Braids (aka 8 Points.)

1.

I was born in the south, and it’s not like you’d know it from just talking to me or even looking at me.  My northern friends would tell me I don’t have the accent and move on, and my southern friends either say Florida isn’t part of the south or I’ve lived too far in the north to be anything but a Yankee.

I remember sitting in the back of an old pickup truck though, with bare feet and shorts with grass stains between my toes and the feeling of wind through hair.

I tried to remember what that felt like sitting inside the noisy room full of people, including my own two children bouncing on the seats next to me with everything we own sitting in a car that overheats.

What it feels like to not care about what it feels like to worry all the time, about the silliest little things, and yet feel so damn apathetic about begging for something that means we don’t have to sleep in a car tonight.

I smile for a moment, almost remembering what waking up determined to climb that magnolia tree in the morning felt like the world’s largest problem.

2.

Sometimes I think that I think entirely too much. That if I could just reach up, and unplug my brain from itself that there might be a single moment of peace and quiet. I’ve found sometimes that music can help, it’s my raft in the ocean of maybe.

Hundred Water’s “Show me Love”, is one of those songs.

Don’t let me think weakly
though I know that I can break
Keep me away from apathy
while I am still awake
And don’t let me think too long
of the one I’m bound to face

But I never know who it is I’m terrified to face. Maybe they didn’t either.

3.

I can’t explain why it’s easy to talk to people that other people would be terrified of speaking to – like the large bikers with big beards that are closer to a giant bear than men in suits with serpent tongues. I’ve never understood why being in a room full of strangers still makes my hands shake, but I can take control in a situation where everyone else is terrified.

My therapist once told me that I likely just trigger through things that are subconscious at this part, which makes trying to find any kind of solution about impossible as standing in the middle of monsoon singing about rain puddles.

I think maybe I’m less terrified of life, and more of living.

4.

Don’t let me show cruelty
though I may make mistakes
don’t let me show ugliness
though I know I can hate
and don’t let me show evil
though it might be all I take

5.

Indians used to believe that, according to popular rumor anyways, photographs would steal their souls. This was far before the invention of the cellphone and I’m beginning to wonder if they had it right all along. That with the invention of one thing far more sprang forth, and as I’m clutching the tiniest electronic that is my only real connection of something that belongs to me, that connects me to the outside world as the strangers around me argue a future I have no say in.

The funny part is, it’s supposed to be my future.

Most homeless shelters have curfews regardless of excuses like work or traffic jams coming home from work. It’s almost ironic to think about how full circle life is, and as much help as they gave me I still get panic attacks thinking about it. Words like ‘ungrateful’ become tossed about carelessly like tiny teeth with trackers aimed for the softest part of your guilt.

I’m sitting in a room, my children in daycare, and these adults are telling me what they think is best. The voice I had is muted, and my only answer is submission.

I never was good with authority. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.

6.

I sometimes think of anxiety like a giant ball of rubber bands. I know it’s a bit cliché, but it’s one of those mental images that have stuck with me over the years. It’s not like a shark attack, there’s no dark cloud that hovers, and it’s simply something that finds too much pressure from any little thing and snaps.

Like Floridian sun, standing in the fields of pea’s still on the plant at the babysitters when I was a child.

Snap, snap, snap. Pluck ‘em off, snap off the ends, toss them in the pot to cook.

And even when were cooked well, they snapped when you bit into them. Snap Peas.  Grown with sunshine, and another’s labor.

I never understood why that same farm had so many cute little bunnies in cages.

7.

Show me love
Show me love
Show me love

Lyrics sometimes are like a praying mantra to me, they help me breathe. I think sometimes it’s the beat that speaks to me, and other times it’s like someone’s taken that voice that I can’t use and tossed it into the sky and let it rain down in the perfect combination of syllables and pronunciations that I feel so at home tucked into it. Maybe it’s human, something bigger than me, that connection to the universe.

8.

I had anxiety before the first time I realized I had nowhere to go.

At twenty two I had two children under the age of three, a 1999 Oldsmobile 88 (which always confused those I was talking to, when it came to the model and year) that had a habit of overheating thanks to an old accident after the nasty snowfalls. I guess if I had to go homeless anywhere I was in the best state for it. The best part was the circumstances that had landed me there.

I was in a relationship, the father of my children (which was established by these great agencies through a series of large, very personal, very important questions – regardless of what their signed birth certificates said). I had a job, we had an apartment, two cars. One winter, it’s funny how much can change. My son got sick, we lost one car in the ice and his father sliding it into a jeep. We almost lost the second one to bald tires, a cracked windshield and a pissed off police officer just doing his job. Within a series of two or three months, we realized we had lost the apartment too. My work schedule didn’t wiggle in room for a seven month old child being hospitalized for two months with bone infections, and his couldn’t cover the cost of everything that we’d already fallen behind on.

But it didn’t matter, to every place I had to fill out paperwork I was just another leech on the system. Besieged by tired judgmental sighs and paperwork that never ceased my excuses were just that. I began to learn then, the biggest lesson in it all. Nobody cares about excuses. They don’t want to hear the story, because regardless of the why you were still there. There was really only one thing to do at that point.

9.

It took me a long time to accept that I had no rational reason for being terrified and to stop trying to use excuses for it. I know that’s not a philosophy for everyone, but I was raised in a generation where you had to suck it up buttercup and keep moving along. Those rubber bands could be used as quick snaps if the panic got too bad, or sometimes a friendly voice. I couldn’t tell the world I was simply to terrified to get out and back into it, could I? The best part was how much confidence I seem to have to people, and it disturbs me to think that the rabbit friends I have aren’t so different. There’s a kind of toughness you build up though, when you go through that experience. I was homeless a total of almost two times, though in the sense of a shelter over having to sleep in a car. It was something, for certain, of a learning lesson in humility and pride.

The fear never really goes away. Some days it’s difficult to remind my heart the second I open my eyes that there’s nothing rational to be terrified about. Sometimes sitting in a room full of people I’d just laughed with the day before aren’t going to turn around and be whatever terrifying thing my primal brain has convinced itself of without my knowledge or permission. Every day, like the day before, is a different kind of battle and the minute you let its own you is the moment you lose that war.