[7] A High of 65 Degrees and an 80% Chance of Peace

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.

[6] Drown from New Heartache

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.)

[5] Out the Window

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.”

[4] Slaap Lekker, Sleep Well

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.

[3] About a Painter

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)

[2] To Measure in Color

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)