11

Feb

Broken.

I needed to have my heart broken in order to feel alive.  I needed to have my heart broken in order to understand my capacity for love.  I needed to be devastated, destroyed, pushed beyond the brink of what I thought I was capable of, beyond all reason, beyond all hope, to know with certainty that hope was the only thing worth holding on to.

I needed to lose everything – my pride, my love, my mind, every inch of earth upon which I stood to understand that I would do anything – claw and fight and scrape – to rebuild what I had lost into something different, something stronger, something better.

I didn’t want any of this.  Any of it.  I tried desperately to hold on even while the center was caving in all around me.  Even while I could feel the universe laughing in my face at how futile it was to try to hold on, like clinging to bits of string while the great downy quilt was breaking apart into piles of feathers, blowing in the wind into nothing.

There’s a hole inside me now.  It used to be filled up with all the things I thought I knew.  Now it’s just a great cavernous hole.  Nothing will fill it.  I write and I play scenes and I work and I dream while I’m awake and it all helps, but nothing, nothing fills it.  It’s an ever-present ache.  It drives me, it fuels me with fire, it burns my insides.  It hurts, but in a strange way I need it.  It reminds me that I can’t stop, that I can’t go back.  It reminds me of who I am.

If you could see me now, what would you think of me?  Would I scare you?  Would you be proud of me?  Sometimes in my dreams we’re laughing.  We’re warm and safe.  And sometimes you’re in pain and you’re afraid.  I reach out for you but you dissolve and disappear into nothing.  Sometimes I wake up screaming.

I didn’t want any of this.  I often wish that it hadn’t happened.  That I didn’t know what I know.  That life hadn’t slapped me across the face with these incredible, unthinkable truths.

I didn’t want this.  But the sweet irony is that I needed it.  I needed it to forge me and to shape me and to understand just what the hell it is I’m made of.  I am dark and sharp-edged and tough, yet at the same time as fragile as a porcelain doll, one fall away from splintering into shards of glass.  I don’t welcome the break.  But I know now it’s inevitable.  And when it happens I will build myself back up.  Each time a little stronger, but each time a little less.

God, I miss you.  I miss you so much that I can’t think about it too much or breathing becomes impossible. I would give anything to wrap my arms around you and tell you that.  But I can’t.  So I wrap my arms around myself instead and I tell myself that I’m enough.  That I will make it through this.  That the hard fought truths that now reside in the base of my being are truths that you already knew.  That you always knew.  Truths that you wanted to teach me but that I had to learn for myself through fire, through pain, through this incredible longing and ache that will never, ever go away.

I needed to be broken in order to understand the depths of my heart.  I needed to lose everything in order to know how much more I still stand to gain.  I needed to have my faith shaken to the core in order to understand how powerful it is to say, “I believe.”  I needed to have my heart shattered in order to feel alive.  I needed it.  But that doesn’t mean that I like it.

12 years ago Short URL 7 Comments

Love/Me

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11

Sep

Eleven.

Today, I have a familiar craving for rocky road ice cream.  The same craving I have had every year, on this day, for the last eleven years.  On September 11, 2001 – and the days following – I ate a lot of it.  So did my roommate, Rachel.  We were college students, just beginning our junior year at the University of Southern California, when the planes hit the towers.  We were in shock, depressed, hopeless, and we couldn’t tear ourselves away from the news.  So other than attending the occasional class (which, in the days following 9/11, were really more like group therapy sessions than anything academic), we holed up in our apartment and ate ice cream.

I’m hard-pressed to remember a lot of specifics from that stretch of time 11 years ago.  I remember on the morning of 9/11, I called in sick to my PR internship on the 25th floor of a tower on L.A.’s Miracle Mile – only to find out they sent everyone home anyway for fear that Los Angeles would soon be under attack.  I remember Rachel waking me up, crying, telling me to turn on the news and not to leave the house.  I remember, dizzy with a head cold, turning on the T.V. and thinking I was dreaming.  I remember calling our best friend, Kate, who was on a study abroad program in Australia and desperate to come home.  I remember sleepwalking through my classes, and getting into a fight with my theater professor because I couldn’t bring myself to read plays that I was supposed to.  I remember lighting candles, and buying an American flag from a vendor on a freeway off ramp and putting it on my car.  I remember attending a vigil in front of City Hall in downtown Los Angeles among thousands of other people who were just like us:  helpless, confused, struggling to come to terms with what had happened, but desperate to connect and to find a sense of community in our grief.

My story isn’t like a lot of the stories you hear about September 11th.  It’s not a story of survival or a story of incredible loss.  In a lot of ways, it’s pretty unremarkable.  When 9/11 happened, I was just a girl in the process of becoming a woman, when the world got turned upside down.

In the years since that terrible day, there have been many defining moments that have carved our young millennium and have shaped and shaken my adult life:  the Iraq war; Hurricane Katrina; the global financial meltdown and the Great Recession; the explosion of social media; the Arab Spring; the election of Barack Obama.

But before all of these things, there was 9/11.  An event, that, for all of its horror, also left upon me an indelible impression of the magic that can happen when good comes out of bad, when hope comes out of tragedy.  In the days that followed 9/11, I will never, ever forget the overwhelming sense of community, the sense of national pride, the compassion, the kindness I experienced from complete strangers.  I haven’t seen anything like it before or since in my lifetime, and I fear I never will again.

How is it that we end up here – eleven short years later – so terribly polarized, so contentious, so bitter and full of hate, so unwilling to empathize with each other and unwilling to work together and compromise to solve the problems that our nation faces?  How quickly we forget that we were once all in this together.

Today, as we mark another anniversary of the terrible tragedy of 9/11, I hope, I pray, that we are also reminded of this simple truth:  that life is fragile, that it’s beautiful, and that our worlds can be turned upside down in an instant.  Why not spend the time we have left being a little bit kinder to one another?

And eating plenty of ice cream.

Until next time, friends.

14 years ago Short URL 2 Comments

Love/Me/Opinion/Politics

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18

May

Love.

‘Now I know I’ve got a heart, cause it’s breaking.’

-The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz

This morning, James and I said goodbye to a beloved member of our family.  Not a flesh and blood human being, but a furry four -legged friend named Leo.  To those who’ve never loved a dog, I think the sorrow we’re experiencing might seem absurd.  ‘He’s just a dog.  What’s the big deal?’

I get it.  As I grow older, I’m confronted more and more with my own mortality, as well as the mortality of those I love.  In the last couple years alone, it has been striking how many dear friends of mine have lost parents and family members.  Loss has been all around me and yet, I’ve remained, luckily, guiltily, unscathed.  When so many bad things are happening to people that I love, who am I to wail about the loss of a pet?

Well. . . let me try to explain.  I grew up around dogs.  From the time I was a toddler, we always had dogs in the house.  I’ve loved every one of them and felt genuine anguish at their passing – whether the culprit was old age or diabetes or a passing motorist.

Without diminishing any of the love I held for my childhood pets, Leo was different.  He was the first dog I, we, ‘owned’ as an adult.  Leo came into our lives by chance, or more likely, fate.  After 2 plus years of dating, James and I took the plunge and moved in together.  We were only a few weeks into our new living arrangement, and it was still, shall we say, a bit tenuous?

We knew we wanted to get a dog, and were contemplating the idea of adopting a rescue Terrier we had just met the previous day.  Enter Leo.  While on our way to Home Depot to shop for a new air conditioner, we pulled off an exit off of the 5 fwy, just as Leo was running up the on ramp of the same exit on to the freeway.

He was a scared stray mutt a hair’s breadth away from being run over by high-speed traffic in front of our eyes.  We tried to grab him, he tried to bite, and then by some miracle, James opened the door to his truck and Leo jumped inside.  We now had a freaked-out, panting dog with eyes glazed over in our car, and no idea what to do next.

We called friends and after getting advice from various animal lovers, elected to take him to East Valley animal shelter.  He had no collar, and upon inspection, no microchip.  He was filthy, abandoned and clearly had been abused.  At 8 years old (the age the shelter presumed he was at the time) and labeled a Chow mix, there was almost zero chance he’d be adopted from a high kill shelter like East Valley.  The shelter gave him even less of a chance when after the 4 day waiting period for the owner to come forward was over, they put him on what’s the called ‘the red list,’ meaning the dog could be euthanized at any time.

James and I were at a crossroads.  We knew we wanted a dog, but we knew nothing about this guy.  We wanted to get a puppy or a younger dog, not an 8 year old.  We didn’t know anything about his history, whether he was aggressive, or whether he had any personality whatsoever.  At our first meeting, he was understandably shell-shocked.  When the shock wore off, what kind of dog could we expect to find?

But we also knew that we couldn’t rescue a dog from near certain death on the freeway, only to have him be euthanized in a shelter.  We debated, we argued, we worried, but in the end we decided to take him home and give it a shot.  We could say that we chose him, but in the end, when he jumped into our car that day, wasn’t he choosing us?

Just over four years later, taking that stray mutt home was one of the best decisions we could have made.  An amber haired fox, we named him Leo because his mane resembled that of a lion, and after he grew out of his initial shyness (he’d been hit, and would cower when we go to pet him and cringed when we touched his ears), he developed a feisty personality to match.

Over the last 4 years, he’s been our constant travel companion, and has road-tripped with us to Lake Tahoe, Palm Springs, Monterey, San Diego, and many points in between, often accompanying us to major events like weddings (o.k. he stayed in the hotel room), including our own wedding last October.

Having Leo in our lives has made us more tolerant, more compassionate, and more patient.  As the 3rd member of our little family, he has improved and strengthened James’ and my relationship, and I daresay, his wandering into our lives by way of a freeway exit ramp ended up making us better people too.  What some people might say is ‘just a dog’ has opened up my heart to a kind of love I’ve never experienced.  Alright – I’m not a parent- and know I can’t and won’t compare the two, but this sweet little guy is at this point in my life, the closest thing I’ve known to a child.

That kind of love is also why, over the last six months, James and I witnessed Leo’s physical decline with an inordinate amount of patience, denial, hope, and ultimately, acceptance.  He went blind, and whittled away to an almost skeleton-like frame.  He developed severe arthritis in his hind legs.  He had breathing trouble, and he needed teeth pulled.

An x-ray last December revealed a growth in his nasal cavity – likely a tumor, but the procedure involved to diagnose that with certainty was both expensive and (more importantly), too aggressive for a dog of his age.  We went through a few vets (who either told us there was nothing they could do, or seemed to be only in it for the money), before we finally found, through the kind referral of one of James’ friends, a sweet man named Dr. Prabhakar at Panorama Pet Hospital in Panorama City.  He told it to us straight – it was likely cancer, and that he was older than we thought, probably about 14 years old at this point.  He advised us that any medical procedure at his age would be too hard on him and wouldn’t be successful anyway.  Better to keep him comfortable and take it day by day and we’d know when the time came.

Which brings us to today.  After fighting, denying, trying everything we could think of, James and I finally arrived at the only decision we could make.  We weren’t ready – we’d never be ready – but Leo was ready.  He told me so two nights ago with a plaintive bark (he never, ever barks) when he struggled and failed to stand up on his own.  A bark that said, ‘help me.’  Coupled with his rapid weight loss and his inability to keep any food down for days on end, we knew that the time we had been dreading had arrived.

If you’re not a dog lover, I don’t expect you to understand what we’re feeling right now.  And that’s o.k.  But I can tell you this:  in the short four years that he went from being an abandoned, scared mutt on the freeway to the love of our lives, Leo opened up our hearts and our minds.  Creatively, he’s the inspiration behind our production company, Punk Monkey (one of his many nicknames), the umbrella under which we’re launching our one-act noir play festival P L.A.Y Noir this summer.

In the end, James and I are different (and better) people because this sweet little red-haired dog wandered into our lives.  Today, we grieve his loss and celebrate his memory.  Rest in peace, Leo Bear.

Until next time, friends.

14 years ago Short URL 21 Comments

Love/Me

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