I recently recited this story for a story slam with the Nebraska Writers Collective and the Omaha Public Library.



I believe that deja vu is your soul’s way of telling you you’re on the right path. Unfortunately, I haven’t had deja vu since, I don’t even know, maybe high school. I’ve been happy, growing, learning, but as far as I can tell, I haven’t quite figured out where I’m going in this world.

Almost two years ago, during a great debate about free will, someone I was in love with told me that he heard some Native American tribes believed that feathers showed you your path. That your ancestors laid them to tell you where you were supposed to be. Since then I’ve seen a feather every day but maybe 5—almost 2 years. I’m an active person. I see feathers in the woods. I work downtown. I see pigeon feathers on the streets. Even on days I don’t leave my house, some down feather will poke through a pillow or blanket and surprise me. Feathers everywhere, every day. I thought maybe the feathers were attached to him. That he was part of my path.

About the same time I found out about my feathers, I purchased what I hoped would be the ultimate road trip vehicle for my price range. A Jeep Compass. In less than 2 years I’ve put over 30,000 miles on my Jeep, largely due to best friend roadtripping with my friend Karyn.

Our first road trip was down to Stillwater Oklahoma to run a 50K race that we decided to sign up for 16 days before race day. We ran out of gas on the way down there—as I said it was my first road trip in a new vehicle—and had to get rescued by a state trooper, we got lead the wrong way in the race and ran farther than the 31 miles, and Karyn got a massive case of IT band syndrome—an overuse injury caused by us signing up to run 31 miles on a whim with little training. But there were feathers every day.

Our next road trip took us to Colorado for a wedding and mountain miles. By this time the feathers were becoming a real thing for me. I was starting to believe in them. Feather! Karyn and I screech at each other every time we’d spot a feather on the trail. This road trip we found that Jeeps have this neat feature where they basically power down before they overheat. Good for not overheating bad because we were stranded on the interstate not knowing what was going on. Next a trip to Kansas City where my struts went bad then our most recent trip to Steamboat where we had to leave my mom’s car there because it died. Just know that there’s always a car problem and always feathers in my life.

I thought with my feathers all around me that I didn’t need deja vu. That the feathers were my substitute. That even though this is nothing like what I thought my life would be like and even though I couldn’t imagine my future much beyond next week, I was doing fine. I didn’t think I was floundering. I’m stable. I have a house. I have a full time job. I have money saved. I’m not floundering. Then I had a dream and I died in it. They say when you die in dreams, it means big change is coming.

So I went to a reiki healer. To cleanse my shit, maybe help me read the feathers and my own intuition rather than just going with the flow and assuming I’m fine. The reiki healer had never heard that feathers show us our path, but she did believe they are sent to us by our ancestors to tell us we are loved. On our next best friend road trip—a road trip one of my clients sent us on to help me get over the love of my life feather guy—we went to the Black Hills to run in the forests. On our way home to Nebraska, I hit a huge ass black bird and it got stuck in the grill of the Jeep and we had to pry it out with the window washer things at the gas station. That’s not how I wanted to see my feathers.

Combine me dream dying, the dead bird, a Trump presidency, a refugee crisis, and getting broken up with by someone who tells you “I love you, but with all the effort that goes into caring about a relationship and all the shit in the world and love just isn’t worth the stress ” and I really felt like this is it. Time for the ultimate last road trip. Abandon all of my things, throw my dog in the car and hit the road and run away from all of it and live in the mountains in a Jeep by the river. There. Change. Done. Even better, living in the woods gets you off the grid. I was in Colorado running through the trees when the Charlottesville protests were happening living in ignorant bliss. Trump’s America makes it even harder to come back to regular life. How bad is it that I just called Trump’s America part of regular life? If that’s the case. Yes. I’m out.

However, even though I am a runner, inside me there is still this sane, responsible, stable person trying to talk the runner into compromise. So I’m selling all of my shit before I throw my dog in the car and I’m not giving up the good fight.

I thought I’d get to end this story telling you that it’s coming—my ultimate road trip—moving across the country to do good work for good people and make a difference. I had a job interview in Washington State 2 weeks ago and wrote this piece on the plane ride there. When the hiring manager picked me up from the airport, he had a giant feather sitting on his dash. A feather! A sign! This is my path! But I didn’t get the job.

So I don’t know that this story has an end yet. I don’t know where the road is taking me next. As I was going through boxes of crap in my basement, I found pictures from my first ever best friend road trip. In the fifth grade, my friend Carrie’s parents took us to the Black Hills. I took a disposable camera and in the stack of photos from this trip, there were probably 18 pictures from the inside of fucking Cabelas. Of taxidermy wildlife. I sat on the floor of my basement this weekend looking at the photos of fake animals on fake mountains and felt damn happy that on my most recent trip to the Black Hills I climbed to the highest peak and found real life mangy ass mountain goats with beards and missing patches of fur and all up there.

You know why it doesn’t freak me out that my car keeps breaking down on these road trips? Because I come home and I take it to a mechanic and they fix it. But being a human is really hard. There’s no one to fix things or no users manual or maps. I’m floundering. I’m wandering in the woods grasping for feathers, looking for some sign that I’m doing it right. The only thing I’ve figured out so far is that it IS all worth it. My best friend in those pictures, that group of people over there who love me, all of you people I don’t know—that’s why I can’t drive into the woods and never come out. I’m not taking the paved path, the path with taxidermy wildlife either. I’m out in it and the trip isn’t over and that’s OK. There’s nothing else to do but keep moving forward.

I wrote something! Well, I've been working on writing a lot of things, but here is something newly published:

http://www.kysoflash.com/Issue8/GesellRetribution.aspx

Here are the first 5 pages of a long (53 page) short story I've been working on the last few weeks. I've submitted it to an anthology of ghost stories, so cross your fingers for me that they might want it. It's dark, creepy (I hope as that's my intention at least), set in 1974:

The Volunteer

The St. Mary’s School for Troubled Girls looked exactly as it should. Creepy as fuck. It loomed through the trees as Hazel guided her 1964 Rambler along the gravel road to the school where she would be volunteering. She drove with the windows down and let her chopped brown hair whip around her face.

St. Mary’s School for Troubled Girls got bigger and darker when she turned onto the drive and stopped at the gate. Bushes cut like elephants and horses littered the lawn and the November sun suddenly disappeared behind blackened clouds enveloping the school. How stereotypical, Hazel thought. She reached out the window to buzz the bell to the gate, but it creaked open before she could touch the button. The gate was tall—over twelve feet, she figured—and attached to a brick wall, just as tall, covered with wire that hummed quietly. Electric.

Hazel parked in the lot in front of the school, threw her backpack over her shoulder, grabbed her suitcase from the backseat with her right hand, squeezed a red stress ball in her left hand, and walked to the door. It opened before she had a chance to knock.

She entered the building and set her suitcase down so that she could put her sunglasses on her head. An old woman with sunken cheeks shuffled out from behind the door and motioned to take Hazel’s bag. “No,” Hazel told her, certain the woman wouldn’t be able to carry the suitcase anyway, “I’ll keep it. Are you in charge? My parents sent me here to volunteer for a week.” They sent me here to “volunteer” so that I realize “how good life is,” she added in her brain. 

The woman said nothing, but raised her hand, pointing a bent and gnarled finger down the hall. Hazel’s eyes followed the finger. The entire room was dark wood, almost black. Lamps hung from the walls at intervals like streetlights, barely illuminating enough space to feel lit, let alone feel like a place where Troubled Girls could grow and prosper. Hazel had no idea where the old lady was pointing, other than down the hall, but Hazel picked her suitcase back up, rolled her shoulders back, and set off.

She didn’t have to go far before reaching a door with Headmistress Davis on a plaque outside. Hazel raised her hand to knock, but the door opened before she could strike.  Again Hazel entered a room without seeing who held the door for her. Headmistress Davis stepped into view, offering her hand to Hazel. “You must be Miss Pickett.”

Hazel set her suitcase down and took the headmistress’s hand, wanting to gag at immediate touch. The hand was huge—meaty and cold and totally unfitting the average-looking woman in front of her. A flutter of warm air danced on the back of her neck and Hazel reexamined the woman in front of her.

“You may call me Headmistress Davis,” Davis said and, though she still stood only as tall as Hazel—five foot five—and was no wider than thirty seconds ago, the headmistress seemed to take up the entire room.

Hazel shivered before she could stop the spasm running up her spine. It felt like someone was breathing on her. She resisted the urge to rub her neck and, instead, crushed the stress ball with her left hand and held the headmistress’s gaze.

“You will be staying in the quarters with the high school aged girls. They’re your age chronologically, but most of them will not act it.” Headmistress Davis dropped Hazel’s hand and moved forward. Hazel backed out of the way and the headmistress exited the office still talking. “St. Mary’s has a long history of housing girls. We pride ourselves at giving these girls a decent home in Christian charity where some will learn skills to be functional in the real world. Others our best hope is to give them a place to stay and not be a burden on their parents until the state assumes responsibility for them either in jail or an asylum for adults. We do not practice any physical instruments of change like you might hear of in horror stories, but we do believe in firm discipline and structure.” The headmistress kept two steps ahead of Hazel. Even when Hazel tried to speed up and walk side by side with the woman, the pace was unreachable, like the hallway carpet was pulling the headmistress along and working against Hazel in the opposite direction. A slight pressure built in her chest. She tensed and released her grip on the stress ball and tried to keep her breath steady.

She followed the headmistress up a flight of narrow stairs. The dark wood closed in even closer than in the hall. Where were all of the girls, Hazel wondered. It was Sunday. Surely the girls weren’t in classes on the weekend too at this school? Shouldn’t there be shrill voices and laughing and, well, human noise? Even deep in the belly of the old house she could hear the wind groan outside. The pressure from her chest moved to her stomach and she felt seasick, like the stairs shifted beneath her feet and she tripped, reaching for a handrail, finding none, and landing with her palms and shins banging against the steps.

“Whoa, there.” Headmistress Davis reached to help Hazel, but the girl recoiled at the thought of the woman’s touch.

“I’m fine,” Hazel said.

“Should’ve grabbed the handrail.” The headmistress looked down her long nose at Hazel then turned and continued up the stairs.

Hazel, again, felt that warm breath across the back of her neck. There was a fucking handrail? She crawled back to stand, forced herself to swallow and push down any panic or annoyance that bubbled up from her stomach, and followed the headmistress.

Davis led her to the highest part of the house. The stairs stayed still and the handrail followed them all the way up to the attic.

“This is the biggest room in the house. Since most of our girls are high school aged, they take this room as their living quarters. You’ll stay here with them.” The headmistress opened the door and the chit chatter that spilled out sounded foreign, after only hearing the wind beat the house, even though Hazel had been listening for the sounds of girls earlier. The prater didn’t last long. As soon as the headmistress’s shadow fell past the doorframe, the girls hushed.

Hazel tipped her chin up to see over Davis’s shoulder. The room reminded her of the twisted version of the Madeline books her nanny, Rhonda, used to read her at bedtime. Rows of cots to tuck girls in at night, but the girls scattered around the room were not cute little French schoolgirls wearing yellow hats and dresses. No. These were Troubled Girls.

Two of the dozen or so girls were, clearly, very pregnant. Several of the girls looked to be showing varying degrees of mental retardation and were mixed about the room reading, playing with dolls, doing puzzles, or sitting alone. Nearest the door, there were two girls, one with sunken eyes and yellow skin and one with a long scar down her right cheek, that looked alert and took a long survey of Hazel when the Headmistress step to the side, exposing Hazel to the room. 

“Ladies,” Headmistress Davis said. “This is Miss Pickett. She is going to be volunteering with us for the next week. She’ll be staying with you. She’ll be here to help you with your studies or any of your needs. As with anyone whom you encounter, treat her as you would like to be treated and, when appropriate, share with her God’s goodness.”

The entire room of eyes took in Hazel’s person. Hazel didn’t smile. She didn’t raise a hand to wave or nod. She picked up her suitcase and took two steps into the room. Headmistress Davis slipped behind Hazel and out of the room closing the door behind her.

There was a beat of silence during which, in her mind, Hazel heard the Headmistress say volunteer again. Sarcastically. Like she thought Hazel was like these girls and belonged here longer than a week. Like Hazel was a Troubled Girl.

The two girls near the door turned back to their conversation. Some of the others went back to their playing. One of the retarded girls walked, with a limp, up to Hazel and stood in front of her. The girl wore denim overalls that were too short. Her hair hung in greasy pigtails and one side of her upper lip seemed stuck curled, exposing a snaggletooth. Her hands were ridged claws at her chest. The girl stared at Hazel.

“Hey,” Hazel said.

The girl shrieked and snorted and put one of her knotted hands over her mouth.

“Jesus, Julie. Get out of her face.” One of the girls near the door, the one with the scar, walked toward Hazel. She rubbed her forearms as she gave Hazel a slow once over.

Hazel took the girl in as well. Scars zig-zagged across the girl’s forearms like she’d stuck them through a barbed wire fence over and over, but Hazel assumed that wasn’t true. Hazel had tried pills. Rhonda found Hazel and gagged her while they waited for the ambulance. Hazel wondered if a razor would’ve worked faster.

Five things I have thought this week:

1. If you pause and ask yourself if you should or should not wear a sloth shirt, that is not a question. You should always wear a sloth shirt.

2. Why do I want to hid under the covers when Liz Lemon reaches out to stroke Peter Dinklage on the head because she thinks he is a child, but laugh my ass off when Dave Chapelle talks about raping feet?

3. Ed Sheeran must be a god to red heads everywhere, because he is even on the hip-hop station.

4. Lots of my friends posted pictures of them with their babies for Mother's Day and I took a picture of me gardening with my dog. I'm sure they love their children, but I'm going to take a moment to assume those babies where no more help gardening than Yadi was and he doesn't poo or pee in the house or wake me up at night. He does shed, though, and roll in dead things sometimes. Tit for tat, I guess.

5. I wave and give seven blessings to every car that actually stops at their stop signs and doesn't run me over. Seven blessings is from Game of Thrones, but I can only think of three blessings I'd give to someone: Health, Happiness, and Love, but three blessings sounds pathetic.

     There are four men I've never met who had great influence on me. Together, they are The Beatles. It has been pointed out to me, recently, that these men I do not know but I love, may have lead me slightly astray. "All you need is love," The Beatles told me. The argument came that life is hard and love isn't all you need. You also need food, water, shelter, support, feelings of self-worth, and the list goes on and on and on. Basically, it's not enough to love a baby to help it grow into a functioning human. It's not enough to love your friend to be a good friend--you also have to make time for them and listen. It's not enough to love your significant other--you also have to consider their feelings/thoughts/schedules. You get the picture.

     "It's easy!" The Beatles also told me. This part I agree with. Loving is easy. I think the work comes in choosing to act on that love. To listen, to make time, to consider someone else, to support, all of it. OK, I get this. I see where I was wrong. Today while I was running, though, I was thinking about self-love. Sometimes it's not easy to love yourself. And when that happens all of the other choices--self-worth, support, taking time for yourself--all of the things you might do for someone else you love fall out the window when it comes to loving you.

    I've tricked myself into believing that I am really good a self-love, because I tend to be proud of my brain and like to read and learn and improve. I've only just started to see that self-love spread outward to my body as well. In college I had a not-life-threatening-but-still-not-healthy eating disorder--I ate, but very strictly, tracked every calorie and was in a constant battle to get the calories out number as high as I could and the calories in number lower. At my worst I weight 117 pounds and had 11% body fat. Even that skinny, I didn't love my body--it was just a vehicle getting me around.

     The first two years after college I gained my Friends Fifteen, so-called because my college roommates and I were homebodies and didn't go out a ton. When they moved, I had to find new friends and go out to be social. Going out meant I had to loosen up on my calorie standards. It also meant I drank more. But I didn't care as much about the weight gain because I had friends and, especially as an introvert, making friends isn't easy after college. I'd for sure thought when my roommates moved I'd be alone forever.

     When I was running today, in a sports bra and shorts, I remembered how jealous I used to be of my aunt's confidence to run in only a sports bra. I never would've done this when I weighed twenty pounds less. The last few years, it's been a no brainer for me--why not be cooler and get a tan? Then, because I was running and thinking is what I do while I run, I realized how much I love my body. It has taken me up and down mountains, ran, biked, and swam thousands of miles and lifted hundreds of pounds.  And keeps me living. My body is truly an amazing thing.

     Then I remembered why I started running in just a sports bra. It's not because I look like a super model in it (I wish I could post you a meme here of what I wish I looked like--see Baywatch--and what I actually look like--sweaty with a lil chunk, hot mess--but I'm not tech savvy and would have no idea who to make said meme). It's because I did it to prove someone wrong. A few years ago I started seeing a guy. The first time this guy saw my stomach he said, "Huh. I thought you'd look like a personal trainer." I said, "What does that mean." "I just thought, you'd, you know, have abs," he said. The part of me that was raised by several bad-ass, independent women wanted to say, "Whoa. Who the hell do you think you are to say that to me and who do you think you are that the .001% of the female population with abs would ever hook up with you, Moobs and Muffin-top?" He totally had man boobs and a fluffy belly. A bigger part of me, told myself to be nice, you love yourself and he probably has body image issues that he's taking out on you. The Daddy Issues side of me would've made out with him anyway. It was summer. It was 100% humidity and 90 degrees. I, pissed off at being called chunky, started to run with my belly out.

     I'm not saying that I let some dude's opinion of my body dictate what I did/do. But I did choose how I let his statement affect how I see myself. Everything you experience is through your filter and yours only. You get to choose who you love and how you love about everyone around you including yourself. I hope you take any negativity and filter it back through into a fire that makes you stronger, makes your love for you better. It's not easy, but all you need to do is to choose that love. I've never posted something #wcw and I've never posted a picture of my muscles, but today I want to give a long overdue shout out to my body. I'm a hard person to deal with sometimes, but I'm going to choose to keep loving me inside and out.

My boyfriend asked me when we first started dating
what my favorite part of my body was. I said my eyebrows.
He thought that was weird. I do have killer eyebrows,
but it should be known I love my legs the most because
they take me all over the  world. 

You see tummy chunks and man shoulders. I see someone
who is strong and never says no to cake. What's life without cake?

Still struggling to blog. I've been working a lot on my fiction as of late, and reading a ton, but my non-fiction, i.e. blogging, is going down the toilet. I think it's because the real world is getting more and more depressing as we slip farther into Trump's presidency. Earth day is coming, though, and there is a new march brewing for our Mother Earth! As Trump poses a total joke of donating his salary as president to the Interior Department ($78,333) but plans to cut $1.5 billion from the Interior Department (the department that oversee National Parks/Monuments/Forests/Grasslands/etc), I hope to stand with friends and march for our many historical sites, national monuments, national parks, and all the great pieces of land on this country. I won't even touch on the fact that New Yorkers are paying $500,000/day for Trump's family to stay in New York either.

Last year I made a goal of traveling to one national park/year not as a hope to see as many things as I can before Trump pollutes our nation (literally and figuratively) and not because I think they'll all burn down--please see Smokey the Bear below--but because the great outdoors is the greatest place in all the land. Seriously. I know many who voted for Trump are too busy looking toward the next life to care about how much damage will be done to the here and now, but for real, I don't think I've lived yet, as I haven't been to Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon, or Redwood Forest. Not to make this all about me, Yadi, and all the billions of creatures that live in the wild also love parks and I know lots of humans do too. If nothing else, I'm sure people like clean drinking water, so go out on Earth Day and stand for your water and air quality.

Yadi and I recently took a road trip south to run in different parts of the country. I hit up a 50k in Stillwater, Oklahoma, we hiked in Oklahoma City, we ran and hike about 25 miles in Palo Duro Canyon in Texas, and then camped and ran in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge. All of those jobs of the people who sustain life in these parks and refuges, all of the people who enjoy nature, all of the plant and animal life who depend on these spaces, suffering. Our Mother Earth has given us everything and yet we continue to destroy her. If you believe in the soul of our earth, the validity of science, and if the great, great world makes your heart happy, call your representatives, march, pick up trash in your park, donate your money, become a member of our parks and don't let Trump rape our Mother. 

                                        

Yadi and I took an epic road trip in March, not to do any soul searching, but to see some of our most loved and missed people, run some miles, see some cool shit, and hang out just the two of us. Yadi was a perfect road trip buddy--he didn't complain, he didn't change the music, and he picked out good snacks. We headed south to Stillwater, OK to run a very, very muddy 50K with our friends Molly and Cade, watch FRIENDS (our favorite show), eat good food, and take a Google Earth Tour of Cade's hometown and Google Earth a 14er trip. 

Then we went even farther south to Texas to hang with our cousin (Yadi's scuzzin) and old roommate Darby. We ran trail, ate birthday cake, went to Darby's museum, ate more good food, hiked, ate more good food, got up to watch the sunrise at Palo Duro Canyon, and hiked more. 

 
Then we went to Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge and trail ran, watched the sun set on top of Scott Mountain, and camped. Then we ran, almost were killed by long-horns, ran, and came home.

I needed a break from work. I needed to see my people who live far away. I needed to be outside. I knew all of these things. What I didn't know is how much my dog needed them. Since our week of traveling and sleeping in different beds, living in different houses, and doing both in my Jeep, Yadi has lost so much anxiety. He's still an attention whore and still hates new people, but, after 3 years, I can finally leave and, instead of destroying everything in the house, he chills, apparently knowing I'll come back. Camping with my dog and having him look out for me when we were on our own (and almost being killed by longhorns) made me love him even more than I thought I could. Of course I learned things about myself taking a solo-road trip, but the best part about it was that I got to do it with Yadi. Love and Nature fix everything--even my stress ball best friend. 

I've been missing a beat in blogging. I haven't been writing, partly because I've been studying (and passing!) to become a Certified Behavior Change Specialist, mostly because it's hard for me to think of writing non-fiction. I want to hole up in a world of my own with my dog and books and the mountains. The news hurts my heart more than I ever thought possible, and I find it hard to look people in the eye sometimes. But silence is what Trump and his administration want. So I'm trying.

The day after the election I called my parents and told them that when I was kid someone touched me, kissed me, licked me all over my body when I said no. I wasn't raped. But I was violated and I hadn't told them because I never wanted them to think they'd let me down. Knowing that our country's leader has bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy" and how he'd have sex with his own daughter made me feel I had to talk--that I needed to put a face to that kind of talk. When Trump talks about grabbing some woman no one knows it's just "locker room talk", but when I say I was grabbed by the pussy, I hope at least, the people I know who voted for a rapist know that's not OK. So this is me. This is me a girl who's first knowledge of intimacy was as a child who said no, who didn't know what sex was, who was made a 1 in 4 statistic. And this is me, a woman, saying that is not OK.

My friend Elisa and I marched last month at the Omaha chapter of the Women's March on Washington. 18,000 people of all different colors, backgrounds, shapes, sizes, ages, genders--I had goosebumps, my eyes teared up. I don't think there's ever been a time in my life that I've felt so part of something so important. The next weekend my boyfriend and I went to his friends' house to write letters to our senators. We wrote on women's rights, Black Lives Matter, the immigration ban and refugees, education, alternative facts, the keystone pipeline--all of it. Using my words and my body to stand against hate helped me turn anger into physical acts I hoped could make a difference.

Betsy DeVos was voted in as secretary of education. Instead of feeling like I should give up, I watched a video of all those who spoke against her and remembered the power of words. Elizabeth Warren went straight badass today to fight against Trump's racist, Jeff Sessions. Republicans tried to silence her, but others have posted the rest of Coretta Scott King's letter. Words. A voice. I used to think I was a lover not a fighter, but I was wrong. I'm not going to run away and pretend bad things aren't happening. I'm going to stay here and fight because I love. Of course there's a perfect JK quotation for this post:

“Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.” – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Elisa and me being Nasty Women at the Women's March and Yadi as a Bad Hombre