All posts by Marissa

Writer, Photographer, and IT Gal

An UnexpectedCookie

After a seemingly longer than expected Labour day weekend of wading through the crowds at DragonCon while also attempting to survive the sticky all-encompassing heat of the late southern southern summer, we took a day to recover. At least we though it was a day to recover.

A late sleep, a relaxed breakfast, and visit to our favorite donut shop before some marketing and chores seemed the perfect counter balance to the crush that was DragonCon. Only, it wasn’t quite recovery. Somehow, in some way we simply don’t understand, we got triggered. For us our anxiety and PTSD symptoms often come out through our body. This is the result of learning at a young age to ignore and avoid awareness of things we couldn’t know. We had to not know in order to survive, and then we spent a lifetime practicing those skills.

We found ourselves hurting. Muscles along the sides and back of our abdomen painfully reacting, cramping, aching, our stomach churning with a unique nausea, our arms alternating aching and burning. Our body reliving some past experience we only vaguely know about. Sitting in the car with our wife, surrounded by sunshine and the anonymity of a grocery store parking lot, some part of us was in overdrive. Never mind we were safe in the moment, inside some part of us wasn’t.

Why it was coming up right then, we didn’t understand. It just was, and there was nothing much to do about it. We did our best to acknowledge it, to take care of ourselves and to move on.

It ebbed and flowed over the course of the day. We managed the marketing, and eventually the chores (there are now clean clothes in the house for the coming week.) Yet we are still no closer to understanding why this is coming up now.

After the sun went down and things calmed down some inside of us, my wife decided she wanted a cool, sweet treat. So we walked down the street. A neighborhood burgerey sells gourmet frozen pops from a local vendor and this was our destination. We arrived to find a few tables full even late on Labour day, and a pop case with only 4 choices remaining deep inside.

We got a Cookies-n-Cream pop, which we discovered (much to the joy of some part of us) has whole, real chocolate chip cookies inside.

And you know what? That unexpected cookie made us feel just a bit better.

Waving through a window…

I must admit, I’m a bit of an Owl City fan girl. Adam’s music speaks to me in a way other music doesn’t. Music is a huge part of my life, I played in the band in high school and college. I often feel music deeply, in fact it helps me feel things much better than almost anything else. I’ve had some near out-of-body experiences to music (I’ll write on those another time) but I’ve never known an artist whose music has reverberated with me so deeply on such a consistent basis.

The other day I was looking for new music by checking out artists marked “You may also like” on Apple Music. After several “I want to like your music, but just don’t” moments, I wandered over to Owl City’s page to check out the “You might also like” entries there. I had one of the best moments of my week to find there was a new Song of Adam’s I’d not heard or even heard of.

It started playing before I could take a breath and suddenly my remaining breath was swept away. I listened to it at least a half-dozen times in a row. There were intense feels, overwhelming emotion, and tears — sadness and joy both at the same time.

The song has become a staple in my life already. And then (there is always an “and then” in my stories) I looked up the song to learn more about it and discovered it’s a cover of a song from the Broadway musical “Dear Evan Hansen.” The writers said they pitched the music and story in part by saying Owl City was playing on the radio in Evan’s room.

So I sit here waiting out a 3 hour delay for a flight to my home away from home… and I’m looking out the window listening to the lyrics.

“We start with Stars in our eyes…”

We have starts in our eyes, and in our soul. But what has been sticking in my mind is:

“When you’re falling in a forest and there’s nobody around

Do you ever really crash, or even make a sound?”

It’s the same question I’ve been asking myself – does the world know I exist or even care? If I shouldn’t exist, if I’m impossible, does it even matter that I exist?

If there’s nobody that really experiences me as who I am, do I really exist?

I feel like I’m waving through a window to the world, and almost nobody sees me.

How is it that Adam knows what I’m feeling, even if he’s not writing my words?

Inner Infinity

I am a Unicorn.

A creature who doesn’t exist,

so rare nobody has ever seen one.

That makes me invisible and unavoidable.

Probability says each part of me is improbable on its own,

adding them all together makes for impossibility beyond measure.

A million, billion impossibilities rolled into one.

I shouldn’t exist.

Therefore I don’t exist.

Yet here I am.

People see me,

though I don’t feel real,

I am not real.

I am someone else.

Hiding in plain sight.

A shell for others to see,

they look through me hidden inside as if I’m not there,

because I’m not.