it's hard to stop

I often think of little things to write about. A thread here or there that wraps up a moment. My intention is to scribble a note to myself to remember the gist of it, whatever it is I’m in, so when I have a moment, I can sit down and unwind a little narrative. One of the final scenes in Goodfellas has become a metaphor for my life. Ray Liotta is strung out big time. He’s about to get caught. He’s juggling drug trafficking, family, a mistress, and dinner. He narrates the back and forth of picking up the babysitter, her lucky hat, asking his brother to watch the meat sauce and keep an eye out for helicopters. Amidst the unraveling, he says he has to make the meatballs. The meatballs are important. You need to get the gravy right.

As we run around like crazy people, sometimes we’ll just stop. And look at each other, exhausted.

“I need to make the meatballs.”

It has been a year of loss and often awakening; the constant cocoon and emergence with different wings. The cycle of change is so repeated, so much that you just want a break from all the different all the time. You want things to say the same or not even that but just stop. Cut it out. But the only thing you can count on is that there will be snow, and that is what will make everything look the same.

Change is like a drug. Pick up the babysitter, make the plans, stack them on top of each other, and make the meatballs.

Being the subject of a little girl comes in handy here. Because I look at her,we look at her, and we want it both ways. We want her to grow up, right out of the narrow range of emotional expression and intense focus on repetition and into broader exploration and inquiry. But we want her to stay the same. The girl who tells me she’s not going to cry. The one who grabs my head and kisses me almost passionately on my face and who can watch Cindy Lauper’s Time After Time and say to me, earnestly, when Cindy hugs her mother for the last time on her way to the train station:

“It’s her mother. She’s saying good-bye to her mother.”

The girl who watched a tear fall onto her shirt when her eyes were weepy with sickness and said:

“Whoops.”

I would like to keep that for a while longer.

For the next week, I will have her all to myself. I will sit still in my heart and let it get strong while we spoil each other. I will look at her and try not to let her know quite how desperately I love her, because that’s almost too much to put on a little girl. If that makes sense.

I will forgo the fucking meatballs.