for her.
The woman who was loved. The woman who wasn't. The woman who stayed. The woman who left. The woman who survived.

And the woman who lived.

God, the woman who lived.

All of them standing in this graveyard, waiting for me to take their hands. And I couldn't remember them. Because I didn't recognize them. Because somewhere along the way, I stopped recognizing myself.

I've been walking through a graveyard full of ghosts, trying to remember who they belonged to. And all this time, they belonged to me.

No.

They were me.

And suddenly the question changes.

What's the last thing you remember?

Maybe it isn't asking me to remember an event. Maybe it's asking me to remember the last time I recognized myself without needing somebody else to tell me who I was.

Before the noise. Before the voices. Before I started believing everybody else's version of me. Before I forgot the sound of my own joy.
An auditorium of echoes.

All those voices, repeating themselves until I couldn't distinguish one from another. Until I couldn't hear myself.

And I wonder how much of what I've forgotten was ever really forgotten. How much was simply drowned out?

But there's something else. Something I almost missed.

I called this place a graveyard. I called them ghosts. Yet none of them have stopped reaching. None of them have stopped waiting.
And I didn't come here to bury them. I came here to take their hands. To walk them out. To bring them back among the living.

What if they aren't waiting to be rescued?
What if they're waiting to be witnessed?
I look back into the fog. They're still there. Patiently waiting.

And I begin to understand why the bite has never hurt. Why there was tenderness in the teeth. Why something kept scratching at me when I wasn't looking.

Perhaps I wasn't being haunted by something that wanted to hurt me. Perhaps I was being haunted by something that wanted me to look. To recognize. To remember.
And still, I hesitate.

Because what happens when I take the first hand? What happens to the others? Do they follow? Do they disappear? Do I have to remember every version of myself to know who I am now?

Or can I leave some of them standing in the fog without abandoning them?

I don't know. And perhaps I don't have to know. Not yet.

I reach for the nearest hand. And for a moment, I wonder whether she's been reaching for me all along. Whether she recognizes me even though I couldn't recognize her. Whether she remembers something I've forgotten.

And then I understand.

The question wasn't coming from somewhere in the fog. It wasn't being asked of me.

I was the one asking.

All this time, I've been standing in a graveyard full of myself, asking every woman I've ever been the same six words.

What's the last thing you remember?

And perhaps that's why there was so much noise in the silence after the question. Because I wasn't asking one woman. I was asking all of me.

I still don't know. The question hasn't gone anywhere. Neither has the graveyard. The air is still thick as fog with waiting.

And I just can't seem to remember what the last thing was that I couldn't remember.

But somewhere in that fog, a hand is reaching.
And this time, I know whose it is.

The Tenderness and the Teeth: A Twitter Memoir

The great escape from reality.

I still come for the humor and humanity. I still smile when I see photos of nature and animals. Giggle at pets. I still am in awe of the talent and creativity. The beautiful souls and lovely poetry. The music I didn't know I needed to hear. Forgotten lyrics that somehow find their way back to me. Sometimes I just sit with it for a while.

I see breakups and people wanting to be seen. Not in likes or selfies, just daring the mass to truly see them. I feel deep grief and sadness, loneliness and insecurity. I stay amused by the audacities and unshaken confidence. The budding friendships and people who are genuinely kind.

The tenderness and the teeth.

And sometimes I am surprised by the bullying and ignorance that passes through my feed. How casually cruelty takes hold, how effortlessly contempt passes for conversation, and how easily people turn on one another. The ugliness of it all, and how comfortably they wear it.

The contradictions hold me. The way some people evolve and other people never change.

I feel lost in a place I like to wander.

The news, the clickbait, the thirst traps, the rage bait, the politics, the sports, the way beauty gets buried beneath the rubble of a world that has shattered.

I see the hopeful collecting the glass and trying to make sense of something so right. Why does something so right tear us apart so wretchedly wrong?

The anxiety, the depression, the creeping, the ostentation. The onslaught of hypersensitivity and oversexualization. The desensitized, the leery, the otraverts. People finding each other. Losing each other. Holding on too tightly. Letting go without looking back. The community. The loneliness of it.

Some leave an impression. Some leave a wound. And some disappear so quietly you don't notice until you go looking for them.

And sometimes I'm the one who disappears.

Shutting the door and still passing each other. In the same place.

The chair between us, empty.

A madhouse full of all kinds, a Pandora's box left open and neglected.

I wonder why I keep coming back.

A Bumblebee Sleeps Here

 

The seed was there first.

Before the roots knew how deep they would reach.
Before the stem knew how to follow the sunlight.
Before the flower ever knew of its colour.

There was only a seed, buried in the dark.

And the seed had to break.

We spend so much of our lives believing that breaking means something has gone wrong. We hold ourselves together long after we've outgrown our own edges, afraid that if we crack open, we will somehow become less than what we were.

But a seed cannot become while remaining whole.

It must break to find its beginning.

And it does so in complete darkness, without ever having seen the flower it carries inside itself.

There is something beautiful about that kind of trust.

The seed does not know what waits above the soil. It doesn't know the warmth of the sun or the feeling of rain against its petals. It has never seen spring. It has no proof that there is light somewhere beyond all that earth.

And still, it opens.

And before it reaches upward, it reaches down.

Roots pushing quietly into the darkness, finding their way through heavy soil, around stones, searching for water, nourishment, and something strong enough to hold what has not yet grown.

No one sees this.

We see the flower.

We admire the bloom, the colour, the way its face turns toward the sun. But we rarely think about the roots beneath it; the quiet, unseen architecture that makes all that beauty possible.

As above, so below.

To reach toward the light, we must also be willing to deepen our roots in the dark.

Perhaps that is what our own dark seasons are sometimes doing. Not burying us but rooting us.

Teaching us how far to reach.
What sustains us.
What we can grow around.
And what we must push through.
It's the anchor that holds us when we finally become tall enough to meet the wind.

And then, one day, something blooms.

Not because it escaped the darkness.

But because it was nourished there.

The flower is not separate from everything the seed and roots endured. It is that unseen becoming made visible.

And even the bloom is not the end.

The flower doesn't desperately hold onto its petals simply because they are beautiful. When their purpose has been fulfilled, it lets them fall. And the plant changes again. It bears fruit. It makes more seeds. It rests. It begins again.

Maybe we aren't meant to spend our lives trying to remain perpetually in bloom.

Maybe we are meant to trust the seasons.

To be the seed when it is time to break.
The roots when it is time to deepen.
The stem when it is time to reach.
The flower when it is time to open.
And the falling petals when it is time to let go.

Because when we are still buried in the dark, we cannot possibly know all the small, beautiful things waiting for us above the soil.

The seed cannot imagine the life it hasn't yet lived.

It has no way of knowing that someday it will feel sunlight.

Or that the rain will collect on its petals.

It just anchors its roots to be strong enough to hold it through the storms.

Never knowing that something else might find nourishment because it grew.

Or that one warm sunny afternoon, after all that breaking and rooting and reaching...

that the flower will giggle when a bumblebee drunkenly sleeps on it.

And maybe that is reason enough to trust the darkness.

There are beautiful things waiting for us that the seed could never have imagined.

So go ahead and break. Find your roots. Reach for the sky. Bloom each time with everything you have. And when it is time - it's okay to let go. Because you can always begin again.

All the grief that swallows us whole is pooling over the edges and bleeding into everything; changing the shape of what it touches. 

Chasing hunger

We’ve mistaken hunger for love and consumption for connection.

Yet the things that sustain us have always been quieter: respect, companionship, affection, patience and safety.

We trade them for intensity;

obsession instead of presence, 

attention instead of understanding,

possession instead of intimacy, 

performance instead of truth.

It’s all spectacle.

And when the noise fades, and the validation trails off, there’s nothing left to devour or consume. So we find ourselves surrounded by everything we thought we wanted, and starving for the things we actually need.  And wondering why we still feel so empty. 

But have we mistaken hunger for love? Or have we chosen it? 

Hunger is exciting, where love is often quiet, hunger is pursuit, and love is presence, hunger is longing, where love is acceptance. Hunger keeps us moving, when love asks us to stay and let’s be real, staying is much harder than people are willing to admit. Because the idea of, “if I remain hungry, then I can continue chasing and I can continue fantasizing, and I can continue consuming, then I can continue believing that fulfilment exists just beyond the next corner. 

We did not mistake hunger for love. We romanticize hunger because it feels more profound. We overlook love, because it can feel ordinary. 

Love doesn’t offer that; love says, sit down and be here. You are enough. Love is enough. 

Love is the nourishment we are craving, while blindly seeking obsession and excitement. But love - love is grace, love is safety. Love is a place to rest. Love is somewhere nothing is being demanded of you except to just be you. I think this is what we all want. We want the radical idea that our existence, even in the quiet, is enough. 

Social media distorts this reality. It makes our heartbreaks, our obsessions, our conflicts, our grande declarations visible. But devotion is quiet, it doesn’t need an audience. The tragedy is that we have built a culture that documents attention and overlooks presence. We chase visibility while starving to be known. We demand to be heard yet forget how to listen.

And if love is grace, if love is safety, if love is a place to rest, then why do we keep choosing hunger?