Tag Archives: self-love

Algae

Posted on by Standard 14

Algae at Marston Lake: Photo by Noelle

It seeps and bubbles with oxygen and fermenting life from last season and rot… oh there is definitely rot. Dead leaves, sticks, bugs, old fish. It is a soup of color and life that smells earthy and pungent. I watch a water bug crawl across its surface. I cannot tell if it searches for food or is its food. Mosquitos swarm above me, but I tell them I’m busy. They’ll have to dine elsewhere. Most listen, anyway. I love ponds, streams and strange pools of water that life springs out of; moist, hot and teaming with all manner of crawling and swimming things. Sometimes they’re creepy and beautiful, other times decayed and rich.

I grew up on a lake in a neighborhood of mostly boys. I had five brothers. I caught toads and snatched up frogs with a stealth a stork would envy. Salamanders and crawfish were my favorite, but they’re tricky. Not easy to find in fresh water streams and under rocks. I never killed anything. I just liked to catch them and look at their beauty. Flying crickets, Daddy Long Legs, praying mantises, rolly pollies and aphids. Furry night moths, lightning bugs, and long earth worms. Tadpoles, sunnies and catfish. Pike, sometimes, snappers often and boxed turtles on occasion. Once a copperhead snake swam alongside me on the lake and scared me half to death. Their bite is most unpleasant. Smores by the campfire invited a troupe of ants to visit my sleeping bag one night. I have never screamed so loud in all my life.

I spent a lot of time alone as a child. I was often lonely, but never bored. My capacity for make-believe had me in trouble for daydreaming, over the course of my school years, more often than I can count. I enticed a chipmunk into my lap with nothing but my hands, once, and then spun a story of a monk village guarded by dragon and damselflies. I regaled my furry friend with my story, but it only slept. Little heartbeat beating like wild horses in its breast. I couldn’t understand why I never quite fit in anywhere and in my early years thought of my younger self always the odd man out. Or, in this case, odd girl out.

I stare into the percolating algae that festers with life and imagine the gnats and mosquitos are angels that follow me everywhere I go. I am the princess of a swamp and they are my guardians. What is there to do? Bugs and birds may swarm, but never princesses. They always seem to travel alone.

Coming of Night

Posted on by Standard 13
Coming of night over Johnston Lake: Photo by Noelle

Coming of night over Johnston Lake: Photo by Noelle

In the coming of night I feel the day slip away. In the last rays that crest the hill, I forget what disturbed my midday and nagged my afternoon. No monk am I, but there is a vesper in my heart at this hour. As if the monastery bell had rung and in the reeds of the lake I knelt. Swallows catch the last flies, before the chill descends with the night. I ache to follow the rays across the horizon, yet, there is peace in this twilight I fear to miss. The passing of my day, its light and its dark, not to be walked again.

Seed to Mulch

Posted on by Standard Reply
Dead Tree at Chatfield Reservoir: photo by Noelle

Dead Tree at Chatfield Reservoir: photo by Noelle

In grain an old storyteller’s life twists and turns. Withered like drift wood that never left home. Each adventure a ring and a knot. An audience of millipeds and the rolly polly beetle that roam the planks and hone the staff. Sun demands payment in chlorophyll and sap, while wind licks it’s length a child on a lollipop. There is no rest from seed to mulch, for even in death the performance plays on, a tale told in wood.

Tree and Earth

Posted on by Standard 4
Dead tree on the bank of the South Platte River: Photo by Noelle

Dead tree on the bank of the South Platte River: Photo by Noelle

And the trunk said “I am alone here. My branches are dead and gone. My many roots are withered or taken by beetles. My leaves have blown far in the wind. No life moves in my bark, accept that which feeds upon me.”

And the earth said, “Come to me. For you have fed me with your leaves and opened me with your roots. You have held me to this bank, for surely the rain would have sent me to the river. Be at peace, my old friend and sink into my soil. Tell me of your years in the sun. For that story given, I will trade of how water rises to the moon.”

Jockeys: Flash Non-Fiction

Posted on by Standard 3
Image pulled from The Mind Unleashed Facebook page

Image pulled from The Mind Unleashed Facebook page

The deep secret of the divorce. I stole a pair of my exes jockey shorts. The ones that are actually like shorts. Gray cotton soft, gentle waist band and my ass looks great in them. Even the flap in the front seems to flatten my belly. I love that flap. Like the secret door to a magical mystery tour. I wear them to bed or dance Zumba topless around the house. The naughtiness is in the theft and that they’re the wrong sex for my wide hip need. My friend thinks it’s odd, but I challenge she simply lacks the courage to step out of the feminine box. We tell men to find some estrogen, well I dig the testosterone rush when I slide them on. Sexy and charged is what they give my lazy Sunday’s reading the paper.

They remind me of him, in the way he liked my style. My need to be only me. For many reasons, I needed to let him go, but his jockeys still belong to me. It’s the part of the story of us that still lives in my jeans.

(Work in progress from The Writer’s Church in Boulder. Hosted by Marj Hahne and inspired by “Pink Pantsuit” by Nancy Simpson)

Little Gem

Posted on by Standard Reply
Re-posted from Twin Flame Reunion Facebook page

Re-posted from Twin Flame Reunion Facebook page

“She undressed my thoughts and made love to my consciousness.”

(Quote posted by Jacob at Dreamsmatic group on the Insight Timer app)

Wuthering Heights 1989: Flash Non-Fiction

Posted on by Standard Reply
Re-posted from Art For Ever's Facebook page

Re-posted from Art For Ever’s Facebook page

The receiver is held tight to my ear. I hear him breathing. He’s likely said all he’s going to say, but I haven’t been listening for some moments now. I hang up and stand in the bedroom. I hear the cars moving along Whitman Avenue and the refrigerator shakes it’s cubes into the tray. Mrs Knapps’s dog yaps at a passing bus. I stroke the bedspread as if a cat and become consumed with a bit of lint on the rust-colored, seventies style, shag carpet. I stare at it, as a lost eighteenth century mariner might gape at seeing the Rock of Gibraltar upon the horizon. Unfortunately for me, there is little salvation in the lint.

The crying starts unnoticed until I am in motion and wailing. The pacing is as comforting as a rocker. Back and forth, a lioness stuck in her cage. It goes on like this for sometime, until the sun has set and the furniture have become fat ghosts sharing my miserable company. Whoever I think I am is now gone. I wring my hands, gnash my teeth and Where the Wild Things Are comes alive in my living room. An entire life planned out, suddenly gone from under my feet. I drift in the apartment completely lost at sea and consumed by a sickening, emotional scurvy. My inner map has stretched as far as it’ll go. I am in uncharted waters and it’s depths are pulling at my skin leaving me nearly transparent in the bathroom mirror. A creepy jellyfish woman with mascara streaked cheeks.

A rage is brewing strong and at any moment I will brake the cell of this room and run wild into the street, I think. That’s when I hear the knock. Stopping to listen, the crying held back with Herculean effort it comes again. A small voice.

“You left your lights on”.

What? It makes no sense. A five year old’s shuttering sob racks my limbs. Who the fuck is interrupting my death wail?

“Miss, you left your car lights on”.

Air drifts out of my lungs on the simple reality. My car lights are on. My world is crashing, but in the end it’s a Tuesday night and you’ve got work in the morning. Wiping my nose on my sleeve, I grab the keys. A dead battery would be like insult to injury, and here you are in a curious moment. Opening the door to thank Mrs. Knapp as if for a basket of biscuits on Sunday and pretending you don’t look a horror show. She smiles, and I hope she’s blind and not offering me pity. Jogging down the apartment steps, heart torn out, but remarkably mobile. Spry even. The wind feels cool on my skin. She’s telling me about that time she had a dead battery and I’ve gone from crushed heroine to benign neighbor. Instead of Wuthering Heights your trying to keep her dog from humping your leg.

Sometimes life turns on a dime. No interruption and you spend an evening slipping into depression and misery. A bottle of wine spent, snot-filled tissues littering the floor, maybe a box of Oreos diminished to crumbs. Or get interrupted and lose that momentum to be completely self-absorbed. A lost chance to be fully lost. She wants to talk about why the rose beds aren’t being kept up. “It’s a tragedy,” she says. I realize I’ve got nothing to give the miserable rosebuds, but I suddenly find I’ve never been fonder of them. She pats my hand, but says nothing. Shit, she’s not blind.

The wailing has gone and I am left with ordinary “You’ve been betrayed and dumped” crying. Not nearly as dramatic as the wailing. And in that I feel the most bereft of all. Not even my grieving feels potent. That’s when the mind turns off and you go make your lunch for the next day and lay your clothes out. You put on a rerun of Seinfeld and pretend you’ve never seen this one. It’s odd how quickly being alone again sinks into the bones.

A work in progress from Writer’s Church, hosted by Marj Hahne. Inspired by “This is the Beginning of Time” by Sherrie Flick