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I'm lying here all alone
and it's 2:06 am and I'm thinking of the way your eyes get wider when you see me
I thought about kissing you once and it's never left my mind
When I think of you I think of warm blankets and tense arms
Of the field of freckles spreading across your nose and the walls between us
I don't know why you're always on my mind but it seems you're never going to leave
The last time i saw you, you were wearing the smile I thought was mine and I haven't seen you since
I can't make you miss me and that's the worst part
 Sep 2013 Sara Loving
Cory
He looked up-pointing
ah moon
He said

You know it was bright and early
morning
and sure enough
far off and unassuming
ah moon

Not even full
or very impressive
Washed out if that helps

But he got it
He knows
At this ridiculous tender impossible age

That the moon is the moon
luminous and heavy
full on the evening horizon
facing any whichway

silver orange ghostly
imposing
left right high low
day or night

And when it is black
New and gone
He's never asked me
where it went.
See
It's time I told you the day is gone. Curtains hung and your work is done.
We watched and saw a last goodbye, waited for you to draw your breath and then
Let the cold come by and say hello. Do you remember our plump days like candy wheels we ate like fools?
Do you remember hungry love we starved on. I do.  
I see forever end. You were there. You promised we'd be together and we were.
I didn't know forever was just for you.  
It's time I told me the day is gone, a dial tone and then hang up.
I stand in the kitchen my ear pressed against the air to see if I can hear.
 Aug 2013 Sara Loving
Rachel
When lust turned to love
I was stuck in the Sea between,
fighting the single wave that held me in place.

It crashed over me and I was under it looking up.
When I tried to ask for help, all that escaped me was a cloud of smoke
destined for wherever, spreading thinly and insignificantly throughout.

As the smoke dispersed, so did I.

My torso sank quickly from the weight of a heart conflicted,
scraping the reef and leaving cloudy red trails suspended above it as it plundered,
finally hitting the deepest, darkest ground like a common rock.

My arms slithered away like eels,
swollen with stinging electric courage as they ruthlessly pursued their prey,
feeding off the triumph of the tangible path of destruction in their midst.

My legs walked back to the land they were used to,
where they tried to get everything back in line; but the line was blurred.  
So they went in all directions-- left, right, and wrong, and they got nowhere.

My head was carried off by the current,
until I suddenly thought to lift it up to the surface.  Thinking about surfacing was hard
but after I did it, I realized that the wave looked farther away.

I think I’ll make it through today,
but tomorrow I woke up bleeding and breathing smoke, wondering

Who I am.
 Aug 2013 Sara Loving
unnamed
28:
My one year-old laughter:*
(I still hear
what God said
when
she
spoke,
to me first;
that sound,
they tell me,
was my mother,
I remember
what God told me
when
she
held me first:
You are too young to be your own personal horror)

34.
What I know as a nine year-old:
  
9/11 means
quiet,
and
look at my feet standing
on the solid fertile Earth
and
be more quiet than the ground is quiet
don't point at Isabelle's mom because she is skinny like fence wire  
don't stare at Jake when he gets limp and speaks like a broken dog

42:
my twenty year-old morbidity,
minor self-inflicted injuries,
invented and self-sustained psychoses,
drink; drinking the whole thing;
i'm going to make myself red inside;
i am the fire, they said, and burned, all of us burned, and *
they said this was love.
There is no need to dwell on the exterior cliche of an injured soldier, the propaganda is superficial. Civilians have only plastic green men, heavy dusty movie set costumes, and Army-of-One heroes to populate stereotypes. Keep your images larger than life, no use touching up a paint-by-number. Mine was banal, foolish, and 19; enough said.

One fence is the fraternity itself, the next is brain injury. No other way to understand but be there. A Solid-American-Made-Dashboard cracked my forehead at 45mph.
Crumpling into the footwell,
unaware that the flatbed's rear bumper
was smashing thru the passenger windshield above me
the frame stopped just shy of decapitating my luckily unoccupied seat.
Our vehicle's monstrous hood had attempted to murderously bury us under,
but the axle stopped momentum's fate and ended the carnage under dark iron.
Shards of my identity joined the slow, pulverized, airborn chaos.
Back, Deep, Gone.

Unconsciousness is the brain's frantic attempt to re-wire neurons, jury rig broken connections, the doctor's desperate attempt to re-attach, stand back and say, good enough. Essential systems limply functioned, but unessential ones were ditched. Years later a military doctor diagnosed an eventual triage: Hypothalimus disconnected from the Pituitary Gland, Executive Function damaged, long pathways for emotional regulation interrupted.

I woke up still kinda bleeding, crusty blood in my hair, a line of frankenstein stitches wandering across my forehead.   My sense of self had literally dissolved into morning dust floating in a sterile hospital sunbeam.  My name was down the hall, words and the desire to speak were on a different floor.  Life became me and also a separate me under constant renovation, a wrecking ball on one half, scaffolding and raw 2x4's the other.

Waking up in the hospital, I realized I needed help to get the blood cleaned up.   A nurse came in, largely glared at me in disregard, and quickly left… for an hour.   She returned and brusquely dropped a useless ace comb and gauze on the blanket over my feet and abandoned me again.  This was my introduction to the shame of a VA hospital.  I minced my way to the bathroom, objectively examined my face in the mirror with shocking stitches above one swollen eye.  Gingerly rinsing my hair, the water ran pink in white porcelain.  I remembered the sound in my skull between my ears when a doctor scraped a metal tool across my skull, cleaning debris before stitching.  I recalled that in the ER I was asking Is he ok, repeating it like a broken record, knowing I should stop but I couldn’t.  There was also perhaps a joke about an Excedrin headache.

It was morning, and since there was no such thing as time or purpose or feelings anymore, I wandered to the hall with my only companion, the IV pole. One side was a wall of windows, and I was, what, 10 or 12 stories up from the streets of a much larger city than where I crashed.  The hall was warm and sunny.  I wheeled my companion to a blocky square vinyl chair to sit next to a pay phone.  I didn’t have any thoughts at all, or care about it.   After about an hour my first name floated up from the void, then with some effort my last name.  It took the rest of the morning to remember I had a brother.  After lunch we resumed our post, and I spent the afternoon in concentration piecing together his phone number.  God had pushed the reset button.

Thirty years ago the doctors didn't understand head injuries; they only recognized the physical symptoms. At first there was good reason to be permanently admitted to the hospital.  My blood pressure was unstable, sometimes so low that drawing blood for tests caused my veins to collapse even with baby needles.  My thyroid had shut down completely, only jump-started again with six months of Synthroid.  I had to learn to live with crashing blood sugar and fluctuating appetite.  For years afterwards, any stress would cause arrhythmias, my heart filling and skipping out of sync, blood pressure popping my skull.  Will the clock stop this time?  

There is always at least one momentous event in every person’s life that becomes punctuation, before and after.  The other side of Before the accident truly was a different me.  I have a vague recollection of who that person may have been, and occasionally get reminders.   Before, I was getting recruiting letters from Ivy League colleges and MIT, a high school senior at sixteen.  After, I couldn’t balance a checkbook or even care about a savings account in the first place.  Before, I had aced the military entrance exam only missing one question, even including the speed math section.  They told me I could chose any rating I wanted, so I chose Air Traffic Control.  Twenty years later, I thumbed through old high school yearbooks at a reunion.   I saw a picture of me in the Shakespeare Club, not recalling what that could have been about.   On finding a picture of me in the Ski Club I thought, Wow, I guess I know how to ski.   A yellowed small-town newspaper article noted I was one of two National Merit Scholars; and in another there’s a mention of a part in the High School Musical.  

This side of After, I kept mixing right with left, was dyslexic with numbers, and occasionally stuttered with word soup.  Focus became separated from willpower, concentration was like herding cats.  The world had become intense.

(chapter 1 continues in memoir)
 Aug 2013 Sara Loving
Annabelle
I was thinking about diners and non-fancy things.
Like morning breath and not having to do things.
People with day jobs behind marble desks
Staring at clocks
Looking their best.
And 3am Ihop, and highways
Lying on the floor and sitting up cause you need to laugh.
Drive to the riverside
Plastic bag of burritos
Those little styrofoam cups filled with heaven
and cinnamon.
The trees can't believe we
give each other gifts as they are dying.

The firs whisper secrets
to stay alive in winter.

The maples die quietly.
They want to be alone.

You have stamped yourself upon me
with the holiday. You are the gift I
gave myself.

We talk about God.
Who else could have invented such temperatures?
The oaks are restless for an answer
before all their leaves are orange.

Somebody is reading a story, aloud.
I stay outside to hear how it ends: shivering, but
listening, because the last word is "spring".

Your secret is inside of me, a beehive queen.
We hum, and sleep, and wonder when
we might emerge and sing.
Just ask me.
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