My entire writing focus since returning from the ‘best-ever-holiday’ has been my book. A few months before my holiday I lost my way for a short time, pondered my ability, questioned my desire, debated my purpose, and left my computer and desk alone to collect dust. It was a dark time indeed.

I stared longingly each night at my shiny new Toshiba super-power, aka Zena, my nickname for this not necessary toy that I ‘had to have’. It was a present from me to me.

I walked around Zena with trepidation, as well as lust. See, I was in need of relief. I attempted a variety of creative exercises to relieve the tension that had built up during this dark time, but nothing worked. Once and a while, I even forced myself to turn it on. Of course, my hope was that the accumulated pressure would dissolve at my touch; my muse would allow me a moment of reconciliation, relieve me, and inspire me to write a few words. But no, he had left me cold.

My dreams went from Technicolor to black and white. I missed the colors, my muse, but mostly, I missed my words. I was unbalanced. With relief nowhere in sight, I took to walking the lonely hallways of my mind, where my words hung on the walls, the gilt frames handing crocked on the lavender colored walls. This became an obsession, revisiting my lonely words, and this desire to write.

I was cold-hearted about this flimsy declaration, and desire I was chasing with reckless abandonment. I asked myself where it had it come from, and why did I give into such an ethereal calling. I had no education, no knowledge, no understanding, no natural gift to lay claim to. I had nothing to justify this folly; I tortured myself with worry over the mental state that too quickly had become physical.

It wasn’t writer’s block, it wasn’t lack of content, and it wasn’t lack of desire that kept me from writing. I had simply come up hard, doing a hundred miles an hour hard, against the cold wall of me. It’s a dark and cold corner of your mind when you’re standing face to face with your own self. There is a certain attraction to this place in my mind though. It is in this place where I face my darkest fears. I hate it, yet love it. I crumble, I falter, and I look into my eyes and say, “So, what gives?”

I wrote for the first time off the coast of Italy. I wrote for five hours. I sat in the coffee bar with my face to the sea. I refused to leave until I had written at least two thousand words that hug together from start to finish. It was shaky at first, but I survived. When I shut down Zena there was one new word document just shy of 3,000 words.

This darkness has passed, or I have battled and won. Honestly, I couldn’t say since the details are a blur now. All I know for certain is that I am writing again, and it’s focused writing, more than I wished. My gratitude is deep.

I continue to fight myself, and this desire. I don’t know where I am going with it, or why I continue with it, especially now that I know the odds of success. It’s humbling to be honest.

I missed my words more that ‘words’ can describe. It is a slow process, trusting and beginning again. My biggest fear was/is ‘what happens to me if I turn around to greet this desire, to welcome it with open arms, but only to see it turn away from me’. **deep sigh**

Life is short. If it feels good (not right, but good) what is the harm, it’s only a passion.

Life is indeed short, much too short, but when you add up the moments of pure pleasure and joy, I found that those particular instances where you mind retraces it’s memories with a lover’s gentle hand, it where risk was involved—those are the most brilliant, singular instances, however short, that take up the biggest portion of a mind. Mine moments of extreme brilliance are rare, but those rare instances are THE moments that take up the substantial real estate. The FEDX package from the Sun Magazine Editor, the email froms the Editor at More Magazine…. Brilliant!

What the hell, life is short, so I might as well give it all I have. Who knows what will happen to me along the way.

I am not afraid of the dark, or being lost in the back roads of Japan, driving in India, or staring down the barrel of M-16s. I came close to panic holding my father’s hand as he lost his battle with cancer. I accepted defeat in marriage. I pleaded with my lover with whom I have never known greater pleasure to let me go because he did not love me as I he.

I am fearless.

I say that I am fearless, and I truly am until standing in the presence of couples holding hands.

You see them everywhere, at the market; the shoe department in Nordstrom, arguing in Home Depot, staring lazily off to the left over a glass of wine during dinner at California Pizza Kitchen while the kids color the children’s menu until one half of the couple reaches across the table and squeezes the other’s hand.

Being witness to couples holding hands, the tender way they touch, or the way he opens the door for her, how she sets his cup of coffee down at Barnes and Noble empties my reserve. In their presence, I quiver, am hollowed, with no armor to stand and face them like a man; their quiet tenderness scares me and sends me inward.

I know the moment because it’s carved with a blunt instrument in my mind, on my soul, and in my heart. If I were a stronger woman, I would seek out celestial guidance, an exorcist, or a Wiccan, to purge me of that moment, and the feelings that settled around me like winter’s first snow on a northern Nebraska farm field when I gave my heart away. But I am not a strong woman, rather I am a weak and prefer rolling around in a puddle of my tears reliving each moment where I was truly content; where the universe slowed for my benefit, for my pleasure.

It’s funny, in a twisted life fucking sucks sort of way, when you are given what you never admitted you wanted, not even to yourself, then without warning, it’s taken away from you, and you are left scratching your head thinking… “What just happened to me?” And ever after that moment you find yourself turning the radio dial to country music stations, and are suddenly buying Dwight Yoakham CD’s. How quite out of character, you are now prone to browsing the Romance section at Barnes and Noble with the pathetic hope of recapturing the moment his lips brushed yours, his body melting into your skin, as if there was ever a question it belonged anywhere but there, burning your heart to his, by reading those torrid words. Or maybe you are simply trying to ease the too heavy to carry burden you are dragging behind. Twisted indeed, I say.

I know the moment when I was truly content with the universe, as well as the moment when I was not, and if I were a stronger woman, I would seek out that Wiccan to ease me of those one-hundred-twenty seconds so there might be peace with in my soul.

Dear Kerri~

Thank you for your kind words about my inner strength, and oh, how I wish that were the case, but sadly, I am not as strong as I appear. I am weaker than I care to admit, but like you and I am strong when there is no option to be otherwise. I am pathetically weak when it comes to those I have feelings for, and will cast my eyes away from the heart of the matter so as not to deal with the crux of the issue.

I believe this to be a common human weakness so I don’t admonish myself for my failings as a mere mortal. When I am looking back over my shoulder, my darker moments are easily picked out from my life’s memories. I’d like to tell you that I grew wiser each time I crossed over it into the abyss but that would be a lie. The emotional heart, or at least mine, does what it wants without paying heed to the realities of the situation. Such is life. We live, we love, we make mistakes, we hurt, we fall, we wallow, and we are start all over again.

I am touched you think of me as strong, possibly like Zena, Warrior woman <insert smile here> but, and it pains to confess this, but I am terribly flawed, weak to a fault, and surprisingly similar to you in many ways.

As for your plea for enlightenment on the life you leave behind and the one ahead of you. I am probably the wrong person to give you counsel, for the reasons noted above. When it comes to matters of the heart, and making the right choices, asking me would be like dousing yourself with honey while standing on an ant hill.

You say the crossroad you are standing before is, 1) to live the next twenty years in regret over a broken marriage or 2) to forget it and move on. I know you loved him, and twenty years is a lot to let go of, still, here is what I can say based on my own experience, there can be no regrets. It was what it was, sure you can spend the next twenty years thinking about the things you might have done better, or tried harder at, and yes, you might have actually pleased him, but then he wouldn’t have been happy because you weren’t your own person, and, and and…

It was twenty years of your life, a part of your life, but it was not all of your life. And I’m sure, when you look back over life you will see moments as I do when I look over mine where you should have or could have… but what’s the point now? There isn’t. It’s in the past, gone and forever cast in stone as what was. The road ahead of you, the one without the baggage and Phillip is waiting for you. While I can’t tell you what to do, all I can suggest is that you don’t waste the next twenty years thinking about how if you made it better for him you might still have him. He is gone, has moved on, and is not coming back.

I have learned one thing about love that I believe to be true over all other life’s truths. It is that love between two people is not always meant to be. It comes to people unexpectedly, and no matter how amazingly passionate, filling and consuming of a person’s heart and soul, it’s highly probable it won’t last—it does sometimes, but not always. There is no reason for a love not lasting. And there no point in searching for the answers to all those ‘why not’ questions because you’ll die broken, and alone, wasting your life looking for reasons. We come together as lovers, and for the time we are together, for however long that time is, twenty years, or an hour, when it’s over—it’s over.

You’re at a crossroads for a reason. Either take the first step and find new meaning to your life, or live in the past writing, and rewriting. If you do that later, you will lose people around you because no one will ever understand. They will yearn for Shari to breathe again, to love and be loved.

Love,

He belonged to another, and therefore was off limits to me. Still, I coveted his touch. To feel his hands upon my body was all I thought about when he stopped by my desk to ask a question. He’d speak and I would pray to Buddha that the right words would magically float from somewhere within, and break the silence that hung between us. Anytime he was within three feet of my body, my mind would flutter as the oxygen in my lungs seeped out without replenishment. He’d thank me, smile with sincerity and then return to his big office and do what CEO’s do. After he’d leave, I grip the edge of my desk holding on with all the strength a woman who only works our three times a week has.

The smell of him as he walked by took me to the clouds. The life in my head became where I preferred to stay, with each visit lasting longer than the previous trip. His presence was debilitating, so much that my work suffered, and before others noticed it, I urgently looked for employment elsewhere. I maintained my neutral position, until he came to me and suggested I accompany him on several business trips.

I felt sick and feverish. Food lost its taste, and my curves returned with pronounced vengeance. My size sixteen jeans hung unflatteringly on my frame. I hadn’t noticed the changes in my appetite, or my body until he suggested I might want to buy a belt.

“Why?” I asked.

He smiled, he even blushed as he pointed out that my jeans continuously fell and I was forever tugging them back up. He asked me if I was feeling well.

“Why?” I asked.

He noticed that I had not eaten since we have arrived D.C., and that I was pale. As he reached to touch the side of my face, my knees buckled beneath me. If not for his right arm wrapping around me and pulling me towards his body, I might have hit the white marble floor in the Four Season Lobby.

The following seconds remain a blur. After that, my memories are brilliant. I remember the hours that passed in his hotel room, the morning after, and the following night. I remember his face when I handed in my resignation. And every day since, I remember each minute we shared five years ago with startling accuracy.