Alone She Stands

Alone she stands there, surrounded by family and friends. The room is filled to the brim with grieving hearts waiting to burst through the seams of the doors to the outside.
Without the one person that had always stood next to her she is alone, even with the family that brushes by her shoulders and whispers their condolences in hopes to relieve some of her pain, her grief, her hurt.
It's not the same.
Still, she stands alone.
I only know what the pictures tell me. The wedding photo of two young lovers wrapped in each others arms, locked in each others gaze. The two sets of hands on a new born baby boy draped in terry cloth blankets, nestled deep in his mothers bosom. The wrinkled hands feeding each other the sweet homemade cake that only a 50th anniversary could provide.
All of this is gone and now she stands alone.
"He hadn't know me since January 23rd," she told me as she sheepishly stole glances at him. "He lost so much weight that I hardly recognize him, but they made him look really good. He looks real good. Don't he?" Her eyes met mine for a brief moment as she quietly walked into another room full of hard-backed wooden chairs.
She sat in the front row, sandwiched between her remaining son and his wife. With their arms around the top of her frame, her quiet sobs ultimately became silent as the pastor began the service.
"From what I was able to learn about Bob, I would say that he was the definition of a truly great man of God. Death for him was not an end, but rather a beginning of a life we here on Earth can only hope for."
Her shudders of pain quickly turned into nods of affirmation as if thinking to herself, "He was a good man. He is with God. I will see him again. I will not stand alone forever."

For when you're old enough.

Dear unborn, unconceived, child of my distant future,

Um, hi. I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Andrea, and...well, I'm going to be your mom someday, but you can call me whatever you want to. God knows I will probably call you plenty of things before the day of your arrival ever comes. I'm pretty partial to calling you Squiggle Monster, but if that doesn't fit I'm sure your dad and I can figure something else out.

So, Squiggle Monster, you've been a long time in the making. I kind of broke a tradition with you. I waited until I was more ready for you than others in my family. Hopefully it was the right decision. I know you won't have that cool young mom that I had, but I promise I will try not to embarrass you too much. I can't speak for your dad though, he is pretty strange sometimes. I mean seriously, he wants to have a Star Wars cake topper for our future wedding cake. He's geek chic to the extreme. But all nerdiness aside, he has wanted to be your dad for a long time.

I guess I'll write more late, perhaps closer to your existence.
Ta ta for now.
Love,
Me

Analyze that.

I laced up my Converse and walked out the door, grocery list in hand.
"Hamburger, mac & cheese, PBR, shampoo. Hamburger, mac & cheese, PBR, shampoo." I couldn't forget the shampoo again.

The rain made the already snow laced ground slushy and awful. I should have picked better shoes. Maybe those rain boots with the peacocks would have been a good investment. Oh well, hindsight is 20-20, right? All precipitation aside, I parked my little red car and headed toward the sliding glass doors into the ridiculously sterile vacuum that was Hyvee.

It was there I saw the man with a thick rope wrapped around his hand, twisting, fraying, tightening around his hand as the object at the other end pulled further and further from the glass doors. My hand could only reach the top of his hard, angular legs. The rest of him was brown and white, soft and like cotton. He turned his head and smiled at me with a toothy grin that melted my heart.

I turned to the old man with the rope and asked why he would bring such a creature out in public. He responded, "This is Henry he's a rare giant purebred South Carolinan Ostrich but, he's defective. Won't produce any eggs that I can eat and he throws a fit every time I try to eat him. So, I don't want him. He's just a waste of space in my barn. I'll sell him to ya for $10. I'll even throw in a saddle for when you want to feel like a queen."

I crumpled the grocery list in my sweaty palm as the rain picked up and threw it in the trash can as I handed the old man my $10 bill. I grabbed the fraying rope and wrapped it around my left hand as threw the saddle up onto Henry's back with my right. And together we headed home, without the hamburger, mac & cheese, PBR, or shampoo.

The beeping of my alarm pulled me awake as I grasped at the tail of my dream, making a desperate, but failing attempt, to hold onto Henry.

The ambiguity of identity

A professor of mine once posed a handful of questions, "If anyone REALLY knew you, would they want to be around and/or with you?" , "How much of your outward self do you make up or pretend, just for the sake of avoiding judgment?" , "Are you brave enough to be vocal about who you REALLY are, quirks and faults included?"

As a woman in my 20s, I take this as a challenge. If your college years and those that immediately follow are all about finding and/or creating yourself, then my goal is to be honest in the process.

So here we go.

Hello, I am Andrea and I am just as lost as you are, but I'm trying to create my definition.
I am a 22 year old college student with a passion for words and all the mystery that follows them.
I am a journalism school drop-out. Sometimes I think it was because I wasn't good enough and other times I think it was because I didn't conform enough.
I have severely disliked my bustline since I was 10. I just want to see my feet again.
I claim I have a distaste for people who try to hard to fit in, but I find that I often fall in that category too.
I don't like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. His language is perverse and obscure. I wish when Ms. Dickinson's house burnt down that her poetry went with it.
I have a fear that I push people away by trying to pull them too close.
I struggle with self-esteem, as most females do. There are days I wake up, where it's a battle just to get out of bed.
I am a bank teller, it pays the bills but I can't wait to get a job I have a passion for.
I talk all the time about wanting to move to the West Coast and survive solely on sunshine and the Pacific Ocean, but the truth is I am petrified to move away from my family.
I sometimes regret moving away from St. Louis. I feel like I am missing so many moments with my family.
I say I am independent and strong, but I rely on a few certain people for more than I like to admit.
When at work, I clean underneath my nails with paperclips.
I always catch myself counting the number of steps it takes to get from point A to point B while on campus.
Sometimes when I'm feeling really down, I go to the pantry and sneak smells from Joseph's peanut butter jar just to feel my heart flutter with panic.
I forgive people almost to a fault but have the hardest time forgiving myself.
I have a bridal book and a list full of wedding ideas hidden in my underwear drawer just in case the occasion should ever arise.
I am a woman that desires to be touched.
I have a daddy complex.
I know my limits but tend to surpass them from time to time.
I am a loving supporter of gay rights.
I am entirely nostalgic.
I look for song lyrics to describe what my vocabulary cannot.
I can get heartburn from anything, including but not limited to water, tomatoes, pickles, and lemon flavoring.
I see nothing wrong with living with someone before you're married, but still I slip a ring on my wedding finger when I go to pick up birth control.
I drink from the milk carton.
I feel like I need photos to document parts of my life for fear I will forget them.
I am a woman.
I am Andrea, I am 22 and my ambiguous identity is endless.

#4

I remember riding in his maroon Mercury Villager when he told me that things were going to be a little different around the house. I picked at my pink fingernail polish with unabashed habit, all while trying to discern what he could possibly mean. When he said "a little different", I had no idea how severely understated that would end up being. "A little different" to me, as a 7 year old, meant my friends would not be able to stay the night all the time anymore. Maybe it even meant that I would have to take more baths or go to bed earlier, which I was okay with, but again, my sentiments were completely and utterly false. I said okay to things being "a little different" around the house, not knowing what consequences it would have, and went on with my 7 year old ways.

I don't remember being talked to about it. I don't even remember him leaving. Maybe I blocked it out, with good reason I suppose. I only remember the things that followed; curling up in bed with my mom in a queen sized waterbed so she wouldn't be alone, crying tears of a rage that only a 7 year old girl with a broken heart could muster, wondering what I had done wrong to make my world shatter into the pieces I could never hold on to.

I remember waking up one Saturday morning, ready to eat Lucky Charms and watch Bewitched with my mom but she looked weak. She looked hurt, angry, alone. She told me he left to move in with a Mel, a new friend of his he had met at the University, and we had an all-girls house now, just the three of us girls. Wouldn't that be great?

I remember talking to that awful woman, Mel, on the phone when I couldn't sleep and I missed him. She always answered the phone. Always. Always told me I didn't need to be upset, and that everything would be okay. Evidently her daddy never left her in the middle of the night to wake up and put together the 1500 piece puzzle of a divorce.

That's the last conversation I remember having with him before things were entirely different at our house, not just "a little different."

#1 for the Funeral Soundtrack

"She's in love with a boy" - Trisha Yearwood

If someone posed a question on musical tastes, I would certainly be one of the first to vehemently deny a love, or a even a liking, for country music. But that does not change the fact that I grew up around it. It was all that my mother listened to; in the car or in the house, it was everywhere.

For me, this song was the epitome of what I intended my adolescent year to resemble. It's funny that at such a young age I already knew that I wanted to be in love with a boy and for my mother to defend me and my heart when my father figure did not approve of the boy that was so dashing in my own mind.

But, it did not necessarily turn out that way.

There was only one boy that I ever dated and remember my mother not being fan of, and that was solely because I decided to hit the pavement and jump on the highway heading north without exactly explaining where it was I was going. I spent a week with my "grandparents", visited the Mall of America, and ruined my parents anniversary. And I lied, a lot, because I wanted so badly to fall in love.

But I didn't.

And my mother certainly did not defend my so-called "love" for this boy to my dad. They sided with each other. I'm pretty sure that's not how Trisha Yearwood wrote the song.