the one thing keeping you down.

Sara Bareilles wrote this song following her first very difficult break-up. These words are a perfect description of a rip-your-lungs-out, fall-so-hard-you-literally-can't-get-up, wish-you-could-sleep-the-rest-of-your-life-away break-up. Read the lyrics if you want to know what it is like to experience something like this, or if you are going through it right now.

A song, like always, is much better than simply the lyrics. The lyrics without the song is green beans without the salt. That's why I moved this song conveniently to the top of my playlist, and it should be playing as long as you have been reading this post.

I honestly like the male voice better than females. That's just the way I am. But when I listen to this song, Sara's voice makes me forget to breathe; it is so beautiful. Listen and read and think about all those people in your life who keep falling into someone else's gravitational pull, and can't stop.

Gravity, by Sara Bareilles

Something always brings me back to you.
It never takes too long
No matter what I say or do,
I'll still feel you here 'til the moment I'm gone.

You hold me without touch.
You keep me without chains.
I never wanted anything so much
than to drown in your love and not feel your reign.

Set me free, leave me be.
I don't want to fall another moment into your gravity.
Here I am and I stand so tall, just the way I'm supposed to be.
But you're on to me and all over me.

You loved me 'cause I'm fragile.
When I thought that I was strong.
But you touch me for a little while and all my fragile strength is gone.

I live here on my knees as I
try to make you see that you're everything
I think I need here on the ground.
But you're neither friend nor foe though I
can't seem to let you go.

The one thing that I still know is that you're keeping me down

A break-up like that does something to you. It makes you feel that you are missing an essential part of your being; like your nervous system has failed and you can feel nothing and everything at the same time. I was the girl who fell, who could still taste his lips a year after we broke up, who could still smell his shampoo and see those pouty brown eyes looking at me with longing. But he was gone, seemingly forever, and I had nowhere to fall, because wherever I fell, it wasn't into him. No success felt as joyous. No failure compared to losing him.

And somehow, I got to keep him. I have a year full of him behind me, a year I spent with a ring on my left finger that belongs to him. Even after 35 years, when we have more years behind us than ahead, I will still be just as willing to give up everything for one more day, one more minute, another 35 years. Anything to stay here in his gravity.

i knew that he would.

my first short story for creative writing, loosely based on the true story of one of my coworkers.

I avoid divorce cases, because I have found no logic in loving a person. Marriages turn into divorces because people try to reason with love; they try to color love in blacks and whites when love only comes in shades of grey. I tried to reason with love once, and before I could realize what I was doing, it was too late.

She wanted nothing other than to become a wife and a mother. Since childhood, my dream came packaged in a courtroom with judges, questions, and convicts. Simply put, I was going to be a lawyer.

“We can do this thing together; you get your degree, and I have my kids. We’ll be happy together,” she said with her lack of reasonable doubt, her thrill of whimsical dreams.

Law practice is not a fatherly career; it involves travelling, possibly leaving for a couple weeks at a time. I have to have flexible availability to meet with my advocates. Staying up into early morning hours to research precedents and file paperwork is a requirement if I wanted to do well at my job. My career would only cheat a child. I do not cheat children, and I most certainly do not cheat her.

Sometimes when confronting a decision that determines the rest of one’s life, such as where to go to college or who to marry, one experiences a flash of divine confidence toward a particular path, as if it is not anymore a wish, a leaning towards, but a must.

I still remember the moment. As I walked diligently from her apartment, my shoes scathed against the wooden floor confirming the justice of my choice. My decision to walk away was only right. The sound of her muffled snivels through the door cracks was apparent as soon as I shut the door.

‘But,’ I reasoned with myself, ‘to have what we both want…’ the sound of her sobbing continued. ‘This will get easier.’

I glared at the stairway, the sun revealing dust in the air as it shown through the clammy windows onto the stair railing. I took my first step from her door.

One day, about a week later, I heard someone screaming outside of my house. It was shrill and serious, not like the careless screech of kids playing in a pile of leaves. Then, I heard my name. The screaming was her voice. She was outside weeping for me. It was horrible, actually, and so silly it made me angry. I drove her back to her apartment, and though she tried to “reason” with me, she was the one being irrational. She needed to move on, I told her. And though I secretly hoped someday I would hear her call my name outside, though I lived in the same house where she could find me all these years, the reason caught up to her and she never came back again.

We crossed paths ten years later. I stopped in the Rudy's bar and grill for a drink after a long day dealing with house evictions and unqualified disability applicants. The bar was a fairly clean one, almost as pure as a coffee shop with a faint mist of strawberry tobacco pipe smoke and aroma so slight of ale. I sat on the barstool to order my drink and turned my face to her, as if the scent of her hair knew me and made itself edible in the air. I knew it was her as soon as I looked. She was sitting at a booth alone.

I turned my face sharply forward, staring at the sierra-tinted beer mugs hung upside down on the wall. My choice was clear, as if already predicated beforehand; I was going to talk to her, however vulnerable it made me. I hoped two things, that she was single and miserable like me. As I approached the booth, she noticed me and her eyes grew so wide I did not know if they would ever close again.

“Warren? I…,” she said. She did not yet close her eyes.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

I stood before her at the table, and I did not want it to be awkward. But it was, after ten years of closing that door, after hearing her call for me, it was. I motioned my hand toward the seat across from her, and she affirmed that I could sit down. My hands trembled, and I purposefully kept them underneath the booth, embarrassed.

“How have you been? It’s been, wow, about…” I said.

“Ten years now. And I’ve been great,” she finished in a polite manner, but noticeably distant.
“That’s really great!” I said, smiling fake. I’m certain she noticed.

“I am a mother.”

“Oh, that’s...” I started.

“and a wife.” She said.

I forgot to breathe for at least fifteen seconds.

“That’s awesome. Boy or girl?” I asked, trying to sound interested. The fake smile was starting to hurt my face.

“Son. He’s four, and his name is Bradley,” she stated, as if rehearsed. She did not look at me directly, but stared at her beer mug as she talked, fingering circles around her beer mug.

“I congratulate you.”

“Thanks.”

I told her about the law firm I shared with a few associates, trying to make it sound as interesting as possible. I asked her about her family, and she was delighted to tell me how happy she was. Her husband had a business degree and worked for a bank downtown. Her son was the “light of her life.” Truly, I was glad for her. Her willingness to open up was refreshing. Seeing me probably wasn’t her idea of a good time.

“I really messed up.” I had to put it out there. I may never get this chance again.

“Yes, you did, and now you are too late.” She looked at me for the first time, and as soon as she caught my eye, I looked at the table in fear she would think I was a creeper for staring at her.
“I’m sorry. If I could go back, I would.”

And I would.

Sometimes I pass by her house and see her son riding his bicycle on the sidewalk in mid-summer. She does not know it, but I wonder if I had only opened her door one more time, listened to her logic instead of mine, sat on her loveseat and gave her a wordless hug, would her son have my eyes?

I knew that he would.

short poems

Déjà vu

A past and future

Lived all at once

Déjà vu

Healing

You hold your breath.

Keep composure.

Exhale, too.

Remember to

Let it out.

No Light

It is a shame to let you walk away.

Isn't there supposed to be a light

at the end of the tunnel?

I can't even find the tunnel.

Fledgeling

You are fighting

But never winning.

You try to fly

But you are spinning.

Life is awkward

And absurd.

What a funny

Little bird.

-all by Sasha Naomi

after the break-up

She is reaching, her fingers stretched to its brink like
a singer at her highest note, trying with all her might,
screeching at the closeness, wincing, her fingers almost
wrapped around it. She needs this can, on the top
shelf, so high, in the kitchen cabinet. She reaches like a drought
has stolen every ounce of rations, as if this can were her
only means of survival. She is on her tiptoes.
Slanted forward, she slightly hops.
She falls.
She can’t get up. No more strength, no more song.
The can is out of reach, out of sight, it will not be had, will not be taken.
It refuses to be what she thought it was.
-Sasha Naomi

nothing without him

I’ve tried to imagine what life would be like without him. The hardest truth about our love is that I can’t. I’ve found that there is a fear in love-fear that is desperate and sure, that I can’t escape if I tried. His breath is the very thing that gives me hope and the very thing that terrifies me. When his breath is gone, how will I find mine again?
It goes against everything I grew up believing.
I shouldn’t be nothing without him.
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
I guess I just haven’t arrived yet. Maybe our thirteen month break-up was so painful because I didn’t allow myself to move on.
Or maybe I found that I really can’t live without him.