My fifth therapist, she's trying to talk me into finding joy. Every day I need to find something, even just a tiny piece of happy. She tells me why: the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of our nervous system work at cross purposes. One handles our positive emotions (the parasympathetic) and the other, the sympathetic, handles the negative ones, the sad, the anger, the revulsion, the things that make us run (or in some cases, hike). And apparently, these branches can't both be working at the same time.
So happy can literally push the unhappy out of my brain.
“I want you to write it down,” she tells me, “anything that makes you smile. At least four days this week.” And my pen's just been sitting there on the dresser.
So today, I fill a water bottle, load my fanny pack with ear buds and a Clif bar, and take a walk back in time, up the side of a mountain at Meyer's Ranch. It's an open space trail up in Conifer, thirteen miles west of Denver and four miles south of the home where I raised my kids. I took them here, my boys, for afternoon hikes when they were shorter and I was younger.
And of course, a poem greets me on arrival:
Toes searching mountain trails
for a way to walk back in time,
a walk to this spot in the woods
where my son, now a man, played small.
Did he leave a part of himself here?
A few skin cells, a dirt-stained emotion
washed away years ago from the knee of his ripped jeans?
Did he leave a piece of his fourth year
that I could pick up and pocket like boys do
with rocks from a Rocky Mountain trail--
can I meet him here, that small self from his fourth year?
Does this tree remember him?
Surely it was standing right here as he ran by,
ran on into some future year between then and now.
I listen and look
for an overlay of a boy still playing here,
still four, still small,
but I'm met with only this present moment,
that limiting minute,
a too-brief second,
my only option in time.
George and Lisa are with me. I met Lisa almost exactly 20 years ago, when our boys, my Sam and her Riley, were four and we joined a mountain moms group for the adult conversation. She tells me about Riley's arm cast (skateboarding) and I tell her about Sam's concussion last month (mountain biking). We laugh and George reaches for his water bottle.
And as we notice the dry stream bed and the trail dust and speak of the lack of winter snow pack and the menacing winds, I remember my first Colorado wildfire. It was the summer of Y2K. Sam was playing at Lisa's house in Bailey and I was home in that little log cabin in Conifer. I heard about the fire on the news. Lisa hadn't called from her kitchen; she just grabbed the kids and left.
I wouldn't get my first cell phone for another two years.
And I drove, fully crazed, down Highway 285 toward Bailey and the huge spiral of black smoke rising from what looked to be Lisa's neighborhood. Traffic at 2:30 pm on 285, an unusual thing. People were rushing home from Denver to get their dogs and their photographs before the police closed their neighborhoods off with tape and parked SUVs. I drove straight into Lisa's driveway – to this day I'm not sure how I got back there, as the fire was just cresting the hill behind her house – but everyone was gone. I was panicking. Where was my son? I trusted Lisa would keep him safe, but where was Lisa? I drove without a seat belt, windows down to listen for his call, irrational as that may seem. I checked the school shelter where evacuated people were already shunted, but Lisa had driven to my house, and they were all sitting on my front porch when, feeling a failure, I came back home.
Cell phones would have been useful that day.
And so, I don't remember much of the hike today, it was so scribbled over with these memories and images, the smell of burning pine trees. My therapist would be upset that I lost my present moment of mindfulness. Not upset, but it's something she'd notice.
When I get home from the hike, I fry up some runny eggs, primordial protein to refill my quads and the other confused muscles throughout my lower body. There's a nice horror flick on Comet. My aunt is in this movie, The Woods. She plays Ms. Cross, an evil choir teacher. All the teachers at this girls' school in the woods are on the side of evil. “Don't drink the milk.” No worries there; I don't even like milk. It's odd, though, to hear my aunt talking to the girls in a creepy, menacing voice. Familiar and unfamiliar, both at the same time.
Some of these teachers in the woods have an odd neck twitch that jerks their head to the side when they talk. I've seen that twitch in real life. A guy from my high school had a similar twitch that jerked his head to the side, ever so slightly. Used to wonder if he had a seizure disorder. And there's a point in the movie where Heather, the schoolgirl main character, is glaring at Ms. Traverse, the nasty headmistress who has a kind, even voice, and the look on Heather's face is this defiant, refusing look.
“How are you feeling?”
Heather says nothing. The muscles tighten around her mouth, her eyes skance... that face full of anger, that's where I've been living for a while now, which is why this new therapist wants me out, looking for some small thing to make me smile. Near the end of the movie, I see my aunt take an axe to the neck.
That's disturbing.
And I've never really thought about how the family members of these actors might feel watching their relatives being brutally hacked to death in a movie on the Comet network.
Turning off the TV, I wonder what I should write down for my smile-worthy moments from today. Maybe those two puppies who ran toward me on the trail. My bright yellow socks. The taste of the pomegranate seeds in my Clif bar, or the fact that I own these memories of four-year-old boys that can make me cry and smile at the same time.
At the same time. I wonder if my therapist was wrong about my sympathetic nervous system.
