I believe in love. Many winters ago I remember seeing geese huddled beneath a neighbor’s porch during a snow storm.  Thirty of them pressed so close against the bricks of the foundation. The snow fell in huge flakes, creating a wall that connected the posts.  The geese didn’t make much noise but from my back porch I could look down and see them beneath the adjacent town house, huddled together from the frosty arctic winds.  They all loved each other, they all had the instinct to survive the storm.

The frosty arctic winds are beginning to blow in Flagstaff.

I began to read  Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed the other day as recommended by a friend.  It is a compilation of letters to Sugar, from an internet blog. I love Dear Abby, the idea of Dear Abby, even if sometimes I think her advice is not quite making it.  This is different, much much different.  This woman has seen so much in her life, and she does the only thing that I have ever been able to do… give advice based upon personal experience.  I am aware that my advice is not at the same caliber as this amazing woman… I admit I will aspire to listen as she does, dwell as she does and see the world from as many points of view as it seems she does.

My favorite book of all time is called The Well of Loneliness. It was written by Radclyffe Hall. And once again I return to my belief in love.

To cry over a book is to live and inhabit an author’s world.

I read The Bell Jar, and I cried and I have Sylvia Plath, more than I can bare.  I can’t open the diary. At first I thought I could. I thought I could muster up an entire thesis about my healing and Sylvia’s healing.  I would write this amazing manifesto about her breakdowns compared to my breakdowns and obsessions of the lack of self preservation vs more of those obsessions.  To read The Bell Jar as a woman now, is mind blowing.  I began the states of depression that Sylvia discusses when I was thirteen.  What if I had read this book then?  I read her poetry but somehow… never this one amazing novel, until two months ago.  I saw that I shared the frustration of how our body’s innate desire to survive can cause us to catch our balance when we could have otherwise fallen easily to our deaths.  Sylvia described this as if I had written it (but I never did describe it in such the way she did on paper, perhaps I may have captured it that clearly in inner monologues).  Damn it! Oh, the frustration that caused us both!  And in time she left the earth of her own choice, something I have an absolute resolve never to do… all life is precious.

I am pro-choice but adopt this mantra since it means the spiders in the bath get another chance.  I get another chance.

I may someday feel like picking up the diary and I may or may not want to write a thesis someday about Plath’s plight…

But whatever I do decide is the right choice, the only choice that is not right is to not get help when you need it.  Getting help when you need it is the difference between sticking to resolve or sticking in the final knife and twisting so the blood of all that precious life spills out.

It is November, so I am not really chillin’.  The funny thing is that chaos is so close to my house and I thought about Tom and I realized something that this father/daughter non-relationship we shared… if you have no one to be responsible to, and you are sick… then you are going to be him.  I miss him and his dream rehearsing.  I feel a deep sadness for his states of grief and guilt.  But I think I understand his hopelessness more on the inside of me than I could ever explain it rationally… hopelessness just is keep fighting and keep living since right now, I have brandy elizabeth life… and that, that is what I want most for my future.

to the 6 legged spider in the laundry room– it is too wet and too too cold to go outside, so let’s stay in.


b elizabeth ns