Shame to Rage and Viola's Composition

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DAY 1137 –April 24, 2017
Prompt: Do you think that shame can be a trigger for anger? How?

Shame is a crippling emotion to live under. It can silence you, it can crush your spirit and marginalize your soul. I lived with shame like that for years during my first marriage, hiding the truth of my life from everyone that mattered. There were so many times in the aftermath of a violent episode, when I would be sitting among the shattered and broken things and I would think, "this is not the daughter my father raised." I would break open all over again thinking about how disappointed he would be that I allowed this to become my life. I was ashamed that I had fallen in love with a man who cursed and spat and hit. I was ashamed that even after that love had been crushed dead under the constant fear of sudden violence, I still could not leave.

I was ashamed at how cautious I had become, how complacent, how silent. I was ashamed of knowing those dark things, like the way passion can bloom into rage with a single word or all the ways a person can hurt you without leaving visible bruises that tell the world what you are. I knew shame intimately. I wore it like a heavy coat. In the end, however, it was the shame that saved me. That day, the last day he ever put his hands on me, the shame had rose up inside me like a tide and that tide carried me away. 

The argument had escalated, as it always did. My cell phone had been smashed to bits on the floor at my feet, my glasses knocked from my face and I could see one lens was shattered. He had my car keys clenched in one fist and he was shaking them at me, telling me once again, that I was stupid and useless. The side of my face was throbbing where he'd hit me open handed. I made a grab for my car keys and he had shoved me back hard, with the palms of both hands. The momentum sent me reeling back across the linoleum. I crashed into and then partially through the glass kitchen door. I had struggled to my feet, shaking glass from my hair and clothes, checking my exposed flesh for cuts, expecting I think, to have been shredded by the exploding glass. Miraculously I was unhurt. He had rushed to me, his dark eyes filled with concern, his mouth spewing nonsense. He hadn't meant to hurt me. He never meant to hurt me.

Standing there, in a pool of glass, listening to him vomiting his panicked excuses, I felt something shift in me. For the first time the shame gave way to something else, a white, hot anger. That anger rose up inside me, like some dark and raging sister in my soul. I literally saw red and I charged at him, tossing him to the ground and wrenching my car keys from his fist. The dynamics had instantly shifted between us. When he tried to get up, I shoved him back down with a strength I didn't know I possessed. "Stay down" I told him, my voice dripping with such venom that it frightened me. I feared if he had tried to move at that moment, I would have killed him with my bare hands. I told him I would kill him if he tried to touch me. I felt like I was on fire. I rushed to my car, wanting only to get away from him...not because I was afraid of him but because I was afraid of all that anger coursing through me. I was afraid of what I could do to him with all that rage.

That day was the last time he ever touched me. Shame had been my jailer for a long time, but it had also been my ally in freeing myself from that life. I think it must have just reached a point of critical mass when the need to speak out, to stand up and to live a different life became so much stronger than the need to keep it hidden, to hide behind the shame.

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Prompt: Write a story or poem using the following words: piano, study, gaudy, ghost, bewitch, blushing, tongue, plan

I watched her for, concealed behind the partially opened door. She was sitting at the piano, her back ramrod straight and her shoulders rigid. Her thick black hair had been hastily pulled back into a heavy braid and it hung down her back, bisecting her thin frame. She bent forward to study the sheet of music in front of her, the tip of her tiny pink tongue pinched between her teeth as she concentrated. Then, Viola began to play. Her delicate, bird-like hands flew over the keys and the music began to fill the space between us.

The composition was one of her own design, crafted to challenge her but also to bewitch the listeners with its peaking crescendos and beautiful rolling valleys. She moved with the music, the heavy braid rocked back and forth like a thick rope. Her momentum caused the gaudy necklace of big glass beads to sway on her chest like a pendulum keeping time with the beat. I held my breath, felt the tears began to well. It was like watching a ghost. Voila played with the same impassioned abandon that her mother had. Watching the girl evoked a vivid memory and in its wake, a visceral pang of loss.

Viola's playing slowed, the notes softly fading as she reached the end of her composition. I had thoughtlessly began clapping before the final note had faded. Voila was startled by the sudden interruption. She turned to look at me, blushing crimson with wide, surprised eyes. It had not been the plan to eavesdrop on her practice. Viola was, as her mother had been, uncomfortable with act of performing. She recovered a bit when she saw it had only be me. She gave me shy smile and rose from the piano.

The Strange Perfume of Memory and the Leaps We Take Alone.

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DAY 1107 March 24, 2017
Write your entry for today about a place that you have spent a considerable amount of time in--perhaps somewhere you lived or worked before--and whose smells are curiously linked with your recollection. Describe the emotions and events from that period that those smells conjure up, and the ways in which your memories may have been colored by your preference or distaste of those smells.

In my youthful days, days when I was driven by wholly different passions than I am today, I volunteered at the local aquarium. During my tenure as a Sea Urchin, the aquarium's term for their student volunteers, my favorite assignment was working with the aquarists in the back. I remember arriving in the early hours on summer mornings and passing through the mud brown door labeled "authorized personnel" into another world filled a new variety of new sensory delights that I can still recall with absolute clarity.

I would always start my shift in the few hours before the aquarium opened for the public. The vast halls and rooms were oddly silent except for the ambient sounds of the massive filtration and circulation machinery always working in the belly and bowels of the place. The gray green windows of the display tanks cast an almost cosmic glow in the shadowed interior. I would pass the rows of tanks on my way to the back, the round eyes of our residents watching me pass. I would always stop at the shark tank and spend a few brief moments watching the sand tigers circling slowly, their snaggle-toothed mouths agape and their black eyes fixed and staring. Behind the circular shark habitat there were the three expansive windows of the main husbandry tank, most often empty that time of the day. Without a resident sea lion or bottlenose dolphin, it always looked immense and cold to me.

It was the olfactory impressions of this place however that leave the strongest impression on my memory bank. Passing through the main lobby and side rooms and pushing open the door that lead to the aquarist area, I was immediately assaulted by the smells of the space. Here behind the tanks, were all the scents associated with the task of maintaining multiple marine environments and those creatures that dwell there. The air was flavored with the briny, slightly antiseptic smell of artificial seawater. There was also the pungent smell of fish meal loaves being chopped in the stainless steel kitchen or the biting scent of raw mackerel being stuffed with supplements and minerals. The strongest odors emanated from the buckets of squid and bait fish and from the rows of glass jugs where the aquarist cultivated brine shrimp for the filter feeders. Leaning over dark tank of the Pacific octopus, the water of that habitat always seem to have a strange tang of sweetness mixed with the faintest smell of detritus. The tidal touch tank smelled brightly of the powered salt that collected along the water line and low tide marks. The big river tank, the one that housed the rainbow trout and had to be accessed via a false woodsy terrain, smelled strongly like moss and brackish bays.

They were all strong smells, often not pleasant smells. They were the smells of this living world and I loved them. It was messy work, it was smelly work but it was the labor of love for me and I wore those smells home with me each day. The time I spent there is a vivid collection of wonderful memories, the foundation for something I carried forward with me in my life.



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DAY 1590 March 24, 2017
"In late February, frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians responding to early warm temperatures began migrating from their winter hideouts to vernal pools to begin the spring mating season. Some of the animals were chaperoned to safety by concerned volunteers across trafficked streets late at night in New York and other Northeastern states. Write an essay about a time in your life when you made a big decision or took a leap. Did someone arrive to accompany you or were you on your own? Was your emotional journey guided by a crossing guard who brought you to safety?" ~ Writers Digest

Reflecting on the times of the bigger decisions in my life, I am forced to admit that those were the times I felt most solitary. In fact, I think the big decision moments felt that way because I had to make the decision for myself, with little counsel or guidance. That isn't to say I did not have people who helped me, because I did. The really big leaps though, I took many of those on my own and often, in relative secrecy from my loved ones. Divorcing my first husband is probably the one that really comes to mind. It wasn't so much the act of leaving the marriage that was the big decision but rather the emotional journey of freeing myself from a physically and verbally abusive relationship, one that I had hidden from everyone for almost five years. It came down to one moment, one moment when I had to decide to stand up and fight back. It had taken everything I had to push past all the shame and the fear and come out the other side. The day I pulled myself free, I was alone and it was awful and terrifying. It was also momentous and defining for me. Afterward, I did have "crossing guards" and good Samaritans who helped me with process of recovering myself and with healing. I found it much easier to let people in once I had made the leap. I think that that singular act, that decision, had to be mine alone.