Tag Archives: heartbreak

The Borders of Magic

Posted on by under Time & Place

It existed once, if only in our collective imaginations. It was a secret place, a sanctuary of my childhood.

There the tall evergreens intertwined with the clouds, forming an impossibly high ceiling and muffling the noise of life beyond its borders. The ground was soft with long pine needles, perfect for the bedding of small animals, runaway orphans, or clever kings and queens. Monsters, dragons, and bad guys were often a threat, but we were very, very brave. And of course, there were also long periods of peace when there was nothing to do but rearrange the castle, look for treasure, or set up cages for the pets.

‘Can I be the queen today?’ ‘The stable is over here.’ ‘Oh no, the lady who’s looking for us is behind that bush—hide!’

There, tucked under the pines, we could see it all. We could see the magic that was always, in those days, coloring the edges of what grownups insisted was real.

* * * * *

Real. The sound of my mom trying not to cry on the phone was real. “I have some very sad news,” she said, and I leaned on the concrete wall that divided my property from the neighbor’s. “Dad,” I thought, “it’s dad.” A week before my dad had a heart attack; he was still in the hospital. “Dad,” I thought, and wondered, in the split second before my mom spoke again, if I could bear to hear the news.

“It’s not your dad,” she said.

I exhaled, and she continued. “You remember your friends up on the hill, from when you were little? Emily, and her brother? She died. It was in the paper. She took her own life. She had some problems with drugs.”

I leaned hard on the wall. I hadn’t thought about Emily for years, hadn’t seen her for decades. All I could remember, through the cloudy vision of childhood, was our shared world under the tall pines.

* * * * *

As I scrolled through the remembrances on the funeral home website, I knew this–I do not mourn as those who knew Emily mourn. I wouldn’t have recognized her on the street. I learned about her adult life by reading her obituary. She was a writer and an editor. She lived in Boston. She had a Siamese cat.

A real Siamese cat won’t stay in a cage made of pine needles.

And a magical childhood can’t save you from the deepest kinds of grown-up despair.

* * * * *

In my own grown-up world, it been a hard and beautiful summer, heavy with sickness and sadness, light with outdoor adventure and the laughter of our daughters, now eight and almost-seven.

The youngest took me for a walk in the woods behind our house tonight, an urban forest full of sprawling vines and broken glass. “Do you want me to show you around?” she asked. “Of course,” I said hesitantly, “But maybe we shouldn’t be wearing flip flops.”

“Mama, we’re fine. Just be careful. Did you know that all the trees have names?” She led me down a path, speaking to several maple seedlings, “Hi Jack. Hi Bella.” I asked her how she knew the names, and she traced the bark with her small fingers. “The markings tell me, Mama. See, this one is a girl tree named Meeka.”

I smiled at her, but suddenly, I felt afraid. Emily and I had created our own imaginary world, but it hadn’t endured. What good is magic that fades? I wanted, in that moment, to lock both of my daughters in a high tower like Rapunzel, to save them from tragedy that reaches its claws into the past–into memories that seemed to belong to another world.

There is only one world.

My daughter tugged at my arm. “Mama, did you know that trees talk to each other when their leaves sway?” She moved her arms and hips side-to-side and motioned toward the leaves. “Like this, Mama. This is how trees say goodbye.”

And in this world, there is still some magic.

I looked up. The top layer of trees formed a cathedral ceiling, now a sanctuary of my adulthood. There I prayed. There I said goodbye.

Pine Trees

* * * * *

I did not ask my friend’s family for permission to share this story, thus ‘Emily’ is not my friend’s real name.

Photograph by Noah Weiner, shared with his gracious permission.

* * * * *

Jen Pelling is a writer and editor who lives in the woods of urban Pittsburgh with two daughters, four cats, ten chickens, and a husband who keeps her sane.

Rocks on the Way

Posted on by under Creating Place, Guest

I skateboarded down to the park to find a place to journal. In about 5 seconds of tiny wheels rolling on rocky asphalt, I almost decided to go back home. The only place I’d ever boarded is on the smooth concrete of San Jose State University. This was the complete opposite.

I forced myself to ride through my own reluctance, because something within me kept saying that 8 minutes of bumps would be worth the ride.

Once I arrived at the park, I slowed down and looked for a place to sit and write.

I found myself drawn to the place I usually avoid—the baseball field park bench.  As I sat on its cold, aluminum surface, I took in the sun’s heat and the flood of unwanted memories.

It’s been three years since I’ve had the strength or courage to revisit the bench.  park bench

Three years ago, I sat on the bench with the person I fell in love with, who’d eventually leave me. We had been together for less than two months, and in a few days we were to separate for college. Him to LA and I to Spokane. As we sat, I tried to hold on to him because, even then, I was always afraid that “we” would end.

The bench was an evocative object that seized my mind into the past. I had been told too many times that I wasn’t “supposed” to return to those thoughts. “To reminisce is only to miss something that doesn’t exist anymore.”

But in the end, I deliberately chose to sit there. I sat exactly where we did back then, accepted that this time I was alone, and wrote. Writing required me to reflect, to remember and I was forced to verbalize the thoughts that plagued me.

With my pen, I scribbled, “There are three places that for some reason, I’m oddly rooted to. This park bench, an ATM, and a rose garden.” Chewing on the cap of the pen, I realized that these three every-day objects in every-day areas had a hold on my attention.  I struggled to keep up with the memories and insights that were suddenly clear as I captured my thoughts in the hardbound journal..  

On the park bench, we shared a kiss while someone awkwardly passed by. After we noticed their disgusted glare, we eventually laughed off our embarrassment. He looked me in the eyes then and said, “Oh well,” and simply held me. He didn’t care about the world around us. He cared about me.

At the ATM, I stood with him while he withdrew money. He followed through with the chivalrous expectation to pay for me, even though at the time he wasn’t financially stable. I didn’t stop him, but it was the first time I saw myself as more of a burden than a blessing in his life.

At the rose garden, we had celebrated our first month as a couple. When we were leaving, we crossed paths with a little old Hispanic lady who, at my goodbye to her, laughed and said, “There are no such things as goodbye! Only ‘see you later!’” For the first time in my life, I felt comfort at a departure.

I looked around again. Children were scattered throughout the park running, biking, and squealing with delight at whatever tickled their attention. In the distance, a Hispanic family danced salsa with one another to the faint tune escaping their tiny radio. I moved the skateboard back and forth under my feet and recognized that the sun was lowering and it was becoming colder.

But I continued to write. Returning to, sitting, and writing on this park bench forced me to remember for the first time what had actually happened. Once that memory was viewed in full, I watched it all play out through a wiser pair of eyes.

As I sat recalling these vivid memories, I imagined that my current self, with knowing eyes, sat next to my past self.

“You know…one day you’ll return to this park bench alone,” I tell her. ”You’ll come back and there will be a rush of pain like a baseball at full speed.”

My past self cringes at the corniness and unpleasant knowledge.  “If it will hurt, why come back?”

“Because,” I begin carefully, “Although it hurts, you’ll see that things always come full circle. From here, I can see that our biggest fear came true. We loved, we lost. But you’ll keep moving forward. You’ll fall in love again, you’ll get hurt again. You’ll continue on, and then you’ll wind up here.”

We both sigh deeply, aware that truth is never an easy burden to bear.

“Coming back here will not be like regressing to your old thoughts.” I continue with an experienced voice, “It will hurt, but you’ll see that everything that has happened molds you into who you’re meant to be.”

My past self scoffs. “And then I’ll have to do it again, right? Return to places I don’t want to go back to?”

I push a bit more. “You’re right. There will be many benches that we’ll have to return to. Benchmarks of experience. But look– this isn’t so bad.”

The sun was setting, and my mind was tired. I picked up my skateboard and started towards home. Though the asphalt ground remained the same, bumpy and jarring but all I could think was, “It feels a little easier now.”

*****

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Sarah Michelle Cruz is an incoming senior at Whitworth University. She is a psychology and English Writing major, with a Chinese minor. She spends her free time mostly making music, writing, watching Filipino soap operas,  or eating cheap but delicious international cuisines with friends. She is in the editing process of her first novel, and is currently writing a second book called, “At the End of the World.” She hopes to inspire others and help people reclaim their own stories through arts and writing.

Island, Dharma, Cup

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

“It was a bad breakup that brought me to the dharma,” a teacher once told me. The dharma — and whether or not I’ve been brought to it — is an open question yet. But it was surely a bad breakup that brought me to the island. And the island that made me whole — not just once but twice, so far. It’s good knowing there’s a place that heals heartbreak, because life can be generous with the heartbreak sometimes.

I first found the island in the pages of a catalog. I was just twenty years old, stuck in a humid, landlocked city and itching to get free of a relationship that was hurting. I felt bound to my lover by the delicacy of her mental health; if I went for a long walk to look at the magnolias, I might come home to find her in the bathtub, bloody from a half-hearted suicide attempt. I couldn’t even get to the “bad breakup” stage until I got her some Prozac or something, but that was easier said than done. Going away to college seemed like it might let her down gently. So I looked for the furthest college I could find and found it: a bare refuge of a school, small, out of the way, on the northern ocean’s edge. A place I could start again.

When I told my lover what I hoped to do, she applied and got accepted herself. So my triumphant ride to freedom was on a Greyhound, half the country over with a woman who, by the end, would barely speak to me. That was a pretty bad breakup.

Halfway UpWe went such different ways that few would believe we’d ever known one another. Free, finally, to take long walks without having to worry what sadness might be waiting for me on my return, I fell hard in love with that island. I got a bike and rode it off roads and on, deep into woods bringing nothing with me but my thirst; and I drank from dripping rocks and soaked moss and boughs laced with fog. I would throw my bike into the brush at the base of a mountain trail and climb over red rocks up into a sky that fell over ocean and pine. Until I was finally strong enough to leave.

And it would be there, to that island, that I would drive almost 20 years later, having learned that marriage can be a multiplier of loneliness. That your heart can break with longing for love, despite the ring on your finger and the child you created together out of your two bodies.

I found myself, once again, climbing those rocks up into the sky, this time with a daredevil child in tow and an old dog that preferred the gentler trails. We climbed higher than the vultures and watched their finger-wings glide below us. We’d walk out like dancers on bits of board into a swamp and sit quiet to hear the peepers. I carried my daughter on my back when she got weary, pulled ticks off the dog and I woke early, to see the sun purple the nearest hillside before anyone stirred. And my heart knit itself back together in the astonishing, delicious aloneness.

I wasn’t lonely there, until a few years passed and brought me into love again — unexpected, unsought — and yet there it came, just as thunderous as heartbreak, just as undeniable as the ocean. And I mourned to leave the island, but love rendered it the wrong place to be; if I stayed, I stayed alone, with my love far from me. So I followed love, back to the mainland and away. It nearly broke my heart to do.

It’s been five years now and I haven’t been back since. And I haven’t really needed to.

There’s a story about a teacher who describes the dharma by holding up his teacup. “This is my favorite cup,” he says, “I love it in every way. And I consider it broken already.”

I like tea and I like teacups and I first heard this story as a caution against getting too attached to things. I could also hear it fatalistically: nothing lasts forever, so be ready. But the first part of the story is essential, I think, the part about loving something in every way. Because one of the ways things can be is broken — and hurt, diseased, suffering. What kind of love encompasses even what our hearts rebel against?

On the island, I can be alone and whole, not aching for any place but where I am. But I’m not from there, I’m from away. From the places where I’m broken already, and learning to love, with this heart I have, in every way.

*   *   *   *   *

Alison on a rock“Island, Dharma, Cup” is by Alison Coluccio. Alison lives with her partner and teenaged daughter in Ithaca, New York, in an urban eco-village, where she loves gardening to build bird habitat and fun food. In her not-spare time, she studies plant genetics at Cornell in a USDA lab. She’s worked with people and plants in Togo, West Africa and Irapuato, Mexico, and her writing on seeds and spirituality has appeared in Parabola. (Landscape vista photo, above, taken by Caitlin Regan.)