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The blog of missing: Day 24
Today has been difficult.
More than three weeks since I last positively knew Jake was safe.
When I eat, I think, “Is Jake hungry?”
When I go to bed, I think, “Where is Jake sleeping?”
When it’s hot outside, I think, “Does Jake have water?”
He can’t borrow a phone. Is he disoriented?
Is he all right?
Is he all right?
I can’t turn it off.
If this had happened during the time he’d kept me at arm’s length, I wouldn’t even know he was missing.
But he texted, called, or visited nearly every day from late February onward.
I am bereft of the son I just got back.
I wonder if this is the beginning of a long, dark summer.
The blog of missing: Day 20
It’s weird how some things stall you in your writing, and other things rip you wide open.
When my son disappeared 20 days ago, the first report I wrote for law enforcement was three pages long. It had bullet points for easy reading, but still. Three pages. But how can you know how to properly track someone if you don’t know the little things?
It took me several drafts to pare it down to the essentials so I could fit them onto a flyer with his picture.
Along with a physical description:
Missing. Gave all his things away. Call me.
I continue bleeding words onto a page of updates. I don’t know who gives a crap about what steps I’ve taken–I’m not really sure I myself care–but I’m compelled to keep track or I will feel like I’ve done nothing.
The words are a trickle on my Facebook page now, and now, well. Here I am. The list is maybe not so important. But this has substance.
This, I think, is better than sending emails to the ether. Better than Facebook messages to my son that withhold that precious “seen” checkmark. Better than editing the updates page with TO DOs and DONEs.
At 1:06am today I woke with a snap, Jake’s slurred voice in my head saying, “Where are you?”
I got dressed and drove to the house where he was staying before he vanished. Convinced he had spoken to me in a dream, in a stupor, helpless.
Shined a light in the window.
Sniffed around the window and front door for a dead body odor.
I’m not crazy, but that’s crazy behavior. Who sniffs windows?
And why? Dead people don’t slur.
Reminder to Stacy: You have no control over things you can’t control.
In all the encounters I’ve had over the last 20 days, only two have been negative.
One man lectured me via text about children who don’t want to talk to their parents and how we need to accept that. I engaged at first, then realized I don’t care what he thinks he knows.
Another man messaged one of Jake’s friends on Facebook, saying that my son was found living in my basement.
Someone actually did that. Part of me accepts that this is just a dopey person who doesn’t realize how callous that was.
Maybe thinks he’s funny.
The other part…well.
Perhaps he will call me with his theory and we can talk.
It’s only been 20 days.
When does it become valid?
Why does it seem invalid?
I make it by grace.
That’s all.
Grace, by U2
Grace, she takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name
Grace, it’s the name for a girl
It’s also a thought that changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything
Grace, she’s got the walk
Not on a ramp or on chalk
She’s got the time to talk
She travels outside of karma
She travels outside of karma
When she goes to work
You can hear her strings
Grace finds beauty in everything
Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because Grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things
Grace makes beauty out of ugly things
A strange but compelling love story
I got married last year after being in a ten-year long-distance relationship. People regularly express wonder at the length of our time living apart, and everyone asks the same question: how?
For the last 9 months I’ve been shrugging off the question because, you know, we just DID it. It was just the way things worked out for that time frame, and we dealt with it. But today I was asked again, and it finally dawned on me (because I’m quick like that) that people really want to know what it is about our relationship that made it last through ten years of being about 3,000 miles apart.
Some reasons we have lasted:
- Trust. That seems obvious, perhaps. You HAVE to trust that you’re not one of a long line of people on booty-call speed dial, right? But how do you trust that when you can’t see what the other person’s up to except when you visit once a year? Well, I have to ask why anyone would be in a relationship where this is even a question. If you can’t trust the person you want to be with, look at yourself. Are you trustworthy? Are you asking that question because you know you’re out cattin’ around? Of course, there’s insecurity. I’m human, and I’m pudgy. I worried that he saw a tall, beautiful, slender blonde woman in town who would suit him far better than I did. There were times when I was convinced that I wasn’t beautiful enough, and I realized after a long time that this was my issue, and only mine, but I arrived at there because of …next point:
- Grace. A crap-ton of it. And for a while, much of it was one-sided. Not me! Tom. I am awed by how much I have learned about what love is from this man. I can be a horrid, grudge-holding woman over dumb things. Heck, we had an 8-month break-up because of my stubbornness. He wrote me a letter during the break-up that I did not answer, and when I finally, miraculously, relented and wrote him, he answered immediately. (All of which makes you wonder, uh, why does he love her? Answer: When I’m not being horrid, I’m awesome.) But grace: it is undeserved. Forgiving. Sometimes baffling. And it usually ends in…next point:
- Humor. Not a day passes that we don’t laugh. There’ve probably been days of arguing over the years that we couldn’t laugh, but they’re outnumbered by the laughing days. And the secret here is that we’re able to laugh at ourselves. We both know we can be childish and unreasonable, and we’re safe with each other so we can say, “Oh, wow. I suck, and I’m sorry.” Tom says part of my awesomeness is that I own it when I’m wrong, even if it’s not right away.
- We believe the best of each other. If Tom says something that hurts my feelings, I’ve learned to step back and consider his words in the light of his love for me. I had to wear bracelets for a while to remind myself of this, but the lesson did take.
I get it now. - Refusal to give up. Tom says I’m relentless. I say I’m determined. Whatever. We’re both thankful. And really, he’s one to talk. It’s he who showed me how to love when it was hard. It’s he who taught me that I was loveable by doing everything he could to make me laugh so I would get over my self-consciousness about my loud laugh. It’s he who called me every day, even when I was mad at him.
- Communication. We talked almost every night. I think we probably talked more than most couples did who lived together. In fact, I’d bet we know each other far better than most people who’ve been married longer. We learned to listen to tones in each other’s voices. And we have a rule: no hang-ups. Hanging up in the middle of a fight is the worst kind of storming off. So we’d have these long pauses when we could not speak because we were so mad and had nothing friendly to say, but we couldn’t hang up so we were forced to work it through till we reached some kind of resolution.
- Commitment to the relationship. We both wanted it to work. This means you have to dump pride to the side, and you have to be able to give and receive grace.
- And now: God. We recognize that God was there all along, but we weren’t paying attention to that at first.
3,000 miles can exist within the same house between two people. Physical distance doesn’t break a relationship; emotional chasms do. Tom and I learned to bridge them while we lived so far apart, and now we are discovering how much we enjoy being together in the same house with no chasms to cross. It’s pretty amazing.
The appearance of things
The appearance of things change according to the emotions, and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves. ~Kahlil Gibran
Be ugly, see ugliness.
Be merciful, see mercy.
Be deceitful, see deceit.
Be joyful, see joy.
Whatever we see out there is true within us.
My husband taught me something about love today.
We had a heated argument yesterday in which we showed all our dark colors.
You always! You never!
This morning, upon awakening, he mumbled, “Prayer works.”
I thought he was referring to the fact that I had relented and cuddled up to him in the middle of the night, but that wasn’t it.
He said, “I prayed that something would happen to make me let go of my anger because I knew I was the problem.”
Note: He was not the problem. We both were.
What surprised me was that he had not prayed for God to move my heart, or to change my perspective. He hadn’t prayed that I would relent.
He’d only prayed about his own attitude.
That little act was a mirror: I could see my own culpability, my own inflexibility, my own pride.
I don’t know how all this relates, precisely.
My goal is that the humility and mercy that reside in him will be evident in me when he looks at me.
Best year ever: weeks 3, 4, and 5
Silence has been my project lately, and the hardest time for me has been over the last few days. My original post had this:
- Silence–Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
I decided to do silence for week 3, and to focus on serenely shutting up. Humility is its companion because staying silent means I’m giving space to the words of others.
Sometimes being silent means not saying what YOU need to say, but allowing space for another to speak. It means it is not your turn. It means that when you do speak, you speak love and grace and nothing else.
Do you know how hard that is? Shutting up does not come easily to me.
Obviously, since I’ve been trying to do it for three weeks. Gah.
I am wearing an industrial-strength bracelet for this–it’s made of a rope material that, if unraveled, can be used as a survival tool. I love the symbolism in that. And I love that I’m learning to be a better person, even if the process makes me want to gnash my teeth.
In silence, of course. lol
D5 Creation