Everything that morning was white and grey,
even the plants showed up in their palest
for an April wedding.
My chest bones ache when I wake up,
stretched after a night of being curled
in sleepless blinking.
A man walked up to me with tears in his hands
that were larger than snowfalls, smaller than marbles
“I made these for you.”
Never had my soul held such concord and pain.
Sitting in the restaurant that poses
as the town centre
You eyes are now a forest on the eastern seaboard
Clarity, growing like sound
You stand in line fishing change out of the oceans of your purse. As you fumble for a fourth penny you blame your habit on an aunt who once cooked a meal for an army of men that was never there. Her house makes you cry. It’s been locked for years but we all bet the curtains still wear her perfume and the ghost of the cat still bites invisible guests’ hands. Whether rooms slumber in completed asphyxia or the walls still live and breathe, homes are always partially frozen in our minds and are remembered while standing in line looking for four dollars and one more copper penny.
Everything is covered once again with the most
brilliant, immaculate glitter
Our breath turns to smoke
The hands that have gone unnoticed all year
are stiff, are frozen
You are missing your gloves
The fingertips and knuckles that have gone unnoticed all year
are finally felt at the gas station, the gas pump
You can feel your toes in your shoes
She is grieving for the first time,
all over again
Every freezing breath she takes
is a breath left behind,
a breath not taken
Winter is a birth of the brightest or the darkest kind.
It’s all about the cinnamon left at the bottom of the mug
I’m not sure I’m alive
The sun is dialed up too bright
And the clouds are wallpaper
There’s barely a breeze
Everything is neutral
benign
silent
I am an empty jar with a spirit trapped inside growing younger
All I wanted was to escape gravity
To be walking in the parking lot and
have stepped above the pavement and be walking upwards
to find the purest of white craft feathers growing out of my shoulder blades
Instead you are behind me
calling
holding onto the string
the spine
and I feel my knees
lock
unlock
lock
unlock
the raw and unbending vertigo, gravity
pulling my shin bones
Where are the keys to my ribcage? I need to find them.
My soul is slowly leaving my body, again.
“I’m usually not a fan of Tim Burton’s style, but for Alice in Wonderland (03/05/10) it seems about as appropriate as appropriate gets. And I’m quite excited. I will be officially annoyed if it’s takes a Narnia turn and becomes one of those loved books that was made to be really pretty but strayed so far from the book that I feel like destroying the DVD in an Office Space manner.”
I posted the previous paragraph on Facebook as my status and within minutes one of my friends, Tim, commented, “I’ll take this as a rave review for Narnia. Maybe I should actually see it now.” My first thought is, Not exactly. That might be a bad idea. I’ve never had good experiences with Naria.
For Prince Caspian, I went to see it with my sister and boyfriend. I then proceeded to make the mistake of sitting between them. My sister and I and my boyfriend and I have vastly different methods of movie-going. My sister and I go to movies and either heckle the characters through the entire movie. My boyfriend? No talking. Even when we watch TV together the only way I can ask questions or make a comment is when there is no dialogue going on and I’m quick about it. If I get too talkative or start asking too many questions, he loving pats me on the head which I know is a nice way of telling me to be quiet. So, you can imagine what it would have been like to be with both of these parties at a movie at the same time.
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I know people tell me things will change when I’m older. I won’t be as open-minded, my metabolism will suddenly slow down to a slug-like speed at 12:01am on my 30th birthday, that I will no longer have the energy or desire to stay up until 4am, that if I am proud of the fact that I can sometimes out eat any guy I know that I will suddenly wake up with at least another ten points in my BMI if I don’t watch what I eat RIGHT NOW, and that I won’t view love or the person I am with the same way.
The problem is that I feel like I won’t be alive in two years. Not that I’m going to die, or that I have some prophetic feeling that I will die young and I remain fixated on the fact that I don’t have much time. What I mean is that I have absolutely concept or foresight into my life in two years. I don’t have the foggiest idea what it means to live another two years. I don’t have any understand of what it would feel like to live to be 30, 40, 50, and so on. My understanding of time and how long it feels is limited by my own biological age. My only concept of time, of age, of life, of death, is what the point of reference built from a little over two decades.
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When you see people in the rain, most often the point is not to ridicule them, ask them why they are in the rain, or to tell them about when you were in the rain once; it’s to give them an umbrella and ask them to come inside.
Once I raced a thunderstorm, but last night I drove into one. With every bright and momentary white string that ran straight to the sky, my lungs felt like a tree that emptied every branch. Because these days–shall I call you brother and sister?–I feel like an ocean tide, waking and sleeping, driving and falling. In my ever maddening mind I am only defined by my screaming opposite, which I told you today makes me a shadow because I only exist when the sun falls on me once and a while. We sat together in a church pew a few states away and all I could let out of my mouth was “Why couldn’t it have worked this way?” and you didn’t hear me say “I need you right this very second.” You want to know me so desperately and yet you only saw my utter weakness inside when the telephone poles and wires were snapping under the wind and I woke up infected with sleep. I’ve been gone every Sunday and I’m afraid to come home because you never saw me in pain and I’m just waiting for your love to run out. I am the three week old shadow and you’re just dying for the sun to go away. (How could you stand next to your brother and leave your daughter in pain?)
He said she smells like rose hips and mint and when I’m around her I’m completely lost… And lost indeed because we’re afloat, sitting on a canoe in the ocean with a Union Jack burning above us and all of the stars are pushing their light through the Milky Way to howl at us and our flag on fire. She said the weather in his mind is always stormy and I’m afraid he’ll never see the sunlight in me, “but how can I tell him that when I told our own city to swirl with rain and be swollen with static?” You see the rain fall to the concrete or on the hoods of our sweatshirts. Maybe you see stars or maybe you see the left over tears that we threw at the ceiling that are coming down on our heads. The girl that smells like roses fell asleep while she was boiling water for tea, but you know it’s waiting for you, waiting for you. Turn off the stove and steep (sleep) away.
I set the fire in your veins when I took my socks and books from your house. No more little pots of tea or bowls of rice over new music you couldn’t wait to show me. Maybe this week of rain will cool the fire and perhaps we’ll wake to each other like a rainy campground on Independence Day. The edges of the damp tent, a sheen of water clinging to the sleeping bag, the smell of wet mulch, and a fire that’s been dying quietly under the rain now full of charcoal that can absorb all our poison.
With windchimes at my wrists, my broken heart will make a scene. When I reach out, (I’m reaching out) please catch me. I am a child who wanders into the dining room with all the adults still talking with their chinking teeth and coffee cups. I am told softly to be off to bed and am quietly sent out of the room. Or, I am walking through an old and empty house, and after turning a few corners through the corridors, only more doors appear and the maid says “Why, I haven’t told you, there are seven stories to this house,” and disappears without any mention of stairs. Everything collapsed just in time for summer, when the taste of the season’s first apple and the sunlight will sweetly sew me back together. When I reach out, (I’m reaching out) please catch me. “I’ll always be alive as long as it’s you holding me to death.” The approach of the deep terror and fear does not coming from failing, of alienation, but from speaking and throwing words to you across the room for you to catch and you never hear me. The words fall like drops around your ears and you never even notice it’s raining. The threat of death comes not from a physical death but from a tired boredom; a futility and the understanding of meaninglessness that slows down the heart ever so softly until one day it stops. When I reach out, (I’m reaching out) please catch me. I’m sent with a candle across the pond in my small canoe. The three day old goslings asleep under a wing on the flooded bank. I’m sent into sleep, into slumber, and gifted with dreams of the hour before I say those two little words, dreams of the weeks before a girl sleeping inside my stomach breathes air for the first time, dreams of the feeling of the paintbrush in my hand and the vats of liquid color for the paintings that are to come to pass and come alive, dreams of witnessing a death. What are these? Messengers? These deep and sleeping statues come to me in the middle of the night, each holding their own candle while I wake into a thousand pieces. With windchimes at my wrists, my broken heart will make a scene.
The beautiful thing about seasons is that we forget what the next one is like. With the breaking of winter comes a moment, even if only a moment, when everything feels right. There’s a full moon and the clouds are tiptoeing through the expanse. There is a fabric of fog clinging to the fields. The air is thick, but warm, and the breeze that washes through the parking lot carries a long and lost and familiar rediscovery of comfort.
It is Peace manifested in the weather. And we wonder, Why aren’t things always this sweet? We forget that even though summer short, hot, and blazing in August, the season of too much feels like a godsend against the season of too little.
A spark of faith flashes at the thought that it will not always be winter. There is hope in the moving, in the passing, in the changing. And that’s why that one day, hanging in between seasons on the calendars in our kitchens, matters. That day, filled with the taste of spring on our lips, gives us enough life to plunge back into the cold for a few less weeks.
I thought I was mad at you for not getting things done, but really I just felt scared and that you weren’t there for me when I needed you.
I thought my feelings for you were small and rooted in a companionship found over turkey pitas and little Greek coney islands. Even after the note that you left for me on my windshield on a rainy August afternoon that looked like a fairy tale, and months of weekly lunches, I didn’t hear from you for a month and then you call me and tell me you’re marrying her instead. And to top it off, you sent me a picture of your newborn little girl last week.
I thought that after you quietly admitted a dark past to me, you would have wisdom I could lean on. But what I thought was going to be a “let’s catch up” lunch turned into you stomping all over the trust I placed in you.
I thought they were all stories, just stories. But maybe they’re more than that and I haven’t been listening to you. (And the crows have taken their seats, better in red.)
I’m beginning to see that I am a mathematician of a line of mathematicians (of the heart). I have to have every piece of my emotions and thoughts all tied together with equal signs, all territory charted and my next moved plotted, or I cannot admit it exists.
Every question has to be considered. Any possible opinion that anyone on the outside could have must be reckoned with. Every piece must make sense and must be practical. Everyone must approve. And if they don’t approve, you must have reasons. Reasons, reasons, reasons.
It’s never been enough to only feel, and I’ve carried that into my life.
Where did I learn this incessant, habitual need to make sure every piece of my being is logical? Why do I feel a need to justify what I feel? Why do I ignore the feelings that don’t make sense?
“What are you feeling?”
“Well… I mean, I don’t like it, but it makes sense, and it’s probably a good thing so I don’t blame you, so… I don’t know.”
“Sweetheart, I love you, but throw logic out the window. I want to hear what you’re feeling. Raw, human emotion.”
Something inside me can’t sleep.
Dreams are a constant mystery in my life. Everything from my grandfather coming to the house to talk to me, to my sister coming down with an awful nervous system disease, to caustically honest conversations with former lovers, to a storm of epic proportions, to coworkers showing up to see me perform in a play but because I hadn’t even looked at my lines the play was a disaster.
While many of the dreams that crash into my evening’s rest are absurd, there are those dreams that refused to leave me alone even when I am awake. They are vivid, nauseating, haunting. They’re memories that form like infections and lodge themselves in crevasses of my waking mind.
Sometimes its just too much. Too much to sit and wait for the storm outside to be over, not knowing if we’d be alive at the end. Too much to see my grandfather’s face so plainly in front of me, just smiling, just smiling. Too much to see my sister struggling to maintain any kind of physical activity knowing that her nerves are ready to strike at any moment.
Sometimes I don’t want to go back to sleep.
I was coming back to consciousness, waking from a deep and restful sleep. The room was quiet and cool to the touch. The three or four thin blankets I had wrapped around me were just enough to keep me warm. The light coming in through the wall of windows behind me matched the temperature of the room; a refreshing and calm grey light of a cloudy late summer afternoon.
I had woken up in someone’s studio. The room was made entirely out of brick and the ceiling was at least two stories up. There were canvases and easels all over the place. Some standing blank, awaiting their clothing in paint. Others were in stacks or were drying, with rough and splotched brush strokes in bold and expectant colors. Cans and brushes and palettes and tubes of paint scattered on the wooden tables throughout the room.
The bed I was sleeping in was pushed against the left wall, and at the foot of my bed was another easel, but this one had the painter sitting in front of it.
Though I had never seen this place before or ever met the woman with the paint brush in her hand, gently studying and attacking the canvas in front of her, I knew I belonged here. Maybe I had fallen asleep and awakened to be ten years in the future.
“Ah, you’re finally awake!” She said, still poring over the painting.
“Yeah…” I said, still incredibly groggy.
She said something about my husband and I moving closer to the city in a couple of months so I wouldn’t have to drive two hours to hang out for the weekend. “And so you won’t lapse into 14-hour comas while you’re here.”
I had gone to sleep at 3am the night before and from the clock on the wall across the room, I could see that it was now 5pm.
I didn’t mean to sleep that long, so my immediate disposition was to be frustrated at myself and the other small annoyances going on around me at the time. After making a few comments about how long I had slept, she and I began talking about everything going on in my life. All the present bothers, the points of stress, the logic of current worry, irritations, odd dilemmas.
She continued painting, and I sat up in bed against the wall, trying to keep my hair from getting caught in the tiny teeth of the bricks and talking about present day. A creative focus that’s be neglected or left to wander aimlessly on its own in my mind with no way out. The way I talk myself out of my own internal dialogue and feelings. An late inability to way to express questions and feelings about the relationships in my life. People who turned out differently than I needed them to. Things that started out looking like a storybook and took a sour turn towards an awkward that I still don’t know what to do with. Communication breakdowns that hurt and leave bleeding scars.
The conversation covered years of memories and all narrow hallways of situations. But then said something that absolutely struck me.
“Well, why don’t you do more with your art?”
She presented this as a partial, though not complete, yet substantial solution.
I didn’t have an answer. All I could think of were little excuses and burnt wishes that I hadn’t paid attention to.
“Oh. Yeah… I guess I could do that.”
And then my alarm clock on my cell phone woke me up. It said 9:32am.
I dreamt this over a week ago and yet I still can’t forget the conversation. I still don’t know who I was talking to, where I was, how I knew her, but her question has resonated deeply and hung in my mind every day since. All I’ve been able to do is respond the same way I did when I was talking to her face-to-face.
Why do storms and painters to give me messages in my sleep? Even though it was only a dream, I cannot ignore its truth.
(Number 3)
Because everything tonight is measured in pink and white. Pink and white, blue and white, or maybe purple. An occasionally green filling the room, drop by drop. The electronic beats shake the walls, shake my knees. “You’re all alone over here.” Yes sir, and that’s how I want it to be. I know you watched me most of the night, and that’s why I danced quietly, not as loudly as I would have if I had known you weren’t there. Songs about American Divorce and American Girlfriends made our ears ring but fills our souls up for an evening. “I’ll be driving nuclear submarines before I’m 24.” Just don’t blow them up, American Man.
Because tonight everything is measured in red and white. For the girl that doesn’t watch the weather channel and ends up cleaning the snow off her car in sandals. For the girl who had her first ultrasound too early, at a small age of 16 to make sure her heart was still in one piece. “Just to make sure, just to make sure.” Just to make sure the chest that is coiled so tightly isn’t constricting her red heart. The traffic lights on the way home bled onto the windshield.
Because tonight is measured in black and white. We’ll let the music rattle the white flecks of our bones while we stand under the blacklights. I’ll make a pretty wallflower and you’ll keep your eyes to yourself. He’ll drive his submarines and you’ll just drum your arms into the floor.
(Number 2)
I’m wilting a little. But not for long.
Hundreds of tiny birds swarm peacefully in their flocks around the stoplights. The tree frogs and bullfrogs are awake and are singing again in the swamps and the sunlight is bursting into our Saturdays. The rain is getting warmer.
Any hint of smoke in the air throws me back to memories of camping through the long and delicious, warm Julys. Cooking dinner over the campfire, the smell of the wood left in my sweatshirt for days. We’d cook sausage and even though I rarely eat it, during the summer I love the salt and smoke on my tongue.
My creative focus has waned a little bit. I daily question the validity of the words floating around in my head whether they are just the playthings of my mind when it reaches levels of boredom from living in the same town everyday or whether they might actually mean something.
I give them meaning today.
No one questions dreams when they wake up. Of course, they are mostly absurd. But no one questions if they saw the vivid colors, or if they actually heard you say what you did. If your grandfather who passed years ago came to visit you in your sleep, and he smiles and asks how you are, you believe he was there. If the dreams are full of new and violent thunderstorms or a taunting and jeering man with a cane who can only be seen by you, we never question those truths.
“I mean, I was there.” “I saw you. You were there.” “I dreamt about Grandaddy last night.” “But the storm was so real!” “And there was this man, and he never stopped…”
And yet, simple things like poems that are woven when I step into a greenhouse, or the book I want to write about you when I realized how beautiful you are when you poured out your soul and sang in front of me, or the instant pain that rushes to my reddening cheeks when you wield your words like daggers and you act as if they have no more weight than paper snowflakes–I question all these.
Somehow a dream with smoky thunderstorms can be life-altering, and yet I can’t allow the pictures and poetry and ideas and words that run in rivers through my veins and ateries all day fill me up and run back out.
It’s like I’m working on the skyscraper of my soul, and as I build I consider each steel beam and tell a few that they aren’t worth keeping. I tug with white knuckles to pull them away from the frame. My building either collapses or the beams remain in place and laugh at me through grey teeth.
Because each piece is essential.
To all the words and pain I’ve left behind, declared void, ignored, brushed away, talked myself out of, I give meaning to today.
(Number 1)
But I want to know why you miss me.
Because you’re sending me mixed signals and confusing all the sense out of me. Because I think there might have been more going on and I didn’t even know it. Because you sent me a picture of your newborn little girl, and even though she is beautiful like the flowers springing up, I don’t even know what to say anymore.
Because I worry.
It’s like even after I take time to quiet the chattering inside my own head, I still have a fist gripping my stomach and fingers creeping up the back of my neck to tell me something isn’t right. Or that I’m not perfect enough to sit down just yet.
Worry has it’s purpose–if for nothing else but to motivate. But my mind has escalated to the point where worry has fed on my peace of mind and my thoughts are now laced with guilt.
Guilt has been an exterior motivator in my life for so long from multiple sources growing up that my mind has trained itself to go into overdrive and it slowly gnaws at me until I have nothing left to offer but a ragdoll heart.
The logic goes like this: In order to protect myself from further nagging, guilting, anger, or awkward conversations, if I can worry ahead of time before the conversation even happens, then maybe I’ll altogether prevent or avoid what might invariably happen, and we can all go on living happy lives.
It’s a feeling that if there is even one person in my life who has a different opinion or has different preferences or just flat out thinks I’m wrong, I have no equilibrium in my life. I’m left crippled by my own doing. Because, as I’ve been told before: “the holy life is the life that everyone else is happy with.”
My emotional logic is still in [this is so messed up] knots.
If I intend to be anything but play-dough for everyone else to put their hands around and squish into the shape of their own liking, I will never be able to live this life. Instead of learning to operate with a functioning spine, the worry throws me into the cupboard with all the other chipped plates and I am out of balance.
The choices I make in life should make me a little bit stronger each day, like learning to walk or use rollerblades for the first time. With each step or each time I pull out the skates my ankles grow stronger out of practice and dilligent use. But instead, as of now my ankle is twisted and I’m still hanging on desperately to the crutches beneath my shoulders when I don’t have to be.
Because I worry.
Even the cakes and black ants cannot contain
the messes we’ve made for ourselves.
I spend hours in the kitchen
baking cakes of red anger
and black silk using
white knots of worry as frosting.
I’d hold your hand and play
ring-around-the-rosy
but we’re just
spinning in circles in spinning in circles in spinning in circles and spinning in circles
and we
are
getting
nowhere.
It’s all coming up and coming out loud
and I don’t know if I can stop myself this time from using the handle
as a ledge into a life
of apathy
woven into tears.
You ask if I’m okay,
you ask if I’m fine,
and I reply why yes! I’m as well as I was yesterday
(for whatever it’s worth)
because even though I tire of being in the same town every morning
I’m never quite tired enough to leave.
We eat dinner and lunch and dinner again and we keep running our mouths
like engines in ten year old cars.
We fill our ears with kindling and spew petroleum,
our tongues spit the sparks.
The fire will climb up into our souls.
We eat a dinner of fruits of overdone thought and a roast of timidity and
we’ll keep plunging our forks into the food and passing the bowls to the others at the table
but there never is an end to our hunger.
We’ll spill the wine of selfishness
and the milk of fear to make it go away
but there is no end to our hunger.
It’s the ache
the anger
our elbows on the table cloths.
Dinner is finally removed from the table and dessert is brought in.
After we finish our plates we sit and cry
because even though the cake was decadent!
delicious!
delectable!
delightful!
we howl because our stomachs are emptier than before.
We’ll take blood, we’ll take water! Whatever fills the holes inside.
You ask if I can help with dishes and I do not reply because I eat the black and white cake alone at the other end of the table.
Even the black ants cannot clean up the messes we’ve made for ourselves.
I spend hours in the kitchen
baking cakes of red anger and
black silk using
white knots of worry as frosting.
You ask if I’m okay,
you ask if I’m fine, and I reply why yes! I’m as well as I was yesterday
because I eat my misery alone.
Continued from here.
It was an early evening in late July. The sun was pouring onto my street, into the house and seeping into the yard. It was warm outside and I was with three of my closest friends, S.D., my boyfriend at the time, my best friend, Hannah, and her boyfriend, Alex.
Hannah and Alex had gone out to the backyard and were sitting on the trampoline eating pizza. I was in the kitchen getting my plate of food, and my boyfriend was close behind me getting his. I turned to leave and go towards the backdoor to go outside, but before I could go anywhere I got that familiar drip in my nose.
I spent the next half hour in the bathroom trying to contain the mess as best I could. My boyfriend hovered in the hallway. I tried to pretend everything was just fine and make it look as best I could.
Still, after thirty minutes and the bleeding still had not stopped, my mother decided to take me to an urgent care center. She told this to S.D.
“Can I come?” He said.
Was he just saying that because that’s what every good boyfriend is supposed to do in this situation? Or does he genuinely care? This was the first time anything medically had happened to me, but even though this was a unique situation the two of us hadn’t even really encountered before, I wasn’t quite convinced. Even though I was puzzled, the three of us and my bloody nose piled into the van and headed to the hospital.
I remember hiding. I hid the fact that inside I was absolutely terrified and that it scared me to see how much blood I was losing. I hid my tears as I pulled towards the opposite door from him and stared intently out the window.
My nosebleed had stopped by the time we reached the urgent care center, but even while in the waiting room I felt like I needed to hide the mess. I couldn’t control it, but I still tried to sweep the imperfections under the rug and do the best I could to feel like I wasn’t at the hospital because of blood spilling from the front of my face.
S.D. may have cared a great deal. I was probably projecting insincerity onto him because of my own insecurity and lack of comfort with him in our relationship. So despite asking the wrong questions about him, it still taught me something very valuable relationships.
Having a blood nose worthy of a hospital admittance is an imperfection I cannot control or hide, and a similar situation is bound to come up again during my life. I needed to be with someone who I could be vulnerable with. Trust is the key element.
This is why when I experienced a nosebleed of the same magnitude a second time, I was surprised to find myself so comfortable with S.O, my current boyfriend. I was able to sit in the waiting room with a tissue stuck inside my nostril, my face a mess, lips chapped and eyes red from crying, and he still loved me as much as when I was “perfect” and healthy. While I wasn’t exactly happy, I could at least trust him to not turn away from me and to continue loving me despite my imperfect nose.
Because Love shows up in the oddest places.
It was 5:20pm on Monday evening. I was cleaning up my desk at work and was getting ready to leave for the night. I wrapped up my headphones, put my iPod away, and then grabbed my phone. Just as I was putting in my purse I felt a drip in my nose. I froze and held my head back slightly. More drips, warm liquid was filling my nose. I reached my hand to my nose when I brought it back fresh blood had stained my fingers.
I quickly made my way down the hallway and into the women’s bathroom. I pulled off two paper towels, crumpled them, and put them to my nostril. At first the flow of blood was slow, but within a minute or two I was struggling to keep up with the bright red liquid. Another minute passed and I was leaning my head over the sink further and further to keep the blood from running down my throat. More paper towels. The trash can was filling up with red splotched tissue.
Suddenly, I felt the cavity of my nose fill to the back. I kept replacing the tissue but there was just too much blood. The hot blood was starting to drip down the other side of my nose. Both nostrils were now bleeding.
Panic was setting in. Hands shaking. I was losing a lot of blood and it wasn’t slowing.
My phone, which was sitting on the counter out of the way, started to ring. The caller ID told me it was my boyfriend, S.O., was calling.
“Hello?”
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Um, not too much. How are you?”
“I’m alright. How about you?”
“I’m not all that great.”
“How come?”
I had a choice. Either pretend like I was just fine and wait it out by myself or tell him exactly what was going on.
“I’m… in the middle of a massive nosebleed.”
“What? Are you okay?”
My fear and panic started creeping in and it tightened my throat. Hot saltwater filled the base of my eyes and I was able to muster a shaky “I don’t know.”
“Do you need to go to the hospital?”
I was trying to balance the phone on my shoulder while simultaneously ripping paper towel after paper towel and stepping on the pedal on the trash can, letting each one fall on the mountain of tissues inside. The tears building in my eyes made their way down my cheeks.
My throat was so tight that all I could muster was: “If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Alright, I’ll be there in two minutes. I’ll meet you out front.”
“Okay. I love you.”
“I love you too, babe. I’ll be there soon.”
I been in this situation the year before, and needless to say: things had gone much differently.
To be continued.
Oh porcupine
You call another “prickly” and “thorny”
But forget your own spines
And porcupine
Why would you assign
Fatal words
To one of your own kind?”
Love is still cuddling with me after I projectile sneeze and get snot all over the blanket when I’m sick. Love is remembering to get grilled, not crispy chicken, on salads. Love is knowing he will still be crazy about me whether I wore my cutest outfit or whether I didn’t have time to shower because I woke up late and just threw on a sweatshirt.
Love is when there was 10″ of snow on the ground and I was without a cell phone to let him know I didn’t end up in a ditch, he said “Tell me exactly which roads you’re taking to get home and if I don’t hear from you in forty minutes, I’m coming to find you.”
Love is not being mad after a nosebleed interrupts dinner and movie plans on Valentine’s Day. Love is rushing me to an urgent care center after the bloody nose won’t stop gushing. Love is sitting with me in the waiting room. Love is not shying away from me during it all.
Love is spending three hours on the phone to fight it out. Love is sacrificing sleep to talk out our deepest fears. Love is being able to trust each other to tell all the stories we keep hidden inside. Love is saying sorry followed by ten hugs.
Love is laughing at me when I wear leggings, when I hiccup, when I jump during scary movies, when I steal a sweatshirt or pajama pants from his closet, when I use lots of creamer in my coffee, when I try and fail miserably at video games, and when I trip on my own logic. Love is being able to laugh with each other for no apparent reason. Love is kisses on the forehead.
Love is pep talks and hugs and kisses before difficult conversations. Love is not shaving his beard until I got home from Europe safely to show an outward sign of support and commitment. Love is teaching me little by little with every game about football. Love is not huffing when I don’t understand football. Love is offering to make a second stop because he knows I don’t like Taco Bell.
Love is defending me. Love is yanking me out of harm’s way in a mosh pit. Love is protecting me. Love is telling me the truth and being completely vulnerable in honesty. Love is being completely afraid of the unknown future but hanging on to each other anyways. Love is taking a chance.
I love you.
Original question is here.
As artists we learn to love that we sell our souls to our art.
That’s because our art is our soul.
It’s the fruit on the branches of the trees,
the petals on the edge of the flower.
My writing, your photographs, your songs, your paintings, and anything else that you create:
It’s our soul on paper, in the melody being carried by a voice, in the colors that bleed off the canvas into the rest of the world.
When it comes out of us it takes a life that it might not have had locked up inside of us.
“The fish swims in the sea, well the sea is in a certain sense contained within the fish. Oh, what am I to think, what writing of a thousand lifetimes could not explain if all the forest trees were pens and the oceans ink?” (“The Dryness and the Rain” written by MewithoutYou)
Sometimes we treat people like dishes.
We clean them up, wash them, put them away in the cupboard
only to pull them back out and use them all over again.
When I have a throbbing headache, I forget what it’s like to not have one.
My skull is tightening. My cranial tectonic plates are moving and trammeling my head. Every light source hurts my eyes and I wonder if things have always been this bright. Have they always been this shiny? Have they always been this potent? The light is no longer something outside of my body, but a part of me because it reaches through my eyes and into the back of my head. The pain intensifies. Text is blurry and it becomes a chore to simply look across the table. I have an intense desire to close my eyes and put my head down on my desk; that strong pull just to let my eyelids sink, let me sink, to give in, just let me sleep!
I forget what it’s like to be without a headache, without 9/11, without your two cents worth, without the scrutinous science of people, without this cloud hanging above all our heads, and without this fear of not being enough if you don’t say I am.
Sitting in the conference room thinking about what to do about my headache, I didn’t want to go get aspirin because I had lost faith in the fact that there was an escape from it, that something outside of the pain existed.
If I can lose sight of an aspect of life with something small and insignificant like a headache, how often do I do elsewhere in my life?
How often do I not talk it out because I think nothing but a parade of elephants will always be walking through the room? How often do I lock you out of my life because I am afraid you won’t be who you say you are? How often do I not confront you because I believe conflict will always reside here? How many times do I not go down the hall to get aspirin because I think that nothing else exists?
I cannot continue to live my life in this room. If I do, I will always be on the wrong end of the hall. I will always be quietly floating in a puddle of what-ifs and imagined pain, wondering if things have always been this bright.
During the late hours of the evening I lose the ability to hide much of what I feel. As I grow more tired, the shield that I rely so heavily upon during the day is the first thing to go.
My die-hard optimism dissolves and I’m left alone in the room with my raw emotion. I am forced to be honest with myself because I no longer have the energy to rationalize.
At six o’clock I can argue with you and be frustrated at you for not handing out the benefit of the doubt to people, but by eleven I’m crying and just as confused as you are.
But it’s the conversations that are supposed to end at ten-thirty but end up going until one that help me make sense of my life. I can pour myself out and we can whittle away at our frustration until we come to the root of the issue.
I’ve never been here before, so I don’t have the answers. I’m just as confused as you are, and that has to be enough. All I can offer is what I feel and what I’ve known to be true thus far. So when we hit conflicts, this is what we need to do. We have to carve away at what bothers us, what fills us up, what makes our day, what breaks it. Pull back the rationalization, the excuses, the trivial words we toss out to fight showing our weaknesses. I’ve never been comfortable enough to do that. But if you’ll help me whittle away, dig deeper, and peel back the layers, that’s more than I could ever ask.
We have to follow the veins back to the heart.
My eyelids are heavy tonight. Five hour nights don’t suit me well, so I had to resort to coffee to get me home.
I went to the freezer to retrieve the tin can of coffee grounds. Next to it was the ice pack that I used to aid a recent nosebleed. There’s nothing that stops a beautiful, snowy Saturday afternoon like the taste of iron and blood spontaneously running down the back of my throat. It robbed me of my entire evening along with the ability to eat and a peace of mind. There’s nothing so small that is so intruding.
I pulled off the plastic lid and immediately the rich scent of the Columbia coffee beans spilled into the kitchen. I cleaned my coffee cup in hot water while the coffee maker gurgled and steamed. Within three minutes the kitchen was overly warm. The cold creamer hit the fresh, hot coffee and bubbled slightly until I stirred it up and it became a car ride companion.
It’s just after eleven and there are still plenty of people on the road and awake at my house. I much prefer the lonelier hours of the morning. There’s something to being the only pair of headlights on the road. It’s a sanctuary. It’s just me and the car humming on the road.
And now I’m home. Late-night reruns of spy television shows run in the background to keep me company. The curtains are closed for the night and the porch light is left on. The single lamp that is on in the livingroom whispers its yellow light softly and begs me to sleep.
I am giving in with the last bit of coffee that’s gone cold.
To bed.
To another morning.
And to bed.
Mornings waits for our people, and we are glimpsing the dawn.
Godspeed and wisdom, Mr. President.
I was making dinner for my boyfriend tonight. I was kind of going off of whatever he had in the pantry and was banking on there being enough noodles for the meal. There was less than one portion of macaroni noodles, and less than one portion of fettuccine noodles. I presented my dilemma to the boyfriend.
“So, which do you want? Fettuccine or macaroni?”
“Can’t you just make both?”
“Don’t you think it’d be a little weird for the macaroni and the fettuccine to be hanging out together on the same plate?”
And then I remembered that it’s Martin Luther King Day. Wrong day to discriminate!
This is the kind of cold that makes breathing impossible. It’s the kind of cold that with arms reaches into down into the lungs and constricts the windpipes in a clean and holy freezing. A cold that within minutes causes the assassination of limbs just as the coughing sets in. Frostbite in its purest, deadliest form.
Will your dead fingers and toes will forgive you?
But, we are home inside the subzero temperatures. It’s the novel to our plotline. The skeletal structure to our empty conversations. My organic curiosity to your love of being the answers. My confusion to your occasional need to talk to me like a child and a long-lost lover in the same sentence. The midnight table for the sliced, orange moon.
This is the cold that sequesters us and changes us. The previous enemy that became a loyal friend in a hospital room. A complete stranger a confidant. Former and formal friends turned messengers bearing omens. The people I’ve always regarded as just faces in my life a turn into the what-ifs, the have-beens, the could-bes, the wishes, the transforming, the becoming.
It all leads up to this moment. We’ve locked ourselves inside an imaginary kitchen of an imaginary house. We’ve got blankets, coffee, and warm pastries. And we’ll talk about anything but the cold.
(Part 1 is here.)
(Part 2 is here.)
3:33pm
There had been a few minutes of cloudless thunder. The sky flickered a couple of more times, but slowly everything was coming back to normal. The sun was burning through its inky shell, the grey sky was being painted back to a burning blue, and the river of smoke was draining like a pool at the end of the summer.
Read the rest of this entry »
(Part 1 is here.)
3:04pm
I immediately dropped my controller and went the window. It was like someone had used a dimmer switch on the weather. The sky that was a pure blue just minutes before was now a flat, dark grey. The sun was still in its place but it looked like a ball of wet black paint. Still no clouds. The level of light outside was the amount that usually occurs after twilight but before it’s truly dark.
Read the rest of this entry »
For weeks the actuaries and weathermen have seen tiny anomalies and inconsistencies in weather patterns across the country. After devoting massive amounts of attention and prediction to these little stochastic occurrences, they predicted the exact date, time, and location of where all of the anomalies would come to a head and wreak havoc.
Not even the weather stations could tell you how all of these elements would come together. No one knew what a literal, perfect storm would look like. They just knew it was coming.
Read the rest of this entry »
6 Quick Facts About Me:
1. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is one of the most brilliant books ever written.
2. I'm beginning to dislike chick flicks / love movies as time goes on.
3. I want to understand more than anything.
4. Burt's Bees Pomegranate Chapstick. That is all.
5. If you don't like analyzing things or listening to other people analyze things, please do not sit in a room with me while commercials are running on tv.
6. My favorite dinner is comprised of either a) a huge plate of grilled vegetables or b) an Oreo and marshmallow Blizzard from Dairy Queen.
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