It's Saturday morning. Outside is foggy and still. The little boy's up and I can see Jon on the couch reading his notes on a sermon that's still just bones and nails and whisper.
I slept hard last night night. I walked into my front door yesterday more like a puddle than a person because sometimes when you go off to slay the dragon you come back with nothing and the dragon's still breathing and the mountain you climbed is still standing and the score isn't even and you're tired. I'm tired.
It must have been all that driving. I listened to my jams and I cried. I went to see Mary Bragg in New York and watched her kick ass and own the room and pour our her art and her heart and her beauty for all of us mortals and I wondered if that could be me. I look in the mirror and the reality of forty one keeps laughing and pointing and tells me I'll disappear. When you're closer to a puddle than a person, the voices get louder, the doubts start taking over, the villagers with shovels and torches come closer and when the news comes that you lost the gig, that you're broke and that the soar on your foot's not getting better it all feels too big to battle.
Back when I was a person, there was this moment in Corona, last week, when I felt like I shone. In a basement room with no air, in front of kids I don't know, singing songs that I wrote and we all sang together. We were sweating and smiling and playing and living and I knew what I was doing and I felt good about it. I smiled to myself. I said, "You're good at this." I tried locking it in my head to hold onto in case the world got darker and it got hard to see.
I'm going to Chicago on Monday with my oldest son. We're getting on a plane for Germany. I lived there for a year once. He was born there.
Back when I was fifteen I left home to go live in Paraguay. In college it was Granada, Spain, then Madrid and then Germany. Never have I felt lighter than when I left American soil. Darrell Scott has a song that says, "Colorado, I need healing from this sorrow I've been feeling." My song would be something like, "Germany, I need fleeing from the life that I've been leading."
So today I should be working, but instead I'll be thinking. I should be re-packing, but instead I'll pick up my sad, broken guitar held together by duct tape (the hardware inside it starting falling out mid-music in that Corona basement one day) and write whatever. Whatever I want. I'm going to sing whatever feels true to me and I'll probably cry. And then maybe I'll write another one. It'll be whatever I want it to be, it'll be as true as I can make it and if I cry, so what?
And I'll turn the puddle back into person. I'll remember how great I can be in basements of churches singing songs that I wrote and letting go, closing my eyes and being bold enough to believe that even a disappearing woman who eats too many carbs and has no gym membership is allowed to climb up mountains to go slay dragons and, when she fails, she's allowed to cry all the way back down, before resting up and trying all over again.