“There are some among us who live in rooms of experience we can never enter”

john steinbeck

I am, at this moment, in that forbidden room.
And for the sake of it, 

for the sake of me,
I'm taking a break from the blog.

A break from the burning desire for validation I lay at it's feet,

a break from trying to lay feelings bare

which are not yet big enough to face this big bad world.

So I'm taking a break,
a day,
a week,
a month.
I don't know.
But I'll be back.

to burn away my shame
i'd jump from the highest cliffs
leap from the highest towers
into a sky aflame and raging with sea-blue
redemption.
i would soar before my fall,
and fly
too close to the sun.

you would see my
silhouette.
the impression
of a girl that could be,
of a nimble if
a might have been
that navigates the sky
so easily;
she uses the changing clouds
the sagging cotton skies
as beacons marking the way,
using the course of the wind
to lead her home.
you would see the black of me
undisturbed by the light
the darkest parts of me
an underbelly aglow
unbroken by laughter,
and
with no such golden child to compare it to
that shadow of a me
would break your heart
with the purity of it's wrongness.

i would be an angry bruise
against and aging sun
high on the heady fumes
of a million extinguished dreams
drunk to the point of belligerence
from sipping at the steady fountain
of prayers,
constantly running between
the ancient rotting terra firma
and that place called the Promised land.
an endless stream of fermented hope
refined, strained, and steeping,
stewed to an alcoholic tar
aged by the distance
between every human heart and his Creator.

i promise this to you,
sometime between the last instant
of toe on ground stability
between the moment i leapt for my
penance
and the time when
bare foot bleeding
skin peeling
nerves screaming
from the burning off of my pain
and the dissolution of my self-pity;
between the time i take flight,
and that ever unsure landing,
whether a sad last thud,
or at a screeching run
with fists and hair flying,
heart humbled and backbone mended,

Whether into the ground or across it i land,
somewhere, between takeoff and letdown,
i will forgive,
i will have burned within myself,
incinerated in the fires of my sudden
short-lived bravery:
my past,
the memory, the marker of my life,
and will have dropped it's ashes
across the oceans.

and in the hands of another
whether fate
Gravity
or Something greater
will be the verdict,
the passing down of a sentence.
the great decider,
the judge of all things
will spew forth the terms of my indictment,
and i might only pray that it rain down on me
run over and through me,
touching every crack
and dry spot,
and stick fast to me
a baptism in punishing healing hoping stinging honey.
only He will tell,
the angry bellowing Future,
prodding me to take my turn,
He
will say
will weigh my penance
my leap
my tears and my singed face
against all i have done.
and whether i will land, or whether i will crash
I will be the bard that brings forth the tale,
and strumming, humming,
scarred and shivering
I will bear witness to all.

this is a lazy blog. :) an old poem i found, because it's the end of the semester and I'm roommate hunting, life reorganizing, brain straightening, and the world appears to be spinning very fast.

i'm waiting

"The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in François Truffaut's movie L'Argent du Poche...She focused her thoughts. "Sometimes," she decided to say, "wonderful things happen to me, too."”

salman rushdie

the satanic verses

so maybe not yet. 

maybe today wasn't the day for the wonderful thing.

maybe the wonderful thing is waiting for me to hold up my end.

but one of these days, man

happiness is gonna hit me like a train.

and every morning?

getting out of the bed?
dotting the i's ---crossing the infinite t's?

every day is training.

to make sure i'm ready to take all that annihilating joy

and let it crush all my fear.

that's what i think.

funnier ways to put off writing your philosophy paper (because i still had 10 minutes)

boot) stop using numbers to demarcate sequence, make up your own sequential device and piss on millenia of mathematical progress. boot comes before one. the end.

car) realize that creating your own sequential devise is a perfect demonstration of conceptualism, and that you actually ARE using philosophy and use that to rationalize spending even more time blogging, because you are getting "warmed up for your paper"

nugget) realize that getting warmed up for your paper is a very important process which you have neglected far too often in the past, and suppose that it might greatly improve your writing skills.

pantaloon) attempt to stretch your brain, fingers, and wrist muscles in preparation for this epic writing journey

nerfherder) let wrist stretching lead to body stretching, which leads to side cramp because you ate WAY too many almonds and did not wait an hour before physical exertion.

proctologist) hold your belly and moan lightly while typing a blog about procrastination. realize, while typing blog, that the word wrist is positively absurd, and needs a sixth letter because it looks naked and vulnerable and wrong.

pork) begin to mentally philosophize about nakedness and vulnerability in human beings and the universal need to protect them.

bandoleer) become distraught because you have realized that you are philosophizing, and obviously warmed up and should probably start your paper.

598)  seek counsel from your goldfish about angst, but realize that there is an epic youtube video where some guy freaks out over world of warcraft and realize that staring at other people's problems is wayyyy better than paying attention to your own.



10) realize that can never be your life, stop talking to your goldfish, begin using real numbers again, do not think about naked wrists, and chastely begin your paper, which is due in 12 hours.

zeus help me.

ways to put off your philosophy paper

1) think about how miserable it is to write philosophy.


2) decide you really haven't been working out enough, and end up at the gym!


3) accept a last minute invitation to the world's cheapest, most delighful sushi

4) decide on the way home from sushi, that you need to stop eating out, and stop at the store for veggies, nuts, berries, bananas.

5) realize upon arriving home, that you NEED broccoli, in the way Nicholas Cage needs to stay away from dramatic acting roles.

6) find four different spices to put on your broccoli, to assess the best way in which to flavor your fiber.

7)remember you forgot to blog, and MUST blog, lest the blog gustapo come cut off your toes in your sleep. (which by the way you won't be getting any of tonight, because you have this very important to do list to complete)

8) check your email, check your other email, check for facebook, spend an inordinate amount of time gawking at the ludicrously overpersonal posts of friends from middle school.

9) remember that your computer chair is actually a giant bouncy ball.

10) wholeheartedly embrace the chaos which is brought on by previous realization.

11) take picture of exactly how miserable it is to procrastinate a blog.

12) spend only an instant realizing you aren't entirely sure what aforementioned essay is to be about.

13) realize you can't POSSIBLY start a paper at 11:42, you must wait for a whole time (like twelve, which means i have 18 more minutes to procrastinate, before i have to find another good reason to procrastinate)

the moment it hits

All we really want, when we realize we've been terribly wrong, is to be forgiven. there is something to be said for the moment when you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what's happened, about what's happening in your life. That moment of complete truth can be a god unto itself, the Vishnu the creator and the destroyer both. It is metamorphic. but as a girl, as a human, I am weak in so many ways, and when I realize I've been wrong, the best way for me to find strength, is to find some tenderness in this great world which can plant the seed.

there's a moment when you look into a mirror and your heart is asking a question, and it's showing in every inch of your face, and your pupils become the tiny dots that sit at the bottom of every question mark. there's a moment when the mirror comes to life, and a finger points directly at you. and as every second passes it looks more and more like the pretend super death ray finger guns children play cowboys and indians with, and that gunpoint conviction is enough to nearly break you in half.

and we must choose. in the face of a threat whose only bullet is our own shame, we can either let the terror take us, and cry. We can be buried in it. Or we can see it for what it is, responsibility, waiting for us to take it up, to make it right.

Do you know me well enough by now to know that I have been making the wrong choice?

Because I most definitely have.

my little goldfish puck died last night. he was in a small bowl and i needed to go get an air pump for it, and i kept putting it off. I know he might have died for a million different reasons, the foremost being that he was a 28 cent goldfish intended for being fed to bigger, less peaceful critters; but it hit me hard.

Puck became everything i had been putting off, letting get away from me, using all the excuses of "I'm just going through something right now, I'm just under a lot of pressure." I was manipulating myself into believing it was ok to surrender, repeatedly, to what simply amounts to LIFE.

I've been letting that indicting finger intimidate me, and in the face of that imaginary threat, i've been quaking in my boots.

And so this morning, as the tears were threatening, as I almost gave up, the snow came. Fat drops, like flowers, falling everywhere, hushing all sounds, and upon closer inspection, upon venturing out coatless and mismatched; the tiny, breathless shhhh's the issued upon landing shamelessly on arms, on eyelashes, on ears and noses. Carelessly frizzing my hair with the wetness of it's absolution.

So yes, I suck a bit. I've been navigating as best I thought I could from some muddled crack of panicked resignation, but the goal today, for this week, because that's maybe all I can handle, is to start moving again, to stay in motion. And to let that inertia sweep me into saving myself.

I hope.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --

First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go -- 

emily dickinson.

i am actually feeling so much more something today. if not more redblush vivid, then something closer, the pinktinged hope of warming fingers, maybe. but then there was emily, and she knew why my smile is stiff, why it takes me a few seconds to remember to laugh. 

but this morning it was those last few words that made me curl my toes and stretch my arms, just to feel the blood rush to the farthest reaches of me. 

to reteach my nerves their joyous pliability.

and celebrate lay-down casuality.

at least for a little while

it's not safe out there, you know?

each day is a step further into a stream we are all trying to cross, in search of that secret, intangible something that touches our soul. we dangle these ideals, these goals in front of us, like golden carrots on strings, justifying each and every step across slippery stones, in rushing waters. We ask questions by our every action, we tell and we tell a joke, to which the answer is a smile, and we can carry on because  i am thisclose to being loved, because she almost laughed. Those questions tell us where we are along the way, how much longer we have to stand here shivering, before we'll be home.

these markers tell us if we are making progress, and we use them to make it okay that we are putting our lives in peril of the McDonald's hamburged filled, speeding car driving, heartbreaking, disease bearing world.

yesterday, a very kind doctor took a very large piece of me away, excised it, put it in a jar, and sent it away, in hopes that he was giving me something back.

he glanced back as he left the room and this is what he said, "Just have a low threshold, don't be afraid to call." And I wanted to scream out and say, what in the hell would you say if i called? would you comfort me? What does that even mean? why did you pat my leg like you were consoling me? The questions flooded me. And i knew if I kept asking them to the closed oak door he left in his wake, I'd never get off that table, get dressed, go to work.

he was supposed to be my reference point. he needed to tell me where i stood. and whatever he said, his brow was furrowed when he came out from under that great awkward sheet, as it had not been before he had disappeared beneath it. and i could not help but trying to translate each wrinkle on his tall shining forehead.

he hoped to give me time, this i knew, he told me as much. he hoped to find the delicate balance between the hope of having my own life, and someday bringing forth another. this was the hope. a delicate hope that made my entire body tremble. i don't know his motives, i want to pretend to myself that implicit in his glance was altruistic philanthropy. i want to pretend he saw something in me worth saving, and so he was going to make very absolutely sure that he did his very very best. I wanted to believe I was an exception to him. But the truth is this; it's his job and his job is to answer the questions by cutting away what he can: the confusion, the ugly parts, the pain. But there are more questions than he has time, or words, or strength, sometimes, I'm sure.

so sometimes, in light of the scary places within and without, we have to shut down. shut it off. crumple up the questions and leave them behind in the biohazard bin.

let it happen, let an afternoon of pastry and tea turn into an easy night at work, turn into the next day where we leave the laundry, and go on a salvation army adventure. just let the air fill us up and empty us out. (expandcontractexpandcontract, all the while, the only focus). nothing complex.

sometimes we have to let it rush past; from cheap sushi, to the pedicure you can't actually afford (but the red wine is complimentary, so please budget forget me for an hour), and metamorphose into speaking too loudly of books we love, with strangers who may not love us and try not to worry, for just a second about the question we are asking with the endless prose, and whether or not they are giving the right answer.

sometimes we have to say to someone, "this day hurts me to my core." and curl up in a ball under the mere effort of reaching out to someone. we can't wonder if it was too much to tell them; if they'll care. in those moments we are not allowed expectation or reservation.

there are so many questions, and no peace treaty which might let them cross over into the place of answers and find their justice. So Tuesday I stopped shooting questions into the air, trying to flag down some sort of rescue. I am fortified in the simple act of letting it all slide by, in watching things take their course, in doing only what must to carry on. I am not asking, I am not explaining. I am not apologizing.

my hope will not be pillaged by the desperation of questions unanswered, of the need to be validated. i have made myself a tautology, and at the risk of being a heretic, have taken a page from that great  yahweh. and today, i am.
All our questions are a way of asking directions to a more permanent refuge from the storm. We are all asking for directions home. No, I can't be safe, it's not the nature of this world I'm in. I can duck into the cramped doorways of love around me, though; the free latte, the hair brushed out of my face, the i miss you text from my mom, the generosity of new gloves on cold fingers. If my hand shake, I won't stop them, I won't ask why, I don't need to know.

i feel you.

It was a wasted spark of deja vu, hearing her just inside his door like that. She stood, barely across the threshold, begging for answers She, the opposite of me: tall and slender, well-raised and well off, convinced and naive. So sure that no one could be wrong but the other; a quality I frankly both envy, and want to slap right off any face I see it on.

I can't deny that there are two sides to every story. Three, in this case. His, mine, and hers.

And the most painful thing; the thing that kept me from standing up so so long ago. The cage that trapped the tiny fluttering "enough" in the back of my throat,  was built of the longe barbed prongs of my empathy.

Did you know that empathy will rob you blind? She is a good one to have on your side, that empathy. She's one of the people you need to know to really, truly be human. But if you are me, you will invite empathy to dinner, let her sit at your table, and she will be ravenous. I could not feed empathy enough, and so like the good, midwestern hostess, I fed her all I had, and starved.

That is why I have not been classy, on the blog. I have been this way because this is my place, this is the door empathy cannot break down. This is the place where I can commune with her and know that I must abide her, as she is thick in my blood, but here I have refused to be the better person, for the first time in nearly a year. Because I saw the other girl, and for all her visciousness I could not hate someone who stood in the same threshhold as me, with the same briny tide washing in and out of her eyes, taking away with it more and more of her resolve each time the tears abated. I could not hate the striking, angry girl who, after all, only had the same questions as I?

I could not begrudge that "why." So I followed her to the stairs, and I apologized. I cried, and told her I was sorry. I who had not knowingly committed any crime, was indicted by my empathy. The rest of the details are brutal, and mine. But I had to testify, that it was all my both-sides-of-the-storying that got me here.

My empathy for the both of them. For her, out of the aching knowledge that we are women, and we are fools. For him, out of a misguided love, that commanded I see, acknowledge, and fight his pain. Even if it leaves me jausting windmills.

I traded empathy for conviction, for self love. And for that, for a while, there was no room in my words for understanding, only for the rebuilding of fortitude, only for finding myself in the mirror at last, and not the negative space the filled the holes between all the qualities I didn't have.

I have been seeing myself, and I have acquired a feral hunger for my own strength. Angrily shooing those who might wish to partake. It will pass, of course. I will not be so demented with need, in time.

But until then, please forgive my need to be angry, to be right. To protect what is so newly mine.

a free willy moment.

i'm aware that this is going to sound like me being a weirdo again.
and i'm aware this is deplorably cheesy.
and yes, i know this will solidify any looming optimism that i might be cool.
so bear with me.
I'll write something real tomorrow,
but tonight, all I can think of is that damned movie.

 a big, black and white whale,
and how,
with winter coming
and my heart changing,
all i'm thinking of
is how pathetically
desperately,
strangely,
i want a willy.

i know it's a kid's movie.
but my whole life that kinship has spoken to me,
and so many times
when the human race let me down,
i turned to a stray dog,
or a turtle with a cracked shell
that my brothers found on the side of the road.

and tonight, seeing how far i feel
from so many of the humans in my life,
feeling a bit like the outcast,
irredeemable, unlovable
and embracing my inner jesse,
i just want a willy.
because it's so much easier than people who have expectations,
who have their own perspective.
because willy is all love.
and because i love willy with all my heart.
but alas, a girl can love a whale,
but where, oh where, would they live?

ugh, yeah. i'm a dork.
anyways this
on repeat
is the best i could do.

"but they told me a man should be faithful, and walk when not able, and fight till the end; but i'm only human"
'cause no one can say that like m.j., really. and no one should. ever.

oh my baby, oh my darlin, i've been taking a beating

i present, for your consumption, a conglomeration of the loveliest things about today.

(

there's a new lake in my neighborhood, and george eliot to be read.

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it,
and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth
seeking the successive autumns."  -   George Eliot  

the leaves are on fire, and my envy for autumn, and it's graceful capacity for change, to make even the leaves fall for it, is filling up my journal pages, faster than i'd like to admit.

it was so warm yesterday, i got to take off my cardigan and feel the sun on my shoulders just once more before the cold builds woolen walls between skin and sky.
btw, Nichole Krauss is amazing. I'm reading her latest "Great House" in between tests this week.
it's tickling my love bone.
(if you could pretend not to see my polkadotty bra strap, that'd be a-ok.)

and of course, zooey deschanel in all her way-cooler-than-everyone glory. :)

the soapbox derby champion of the world

I'm just going to hop right up on my soapbox, before I worry I'll sound too preachy and change my mind.

I want to talk about something. About the heavy workaday things I said I wasn't going to say yesterday.

Well, honey-darlin-sugar-pies, it is today now. 

There is a boogeyman living under all our beds. Sometimes, in the little bubbles of our daily drama's, between the kids who won't write their papers, the boyfriends we don't know if we should keep, the hangnails that drive us crazy, the irking slivers of life that get under our skin and seem for an instant like a Shakespearean tragedy...in the shelter of these predictable daily struggles, we begin to see ourselves as beings too small, too insignificant, or too intrinsically us to be affected by life's big scary boogeymen.

Thinks like cancer become words that can't possibly apply to us. That word, oh no, that is the word that is someone else's to carry around. It's what the grown up's use to keep us from microwaving food inside plastic, or smoking cigarettes, or sitting too close to the tv. But this word is yours.

This word is as close to you, as the three blocks between your morning class and your yearly checkup with University health. 

But this one, today, is for the girls. Cervical cancer awareness commercials are all over the place now. It's not because it's some more sinister form of cancer, it's not because the makers of the Guardasil vaccine want your cash; it's because it's caused by a virus that one in three sexually active women will acquire at some point in their lives. And because it may be one of the few cancers out there that may be preventable, and because there is a test that can be done regularly and painlessly, to catch it in it's baby stages, to stop it in it's tracks, while it's still manageable.

So, boys,(i know there is at least one of you, mike) this is for you, too. For your daughters, your wives, your friends. This is for the girl you see smiling every day, and never get the chance to tell her about the sacred heaven ascending light she brings to your life; this is for the girl you might not get a chance to tell.  This is for your chance to hear that, girls.

If you are under the age of 23, get the Guardasil vaccine ( i promise, they are not paying me for this). Most colleges subsidize the vaccination for their students and even doctors are recognizing the importance of a possible cancer preventative, and are willing to help. You may not think you have the money, but let me tell you, most ardently; you can find the money to protect yourself from cervical cancer.

For women of all ages: always wear a condom. Most men are carriers of the HPV virus, and the destruction of cells by this virus is the leading cause of squamous cell carcinoma.

Always get checked. Fifteen minutes, once a year. If you are, or have been, or are considering being sexually active, get checked. If you are embarrassed, it's as simple as saying to your doctor "I need my yearly." The social stigma and awkwardness of actually having a pap has made it a very easy thing to ask for.

I could save myself some embarassment here, but I don't think each and every one of you realizes how close you are to this disease. So I'll tell you. My first love, the man to whom I first gave my most sacred possession to, was a carrier of HPV. Six years later, I have a carcinoma on my cervix.

I blew it off. It's just some boogeyman meant to scare you into spending money you can't afford at a doctor who doesn't care, right? Something too big for you, right? I got checked when I was 18 and found out about the HPV. One sexual partner. I thought, "This can't possibly be serious, I've been so carefuly, I've been so protective." But six years ago they were still saying 1 in 3 women has this, and most forms just go away. Now, we know. But it's that close. And you do need to be careful.

This is your life, and there are so many things in this world we can't control, so many things that can hurt us. We have millions of tiny heartaches we can't prevent, car accidents, lighting strikes, muggings, and a frightening list of cancers and diseases we can't do anything to prevent. But this, this is in your hands.

Protect yourself. 

oh yes

oh.
one of my favorite words.

today, there are heavy, thick, leathery workaday things at play.
saddle-fat, and careworn, they are waiting by the front door,
to be taken out when I go
or to take me out,
should i try going without them.

but I could not care less.

i have new boots.
and today,
there is no panic in my heart.




I have a sweet empty afternoon, and a rectangle of sunlight on my bed, whispering catnaps in my chilly ears. I can almost hear my own heart purring in feline reverence to the possibility of a mumbling wakeup, and an endless stretch. I have
a five foot square sanctuary
in which,
even if it's only for a moment,

i can keep my peace.

and that small two-letter revelation,
to keep me company.


oh.

a toast.

fall's first great soak began this weekend.

I feel as though the skies are pouring great cupfuls of change, and I walked home tonight with even my socks eager to drink it in. And I would like to raise a toast to the heavens:

To an old post, which reminded me of a me I love; of a girl who set out from home to set to rights what she had wronged, with a single suitcase, and shaky knees. A girl I plan to see much more of.

To the people who are already on their way to get you, because they are worried your hair will get frizzy on the way to start your new job.

To bright yellow glass pitchers, and the promise of mimosa brunches.

To understanding, finally, that empathy for others does not invalidate my own feelings.

To the final straw, which galvanizes you to actually tell her (while awake) that cosmetic aptitude and an ability to use hair product and do a truly excellent disgusted hair flip does not constitute true beauty, but a courteous kitsch, a cheap mass appeal, which is easily replicated. That beautiful insides, kindness, and empathy are of greater value.

To calling myself beautiful, and meaning it. 

To a long lost someone, who reminded me tonight of what it means to be unashamed.

Salud.

you should just know

that monday was a day of redemption.

That I told the darling, living-shock of a bright smile, Megan, that we'd go for a little hike. But I forgot, for just a second who exactly I used to be; more importantly, who Megan and I are together. Alongside her I brighten, as almost everyone does at being near to a very dear friend. When together we let the ordinary grow up tall, and slip itself neatly between the course threads of daily living, We follow it to it's peaks, as Jack with his beanstalk, we see what treasures await us in the clouds, and then we climb back into our lives. Return home, with the twinkling merriment of being able to slide so comfortably in and out of the extraordinary. It is a beautiful life, that alongside friends such as mine.

And so, yesterday afternoon, we hiked. Among the flaxen residue of trees growing sleepy for the winter; preparing themselves, shedding their spring and summer day layers in preparation for yet another sweet winter catnap to rest them for their endless yawning eons.

And we climbed, up and up, and endlessly up. Three thousand feet of up, over what felt like as many miles. In the shadow of the mountain's ancient fortitude, we grew, within ourselves, at ever taller foot. The laughs became louder, the songs more jubilant. Drunken on the amber honey-ale of light you could touch.

And when we reached the top, we found we were not truly at the top. So, in our hands, we took the great strength of boulders, and under shaky, height fearing legs we stood at the apex, but still we stood. And the conquering became a game. I playful hide and seek with our own courage. In the thrumming darkness of this crevice, or just the far side of this boulder.

I could go on, and on, and on. You know I can. But the photos must speak, the moment can tell you. But can I just tell you, that last night I dreamt of her again? I dreamt of my current greatest fear, and she didn't win this time. I threw a trash can full of iced tea on her? Several actually. The brain does what it must to cope. And I awoke to a geology quiz that reminded me that mountains are the product of the Earth's great collsions with itself. They are war wounds. And today, the resuscitating breath of the mountain still in my lungs, breathing is easier.

I can't quite tell you

I can't quite tell you what it is I'm seeing.

Because I know I'm not seeing it all.

I know that if I could just breathe deep enough, I could leave myself.

Because somewhere, above the shuffling of my feet along the roads, and with the insulation of miles of atmosphere between the effervescent dream of a me that can truly see and the girl who is yogi-breathing her way through the day, is the vantage point from which I could make sense of things. If I could find perspective, I just know I could see the great amalgam of what is coming. I want to see that things are going to get better, even if it means that things are going to get worse first.

But I am just a girl. A girl who was made a great fool. Just a girl who accidentally rants out loud, and sometimes forgets about breakfast, and lunch, and sometimes dinner. I am, at the moment, a girl mesmerized by the rerun of her great fall.

I am Nixon, watching Watergate unfold, hoarding tapes, imagining my downfall, until it comes to me, again and again. I am Achilles, wondering why the God's did not just thrust me into the River Styx and let me try my own floundering luck at escaping my mortality, rather than leave me blinded to my weakness under the roaring sun of assumed fortitude.

But these things are not a life. And all wallowings must end. I am just a girl, and so I must look for light in the world through the pinprick left me.


So, no. I don't know what it is I'm seeing right now, because I am too close, and my view is too narrow. But I'm trying to look. Because even if it's terribly cliche; if I am willing to push forward without seeing everything, then a crack is enough to give me an inkling. To give me a dream.

(i took this photo last winter, having no idea what it would mean to me tonight.

i find great joy seeing that sometimes, we already know the answers)

for the sake of ranting in peace

I think I need a bluetooth. I have no intention of hooking it up to my phone, but hear me out.

This is the part where I have to stop worrying that this makes me self-important, or that you'll judge me, and just tell you, that for the sake of caution, and not getting hauled off to the looney bin; I need to invest in a bluetooth.

You see, I just got my hearbroken. And yes, if you've been reading, it's the same vaguely alluded to once considered boy of my dreams, and now, lately, literally, nightmares. You see, I've never actually come out and said it, because really, it's too hard to blog about a boy sometimes.

Because sometimes this particular boy had flame-red eyelashes that made you forget what you were saying,  and who plucked your eyebrows for you when your couldn't see, so you wouldn't have to look like a bush man. Because sometimes, this boy liked to break your heart. Sometimes, he was too scared to love you, and kept a back-up, just in case.

 

Boys, in case you were wondering, keeping backups is not fair.

 

So sometimes I need some help, when I make it to campus, when I'm walking by the places I saw them together, and let myself be convinced it was innocent, it was happenstance, when I am pretty sure I've become epileptic and asthmatic (because my lungs are supposed to work and whole body should do what I tell it to, because it shouldn't shake liek this), when I remember that Thanksgiving break won't be in Portland, or when she stands outside our philosophy class on the day of the midterm just to see him; when these things happen, when I have to leave the midterm because there is not enough oxygen getting to my brain, and why is my face all wet; when I'm just trying to make it home from the library through the landmine of everything I can't stop seeing,
I imagine.
It's very similar to the dreams I've had every night this week.

I walk through an elaborate discovery of her, of him. Together. I am classy (sort of). I look them in the eye. I ennumerate their wrongs, and if I am asleep and have no control, they kiss and he does the same thing he did in real life, and I am banished.

But when I'm walking, when I'm awake, I get to pick.
I am majestic and eloquent.
And I don't cry.

This is how I get through.

But sometimes, I cope too hard. And I might slip a few words out loud, as though it were a song stuck in my head.
The Ballad of The Chastised Infidels.
And people passing look bewildered, they take a few steps away.
So I was thinking, if I just had a bluetooth in my ear, they wouldn't know I was broken.
They would just think I was an obnoxious bluetooth person with a need to publicly air her laundry.
And I was thinking I could be okay with that.

So I can rant in peace, you know?

it was neither diabolical nor divine; 

it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition; 

and, like the captives of Phillipi, 

that which stood within ran forth.

-the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson

I have realized, that although I may be a good writer, I am censored. everything I write is vague, impersonal. And what appears to be my best blog, was the one in which I was vulnerable; in a real, not just whining, sort of way. So now I have to make a decision. Where is the line between being self-important, and wanting to connect? Why do I think it's okay for all the other blogs I read, and find it unacceptable in myself?

I either need to cross the line and let it out in all my writing or I need to pick a new love, a new hobby, a new profession. I need to say goodbye to the prodigal child. 

Advice?

and just to keep me sane

and just to ease my neurotic mind,

and just because today, a nurse, who does not know me, said "darling, fish oil, for concentration."


and because forty people this week alone said, "It's not your fault."

and because i don't believe them.

and because i'm going to fail my test tomorrow.


and because i need one thing to go properly.....

can someone, anyone,

pretty please-with-nuts-and-berries-and-chocolate-covered-anything on top

please tell me

what temperature at which

i am supposed to bake sweet potato chips?

you'd really be doing my neurosis a favor.

a reality check

i have not written a poem

in 2 years and five months.

.exactly.

i've been a poet since i the day black squiggly lines sprang forth

from the shel silverstien's page

and showed me the nimble toes of the written word.

and yet,

the poetry

appears to have dear john-ed me, dear friends.

the lyric toppling of syntax

and form,

appears to have dropped it's bouquet;

turned it's back on a hasty nuptial embrace

with the girl who 

just can't seem to commit

to who she really is.

 it's been that long,

since i believed

in my own words enough

to give them a home

and i, the prodigal child,

the seeker of life's little
nests

have denied my conviction it's home.

what i'm really trying to say is,
it's you-know-what or get off the you-know-where time.

 

So this blog is going to change. This blog is going to have a mission now. Because there's a reason i can't believe in the traipsing ballet of my own poetry any longer, there's a reason i can't pay attention logn enough to not burn the sweet potato chips. There is a reason I cannot turn away from a wilting-orange sun, which may very well be blinding me.

I have been tiptoeing around the heart of the matter. I have been not singing my story, because i was afraid no one wanted to hear. I was afraid that the overrunning well of all that I have been too afraid to say, would not be wanted. But it is time that I hold myself accountable. It is time that I held you accountable.

If you do not love me, even when I have said what must be said, then I do not need your love.


But if you do, if you even have the tiniest spark of the faintest scratching friction of love for me, you must help me.

I need to know you're there.

the rarest

i'm so sorry.

I've been having a very changing week.

a week full of blue-moon rarities.

of things i was not sure could happen anymore.

the kansas city chiefs won their third game in a row.
(football was not something i chose to love, meet my mama)

i asked for help.

and i something shifted in my soul,

something that made me say,

no

you cannot break me anymore,

when all i really wanted

was to let myself be a twig

in hands that could 

gently obliterate me

and then convince me i needed such decimation.

it is a rare day.

this is what you shall do

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem
And have the richest fluency,
Not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes, 
And in every motion and joint of your body.

-walt whitman

when it's getting crowded.

I felt all week as though I were going to scream. I felt as though there were too many pieces of a burgeoning, changing life for me to hold, too many faces, too many versions of the same, care-worn smile to be spread across too much space.

When I was a kid, and my dad and I would drive from Dodge City, Kansas to the tiny town of Randall where my grandma lived, we would drive through a place called Cawker City. And as the highway pulled through town, in a park under a shaky old picnic awning stood the creme de la creme of nothing-nowhere-sights-untold midwestern tourist traps.

This ramshackle leaning roof on stilts housed the World's Biggest Ball of Twine.

I would love to be joking. Even more would I like to be joking about how much I loved that hunchbacked fantasy. It represented one town's need to be more than just a potty break, just north of quiet, flat Highway 36. But I did, and in their endless quest to stay the biggest, they added to the ball, and added to the ball. And eyes squinting against the glare of my memory, my distorted self history bore witness to that ball of twine as something that did not fit, that could no longer live under that tiny roof that would soon have to sit atop the head of that squatted twine ball.  And this week, I was that poor faltering building, with too damn much inside.

and then I went in search of pictures. To drive my point home.
I did my research. and this is what found.


Either time had changed the housing in my eyes, or the citizens of Cawker City had expanded to make room for the sheer mass of their fantasy. They saw that in order to keep their piece of singularity in the world, they must make way for it's bigger burden. Make a home for the weight that must be carried in the name of claim. A safe place in which to house the small voice that let them scream above the rest, for just a moment.

So they expanded.

And celebrated it.

They put the wonder of their farmland world in great works of art. And made their town a shrine.


And so it is that, once again, my metaphor must change me.

I must expand myself, and keep wrapping myself in the trappings of a developing heart. Stringing myself up. And when I am made full to bursting, 

I must make way.

And celebrate. :)

this is why.

it's amazing, the magnitude of words.of the hope implicit in community.

I was going to catch up on reading. And then I realized that I hadn't read Meg's newest blog. I read this blog every day, because something about it touches me. Even if there is nothing new to read, I read something old.

For the last week or so, I've been in a funk. The kind bluesy restlessness that verges on being Truman Capote's "mean reds."  In the space where you know you should be getting out of bed, and aren't sure you can. I should recognize this space by now. It is the narrow slit of life in which you stop at the door to your class and think, I'm already a few minutes late, and who cares if I miss it; the fissure in your days where it takes an gale-force will to walk through the already-open door.

I enumerated all that was wrong with me, and burned forty of my very own witches on the hunt for some hands in which to put this crisis. But I was reminded today, that this funk is deja vu.

And then this morning, I read the latest entry at "The Wild and Wily Ways of  Brunette Bombshell".  I read her unhappiness. And I cried. (in the student union).  Because this is my fifth year in the fight for myself. Because I have been trying to contain this. Because I spent an entire summer in a dark basement, because I spent my 19th birthday alone with a chocolate souffle I baked myself. Because I am lonely. (because, just the other day, i too needed to remind myself, in a list, just to breathe) Because i tried too hard to push it down, to pack too much into the overspilling bin. only to have it utterly refuse to be made small. This week of wetted wings is the product of my soul's unrest in this place. It's periodic rebellion to such fallacy against my true nature.

And this is why. This is what it is all for. We write so that, from Texas, from New York from Provo, she can crucify my pretensions. So that I can hand out copies of "Everything is Illuminated" like a missionary, as a fantastical bible of my humanity, so that I, and not the receiver, might be baptized int he mutual recognition of ourselves in the tiny black glyphs on each page. Because I need e.e. cummings to tell me that I must breakfast always on light and silence, and in this way still, the vortex behind my eyes, for just a moment at a time.

Because these words are the mirror into which we can look to examine and see what we could not merely feel the presence of.

So thank you Meg, for holding up a reflection, like a beacon leading home, in which I could see my fault.

too much

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog followed a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I cried over it…I spent my life learning to feel less."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

my phone took that picture. all by itself. and now i check on it often as it sits in my bag. a fret for it as one would a tiny thing, (a sparrow, or a hope) slung across me in my bag, waiting to see beautiful things. its whole life is just to wait, to be the tool through which those i love who are not here tell me i am someone. 

and while it waits it steals tiny pieces of beauty

to pass along

pictures

messages

just to say "i miss you" 

it is so easy 

to forget for a moment

and feel that such a thing might come to life.

and so i catch myself peering at it

even when it has made no noise.

asking it questions it can't answer.

and sometimes it's just too much

 and i have to laugh at myself.

for being so moved,

by something which never wanted to be beautiful.
something that never wanted anything at all.
i laugh because i can't help but seek depth in the smallest puddles.

breakfast.

I'm taking a moment of silence, of gratitude, not at the beginning of my meal. This is no precursor. But I've stopped, with berry to lip, in confusion.

Sometimes beginnings happen without our ever having noticed. For all the pomp and stutter stepping that accompanies the fiercest beginnings, sometimes they just slide past us, like a fish underwater. Inches below or to the side. All we feel is a slight rush of water. But suddenly, everything is different.

We commence, and once it is done, we are astonished, frightened, diminished by the crime of life not having given us proper warning. Something momentous has happened, and we were not given the rites of deliberation and procrastination. For an instant, we are bewildered. Misplaced from our own ritual stuttering. And then, it dawns on us. The exuberant moment when we realize that far away light wasn't a tired fluttering of exhausted eyes in the dark, but a chink in the great edifice.

I did not even feel this change, until it was upon me. For a lifetime, I have done what I must. I have moved by necessity. Ended up in this house or that town because of a lack of preparation more than any real decision on my part. Because I could not begin, my life carried me, and I reacted. I have allowed myself to be a refugee.

But today, with my blueberries, my coffee, and my philosophy homework, I realized that I chose this.

This is the moment I have chosen for my breakfast  (for breaking so many fasts) and it is of my design. I have chosen these days of feasting on knowledge, on joy, on the pleasure of a room which is mine. I am the designator of this revelry. I do not feel cheated, but as though I've cheated the world. Like I've slipped a five hundred note from the bank in Monopoly.

Now, if only more beginnings would slip past me. (like the beginning of my Palooka Journal fiction submission).

p.s. sorry there are no pictures, I was very hungry...

base

I am strange. I am one of the most spontaneous, random people you will perhaps ever meet. The other day, I fell in a fountain.  But I am a creature of habit, of needing a lot of pomp and circumstance before beginnings. Of needing to feel some sort of ceremony. I love my tiny rituals. 

The way I eat bananas. Split into thirds from top to bottom. Three tender curving triangles. as delicately chewed as possible to preserve their perfect graininess.

I like to find favorite spots, favorite stores, favorite feelings. I revisit these with unwavering affection, they are my anchored bouy in the evermoving, ebbing, flowing, sea of myself.  They are bastions against panic.
j
My small superstitious tokens against the instability of never having permanent homes and entirely reliable families.


These tiny corners of fortitude are what allow me to be who I am. They are that which make moving whenever, wherever possible. They give me the assurity to jump in the fountain, feetfirst, and therefore fall on my butt, and soak myself entirely.

And when I am taking on a great thing (because returning to school with 19 credits is no small thing) I seek these bases for my context, so that I may safely venture out and play tag with my ambitions, and always have a place to sprint towards when breath is needed.

And so, this morning, I am here. Between the math and geosciences building. In the sun. Near coffee. Near people. In the midst of campus, so that my very presence here may act as a revolt against that which I fear.

"it's the middle of the night there chief, what are you doing--?"

"learning how to be a human, and part of a family"

"yeah, i think you speak for a lot of us there"

image courtesy of rottentomatoes.com

from the movie Martian Child 

i could stand to lose a little.

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

--e.e. cummings

Loss is not generic. It is the single most paralytic happening known to man. And still, all the loss in this swirling miraculous universe is the same. It is the shadow lurking at the edges of our days, which makes us hold tighter, fight harder.


It is a fingerprint unique to each of us, woven into the grain of us; with every scintilla of growth, it changes and is as capable of evolution as any species of animal. The loss of a child, of pride, of an ideal, of a nation, of and earring, of a home. Each an entity unto itself.

But ever the same. For loss, in itself, cannot be lost. We bring it with us to the grocery store and to fetch the dry cleaning. We dance with it balanced on our heads so that even our most joyous labors are restricted by the need to remember our loads. As though we were the foreign villagers of a tired third world nation, keeping our burdens close to our center, letting it press down from atop our heads, disc compressing disc in order to continue moving forward beneath it.


Such is the scar of loss. The residue is as everyday and as everywhere as the dust., as sleep in my eyes in the morning. The left behind lost particles are as much a part of wear as the freckling of skin.


But losing scares the hell out of me. The cutting away, the very process of it. Not because I am unsure of how it will feel. I know, and know, and know again. I am by nature a collector. Of people. Of minutes. Because of that the subtext of my loss is a second heartbeat to me. Ba-bumping deeper, and more malevolent. It makes me laugh harder, until the whole of me aches with joy. My throat burns with singing into it's yawning mouth songs of joyous banishment. The very idea of that tearing feeling makes my boisterous tongue shy, and simultaneously, a feverish scrambler for its antithesis.

But that second heartbeat was born at the very dawn of joy, in the moment of my first laugh. So that I could more rightly see the beauty in things kept, so that we might know the precious thirst of holding on.

and even though we can barely stand it, even though the possibility of it is enough sometimes to keep from listening to the the little birds, it will come. It will be the shadow, dancing along behind us, and when the tearing feeling leaves, the weight of what is left becomes our gravity, centering us around that which matters most.

and these things

make uncertainty seem

so, so, small.

this week

I put notes on strangers cars with the most beautiful things I could think of on them.

I am making a wish tree in downtown boise. (keep an eye out for elaboration)

I laughed until I cried.

I remembered that no matter how wonderful my adopted families are, blood is a beautiful tie.

I stayed up too late.

I planned eight thousand things I wanted to do in a four day period.

I did them all.

I got a concussion.

I challenged myself.

I made my life an art project.

I ate whatever I wanted.

I accepted every drop of love that game my way, and sucked it up more joyously than the exuberant, exhausted August ground.


My tummy is full. My heart is full. My life is full.

And getting fuller.

a new woman

 my cousin is in town. Today we went to the Discovery Center of Idaho. It is the closest thing to wonderland that I can think of on a rainy Wednesday afternoon with ready-to-laugh company by your side. We wound through the rooms, and as two independent, curious, explorers of the world will do, Mikki and I lost each other to the intrigue of the whistling, singing, whirling innards of the world around us. I happened to come across something called  The looking glass. For visual learners and comic relief here is a picture of some total strangers who probably didn't want to be on my blog sitting at the looking glass.

Are you done laughing? If not, continue anyway, my philosophical waxing is, at times, taken better with a dose of humor.

I walked up to the contraption and sat down. From my chair it looked like a regular vanity with a very flimsy mirror. Still, I analyzed myself and waited for my company to come help me test it out. I mentally noted everything wrong with my appearance and cringed at the stitches on my forehead. And then I smelled soft after-bath powder, and the tails of a sigh I looked up and saw a woman leaning steadily toward seventy looking over my shoulder in bemusement. I asked her if she'd sit on the other side and try it with me. The light on both sides of the two way vanity was set on high and I dimmed mine first, and as I did, my face melted away. I saw powdered cheeks, papery, as though the pages of every calendar day had been thrown in with the wash and lain to dry along the curves of her high cheek bones.  I faded and the next fifty years filtered through tinted glass and shone in that dark room. The peace of having lived; having decided and done all I can to make a full life and left to look through the glass at the wonder of it all.

I turned the dimmer back up on my side just as she began to turn hers down, and when she did, she all but disappeared, she became a faint ghost of reassurance on the other side. And then I heard her suprised laughter. On rising note expressed all I needed to hear about the return of the lithe pulsating kinetic life she'd suddenly been turned round and allowed to face again, in the same direction she'd come the first time. I previewed the joy at looking in a mirror and somehow losing the last forty years. Her daughter had found her and was looking over her shoulder. The ghosts in the looking glass spoke.

"Look at that," she said. "A new woman."

There is so much coming.

images courtesy of scidaho.org

tell me i'm right

I should be sleeping. I definitely should.

I'm so, so, so sleepy. Something about a concussion yesterday or something. Who knows. But I can't sleep. Because too much has peeled my eyes today, and my eyelids seem afraid to close again. Afraid of the inching dark of turning a blind eye to all the wrong things.

So I'm listening to a lightning storm, and learning about destruction as a means of creation from this little gem.

Each page comes with instructions. Ideas for how to tear it apart, break it into pieces, spit on it, tear it into strips, color the entire page, paint a picture with your coffee. It screams at me to do anything, to drop it off the roof in the rain, and by the low lights of my own gumption it is beautiful. While I gather my breath and listen to the lightning outside and I survey the ravaged plain of all I can't manage, throwing a perfectly good book out the window to make a collection of my damages seems like a screaming beacon calling my scrambling hope home.  It seems like a strange thing to cling to, but hear me out

The family I was born with is damaged. The battle between innocence and angry fragmented humanity has come to my door step yet again and I am charged with a bleak attempt at tipping the scales in favor of the only side which allows for healing. I cannot stand aside any longer. And so I will break the thing I cannot break, and fall headlong into the wispy hope that the piece that must be saved will survive the collateral damage and blossom into something more than the sum of countless generations of convoluted survival; that the piece will thrive.

So, in the face of these things, in the breath between decision and acting upon that which I know I must do to live with myself, I am grateful for a small black journal which promises that sometimes creation is only bourne forth through the rubble by destruction.


P.s.  i need blog beautification lessons. any volunteers?

there are certain things you need directions for..

This is the story of the girl who did not ask the right questions, who did not think the right thoughts, and now, has a beautiful crescent schaped scar on her eyebrow to remind her.

It started out innocently. My boss and his daugther (a very good friend of mine) asked me to go shooting with them. (I live in Idaho, this is par for the course) She does rifle competitions and he has been shooting for fifty years and they promised to teach me the basics.

I shot about twenty shots out of a .22 caliber pistol (which means something, or something) and since I was shooting at a big piece of wood a long ways away, and nothing was getting hurt, and I'm hypercompetitive, it was a little exciting, you know?

So Bob (my boss) says, "Hey Rach, want to try the big gun?" (insert devlish grin)

THE BIG GUN.....

So, I followed all his instructions to a T, but my crappy vision kept me from seeing properly through the scope (big ugly telescope thing on top). So, having recieved no instructions to the contrary, I got closer. Sighted the ancient laptop that they had been shooting the big gun with (because in Idaho we blow up old electronics, it's pretty standard). Pulled the trigger and......

Pain. Confusion. Bob, staring agape at me and shouting "Pack it up"  T-shirt on face. Water bottle dumped on wound.


I got scoped. In the face. The good news is, I hit the target.

The bad news is, that the lovely doctor with a bachelors in Russian who works in the ER at West Valley Med Center had to give me five stitches. In my face.....

I think I'm over guns.