Mooring

Most days the house of my body is my guardian and friend but today it turns slowly against me, minute by minute, I can feel the stirrings in my gut, the skipped heartbeat, the sweat gathering on my brow.  Perhaps only my defenses against some foreign agent?  But this attack is from the inside out.

How do you weigh heartache, in metrics?  In feet?

Four thirty-four years I held this rock of my father in my gut; why did I think it would erode with his death?  I have come a long way, and yet this stone agitates my insides each time I hesitate on the big move, or choose the wrong boy.  He was my compass and anchor and when the compass failed, the anchor remained.  Rooted by his expectations, his need for me to live the life he passed up, I find it harder and harder to lift up on my own, to jettison the words that pushed me out of every comfort zone, that cheered my success and disregarded my failures.   Every ship he carved or boat he bottled was a journey he never took and I am trying to take all those journeys for him.  Spain and Wales and Italy and England and Mexico and Canada… I’m wearing my papers thin.  My skin thin, when it should have been getting thicker. I’m running out of time. And patience.  I’d rather be happy and to be happy I’d have to ignore what came before.  Forget the past and every lesson I’ve learned and start over.  Risking so much, I’d have to be crazy.  And maybe I am.  But sickness from the inside out is the worst kind of sickness, the foreign agent to repel is your very self.

How many miles must I go to leave the accumulated sorrows behind?

When people talk about finding themselves, I don’t understand.  When people say that when they travel, they can become anyone, I still don’t understand.  Even when I’m acting out of character, or behaving outrageously, I’m me.  Come hurricane, tsunami, heartbreak, or broken bone, I couldn’t shake me if I wanted to.

When my mother died suddenly after my 27th birthday, my relationship with Dad became the same sea it always was but with different currents.  At times, I needed my mother but I had my father.  He was frustrated by my venting about life, knowing he couldn’t help.

“What do you want me to do about it,” he’d say, and I’d reply,

“Nothing, Dad.  Just listen.  I need you to listen.”

There would be late night drunken phone calls from him where he would ask the same of me.  “None of the women wanted to dance with me,” he’d say, his voice choked with tears. “One called me goofy.”

“I know, Dad,” I’d say, “I’m sorry.”  What he was really saying was he missed my mother.

What happens when breath stops? 

When my father died a few years later, I finally become unmoored. I was the anchor, the compass, and I rooted my sisters through the super storms of those years.  The rock in my gut crept up to my throat. I stopped breathing, eating, living.  I lost sight of my husband, let foreign agents determine the course of my life and it was like living underwater.

Will the memory of love buoy me into the days to come? 

All these years later, I understand what it means to not be reassured by a parent’s love.  We all learn this at some time, but mostly we’ve docked ourselves in a new family, one we’ve made of our own.  I’ve drifted another way.  The ill-advised love affair of nine years.  The constant change in destination.  The stunted marriage abandoned.  Not my fault, not always.  But still.  Keeping a list of the slights the universe has given me won’t raise these sails up.  I’m building a raft.  Trusting the strength of these arms, this torso, this mind.  My body.  I don’t need to start again.  I only need to choose the direction and sail on.

_______

Christine E. Salvatore  teaches literature and writing in the MFA Program at Rosemont College, Stockton University and at a public high school in South Jersey. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including The Cortland Review, Diode, The Literary Review, Mead Journal, The Southeast Review and elsewhere. Her work is also included in the craft book More Challenges for the Delusional and is featured in the art book, Mother Monument by Holly Trostle Brigham and Maryanne Miller. You can read an interview with her on the Dodge Poet Spotlight Blog and learn more at www.christinesalvatore.com.