A lovely blogging friend commented that she can see both peace and sadness in my eyes. I think I was born with the sadness. I don’t know from when or where, but it seems to have always been in the depths of me. As far as the peace is concerned, that is something that has taken extreme dedication, focus, and prayer to acquire.
This is a short story from the many writings I did in efforts to heal myself. I believe I shared this piece before but cannot remember. I spent a period of four years writing. I collected some 265 typed pages in the form of a manuscript, much of which I have shared on this blog. People have inquired about the idea of me writing a book. I used to be hyper-focused on becoming a published author, so much that it became my goal and identity. With time, I came to a deep inner peace about my works; I understood that the passion for writing a book, though a necessary passion at the time, came from a place of ego and self-want. I am not attached to publishing any longer, especially not attached to gaining monies or recognition. I pray continually for humility and what is best for my higher good and those of others. I maintain an energy of release when I write: the release of stagnant energy, the release of want, of validation, of need. I write purely in hopes of being a light and answering my calling. I put intention and healing vibration behind every word. In most of my writing there is a distinct rhythm. This rhythm is intentional, and filled with my love. If I heal along the way, that is a wonderful bonus. What is more important to me, at this point in my journey, is giving to the world. That is what life means to me.
The Fig (Based on True Events)
By Samantha Craft
In some ways, during the first year at our duplex, our home served as a transitional stopping point for strangers: a person would arrive and rent out our spare bedroom and then, as if they’d landed on the jail space on the board game of Monopoly, after a few rolls of the dice, they’d move on.
Our first roommate, kindly Jeff, a man in his early twenties, arrived a few months after Mother and I had moved in. Sprouting a fantastic full head of cherry-red clown hair, Jeff was entirely intriguing—from his gigantic gold-rimmed glasses to the smooth glass eye with an iris-blue center he’d pop out from time to time and let me examine up close in my hand. Jeff had a puttering V.W. Bug that jerked and spat and carried us to fancy places like the local Taco Bell and the red-boxed television booth at the corner Lucky grocery store where I could watch Woody Woodpecker cartoons. Sometimes, my favorite sometimes, Jeff carried home his work case laden with the grocery store price numbers, each type housed in its own tiny pull out drawer. They were a hard flexible-plastic, nothing I’d seen or touched before. These clear drawers and the miniature treasures inside each drawer out rated any old doll house in my book.
For a very short while, Ruth, an eccentric plump puppeteer with wiry-white hair, lived in our home. She also had a case, but a much more impressive wooden one which housed her enormous stringed-puppets. Though the puppeteer wasn’t with us long, I fondly recall her performing puppet shows with her life-sized floppy marionettes out on our front patio.
I post love on my blog, on my social network page, and admit love to my friends.
It’s been very freeing and healing.
I’ve also been processing through past relationships with men.
Until last week, I saw myself as a real victim in love relationships.
In the beginning of my “dating” years, which actually started at age five, (No kidding; I always loved boys. My first “date” was at Keith’s house, where he introduced me to his favorite delicacy, peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches. I politely gagged.)….
In the beginning of my boyfriend-girlfriend years, I attracted very safe males: sweet, kind, friendly, and truthful. I was fortunate to have two boyfriends in high school (at separate times), after I moved back to California, that treated me with the up most respect and love. But something shifted at about the age of twenty. Perhaps it was being away from my extended family and not having a father that adored me. Or perhaps the shift was brought on by insecurities surrounding college or finally “growing up.” Regardless, at the age of twenty I began falling for whomever paid attention to me. For seven years my relations with men were bleak and tumultuous.
So often, in my twenties, the man I “chose” was addicted or abusive or both. I felt used physically, and was often dumped out like last week’s beer bottles—left clanging and spinning down a steep hill of depression. For years and years I blamed these men for their character and callousness. I cringed at the thought of these people not loving ME! How could they not? What was wrong with me?
A few days ago, I suddenly had a knowing. I suddenly saw in full picture, a truth. I wasn’t a victim. I wasn’t used and tossed out. There wasn’t a right person or wrong person in my sexual drama. I attracted men at the same level I was at spiritually and emotionally. (I had to leave out mentally, and just giggle. I was always smarter! Lol.)
But most telling, I realized at the center core of me the profound truth: that in fact I USED THEM.
In my mind I had thought that their “crime” was using me physically; and how could any crime be worse than that type of invasion? However, my crime was equal. I was a “villain” too. I used them. I chose to be with a man I didn’t like and didn’t respect, in order to not be alone. I used men!
Suddenly this ah-ha moment swept me away, and time stopped. I traveled back to a dozen relationships, and revisited and swept clean the energy attachment. Within seconds, I’d forgiven the men and myself. The labels were released. The words of scumbag, loser, liar, addict, etc. that I applied to the men, vanished. And then, presto, the labels slut, stupid, blinded, desperate that I’d branded to my energy field disappeared too! I began to see the men as other spirits on their journey. I began to see I was never victimized. I understood that using is using, whether it be of flesh or emotion. And then I released the using label, too. We weren’t using. We just were. We were existing, surviving, journeying. We just were. And so it goes.
(notice the tone of this…written before my ah-ha moment.)
The highlight of my dating career had to be the season I spent with the habitual lying, sexually addicted Don—a spineless man five years my senior who behaved ten years my junior. At first glance I’d fallen head-over-sandals in love with Don. The summer day he confidently strode through the Catholic daycare where I worked, I’d tucked myself halfway behind a shelf of books and drooled over his perpetually sun-kissed skin. He was everything I’d wanted, dark and handsome, and tall enough to look down at me with his bedroom eyes.
The times Don and I were together weaved in and out sporadically through a span of half a decade. When I first met Don he was separated from wife number one; when I last reunited with Don, he was struggling to patch it up with wife number two. I was the in-between, but one Don swore up and down he intended to marry.
The majority of our relationship played out like an ill-plotted soap opera, with me as the dimwitted, star-struck mistress and Don as the notorious villain.
There were definite reasons I stuck around. With Don came a familiarity of unpredictability. He was my locomotive, the one I could catch a ride on and speed through the world with a view I remembered—one of constant change and chaos.
For a long while, I’d do anything I could to win Don over. I’d forgive his shortcomings and mysterious disappearing acts, and demean myself in different ways.
In our first months together, when I was still hopeful, there’d been major red flags. Don had no home phone number or address. His scorned, soon to be ex-wife, had warned me to have nothing to do with Don. And Don’s truck was mysteriously breaking down, in an accident, short on gas, or had a flat tire, many of the nights he was supposed to be with me.
I was good at rationalizing his actions and taking his lies as truth. I found reasons to stay, like the fact that Father liked Don and that Don eventually showed up.
I was twenty-years-old and newly accepted into the teaching credential program at the university the weekend I learned of Don’s other woman. It was either the Saturday I’d scrubbed Don’s toilet, or the time I’d obsessively lined his kitchen shelves; no matter, it was the eventful afternoon I came face-to-face with a woman out for blood.
I’d been oblivious of course, hadn’t a clue Don had flirted with a seventeen year old outside of the construction site where he worked, slept with her, and possibly fathered her baby.
For some time there had been hints of another woman. All along Don had pushed back our framed photos or even turned them face down, forgetting to place them back up in their right position when I arrived. And I love you posters and cards I had made for Don had been rearranged on the wall or re-taped in another room of his cheap apartment.
The one of many climatic events of our relationship began with a loud knock at the door, an initially startling noise that momentarily displaced me, until I assumed Don missed another rent payment or lost another spousal support check. By the second series of knocks, I’d headed toward the front door, and would have unlocked the knob, if Don had not, in one swift pull, yanked me backwards by the tail of my shirt and whispered, “Don’t.”
It was then I heard her voice for the first time, a high-pitched scream to the tune of: “Open the damn door, Don. I know you are in there.”
I wasn’t that far gone in my oblivion love state, not to recognize the voice of another woman. With immediacy I scowled at Don like he’d taken my only prized possession, and pushed my palms into his chest, wanting to hurt him like he’d just pained me.
Don stepped back, taking my hands into his, and mouthing, “I’m sorry. I love you. I only love you.” He then released my hands and tugged down nervously on his neon-green tank top. “I meant to tell you. I swear,” he said, widening his dark eyes in remorse like I’d seen him do a dozen times before. “If I told you, if you found out, I was afraid you’d leave me. And she was a horrible mistake. I didn’t want her to be the reason we lost such a good thing. I love you so much. You know I do. You have to trust me.”
Before I could make up my mind about what to do, there was one final series of knocks, and the voice came again, only louder and more determined: “If you don’t open this damn door, I’m going to kick it down!”
What happened next still amazes me, and proves once again the strength that can be found in pure rage. Within a few seconds of her last knock, there was one heavy kick of her foot, followed by several more, and then, without warning the door broke off of its hinges, the side paneling splintering, and the whole of the door slammed down inside the apartment.
There, amongst the settling dust, in marched a skinny girl, no taller than five-feet, cradling a screaming newborn in her arms. Boiling with revenge, she charged Don like some creature from a Japanese horror flick, with her arms outstretched growling for revenge. On reaching Don, she punched him once in the chest and then shoved the baby at him. “Take her!” she ordered, back stepping and turning her head with a whip of her dirty-blond hair.
From behind the couch, I tracked the baby’s wrinkled arms flailing, and then gasped as the girl moved towards me. Her eyes were on fire as she shouted at full-throttle, “I’m going to kill you, Bitch!”
Without thought, I ducked around Don and attempted to make my way to the doorway. Don didn’t waste anytime. Before I had a chance to maneuver myself around the girl, Don had tossed the baby on the couch, grabbed his bike, carried it down the apartment stairs, and rode off.
For a few seconds both the girl and I stared out the doorway with disbelief, and then we stared down at the tiny infant crying on the couch, until the girl’s raging eyes met mine, and she roared, “You’re dead!”
From where she stood, prepared to launch, I could smell my scent on her, the expensive bottle of perfume I received from my father for my birthday, which had recently gone missing from my bathroom shelf.
As the girl stormed forward, I managed to swerve around her. She lunged at me, barely swiping my shoulder. I jumped over a small ottoman, snatched up my car keys and practically flew down a flight of concrete stairs.
In the narrow carport, I started my sedan and backed up. Just as I was about to turn out of the apartment complex, the frenzied girl’s enormous boat-of-a-station wagon came charging forward and blocked my way out.
Seconds later, leaving the baby wailing on the front seat of the car, the girl marched across the parking lot to my car window and ordered, “Roll down your window!”
Caught between a place of disbelief and hysteria, I shook my head and whimpered, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
The girl’s face turned from one of frozen-ice to empathetic-disgust. She tapped on the glass of the window a few times, and then rolled her eyes up letting out a long heavy sigh. Finally, seemingly understanding my predicament, she waved me off with a shake of her hand, before stomping back to her car.
After she sped off, I remained in the parking lot, uncertain of what I’d gotten myself into, and more uncertain of how I would ever find my way out of my contorted labyrinth.
One midday, beneath the shade of a leaning cypress tree, after the late-spring sea fog had lifted, I stared out to the crashing waves with a grave impassivity. In the past years, I’d grown deeply attached to the ocean side town. I believed in a sense we were one, the town and I, joined together in the same way the redwood trees unite their roots underground.
Aggrieved and spiraling with emotions like a blender on high-speed, I replayed Mother’s words, her promises; there would be new bedroom furniture and a private school, and a nice house. I could wear a school uniform like Jane.
Mother had strolled into my room twenty-minutes earlier with a confident air and found me absorbed in my sticker collection book, categorizing each sticker by theme. I was on the butterfly page. There were 33 butterflies—one more butterfly than fairies. Mother had a faraway look, a deep and distant gaze that made me think she was traveling with the angels in the sky or the dolphins in the sea. I knew innately from all my years with Mother that she was happy; and so I also knew she wasn’t going to tell me her boyfriend Ben was finally leaving; still, I held onto the hope, even though all the signs pointed in the opposite direction.
Now as much as I love, love, love someone else doing the dishes and fretting about dinner, the trade-off of viral bronchitis—so not worth it!
Seems some nasty bug is circulating the state, well at least this town. Watch out for the attack. Not fun in the least.
Picture red plastic cup marked “phlegm” and me in blue medical mask, and endless hacking. Fever seems to have FINALLY subsided; at least I no longer ache in places I didn’t know existed. And the paranoid thoughts of being the very first person to die of the new viral outbreak, set to kill 10% of the population, have stopped. At least for the most part.
Still I’m left rib-bruised, out of breath, and wondering what happened during the month of September, beyond what I learned from season eight of Grey’s Anatomy and seasons one through eight (yes, eight seasons) of Everybody Loves Raymond.
The good news is I’m in love! Yes. I am. His name is Robert.
He is a fictional character on the show Everybody Loves Raymond, a very tall, insecure Italian who is just one giant adorable bear. Though I realize the episodes are over a decade old (and therefore Robert is in his fifties now), and that Robert is fictional, and thusly doesn’t really exist, I am in love nonetheless. He’s more attainable than the young wealthy god-like creature in the Shades of Grey series anyhow.
When I was having fever dreams, during the early stages of my illness, my dreams were related to the fictional character Robert, (or to dimensional time travel during the era of futuristic war-ridden earth). I didn’t dream of Robert. I dreamt his dreams. Yes, indeed, in my fever-state I believed I was Robert. After over 100 episodes I imagine our minds had molded together in someway. As Robert, I dreamt as Robert, and had dreams about his circumstances that befell him while on the show. Yes, I had fictional character anxiety dreams. Who would have thought that was even possible?
Dreaming I was Robert was far better than the jumping from one dimension to the next dimension dreams, to recruit and “save” people who would make good warriors back on earth for the alien battle we’d soon be fighting. There was a sophisticated screening mechanism for determining what individuals were suitable to be pretty much kidnapped from their dimension and brought back to ours. Basically, if your life sucked, and probably would continue to suck, or lead to early death, or harm to others, we stole you. Nice mind I have. Don’t you think?
So that’s what I do when I’m sick: Watch lots of television, obsess about all the feasible ways of expiring, kidnap people in other dimensions, and fall in love with fictional characters. Probably not too far off the mainstream. That and write poetry—when the head’s not pounding and I’m not catching phlegm in a cup.
~~~~~
Love Leaves
I shall not tread
Into thy dark night
A cornucopia of lost cause
Landscape stripped barren
By voice of horned trumpet
Melody suffocated by circumstance
Mind bled out by tourniquet expired
Whistle blown at ruptured drum
Bleakness wrapped as toy for infant
Revealed broken, rusted blade
When torn
Open, his tangled mane made web of longing
Prepped and fondued to tempt desire
Lion’s thirst, a churning ache
Thick swallowed whole
Harbored
A chest plate of veins, pulsing blue
Tulips turned stone
Roots in mire
Crushed sweet
Gone
Sour echo vines and chokes
Stiffens in eradication
Layers thick upon cake of earth
Stomped brittle leaves remain
Rocked forth
In cradle of you
~ Sam Craft, Sept. 2012
~~~~~
Love Enters
Love enters
Starlit glow aflame
Beauty infinite
Whispers honey
Recognition formed
Beyond womb
Of mother’s promise
As feather set upon chariot wind
I move within your substance
The sound of songbirds assembles
Lullaby of cherubs
And silence
He knows not
How to exist
When I am filled
With your beckoning
~ Sam Craft, Sept 2012
And this video Explains Exactly How I felt during my illness
The King he coughed, and then hoarsely spout, “I’ve had quite the battle, of this no doubt.” He hovered there, in chamber room’s sheets, his face pale white, despite the heat. He stretched his neck, and cracked his knuckles, and adjusted his bedclothes with a string-like buckle.
I sat in the corner, unseen but there, my ears alert, my mind aware. I’d heard the story of Dragon V and how Noble King had battled thee. But now to see King living still, after all the tales, I shook with chill. And wondered too, if Dragon had left, or stood behind curtains with fiery breath.
I sneezed aloud, and heart sank low, would Dragon appear, and make me his foe?
“God Bless You, lad,” the King did say, and turned down his covers to reveal a tray, of turnips and broth, and chicken legs full, and desserts untouched, by this noble who ruled. “Can’t eat them; no want. Help yourself if you wish. Can’t even stand to look at the dish.” He adjusted his pillow, then fanned his full face, coughed up some more, before finding his place.
“Now, where was I?” he mumbled, his lips parched and dry, his skin lacking luster, the red in his eyes.
“Oh, yes, fine lad, listen, while I whisper a word, about the fierce Dragon, no doubt that you’ve heard.
I call him Dragon V, the v stands for venom;
his poison is hot, from the land of fierce demons.
At first Dragon whispers, and the fire is null,
still knight’s eyes gather tears, and do slightly swell.
But then Dragon breathes, and his flame rises swift,
and ghost enters the ears, and causes a rift.
Then there is burning, and acute subtle itch,
until comes the night, and ears ooze and they twitch.
This pain is rather meager, simple indeed,
compared to where Dragon next turns to feed.
He enters the head, and burns up so hot,
that knight cannot tell boot from his pot.
The Dragon’s heat strong, climbs fierce and then falls,
leaving King in his bedclothes all soaked in a ball.
Bed covers too, are wet with foul rain,
which must be the body weeping in pain.
This happens trice, the heat pattern clear,
three moons pass, with muddled thought and wetness severe,
Next, he takes hold, this Dragon mad,
and pounds at the whole head with his strong iron clad.
Dragon releases, after throb-filled days,
only to take harbor, in the lungs straight away.
Now comes the spit, the cough and the hack,
that starts at the ribs and stabs behind back.
Gasping and wheezing are familiar sounds now,
bringing yellow-yoke present, sunrise from sundown.
This lasts the longest, the spitting of yoke,
the catching of breath that resembles a choke.
So withered and wrung out, so weathered and worn,
tis the greatest of battles, of this I have sworn.”
The king took a breath then, and I could hear what he meant: How the Dragon still lived, for King’s breath was still spent.
I gathered my notary, my reeds and my ink, and thanked the King properly, by offering drink.
I sneezed then again, my face turning blue, I’d swallowed the dragon, of this I now knew.
The King gulped and slathered, his beard getting wet, and looked me all over, with green eyes sternly set.
“Now son,” he said, warmly, his grin rather tart, “There’s something to mention, before you depart.
Your sneeze, tis no warning, no bell to alarm; the sneeze will bring nothing to cause you V’s harm.”
He shook his head proudly, then spit yoke in his pot, fingered his mustache and made the ends taut.
He held out a finger, and gave it a whirl, after giving his mustache, one last final twirl.
He sat up very proud, his eyes starting to glisten, he beckoned me closer, and said, “Now, you listen!”
You scribe down my words, what I know to stand true: When battling dragons, a King never achoos!”
~~~~~
In this tale, I am the King and this is my Dragon V. Now on Day 16 of the battle. And I still haven’t sneezed!
Everyday Asperger's 