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.