Letting Go and Holding On is a four-part short memoir essay, which is part of a larger creative non-fiction project that I am working on…
Part Two:
So there I was, unpacking all of these fancy dresses and wondering why was I still hanging on to them. Chances are at this point in my life, living in a small coastal town on the north shore of Massachusetts, I was never going to have the need to wear one again. And then there was my daughter Juliet, I could always use her as an excuse to hang on to those dresses. Yes, I thought, “She might wear them someday. She likes vintage clothing.”
The thought of paring down my closet comingles with the thought of paring down my body. I hang on stubbornly, wishing I were forty—forty-five years old again; even fifty would do, still rocking those tight little black dresses and spike heels at the blues bar on Saturday nights. Who was that woman, I ask myself now. “She feels like she was some styling soul sister,” I respond to myself, “She was not my self. No she was just a facet of me back in the day.” In truth, I had begun to separate from that self, a few years before I left Los Angeles, but part of me still hangs on to her clothes now, secretly hoping I can slip into a little black dress and head down to the local blues bar for a Saturday night of good times and good tunes. I have a hard time letting go of things. My memories of these times gone by both haunt and amuse me.
A trip down memory lane, a night out in the blues club, grooving to straight-up, white hot road musicians who regularly toured with the likes of Bonnie Raitt and others. Yes, that was I, in my other life sometime in the 1990’s on the left coast. I rocked my little black dresses and spike heels with my platinum blonde buzz cut. I fit in in there that eclectic city of angels. I was even consider more normal than eclectic there in L.A., unlike here at home where I am a bit avant-garde in my attitude and tastes.
“Look at me now I think,” my hair is long and au natural, in multi-colored streaks of gray, blonde and brown. In fact, my hair is so long that it falls a few inches below my shoulders, the longest it has ever been in my life. He liked my hair long. Somehow, I felt as though I let my hair grow with the instinctual knowledge that he would consume himself in it one day. Yes, it was that sort of connection that we had. I knew the hair would pull him in. And it did. A year and half had gone by from the last time we had seen each other and all he could say was “your hair… please don’t cut your hair.” “I won’t,” I told him.
Stay tuned for Part Three…
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