Centering the first year

On year ago today I was in the front seat of a Ryder moving van speeding over the Atchafalaya Swamp in Lousiana thinking, "This would be the greatest place to hide a body." I had been married less than 36 hours and my wedding bouquet, a spray of dark red roses larger than my head, was swinging upside down from the rearview mirror.

Four hurricanes and two moves later, my husband and I celebrated with a quiet weekend together making pizza from scratch to cook on the grill. He stretched and kneaded the dough, singing a little song about yeast farts, while I chopped artichoke hearts and cracked open two cold beers. We dodged each other and the refrigerator door, the dog wove happily between our legs hoping for scraps, and I felt as weightless and exactly right as when I was little kid diving for quarters in the deep end of the pool.

It wasn't always like this. The first eight months, living together in a recently destroyed city, were clumsy and tense. Not having a job or peers and getting lost every time I left the house was like having all the identifying features wiped right off my face. My roots, long buried and (too) deeply established, were naked and trailing behind me, but I had no idea how or where to replant them. I got sick over and over again and I slept a lot. I sympathized with the plowed earth and toppled people of Pensacola.

Interacting with my husband during this time was awkward because I was disoriented and off-balance and he was always there-- there in the bedroom, there on the couch, there at the computer. All the Mine and Yours was now Ours, including space. I ended up taking hideously long showers and reading way too much Dostoyevsky, feeling the characters' overwrought guilt and paranoia as my own and eyeing my husband suspiciously as he retreated into the X-Box, where victories are solid and quick. Was this what he expected when he married me? Surely not, surely he must be disappointed. Is he quiet right now because he's regretting marrying me?

Three things happened, though: I got a job (a crappy one, but I made several good friends), someone began painting the phrase "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL" in big block letters on bridges and walls around town, and I took a pottery class. The job regulated time, created a separate space for me to putz around in, and brought in some extra cash. The graffiti gave me something to hunt for, measure, describe and puzzle over. I'm still trying to write about its effect on me and its meaning in a larger sense in a city that was so wrecked.

Pottery was something close to religion.

We spent the whole first class spinning bumpy lumps of wet clay into smooth lumps of wet clay. Centering. It takes your whole body, it takes shoving and muscle and then gradually the lightest pressure from the sides of your hands and the pads of your fingers. Honestly, it takes closed eyes and smooth breathing and it takes lots and lots of fucking up because it is the art of fucking up and accepting it and gently moving it into something else. Every Thursday afternoon I drove just over the Alabama border and practiced fucking up, coating my jeans and hair in mud, spinning the soft skin off my hands from the grit of the clay, and at the end of class I would drive home in the dark feeling like my whole ribcage was full of light, like the revelation was enough to make me cry.

My husband and I have been centering for a whole year now. The lurching, oscillating chaos of the beginning has quieted down, and I can feel the shape of something smooth and whole emerging. Here's to patience, closed eyes, and smooth breathing.