MeliGoesRogue

Before each trip in my list of preparations is the need to make a musical playlist. I typically spend a quite a bit of time driving and when not, I am rambling about alone. Music is a prescription I must always have filled. Throughout my life it has meant various things. Only one person truly knows who I am via the music I hear. My precious mother can detect the smallest tectonic shift over the songs I hum or phrases I reference. Most of my music taste came from my mother and her family. What was played at Christmas or birthdays or on those very long drives home from work. Yet somewhere along the way I acquired an affinity for Blues music. I’d be lying if I said when I found it but I can remember a very specific moment when the music felt so real to me that I could almost wonder if I could have written it myself. Billie became the other half of me.

The year is….I don’t even want to think about it so it was a long time ago. My little apartment above the garage on the west side of the house. I was far removed from everyone. “ You deserve your privacy” she said to me as she showed me the biggest bedroom I had ever been in. I had moved up north to care for her children and in some ways I felt, care for her. The truth is that my soul was what was in desperate need of love and care. I had reached a point in my very young life where the mistakes of my past had come to confront me and the hope I had for the future perished. I talk about this often but as a young girl I learned that the truth was freedom from the burden of lying but not freedom from the pain of its current iteration. There was so much truth I desired to bury deep within my belly. The cold patio offered refuge from the little boys that constantly called for me. I miss that. I miss being needed by those little ones, I miss waking them in the morning and reading them stories at night. They are big now and probably don’t even know my name anymore. The irony of that being that it was my name they would call out at night when their nightmares drew too close and the train light no longer enough to illuminate the truth of their safety. Down the long hallway they would run, their little sweaty feet slapping against the wood floors and before long silence as they stood at my door turning the handle quietly before pushing in.

I would unfurl myself and welcome them into my warm nook to get their rest. The oldest would make me pinky promise not to take him back to bed. I could feel him nestle his head into my hands and exhale and soon he would drift back to sleep, leaving me as gargoyle ready to absorb any of those bad dreams. It was here in that same room that grief would overwhelm me and Gloomy Sunday would play on repeat.

As you know…or should, I am on vacation in England; Cornwall to be specific. Having chosen the coastline for this adventure I can Only declare destiny that the wind howls as she does here or how heavens pour down. I have been kept inside from the many adventures I had planned. The first time I was kept in I felt almost a permission slip from God to stay in bed and just rest. When the next day arrived with the same outlook I began to feel this imaginary pressure to go out and explore, that I was being held back. With little choice I settled into the sofa looking out to the water with my book….”A Woman Destroyed”. I literally can’t make this shit up….anyways the book has had very little bearing on me, other than being an interesting glimpse into the future that seems to await every woman. However curled up on the couch with all the doors open and the aggressive sound of the water crashing on the shore below I was brought back to the cold of the house on Angus Lane which also meant the sounds of Billie filling the air.

Pause – Mama I promise I’m ok. I think for the first time I could hear her pain and detach myself from it. To remember my sadness but also remember that it sits in the past. Grief is not unknown and neither is the knowledge that I will live past this moment, this pain and these memories.

Ok back to it. This is aging, or growing up. My memories and their names are never far from me but I no longer believe I will be crushed by my need to have them back beside me and the life we were meant to have. One of the things that started on these travels was the parts of myself I would leave behind. I had framed all my trips in September for that very reason. It became a time when I would “lose” something of myself in each of these countries. It started as an exercise of my grief. I was alone in a country that didn’t know my name and I could openly grieve them both, I could wrap myself in those memories, that anger and yell out to my God for answers and only the sheep and rocks would hear me. I can recall what and where I left each of these pieces of myself. Scattered across the world so that no matter where I ever am they are never far from me. But it’s May and I expected all of me to return and yet…I sit on the floor before the French doors open to the ocean with only the white of this page to illuminate my face and pieces falling off me each time I breath out.

On Saturday I attended virtually a theology class I used to frequent often. I used to have a very close relationship/friendship with the professor and unfortunately one day that was dissolved. Much like the deaths that have trailed me it was abrupt, with no explanation and no salve to ease me. It’s been years and my heart has not forgiven him. I’m not sure what came over me but I followed the link and soon I was face to face with him ( and a few other people in the room lol). I listened intently, my microphone on mute so my tears would not provide any verbal resonance. The content of the lesson while important is for this purpose irrelevant, although in truth in defiance of it I was able to draw closer to God and truly hear what was required of me.

I would need to leave him here. I would need to leave the dreams I had, the desires I carried. They must be deconsecrated from my heart and tossed to the sea like the ashes of those i love that have left me. How will I do that? I cried out to God in desperation. I had only been able to leave pieces of those he already held in his bosom, how now was I suppose to grieve him when his face, voice and name would never be far from me. Then the gift arrived…Billie began to sing and as I sat hearing her words against the crashing of the waves I finally saw it. I saw all the parts of myself I lifted above my head as an offering to this mere mortal man. His clumsy hands dropping the platter as parts of me went flying. He was and is unworthy of me. “For my love is like the wind and wild is the wind.”

I don’t know what weather will greet me when I arise tomorrow but when I reach the top of the Tor whether it is tomorrow or the next day, I know now what will be left on the high peak. The memory, desire, dreams and lust for a man who never saw the diamond before him. Moreover the girl desperate to not lose anything else must also remain behind.