Into the swim of things

I got back in the pool today!

First time since my surgery.

Second time since my prior surgery.

Yeah.

It’s been a minute.

I was thinking to myself, as I checked into the facility, that had I known how many times I would be out due to surgery, I wouldn’t have bought the year pass.

Sigh.

Oh well.

When I look back over the year, I got the membership last year at the end of January, so basically a year ago, I did have a good run to begin with.

Then I got hit with the appendicitis a few weeks into the membership in February.

That knocked me out for a while.

I got back into the pool about three, four weeks after the surgery.

Then I had the brachioplasty at the end of July and well, frankly, that one still hurts.

Not as bad, no not as bad at all.

But my arms were so damn tender and achy, for quite some time after. I literally could not lift my hands over my head for months, that I didn’t get back into the pool until months and months after that procedure.

And when I did, I barely managed 400 yards.

Half of that was kicking while holding a kickboard.

Then I was back getting surgery at the end of October.

That one little time I swam 400 yards was it for me.

Partially as I really wanted to stay COVID safe and so stopped prior to the next surgery.

But mostly because I was defending my PhD dissertation on October 15th and I had to bust ass on getting my stuff complete and preparing for the defense.

Then I had to get ready for the next surgery.

That surgery was done on October 26th.

Which seems like it was so long ago, but in reality, was just three months ago now.

I have been impatient at times with myself and wanted the recovery to go faster.

I am used to being strong and connected and embodied and not being able to move fast, well fuck, I could barely hobble around for weeks, it took a lot out of me. So much. Hell, I couldn’t even stand up straight for weeks.

And because it’s been a slow recovery I haven’t addressed a lot of things that I would like to have dealt with by now.

Like.

I still have things stacked up in my kitchen–boxes of research and my Christmas tree–that I have not put into storage yet because I can’t quite lift heavy things yet.

But.

I will soon.

I can feel it.

And despite being cleared for exercise a few weeks back, I just didn’t feel that comfortable with the idea of getting back into the pool.

Sometimes just taking a shower can zap the energy right out of me.

But something whispered to me last night, “go swim tomorrow,” and I did!

I got my swim bag out of the closet and loaded up my toiletry bag with all the things and checked to make sure I still had a working swim cap and goggles and I got my flip flops and queued everything up to walk out the door in the morning.

I didn’t even sleep in!

I can on Saturdays, but I didn’t.

I was up at 7:30a.m., without an alarm! I made my bed, did my routine, pulled on swim suit, put my binder over the top of it, and put on sweats.

I was out the door by 8a.m. and in the pool literally twenty minutes later.

And it hurt.

I won’t lie.

And.

It felt so damn good.

I mean.

I am tired now.

Like exhausted, swimming makes me really tired.

But it was also so lovely to be back in the water.

I thought that I was not going to be able to do much, the pain was pretty quick, but I was like, just swim a length and do a flip turn and if the flip turn fucks you up too much, get out.

I was pretty proud of myself for just getting in the damn pool in the first place.

And!

The flip turn did not fuck me up.

I was able to do it.

Yeah, again, there was some pain, but tolerable.

I knew I wasn’t going to push myself, but my arms felt pretty damn good and I felt like I could keep going so I did a bit more.

Not a crazy amount.

I mean, I swam 600 yards, that was it.

But it was luscious.

The water felt so good and I was happy to be back in my happy place.

I am not a super talented swimmer, but I am a decent swimmer, and just moving through the water with ease, albeit it slow ease, felt so damn good.

So I told myself, “good job kiddo,” and got out of the lane after my 600 yards and hit the showers.

I was happy to take it slow in the shower and slow getting dressed and just go gently.

Like really gently.

My body is still healing.

And.

It will continue to change for a bit yet, full recovery is estimated at 8-12 months.

I’m at 3 months.

I’ve still got a ways to go.

But, I’ll be back in the pool soon.

Tomorrow, as a matter of fact.

But that will be it for a few days.

Prior to all my surgeries I was swimming four to five days a week.

I’m going to start out with two days and see how it goes.

Soft and gentle.

Easy does it.

And it was nice to also be at the club, as it’s close to the Ferry Building, which had a farmer’s market today.

I bought myself some flowers and some late, I mean way late, end of season persimmons, and had a nice walk through the market, noticing all the things that are changing and the early signs of spring foods–radishes and lettuces and budding pussy willow branches.

I love a farmer’s market.

I came home afterward, had a lovely breakfast, with some of those persimmons, drank my latte and did a ton of writing.

I went grocery shopping.

I went to Dolores Park and hit up a friends birthday party.

And I walked 12,000+ steps today.

I am done in.

Like I said.

I wasn’t going to even write this blog, but something compelled me to.

Whatever it was, I have to say, it’s nice to be back here again too, doing the writing, dumping out the days’ contents onto the page and letting it go off into the ether.

My arms are sore.

Both from the swimming and from the writing.

But it is a good sore, a welcome sore, and let me tell you, I will be sleeping like a baby tonight.

Swimming through the stars, sliding through the water of the night into the morning.

When I will wake up and do it all over again.

Sweet dreams.

My friends.

Sweet dreams.

I Would Follow You

To Wisconsin.

He said, underneath the heat lamp at the outdoor cafe.

On our first date.

There have now been four dates.

Tomorrow will be number five.

And that is all you need to know about him.

I would like to spill all the words and looks and the synchronicities and the eyes, oh, the eyes.

But.

I am not going to.

I spill so much of my heart on these pages.

“You wear your heart on your sleeve,” an old lover once told me, “I could never write about the things you do, share the things you do, it’s what makes you a good writer.”

I don’t know about that necessarily.

I think a good writer is just one that writes.

I still write every day.

In the mornings.

Three to four pages, sometimes just one or two, but I always write.

I don’t show up here as often, sometimes I think it might be time to hang up the blog, but I just keep holding onto it.

There is something here still for me.
I am not sure that there is anything here for you though.

I just keep letting you go.

I don’t know who shows up to read these ramblings any more.

I don’t know who you are.

I do know that you still read the words.

Sometimes you search me out.

Sometimes you find me on some old social media post I thought I had scrubbed away.

Sometimes you find me with esoteric search engine terms.

You keep finding me.

And I keep writing for ghosts.

This time.

This time though, I am writing for me.

About a month ago I sat down in front of my computer with too much eye make up on and a bushel of glitter and my hair wild and I did my dissertation presentation for a friend who is a film maker.

It was not as good as when I defended my dissertation and was awarded my PhD, that feeling of being so in the moment and not even realizing the camera was on was not with me when I did it for my friend.

But.

He got the gist of it and he liked it and he said, yeah, we can make this into a film.

It had been suggested to me by one of my former supervisor’s that I make the dissertation into something, a one woman show, a documentary, a film.

He said I had it, that he could watch me present the work all over again, would pay for it and that it was better than a lot of what he’s seen on Netflix.

I mean.

Fuck.

What a great compliment.

And also.

Fuck.

Scary and wonderful and am I really going to do this?

I mean.

I just finished my PhD.

I have a full time therapy practice.

Shouldn’t I just be taking long walks on my days off?

Just looking at the sky and the city and breathing without the pressure of a writing project on my shoulders.

Just walking around and watching the birds wheel in the sky.

Just listening to music on my Airpods and smiling that I don’t have to go anywhere, don’t have a deadline, don’t have to do another draft or edit or more research.

I can put away the research.

I have shelved the books.

I can let it go.

Or can I?

There is something here.

There is a story and I do think there is a movie and so does my friend.

When I started writing my blog, twelve years ago now, I would sometimes get a line of words in my head or a phrase and I would know, that’s my blog.

That’s the line.

That’s my way in.

I don’t actually need anything more than that.

Just the line.

What follows after that line I never know.

I just have a feeling for what has to be written in the next moment, the next breath, the next beat of time.

And I kept thinking about how my friend sent me the info about how to write a screen play and how it should be a certain kind of way and I was like, well, damn, I don’t have the “ending” you’re supposed to have.

But who ever does have the ending that they’re supposed to have?

What if it wasn’t bad timing lover, friend, soul mate, what if it was just that we weren’t meant to be, not really, not ever and we stole something, took away light from the moon and carved out a tiny moment in the soul of the world and hid our love.

But it couldn’t stay.

We weren’t meant to be together.

We never were.

Because we aren’t.

So I let it go again.

Let you go again and choose something else, I look up at the stars, the moon be damned, and find a new way forward.

It is dark and it is new and I don’t know where it’s going.

But when I put my hand on his back last night I thought I might just find a new way through.

And I might just have an ending to my story that has hope.

It may not be the fairy tale ending.

I have had my heart broken too many times by the fairy tale.

It will be a different story.

A new story.

And yes.

It will be a love story.

My love story, though.

My way through.

My way out.

When I chose to walk out the door to my apartment and take a right and not a left and meet him at the corner of the street and take a deep breath and say.

“Hi, it’s nice to meet you.”

And really, really mean it.

It really has been so nice to meet you.

I don’t know if we’ll ever go to Wisconsin.

But that you would follow me there.

Well.

That is one hell of a way to start something.

Something that begins with hope.

When Jody Sings

I remember dancing to this song from Masters of Reality in a red and blue gingham check skirt that I had made from one of my mother’s old house dresses.

I was wearing a navy blue leotard body suit with long arms and had a black sweater or cardigan tied around my waist.

I remember the sun shone through the windows of my bedroom on Franklin Street in Madison.

The light dappled through the trees and I was wearing blue stained glass earrings in the shape of elongated tear drops.

My boyfriend of two years, at the time, had hung them in the window from the screen so they caught the light and put me in front of the window with his hands over my eyes.

It was likely the best gift he ever gave me.

I felt beautiful wearing those earrings with my hair down and long and curling.

I was twenty one.

He had introduced me to a lot of music that I had no clue about.

I also introduced him to a lot of music he had no clue of–jazz and blues mostly and some classical.

The music I had grown up with, my step-father’s much played genres.

My boyfriend at the time, the blue stained glass earrings boyfriend, turned me onto what I would now consider classic alternative music.

Jody Sings is from an album called Sunrise on the Surfer Bus by Masters of Reality.

I had never heard anything quite like it and I loved the album.

He also introduced me to Soul Coughing, Jeff Buckley, Beck, Cake, Morphine, Annie DiFranco, Tori Amos–all of whom we saw in various concerts.

To this day I get some kind of sneaky cred for having seen Jeff Buckley live in concert on his Grace album tour.

I will never forget his rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” it blew my soul open.

I broke down into tears when I heard of Buckley’s death weeks after he had passed.

He introduced me to Phish as well, not that I ever became of big fan of them, and a lot of heavy metal, Pantera, Sepultera, and the like, as well as Primus, who I wouldn’t call metal, but I was fucking blown away by when I saw them in concert.

I don’t know why this week I thought of Master’s of Reality, it just popped into my head.

Listening now, fyi.

And I suddenly remember that girl dancing barefoot on the warm summer sun wood floors in my bedroom.

I didn’t know that my boyfriend was in the doorway watching me dance.

I spun around with my skirt flaring out and caught him staring at me in the doorway.

The look of love in his green eyes still haunts me if I think about it too long.

He loved me, more than I think he even understood, especially after I broke up with him five years into the relationship.

He never really knew me though.

I was nascent.

I was incandescent in my beauty and I never knew it either.

And as the relationship went on, painfully, unhappily, co-dependently on years after I should have left him, I gained weight and gained weight and suffered deeper and deeper depressions.

I had no idea I was depressed.

That 21 year old girl had no idea how dark life was going to get.

My boyfriend cheated on me, twice.

He got caught growing marijuana in our house.

We both wound up with felony charges.

Mine got dropped.

He went on probation.

He went bonkers when he had to stop smoking pot.

He started drinking really heavily.

I realized I was in love with another man.

Who, now I can see, oh can I see, quite clearly, was unavailable and the love was always going to be unrequited (though he told me once quite drunk how much he was in love with me), which was my way of staying safe.

The love of the unavailable man.

My music, blue stained glass earring boyfriend, lost it when I broke up with him.

Lost it.

Hit me.

Spit on me.

I ran off into the night.

One very cold January, Wisconsin night, dark as sin, snow piled so high, no cars driving down East Washington at that late hour.

I ran out of the house in my flannel nightgown and made a phone call to the police from the payphone in front of the grocery store a block away.

I was terrified.

It was a long, scary night, and a story for another night of blogging.

He stalked me for a few years.

I got a restraining order.

He broke it and because he was on probation for growing pot he went to prison.

He’s married now.

Two kids, wife–former classmate of mine in high school, my how the world is small.

House in Sun Prairie, I looked him up a few times years ago.

I don’t wish him harm, he was in a terrifying place and lost his mind.

I grew.

And I also stopped being available to available men.

There are many other reasons why.

I needn’t list them to underscore how the things I did to protect myself came back to haunt me later.

Oh siren song of unavailable men.

It’s been one year today, one year since I saw you last, my love.

My former lover.

And things.

Well.

They are a changing.

New therapist.

New year.

New PhD.

New dating attitudes.

New healing.

I’ve had three dates with three separate men this past week.

I have a second date with one of them tomorrow.

I don’t know where any of it’s going to go, but I do know, that I am moving on.

So when I hear this album, it’s still playing, but we’re almost to the end.

It’s only 45 minutes long.

I can still be that beautiful barefoot girl with the long hair in the long skirt dancing on the warm wood floor, my hips swaying, my arms in the air, ecstacy.

I’m 28 years older.

28 years wiser.

I have been to hell and back.

I have put myself there.

I have rescued myself.

I have had so much help.

I will never repay it no matter how much service I do.

I feel like I am breathing again.

And the grief that once choked me has finally lessened it’s grip.

Maybe it was the warm green eyes of the man on the date last night who said, “I would follow you to Wisconsin,” maybe it’s just God, maybe it’s the music.

Maybe it’s love.

The love I have chosen for myself and the realization that I can hold space for that beautiful girl because I finally belive.

Really believe.

That I am a beautiful woman.

Worthy of love.

And.

Worthy of an available man.

Jody Sings

Lucky one
I am too
Lucky three
The one for me
One, two, three
I’m on my knees
Jody sings
I get high
When she rings
Clouds roll by
Jody sings
I get high
When she rings
Clouds roll by yeah
Lucky one
I am too, yes I am
Lucky three
The one for me
One, two, three
I’m on my knees
Yeah, yeah, yeah
On my knees
On my knees
On my knees
On my knees
Jody sings
I get high
When she rings
Clouds roll by
Jody sings
I get high
When she rings
Clouds roll by
Yeah

When Jody Sings, Masters of Reality, 1992