Drafting in Exile - first pass

November, 2008

I am here because of a lie.
I am here because of a truth.

You leave, you close the door, you fly 1500 miles away and you think - that's it.
You dance with your son at the baggage carousel because you are FREE. Embarrassed, afraid- but FREE.

An efficiency hotel suite by the ocean; on a pull-out couch, the day I get D back - he falls asleep draped across me. I don't know yet where it goes from here. I can hear the palm leaves sawing at each other, and the distant music of the Lauderdale-by-the-Sea street festival, and I walk outside for a smoke on the balcony. Burnt tourists come back to their rooms, leave their flip-flops sandy on the mat.

I don't know yet that there are years ahead and not simply weeks. I don't know yet that I will move a few doors away, and make a life with borrowed furniture, just one parking space away from where I first found out I was going to have a baby.


I don't know that I will sit on a playground park bench, kicking at big fat fallen leaves and losing faith. I don't know yet the erosion of words, or that I will learn to build the castle back up after the tide has come and gone.

I only know that D is back, and from this moment on I think no further than the next hour.
It stays that way, for a long time.



The colors never mixed to THIS on the palate of my anxiety: process servers, dicey lawyers, cops with notebooks, court dates and affidavits and false accusations.

And then, just as the last leaves are raked from the yard, you are on a plane. Back to paradise. The smell of sand and a suitcase, of mold and margaritas.

The place everyone dreams of being - and you are here, and you feel nothing but captive.

It's far ahead now - From my porch I watch drunk people walk their dogs at midnight. D asleep in the bottom bunk of his bed, his own room, no longer sharing the pull-out couch.
The false accusations - of drug abuse, of incompetence, are long since thrown out.
The only way to escape limbo was to accept the palm-fronded necessity of where we are now. 
 But still we are not done.


If a lie can force me back here, a truth can make it right.
















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