Home of the Brave.


I've jumped out of an airplane at three miles high. I've climbed a 14,000 ft. mountain in Colorado and stood at its summit on the 4th of July. I slid down a New Mexico mountainside with nothing but my tennis shoes to break my fall into the cold, cold Red River. I've been in waist deep water in the Gulf of Mexico as a shark scoped out its meal advantage, circling … circling (he didn't think I was worthy, thankfully). I have been legally blind. I stood in front of on-coming traffic just to see the headlights coming my way. I've taught young men and women who might have knifed me on the street but in my classroom, some of them paid attention. I've been in the Navy, in the theater, and unemployed. I've dated convenience store clerks, pathologically. I've crossed this country by myself from the East Coast to the West and back again more times than I can remember, once on a Greyhound bus with a bottle of Southern Comfort and a kissing companion I wouldn’t have met had I not sat next to him. I’ve chased a would-be rapist down ten flights of stairs only to lose him in the traffic of a busy city sidewalk. I held my mother’s hand and told her when it was time for her to let go of life and wept as she said "I love you my baby" for the last time. I have stood on the bathroom scale every morning for the last fifteen years. I have tried on every shade of red professed to not be my color. As my dear, dear friend tried to kill herself for the umpteenth time, I advised her "You need to cut this shit out or get better at it ‘cause I can’t take it anymore."

And yet I do not find myself a particularly brave person for I have also said "no" to the entire sea going fleet of single sailors but said "yes" to one married man. I’ve worn men’s clothes because I was terrified of being pretty. I claimed I was asexual because I was terrified of being loved. I never spoke of my dad to anyone, ever. I spit on my grandmother’s grave. I am an active participant in my own creativity only after much kicking and screaming. I changed addresses every eight months for close to twenty years before I finally changed my name and settled down. I sought answers from my brother, newly released from prison, knowing he was mentally ill. I looked to him and asked "WHY?? Why am I so fucked up?" and he said "I don’t know darlin’. You’re the one that holds the rest of us together. I thought you were here to help me."