Syrup soaks the 3am eggo.
Exhaustion steals any sense of self-control, and I chance a burnt tongue for a comfort feast of hot gooey goodness. I lean into the kitchen counter as I lavishly lick every single sugary morsel with impatient fingertips.
This is my 3am celebration. This is my 3am contemplation. This is my 3am check-in.
In the odd hours of morning, too late to be awake, too early to rise, I feel the echo of the day’s events reverberating through a shocked, stimulated, sweetness-spiked nervous system.
I feel the presence of the moon, blooming into a fullness that astrologers promise will bring tides of stability, gentleness, smoothness.
I even feel the messy magic of Mercury Retrograde at quiet and purposeful work. This planetary phase so often eye-rolled and muddled in frustration I actually rush to eagerly meet.
I’m ready to harness the Mercury Retrograde energy to finish the tasks that have weighed on my wellbeing. Mercury Retrograde schemes to show all the issues we’ve neglected, all the things we’ve left untidy and uncompleted.
I review the current conundrums causing chaos and stealing my energy.
I reconnect to how I want to show up (as Glennon Doyle brilliantly advocates, “in kindness, in bravery”) and recommit to that guiding belief in my own resiliency, my own radiance.
I resolve by taking action that moves me forward.
October agonized in emotional and actual fender-benders.
Whose responsible? The insurance companies and cupids in question deliberate.
At this point in time, I just want my car back, and I just want my heart back. In one piece. Please and thanks.
Financial insecurities skyrocket and my complexion cries in breakouts from the upheavals of stress, and the breakouts pull to the surface the core wound that begs to be seen: love me as I am, in all my hurting humanness, I’m still worthy.
Mercury Retrograde galvanizes me to reset, recharge and rise in a readiness that trusts my resiliency. I become a realized version of my inner adult: capable, confident, calm. I am reunited with my car. I am reunited with a clarity that feels like a freeing release that arises after a heart-cleansing cry.
I eat the 3am eggo as a decadent treat for a day encompassing heart-feats, but the sweetness tastes artificial to the memory that really needs to break free.
Tonight, pass midnight, I witness a bar fight. This is the reason driving the 3am reassurance in a sugar that fails to soothe.
In the quiet kitchen, sheltered in from the mercurial winds, waffle in hand, the flashback bursts through as I hear once more the glass shattering, the chairs toppling, the slur of infuriated profanities plummeting with fists and kicks.
For a disorienting moment, I think she’s drunk, the woman in the teal floral dress, and liquor loosened her hold on the high-top stool. I assume her friend, this bouncy bob of cotton candy pink hair, attempts to catch her, hoists her up.
No, this is a flickering illusion that summersaults into a sinister reality.
Fight. For another split second, I reason the second woman running to the two wrestling and shouting on the floor is hurling in to break up the violence. No, she contributes.
Kicks to the face. Hair pulled. Boobs displayed.
Fight. I instinctively do what I use to teach others to do when there’s an eruption of violence – get yourself to safety. And I do. I’m the closest to the scene, and then I relocate to the watching crowd at the bar.
Fight. I reorient. Call the police. And the last minute decision to leave my phone in the car chills me.
I rearrange, and speak, “Someone call the police.” A bystander takes a picture instead. A bartender snaps to stop, and the fight continues with hysterical accusations bleeding into blows.
Fight. “Call the police!” And the man in the leather jacket beside me points to a bartender urgently speaking into a phone.
The fight ends. The women are quarantined into far opposite corners of the bar.
The silence haunts me. The silence that descends when violence happens. The silence that cloaks the woman in the teal floral dress, that makes her poised and precise steps to the bathroom achingly loud.
“She’s sleeping with that woman’s husband,” I’m informed by the bar’s regulars. It’s a “had-it-coming” type of explanation that the man in the leather jacket decides to report because I looked so “horrified.” There’s a reason, he’s attempts to assuage the visible horror etched onto my face.
Sharp words form on my tongue. There’s never an excuse for violence. He leaves me alone to join his friends playing pool.
It’s the silence that follows me here as I eat the eggo at 3am. The eggo that’s a left-over from a late-night improv show that spun in playful strangeness, quirky fun. A show contrasting with the violence that will spill down the street an hour or so after.
I take my friend up on the offer to go to a bar after the show because I don’t want to be alone with my heart that churns with narratives over rejection…not ready to be heard, not quite yet.
And now I am alone and in a stillness that shakes with flashbacks from the bar, and with silly snippets from the improv show.
I think of the woman in the teal floral dress. I think of my past life in Kentucky where I spent hours in my parents’ basement studying talks I would present on how to prevent and stop violence. I wonder if I was present enough for her. I wait at the bar until I see her friends gather her and pick her up. But I’m a silent observer, and I regret my silence. I always do. And it’s a curious, haphazard sway between speaking up in some areas of my life and then staying quiet. I want to foster the confidence to speak – in the moment – when led to.
My thoughts float to my work day ahead, of returning to the theater just up the street from that bar, and the children I will be working with in improv.
I flow back to my parents’ house and another 3am kitchen memory of consulting a tarot deck about my life’s purpose and the card drawn surprises me because it shimmers with a vision of me with long hair and I am surrounded by laughing kids. This future glimpse of me contrasts with my Kentucky reality – my hair grazes my collarbones, I sport tweed J-Crew suits and commute to community meetings on cultivating a culture of safety in the city. And there’s an undercurrent that nags at me about changing course, and the fear of regret propels an uprooting launch that lands me here at 3am in this Austin bungalow that is home. And my hair travels well-past my collarbones and my days are bright in the challenge and the joy of teaching kids, who instruct me about realness, kindness, presence. Of course, Mercury Retrograde stirs the past into my present and 3am with waffles seems to be the only time to digest the events of the day, my current life-course.
The bar fight reinforces the significance of the tarot card drawn in my parents’ kitchen. At what point in time could have the bar fight tonight been prevented? All three women acted out of pain – pain fuels violence, and they were children once, and they are still children, crying out from a feral and ferocious wound. Hurt people hurt people.
And that is why it’s pivotal we do our soul-work, too. We must kindly and bravely tend to our heart-wounds and take responsibility for how we move through this temperamental world. And sometimes this work appears as vocalizing needs to the car insurance company and sending a truthful text to a fling that didn’t unfold in the way we long it would.
I’ll harness the Mercury Retrograde energy to assist in the closure, and rejuvenate the reconfirmed decision to stay my course with utilizing the healing powers of improv to empower youth.
I’ll continue to choose to do my soul-work now, using Mercury Retrograde in my favor, and especially as I have a surplus of eggos to reward and remind that we can and we must create moments of sweetness while in the throes of this brutal and beautiful life ride.