Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time I heard it, I was wearing ruby slippers and a ‘Dorothy in the poppies’ shirt. Well, they weren’t real ruby slippers just a pair of red loafers I’d worn to match. The red heart earrings had been a nod to both the tinman and my partner who had been so happy for me going – doing something I loved, just for me. “Have Fun!” she’d said, “You’ll be great!”. I drove off. I was nervous. Why was I nervous? Was it because it meant so much to try and find the missing “me” or because it was the only thing I was good at and I didn’t want it to be gone. Either way, I was a mess. I couldn’t go in. I felt a failure as I rang my partner at 9.53am.
In order to allay my fears, I’d called her. As cliché as it is, she’s my rock and the one who knows me. She would be the voice of reason, well in my reasoning she would tell me to get in the car, drive the hour home, and be back where it’s safe and where I’m unchallenged. Where it is ok the be the ‘lost’ me because I am loved. Where it is ok not to change, or change in my own time as it is my safe place to fall. I needed her to tell me to come home. She didn’t answer the call.
So, it was just me, just same old me, the same one who got me in this mess in the first place. The same one who had to fix it. It’s probably time. Get inside girl. I’d heard it.
Later I looked down to think about the red sequined garter that I’d pulled out of the mystery bag. I wandered about the randomness of that. Is it really random when you’re wearing a Dorothy in the poppies shirt and ruby slippers? Was it a nod to my upcoming nuptials, the symbol of the wedded, used no-where else except the institution of marriage or cheap porn movies. Odd. Not particularly random. What does the garter actual symbolize at a wedding? The taking of ownership of the bride? Taking of the old? A promise of sex or fertility or sexuality or what? Probably some misogyny. Today, I choose to take it as a chance of new. A chance to re-identify. A chance to renew. Perhaps be a new kind of something or somebody, someone that doesn’t put herself last but who show’s up, shines and lets go.
The newness on me is exciting. It’s both chilling and warm. Feels soft and hard and I feel all sorts of sharp angles that I don’t really know. I like how it feels, like a new skin growing through but feeling like I have a chance to change what that skin looks like.
It’s a strange feeling but it immediately reminds me of the starkness of grief.
It was warm in my mind, that crushing arrival of grief. That whirligig of unknowing about which way is up. Where your idea of today and normal ceases to function and in its place, your breath is held and your heart stops beating and you look for signs. It’s the feeling in the morning where you wake and forget that they’re gone, your loved one, and in those moments there is sunlight and there is love and hope and sound for just the quickest of moments. Then it is replaced with the overwhelming pain and heaviness and dawning of reality, and whatever the opposite of hope is. Despair maybe. The pain of swimming upstream and the swampy seaweed that drapes and binds your legs, anchoring them into inertia.
You must try, at these times, to find your anchor. Your place in the game. Your handle to hold until the waves subside and the grief changes into something you know how to swim with and not against. This would be the second time I would hear it. The sound of my own distant voice, soft but firm, driving me forward. My head out of the sand, and clear of the ocean.
And finally, nothing is dictated for us, unless you let it be so. My life is mine and I can call the shots. Nothing is promised, nothing delivered with a neat bow. Just fought for and negotiated and claimed, rightfully mine.
And in the next minute, I hear it again. Show up and shine. Shine and show up. One foot in front of the other, again and again until you remember the way. Until the journey moves through you as you move along it, earning the medals and stripes of your work and sacrifice. Your new insistence to be heard and be useful pays its way. You are not lost, you just forgot to ask. You are found and you are free.