stroking out (no longer in the dark)

because of you
i augmented my
lifestyle to half light
and then no light at all
afraid to make a move now
or you would find me again,
stop me, dead in my tracks,
paralyzing my movements,
wickedly twisting my words.

i am living,
and yet not,
along the post-traumatic
jaded, off-avenue side streets,
afraid of my own shadow
petrified i'll be chosen
for a repeat performance,
a victim of the statistics,
unable to say my name.

in defiance to you
i fight to regain strength
the ability to face sunlight
with an upturned face,
running as the day streams,
screaming through the locks,
unleashing every dawn,
having rested in the dark,
no more night swimming.

this was originally written in 2002 when I quite literally had a stroke, which quite understandably scared the living piss out of me--and my kids--and the first summer, maybe the whole first year afterward--perhaps longer--I may have had a little PTSDishness about the whole affair, and some guilt and shame for SCARING MY KIDS, and i tiptoed around, not wanting to tempt the gods, not wanting to overdo it, thinking it would repeat itself if i didn't behave myself.

turns out--knock on my wooden head, history doesn't always have to repeat itself, or repeat itself in the way one might imagine. years later, having gone down into my basement to look for a hummingbird feeder, i knocked over a box, and a great deal of papers and notebooks and journals came tumbling out, spanning YEARS!! 

this was the basement me. i have plenty of me upstairs, and so to see so much of me buried in the basement really surprised me. i thought all the papers and notebooks and angsty journals were already upstairs lined on a shelf, chronologically. (okay, they are now ... i am nothing with out my OCD)

years later, coming across this particular piece, with zero edits, i realize it's not about clouds at all -- wait, that's Joni Mitchell ... it's not about my stroke at all! 

it's about living out loud in the now, and about how--when we finally have the time to sit with our "selves" we realize how long we'd been silencing that same "self" all along ... or we've just been waiting until it really was time to scream and run as the day streams and pick up all the old notebooks that just spilled out of a box.

eventually have to circle back and find the hummingbird feeder ...