Miriam Lamey Archives • Page 2 of 2 • Eckleburg

I sometimes wonder how I forget that power to knock the tightness, the constriction I feel near my heart out of this emotional boxing ring. You see, this is Fear, and Fear is an awesome opponent. It settles in that place, right around the heart, and will pound and pound, treating the superfine organ as its own personal punching bag, because it has to get practice somewhere. Naturally, this bully gravitates toward the open, the vulnerable and the true. Because a closed heart sits behind a reinforced concrete wall of its own making — closed hearts are crafty you see. Over time they become architects of their own carefully constructed prisons that both do and do not make structural sense. Some like to create slim and shiny — but oh so sturdy — curtain walls of shimmering glass. They decorate and revere these see-through shelters that keep out the elements, but that allow a window out onto the world, glimpses and insight into where the everyone is spinning, crying, laughing, loving, hurting. Watching is easier, and painless. Yet sometimes Fear can crack through this facade, which is why many closed hearts are able to have a beauteous exterior of which Frank Lloyd Wright would be proud, but shelter behind tight, solid concrete walls.

However, the heart is a poor architect, mostly creating those proverbial castles in the air — dreamlike buildings and walls that look beautiful in the imagination but are entirely impossible to sustain. The illusion takes up too much energy and, as it is wont, the heart wants to be allowed to explore. Fear can smell this desire, and it sends out its minions to threaten the heart, to make it retreat. But once a heart has been opened, it can’t and it won’t go back: the first taste of experience, the first pages turned in that fresh book it has waited for years to read. The heart has experienced life and, not out of greed but out of childlike curiosity, it wants more.

So I find Fear has returned to my poor heart, and it aches in its reluctance to go again for another 9 rounds. Last time it made it through 16, but that kind of fight is not sustainable. This time though, this time it will really be different. Because the heart has read a new book, learned the words to a different tune, but one that will not necessarily soothe Fear’s savagery. The heart has also been bruised and beaten and has nothing left that it can lose; watching the last beautiful home it created fall into ruin was enough. It needs more, it craves more, and it is ready to face Fear head on.

The question is, who will win? Fear or the heart?

I subscribe to the belief that any bully or formidable opponent only has power as long as it is given a name and allowed to continue in the same trajectory as of yore. As I am aging and growing and changing, so is the level of punishment the heart will allow itself to take. And over the years, some of Fear’s fists are not coming from what is really a misty specter, rather, the heart has developed its own defenses and it is starting to attack itself.

Fear has so little power that the gentle kiss Hope can and will blow in its direction, will send it away into a million dark crevasses, where it can stew and be alone. Because Fear needs its companions to fight, and once it melts away, its minions retreat, immediately losing their own, limited power.

And today, knowing how much I am incapable of controlling or hiding from, and how tired my heart is of hurting itself, I breathe into this tension, this fear that something is horribly, anxiously wrong. Because neither my heart nor I have anything to lose anymore, and it is time to allow Hope’s sparkle to do its magic and allow my heart to strengthen again.

We only get one chance at this rodeo, and Fear has no place inside my arena any more.

Miriam Lamey is an Astoria, New York-based writer and yoga teacher trainee under the 200 Hour program at Sacred Sounds Yoga to be completed in February, 2015. She strives to be open and attentive to the everyday, using life’s beauty and tragedy as inspiration for her writing and yoga practice. She’s an avid Ashtanga practitioner, also partial to a great new album, excellent bottle of wine, a good Manhattan, and attentively-cooked meal. Follow her on Twitter @mirseven and on Instagram. Read more on her blog atwww.miriamlamey.com.

Photo by Miriam Layme — Photo by Miriam Lamey

For a while I forgot how to see color.

It was when I was running early in the morning, when the trees and sky and Tarmac blurred like a zoetrope of motion. I couldn’t find the right niche through which to watch the action I convinced myself I could see—him running. In this animation, unlike my own running, he performed a long-limbed dance of beauty, while my feet stumbled and caught on the pavement.

They told me running was what caused the tears in the delicate muscles of my feet.

Over the weeks it took for the pain to heal, I had to stop moving. This injury felt like another ruse to control and push me into an existence—one I did not want or need. One that would take away my freedom and slight thread of identity. I felt that I was already colorblind, and I might as well just slip into the river of suits and Chinese-made faux leather, faux fur, faux designer, faux everything that I waded through every day.

Yet in the depths of these murky waters, I still couldn’t forget that invaluable lesson from so long ago – that hot dog rolls should never be left out in the rain.

When I was on the subway, commuting to wherever my life went next, I refused to bring my coffee mug with me. This can of fetid air that shot through the city was the shared place where breathing and rasping and coughing and holding swirled together, and I found it vile that I could carry coffee, something I was expected to swallow, while surrounded by these multiple toxins. So I bought my morning beverage off the train these days, paid too much, and stumbled out of my commute, half-awake but not dreaming. I knew if I were to dream again, I would be with him, still, and not here, isolated and immersed in black and white. Engulfed by all the rancid things.

Yet that day, I stopped and breathed because there was no more running to do, and then he was there, an animation waiting for me, reminding me of when I left those hotdog rolls out in the rain. It was after the sole summer barbecue of the season. A different he, a newer he, not like the one who ran beautifully, but too fast, was laughing, with that bag, those white rolls which were never used, but also never went stale, because of bleached white flour and preservatives. The bag was adorned with red lettering, bold yet like a lipsticked kiss against the white of the rolls. It had no expiration date.

I was tired of forgetting and weary from moving and being moved, and I couldn’t run anymore. So I just sat and closed my eyes, imagining the bright neon glow from buildings above was really the warm late summer sunshine from years ago.

I felt the vibrant colors from that day, remembered how it was only after he took my hand, and kissed me gently, so quietly and nearly imperceptibly that, I became aware the trees around us had fireworked into autumnal shades, with leaves falling like feathers in a firey post-apocalyptic shower.

The man with the rolls gave the world’s colors back to me.

Alone, weary and not running, as I sat mentally rubbing the delicate pain in my toes, he returned. I almost expected him to be carrying another bag of rolls. That was silly, I thought to myself, as I put my coffee cup down, turned my face in his direction. Today, the rain had started to fall, chilly and succulent, and the air had held the promise of winter. I smelled of the onset of snow, caught the delicate blue seasonal tinge to the air from the sparse trees, the artificially placed grass and knew this feeling wouldn’t expire, either.

Miriam Lamey is an Astoria, New York-based writer and yoga teacher trainee under the 200 Hour program at Sacred Sounds Yoga to be completed in February, 2015. She strives to be open and attentive to the everyday, using life’s beauty and tragedy as inspiration for her writing and yoga practice. She’s an avid Ashtanga practitioner, also partial to a great new album, excellent bottle of wine, a good Manhattan, and attentively-cooked meal. Follow her on Twitter @mirseven and on Instagram. Read more on her blog at www.miriamlamey.com.

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No Place in This Arena

Rolls in the Rain