Can you feel me staring at you as you sleep? You are as still as my pink robe tossed at the foot of the bed. You are not even dreaming by the look of it.

I’m gazing at you with more intrigue than resentment, although that may be a lie. Not only are you sound asleep, oblivious to my scrutiny, but you were unconscious 30 seconds after your (stupid) head hit the pillow.

Sorry. That was immature.

I’m tired, and I’m envious. And I’m ascribing to you all kinds of virtues that may be unwarranted. It just seems as if you should have at least a few things to worry about, be mentally replaying at least a few cringeworthy moments.

I love the warmth of your shoulder near mine, but let’s face it. That head doesn’t contain much except “come,” “treat,” and “squirrel,” in reverse order. I’ll take you for a walk in the morning and try not to disturb you as I turn over.

The primary reason I can’t sleep is this persistent ache in my left glute, for which I’m trying various remedies. A spinal injection and a month of intense acupuncture haven’t helped enough, so I’m thinking about massage, which I’m afraid I will love too much.

In search of additional sleep remedies, I’ve been asking friends what they do to fall asleep. My friend Joe doesn’t monkey around with the mind monkeys—he goes straight for the drugs. Unisom is his friend.

A guy in the waiting room at acupuncture swears the key is counting backward from 498. I like that he has a specific starting point that clearly is no one else’s.

Till now.

I want to ask him why we are using 498, but he already has his shoes on and is heading out as I’m heading in.

My friend Haley has recently discovered a sure-fire method: seeing how many words she can make from a single word. She is way too excited about this.

Like monkey-mind. There’s key, monk, on, oink, din, mind, in, dim. Are you sleeping? Like  gratitude. There’s read, it, are, rate, great, dear, due, rag…still awake.

So, I’ve come up with my own method. It’s making a list of what if’s?

If I’d been the first-born girl instead of the last in my family, I would have no girl skills and standards at all.

If I had not gone on a blind date when I was 19, I would not have my three children. I’d have other children, no doubt, but who wants those?

If I had married my sophomore-year boyfriend, Will, I’d have been a widow at 55.

If Sue D. hadn’t majored in drama the year I majored in drama, I would not have changed majors.

If I had not had an offer to work for a magazine the same day I was accepted to graduate school in pastoral counseling, I’d have been a therapist, not a writer. And yes…I do question whether there’s much of a difference, you memoirists.

If I had not volunteered at the SPCA, my solitary heart would not have been rescued by the warm body sleeping belly up in my bed.

But backing the camera up, if my 10^th great-grandfather had not transferred passage from the leaking Speedwell to the Mayflower in September 1620, I might not have been born in America.

If the planet Theia had not hit proto-Earth with a glancing blow 4.5 billion years ago, we would not have seasons and a moon.

If we didn’t have a moon to slow us, an Earth day would still be 19.5 hours as it was a billion years ago.

No full moons, Harvest Moons, Wolf Moons.

No moon rivers.

If I had gone to visit my mother more when she was in assisted living, perhaps I’d sleep better at night.

How many words can I make from regret?

How many from love?

Some words are indivisible.

Like me, beloveds. Like you.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Note: On June 5 Laura Oliver and Andrew Oliver will be reading stories as part of the Spy Night Series at the Avalon Theatre. Doors open at 6:00 pm

I leave at 3:20, having not yet taught myself to check the traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge hours before any intention to cross it, and so, already marginally late to my college reunion—and this is a big year for my class—I am stopped bumper to bumper. It takes me an hour to creep along the next six miles to the bridge for no reason other than rain and rush hour on a Friday. I have another hour to drive beyond that.

I’m good at immediately accepting the things I can’t change without handwringing or complaint, which is true tonight. I ease forward a few feet to escape the Barker Paint Company van and turn up the music. The smell of weed emanates so virulently through closed windows I’ll be high before Centreville if we remain in these lanes neck and neck. I glance over, and the driver smiles, raises his eyebrows, and nods laconically. The minutes I could be reuniting with my class are evaporating. I put a book on Audible and wait it out.

When I arrive an hour and a half late, in the pouring rain, the building is locked. I can see my classmates inside, sitting at round tables, wine and appetizers before them, listening to a speaker, but the door won’t budge. This is starting to feel dangerously like metaphor, and my equanimity is cracking. I mutter, “Maybe I just wasn’t supposed to be here tonight,” but I say it with a self-pitying pout. Aware of this, I circle the building looking for another way in, knowing that, too, is metaphor for my college experience; only my exclusion then was self-imposed.

Eventually, I find an open door and there is someone to greet me with my nametag on a lariat. I slip into the nearest seat, gazing longingly at the bar and caterer’s spread behind the speaker. The shrimp cocktail looks fresh, and a glass of Pinot Noir wouldn’t hurt. I look around the room and can identify no one. The only person I might recognize, my boyfriend from freshman year, I know immediately, isn’t here. He is six foot 4. He’d stand out even sitting down.

When the speaker concludes, everyone rises and mingles and that’s when I start to recognize classmates. Debbie’s kind eyes, Paula’s megawatt-Midwestern smile. I’m casually looking for my friend, and anyone I ask says, “Oh, he was just here!” As late as I was, perhaps he thought I wasn’t coming. I keep looking.

The greatest thrill is to look up and see my freshman-year roommate for the first time since graduation. She was a better friend to me than I to her and that has grieved me. I was a loner and had never shared a room in my life. I don’t know if I literally drew a line down the middle when we moved in, but I may have.

She looks exactly as I would imagine and has the same ready laugh. She got married at 39 and had a baby at 45, she reports. We do the math to see if we should introduce him to my youngest daughter.

“I hear you became a writer,” someone says. “I remember you wanted to be one,” and I say, “I have been lucky. That’s a dream that came true.” At the expense of other dreams, but I don’t add that.

I continue to ask for my friend. “He was here a second ago,” I hear again. “He’s wearing black.” A minute later, I hear, “He was over there by the doors. He’s wearing gray.” See how fast our witnessing becomes perspective, not fact? Was he here at all?

Everyone else has come for the entire weekend, so they are going to reconvene at a bar on High Street to get the party really started. I am driving home—back across the rainy bridge. I won’t be back for the game tomorrow. I have seen what I wanted to see, experienced, and discovered what I longed to know. We are okay. We turned out all right.

And as I drive back, I realize I’m not at the bar tonight because I’m still a non-joiner—a writer who observes as she participates–whose picture was somehow omitted from our yearbook, so there’s no record of me having been here though one of my professors attended my wedding. Why didn’t I drive to Florida with Paula on Spring Break? Go to more parties? Cheer at lacrosse games?

We are who we were, I think, as I hit the bridge. But shouldn’t life have changed us? Are you now who you were then?

My missing friend calls me the next day. “Where are you?” I ask, not “Where were you,” because that doesn’t matter now. Once again, I’m quick to let go of unchangeable loss. “I was late,” I explain, “I drove for hours, but I came, and I looked for you.”

“I’m in Connecticut,” he says, “I had to get outta there. Too many old people.”

We laugh. Exchange updates on our families. I ask about his wife, their kids, and how they spend their days. We plan to meet next year though we may not. Anything could happen between now and then.

Reencountering the past leaves me wistful. You never know when you see someone, whether you will ever see them again. Only our future selves recognize last times as last times.

But I am smiling as I write this, and I know what I would have said had I joined my classmates at that High Street bar. Had I been someone I’m not.

I would have raised a glass and hugged the person closest to me. I’d have said,” I’m so glad that I came tonight, I’m so happy to see everyone!”

And I would be thinking: because in spite of myself, you feel like my family.

And I wish that I’d known you.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

I’m at my sister’s horse farm basking in a late-March, Blue Ridge mountain twilight, enjoying a glass of wine around the firepit with my two older sisters. Golden Mica-dog is on sentry duty gazing out over the fields and lake like the good boy he is—keeping watch for bears, beavers, and falling stars. He will never be known for his intelligence, fairly or unfairly, because he is such a good-looking blond.

We are comparing memories—and it’s gratifying when they are the same; how Mom drove like there was a wasp in her blouse, the blue Ford with the hole in the floor. You could see Eagle Hill Road streaming like a river beneath your feet, speeding to the bus stop or home from the A & P. Sometimes we recall the same event but entirely differently– the emotional lens of our visions unique to each.

Because there are three of us, often two memories will coincide with gleeful validation but not convince the outlier who hangs on to what she alone knows is true. The car was black! It wasn’t a Ford! That kind of thing. That role changes with each memory.

As with your siblings, we learn things from each other that we never knew about our own histories. My eldest sister remembers saving our middle sister from a group of boy-bullies who had surrounded her on a piece of playground equipment, dead-reckoning her bike to disperse the danger, but she is the only one who remembers the event. And I remember, but don’t share, a similar memory where Tommy McVeydo-The-Rotten-Tomato (kids are callous, what can I say?) had backed my very pretty 14-year-old sister up against the pasture fence in what I now recognize was a moment of highly charged flirtation. As a 9-year-old, I saw a threat, a call to glory, and threw myself between them, thwarting a budding romance.

I had not yet learned to read the room.

And these exchanges are as grounding as the land we gaze over. Siblings. The only people in your life who know your whole story, who know where you came from, what you overcame, and whether you turned out alright. Though it is good to remember that if life were a court of law, nothing is less reliable than eyewitness testimony.

Carpenter bees are bombing us, and the red and yellow pepper hors d’oeuvres. We look up the species to be sure they’re not bumblebees, then whack them. They sport shiny, hairless abdomens and are further identified by their flight patterns–diving and zigzagging. Vanishing like UFOs. Like drones.

Like memories.

Barnstead, the renovated barn we grew up in– was full of wasps, and we start sharing bee memories. The invisible but ominous buzzing against the screens in our bedrooms upon returning from school, waking to wasps crawling up our pillowcases or tangled in our tennis shoe laces when getting dressed in the morning, late for the bus.

My middle sister’s memory is that I helped her kill wasps in her room—that she was afraid, and I was not. This is interesting because it could not be further from the truth. Things that sting terrified me as well—but I’m guessing her memory is accurate—that I did come into her room with bee-slayer bravado because what I know about myself is this: when I’m terrified of something, and you are too, your need flips a switch, and fear becomes fierceness. How does that work? That we can take on for another, what we cannot face alone. While cowering in my own room in a bee face-off, in her room, it was, “He’s on the curtain. Get ready to run.”

I can read the room now.

We vow to come back to the farm for the full moon in June –to watch it rise like blessings over the lake.

The next day, we decide to take a tour of the hilly 80 acres of forests and fields, and since I’ve got some aches from running with the dog the day before, we use the ATV known as Jethro (picture a golf cart with upgraded horsepower). We park it at the bottom of the steepest hill, so we won’t have to hike back up to the house later. My sister drives like there’s a wasp in her blouse, as if she’s on her way to a fire, or as if …she is our mother’s daughter.

My oldest sister calls shotgun, and I’m on the open side—no door and a slippery seat we three barely fit on, but she links her arm in mine to hold me in, to keep me safe.

I brace with my outside leg and clutch a roof strut, and we are laughing now as we accelerate down the hill because if this is how we’re going to die, it’s very funny and kind of okay.

 Your siblings are the longest relationship you will have in this life. Interestingly, it is an involuntary arrangement. At first, anyway. But later, if you are fortunate, you will gather by choice when you can.

Our own families are grown. Our parents are gone

We start over from where we began.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

 

 

 

Easter is near, and although I no longer participate in an organized religion with an origin story, we have a brain bias to believe what we have grown up with—a homing instinct, perhaps. So, this is a resurrection story based on my Methodist upbringing —not the resurrection of God Incarnate, but of a family pet called Mr. Fish.

Is it silly? Well, it’s about a goldfish, so yes. But also no. If there is anything I’ve learned of late it is that there is no coincidence too subtle not to consider nominating for the extraordinary. We can’t be sort of pregnant, half-loved, or more perfect. While the U.S. Constitution refers to a ‘more perfect’ union, in reality, “perfect” is an absolute, like “always,” “never,” “all,” and “none.”

Like “miracle.”

When the kids were in elementary school, we bought them two goldfish. I’d had two goldfish in my youth—Tipper and Topper –who met a mysterious end I want to blame on the cat, but the evidence doesn’t support that theory. In the novel Lolita, Nabokov writes: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”  In deference to Nabokov, I’ll just say, “My very pretty goldfish died in a freak accident (hole, pencil) when I was six.”

But does any goldfish story have a happy ending? Stay with me. This may be a first.

In the uncanny way we recreate our own experiences for our children, I bought two goldfish for our kids. We set the bowl in the dining room, where I found Mrs. Fish floating belly up within days. But Mr. Fish lived! I removed his dead companion and cleaned out the bowl. A few days later, however, I slipped downstairs in search of my first hot cup of coffee and found Mr. Fish also belly up, eyes glazed and covered in some kind of spots.

I felt terrible. Unreasonably sad.

I’d been thinking about miracles, prayer, love, and possibility since Mrs. Fish died. Okay. All my life–or at least since Tipper and Topper bought it. So, I was alone in the dining room with a dead fish bobbing around in his glass bowl, saying a dead-fish prayer over his little spirit, when the thought popped into my head—What if to God death isn’t a thing?

What if it is all the same to God—it’s just that no one has asked or expressed a preference? What if there is no judgment over the worthiness of a request?

So I stood there and prayed, “God, if it’s all the same to you, please let Mr. Fish live.” I beamed my love, hope, and gratitude on his little floating body and left the room.

It was a spur-of-the-moment experiment—no risk and nothing to prove. Just a desire to understand the nature of limitations and love. Love of the kids, perhaps, more than the fish—but again, it may not matter. Love isn’t a need-based scholarship.

It was a pretty dining room with a fireplace in the next room visible from the cherry table and chairs under double windows, but as it was seldom used, no one else was aware of  Mr. F’s demise. The next morning, however, when I again slipped downstairs for my coffee, I peeked in the bowl where a fish had been floating, to see Mr. Fish swimming around submerged three inches underwater.

I’m stunned every time I lose someone I love—no matter how sick or how old, which must mean we actually never expect death, no matter what we say.

And it never fails that within a day or so of hearing news of a loss, I find myself thinking, “If I searched the whole world over…every continent and country, every mountain and valley; if I boarded a plane and flew to every corner of the earth right now, surely, I could find the person I lost. As if death doesn’t mean gone, it means elsewhere.

That thought experiment always ends with the realization that there are some things in this world you can’t work hard enough to earn, seek long enough to find. But maybe there are things available to us we have not attempted because we have deemed them too small, too frivolous—as if the creator of 100 billion galaxies can be too busy.

The stories of my youth and the rituals of my Methodist upbringing are permanently embedded in my mind and heart. In this season of Easter, I think of Mary Magdalene. Her grief, her devastation, her astonishment to find the boulder rolled away from the entrance to Jesus’s tomb and it empty.

I can feel her confusion and incredulity when she sees a man walking toward her whom she first mistakes for the gardener– with no idea he is Jesus until he calls her by name.

“Mary! Don’t you recognize me?”

And I can imagine her joy because, in my own small way, I have felt it, too, for people I’ve loved, lost, and found again. For miracles—which are neither great nor small, but absolute.

“Mary! You know who I am. Tell everyone.”

Our fish didn’t survive long after that—just three days, as I recall.

But he did live.

And I’ve waited 30 years to tell everyone.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

How could anyone who loved school as much as I did hate the idea that life itself is a school? And how can someone who was a Safety, for goodness’ sake, be such a bad student? Shouldn’t I be thriving on learning new things in a giant earth classroom with you, my teachers, and classmates?

I’ve moved up to the front row because I can’t see over John Houser, and I would be sitting next to Chris, if the seating chart was alphabetized, but he died. So did Sally. Which boggles my mind and breaks my heart. But then, we’re all going to die, and as Richard Dawkins says, that makes us the lucky ones because most people are never going to be born. The number of possible people allowed by our DNA outnumbers the stars in the universe. So, we are the privileged few who overcame stupefying odds for the privilege of being here to learn and to grow together, and lately, I’ve been confronting a new challenge.

One of my friends from adolescence and I have nearly the same birthday. He’s a doctor in Vermont now, but we made a pact a while back to connect every year on that date, and because he’s a doctor, he always asks about my health. I like this. A lot. It’s different than when your regular friends ask you how you’re doing. When my friend asks me, he listens intently with his head cocked to the side, like he’s meditatively gripping either end of a stethoscope around his neck, and then he offers thoughtful suggestions. Expert medical advice from the boy who went to camp Wanga-Wanga every summer, perennially assigned to the Sioux cabin with Wet-Wet Myers. (A popular class in Life School is “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.”)

We had a great catch-up this morning because even though this is my writing day, I wanted to make room for this ritual. “Work-Life Balance” is one of the classes I’m repeating in Earth School having failed it for many years. Okay, forever.

There are fewer and fewer of us in this class, and I’m starting to panic. Everyone else has graduated to “Having Fun in the Here and Now!” They are across the hall laughing, planning yet another field trip while I’m still scrubbing the blackboards in “There’s Work to Do,” which is the super-fun prerequisite to “So You’ll Never Retire.” To get into this class, it helps to have been raised by parents with a strict, probably Scottish, work ethic that prescribes work every minute, save every penny, and wear pretty underwear in case a bus runs over you.

Fun is for superficial people with no depth who don’t clean their dinner plates even though clearly that practice feeds starving children in Africa.

This upbringing is difficult to unlearn. It promotes “doing” as opposed to “being,” which I honestly consider a huge waste of time. I’ve equated productivity with happiness and work with worth, unfortunately. And please don’t tell me to breathe. We all breathe. I don’t want to breathe your slow way or stop to smell the roses. If I do smell the roses, I’m probably going to write about them.

You see the problem here.

So, of all life’s teachers no one wants to get stuck with Jealousy– a tough-love instructor I know well. She teaches “The Grass is Always Greener.” This is a trick class, but I fall for it every time! I know that my envy of friends who now are in recess until they die—which could easily be another 30 years—(30 years of recess!!)  serves no one. And I’m not sure it’s even genuine because I love what I do and who I do it with (that would be you).

But it’s just hard to be sitting here at my desk as the sun shines outside my window, and I don’t have time to take the dog for a walk. Then, when I do take her for a walk, I see your plane to Portugal passing overhead, and I’m not kidding; I feel left out and left behind.

So, is it possible to long for something you don’t actually want? To envy others’ lives because you imagine a satisfaction greater than your own, that may or may not be real, but the pain is real?

Is FOMO a class I can pass? If I stop passing notes, distracting my neighbors, and talking while the teacher is talking?

I live in a state of constant revision, because the plot keeps changing when it comes to my own desires and because I really do want to learn to be a better person. As Maria Popova says, we don’t fully know what we want because we are half-opaque to ourselves.

Yet we are the lucky few who got to attend this school—to grow together—to study at each other’s houses, and to ask for help. I need yours.

How often is it true that something we didn’t want ends up enlarging our lives in an unimaginable way?

Be my undoing.

Teach me to play.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

The first time my mother brought my father home to the farm, my grandmother said of this charming college classmate in the yellow sportscar, “He’s either the worst thing that ever happened to you or the best.”

“He was both,” my mother confided from the far side of that marriage.

Here’s what I learned from my dad:

The inability to breathe when you fall from the top of the swing set is called “Having the wind knocked out of you.”

To keep from spilling an overfilled cup of coffee you are carrying to someone across the room, do the counterintuitive thing: run with it.

To take the hook out of a sunny’s mouth, stroke its fins toward its tail.

Put sand on a sea nettle sting and baking soda on a bee sting

If you find a spider in the wood pile, look for a red dot on its belly. The bite of a black widow can kill you.

But daddy longlegs don’t bite.

Mud daubers don’t sting.

Walnut leaves under the rugs repel the dog’s fleas, and you can teach a crow to talk.

Pick up a crab where his back flipper hinges to the shell.

Volkswagen Beetles feature the trunk in the front.

I learned very little else, but after he died, Dad taught me that neither life nor love end, arguably one of the best things that ever happened to me.

*****

My mother taught me how to tie off a sewing needle and hem a skirt.

To grease a cookie sheet and crack an egg.

To value education.

That I’m a Pisces, Sagittarius rising.

That vinegar will make my hair shine.

That supper must include meat, a vegetable, a starch, and flowers on the table.

That books are to life what dessert is to dinner.

To brighten the house with lights on rainy days.

To do things that are scary—to build houses for the poor in Appalachia with a group of teenagers you don’t know, audition for a play when your knees are shaking. Speak up when you’re scared, sing when you’re terrified, protect the vulnerable.

To believe in miracles.

To read when you are lonely, write when you’re confused.

Write when you’re in awe.

(Awe is grateful with a mix of beautiful.)

When you are empty, give something away.

To make all birthday cakes from scratch and Halloween costumes by hand.

That there is power in prayer and voting is a privilege.

To recognize the metaphor in virtually everything.

******

My oldest sister taught me that a boy should think you are beautiful but not know why.

That listening is an act of generosity.

My middle sister taught me that the Beatles were a band

That hip huggers were cool

And a secret code to knock on the wall between our bedrooms at night. Pay attention. You will need to know this: One knock meant yes, two meant no, three meant I love you, four meant I hate you, and five meant come into my room.

*****

Somebody taught me that I think too much, talk too much, have no sense of direction but have a high pain tolerance, and promptly respond but seldom initiate.

Almost everything I think about myself, I absorbed from someone else. I’m still learning what has value and what to put in the discard pile.

*****

What’s your story, and who told it to you? You really need to know this because if you repeat the story you were told about you long enough, your story becomes the teller of you.

So, here’s what I’ve learned about you. (Check for accuracy.)

You like to read.

You are quick to laugh. (I love that about you. It’s my favorite thing.)

You want to love; it’s your nature. You’re very smart, and because you are smart, you are trying not to despair.

You fear for those you love and would do anything for your children.

You really want to believe there is no reason to be afraid.

You are a little uncertain of your great-grandparents’ names.

You have stories to tell, and you think it would be awesome if others could hear them.

You know, or suspect, you have been touched by grace.

You want to be remembered, but if you are only immortalized in the way your children show up in this world, or the abiding passion with which they love their own children, that’s enough. 

And you will be sad to leave this life not because you think this is all there is but because that’s how you will say to the world, “This was beautiful, and it mattered.”

You believe in life everlasting more than you don’t, or you wouldn’t be here.

You are hoping I will convince you, and I’m trying.

Listen closely.

(Three knocks.)

******

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

My friend Brian meditates five hours a day while running a successful multi-state business. We started as editor /writer and are now Zoom friends. We’ve never met.

Brian texts me that there is only one guaranteed path to self-love, the basis of all spiritual growth, and it is not relationship. (My theory.)

Which you do with others.

Which involves food, wine, and eye contact.

It’s meditation. Which you do alone.

“You do you,” I text Brian. I add a happy face emoji, then delete without sending.

Because I’m joking. And intrigued. I do get it that to love yourself, you need to be in control of your mind monkeys (those things you regret, those fears you imagine), which means you must be present. But meditating five hours a day? How about five minutes, I ask Brian? I can do five minutes.

Well, now, that’s a lie, he says.

Brian sends me a comprehensive history of Hinduism to encourage me on my limp to enlightenment. He warns that it will only make sense if I’m ready for it. This kind of bothers me. I’m deeply resistant to “us and them” organizations and ideologies. I want to be picked so I’m part of “us,” then I immediately drop out because I’m uncomfortable not including “them.” Ask those in my brief stint in a college sorority.

It also reminds me of being a teenager and my best friend telling me she had discovered the secret of life. To life! The answer was encoded in the lyrics of a John Denver song. We were all over John Denver at the time– Rocky Mountain High Colorado! Who hasn’t belted out the chorus in the car?

Oh.

And neither have I.

She wouldn’t tell me what the secret was. I had to come to it on my own. So, I internally hummed along. He was born in the summer of his 27th year…(we were 17, but okay), coming home to a place he’d never been before… I started to guess—wildly. Love? Is love the key to every door? We were on the phone. Forgiveness? Compassion?

The key, it was revealed since I couldn’t figure it out, is self-love. That club I’m still trying to get into.

In meditation, (sigh, thank you Brian), I see that the greatest obstacle to self-love is self-forgiveness. My immediate thought is that I don’t have that authority, but here’s why this is so important. People I trust assure me that if I don’t love myself, I can’t truly love anyone else. My love is a facsimile. A knockoff. This is a huge worry. As if all the people I think my love warms and protects, have been out there in 30-degree weather without coats. And I certainly feel like I love others, including you. But maybe it’s imposter love. Counterfeit.

So, to that end, and based on Brian’s claim, I decide to make a concentrated effort to find self-love in the now. I order a lotus mat to enhance my meditation experience. It’s made of needles reminiscent of the mats on which yogis meditate. I ordered it because my mother taught me that if a little is good, more is better, that suffering makes you a better person, and that if there are two ways of doing something, you should always choose the hardest way. Check, check, and check. Meditation is enlightening? Let’s do her on a bed of nails!

I take my mat from its packaging and unroll it on the living room rug while Lester Holt explains all the extremely bad news, which usually begins with the weather somewhere else and goes downhill from there. On my back, I arrange myself gingerly on my needle mat in my jeans and a sweater. It’s a weird sensation and not too bad, so I lift the back of my sweater to get the full effect.

 Aie yi yi. I can see why this may work. You’re in enough pain that when you get off the thing you feel good! You could also hit yourself in the head with a hammer to achieve this effect.

I leave my needle mat at home and take my conventional mat to a yoga class. When the teacher says softly, “And if this is available to you, bend your left foot behind your head while balancing on your elbow,” I’m going for it—inevitably attempting the most challenging option (thanks, Mom). I’m also glancing around the room to see if I’m doing this correctly because sometimes I think we are all still bent over with our foreheads on our knees, only to realize everyone else stood up two minutes ago.

I come home thinking about that phrase, “if it’s available to you.”  Is self-love available to me? I’ve been trying for so long. I can remember a time when I was very young, maybe five when I would scrub away the summer day as the call of the whippoorwill drifted in through the window screen. I’d slip on my pale blue shortie pajamas, then run downstairs to tell my mother that I was brand-spanking new, ready to start my life right then and there. I felt like a rocket on the launch pad, powered up and prepared for lift-off without coordinates.

I was so sure, in those moments, looking up at her at the kitchen sink, hands in the dishwater, watching the sun set over the pasture, that I could do and be anything in the world if I just tried hard enough. The coordinates were for whatever I was to become, and she was my witness.

I thought then that everything was a matter of choice and work. Now, I suspect some kind of divine osmosis is necessary—some kind of surrender to a power that can love me more than I love myself. But. I am still my mother’s child.

If being able to truly love others requires a near-impossible posture held on a bed of nails, I’m going for it.

Stand by, beloveds, stand by.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.