start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start.

It all started with a song about a star. A kind sleepy melody and a simple lyrics, the burbled up from a heavy, tired chest in the bunk bed next to me. My daddy wrote that song for a girl who broke his heart with her broken heart. It changed everything.

Because of what she did to him, and because of the only way he knew to tell it, the world held the soft glow of love and I could sleep at night. Words and I have had a closer relationship than I've had with any other living thing. Since the beginning of my always, they and I have been able to shape one another, and so I have chosen to use them. They will be my life's work. We will tell the stories that need to be told. This is where today's little conundrum pops up.

I chose to start my freelance writing career today. Make a portfolio, pick intense amounts of projects to send bids for, gather my reccomendations and become a writer, or something like that. So it's four thirty in the afternoon and i'm still staring at my computer. Nothing has happened, so I did what any sensible person will do, I began to complain to my friend Paul. This is how it went.

"I hate newton"
"Isaac?"
"No, fig. Yes, Isaac."
"But why?"
"Because objects at rest suck, and I'm not doing very well with finding a force in myself to make it go."
"Ah, but Newton did something nice for you too"
"Pfff."
"An object in motion will stay in motion."

Needless to say, Rachel was chastised and so much humble pie eaten that I in fact felt the need to unbutton my pants. So half dressed and needing to feel righteous in my frustration one more time, I went looking for sagelike advice from Google. I typed in "beginnings." Galileo was pretty useless, Lao Tsu kept saying the same thing over and over and over and over again, Rainer Maria Rilke, who I would typically side with over nearly anyone else had a fabulous idea;
"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning." but no procedural advice on how one actually gets around a beginning, because no matter where you think you are starting, you still have to start. The whole concept became a distracting tautological monstrosity. My brain in it's desperation to procrastinate fled to a land of inanimate "I am that I am" logic, and it was Moses and the stinkin burning bush all over again. I had to take a coffee break, it was pretty dreadful.

I was truly beginning to run out of steam. I seem to do that very easily about writing, because it may very well be the love of my life, and like any adolescent with a crush, I'm pretty sure I'm not good enough for it. The end of the quotes on beginnings was nearing, and the fickle tickleof inspiration was still far far far away. Then I found this: “I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards.” This quote more than any other touched me, but it still wasn't enough to make me commit the violent crime of beginning. What came after it was. There was that beautiful elipses and then the words Alberto Salazar, Sprinter. Inone word thinkexist.com told me exactly what he had started, and how many thousands of times he had to begin. If he hadn't, he'd have been Alberto Salazar, Stander. Alberto Salazar, Coward. Alberto Salazar, Spectator. Maybe there woudln't be any descriptor, maybe no one would ever know his words.

I've done everything I could today, except start. Which means I'm going to have to spend tomorrow and the next day and the next day coiled in my cowardly starting position. I'll waste the beautiful potential of all that kinetic energy as precious seconds tick by, and both what I want and the starting line sit exactly where they are, waiting for me to decide if I'm going to be a revolutionary or a receptionist. Starting lines don't make up their minds to get the heck out of your way very often, so I suppose I should get cracking on that descriptor, because if one sweet song from my daddy can change my whole life, imagine what could happen with a whole life of words.

-- Rachel Baxa, Writer. :)

forkforkforkforkfork

the sad truth is this: I have not written in almost two months. Whoa. I have written nothing, absolutely nothing. I haven't been able to complete a goodbye email, a scrap of poetry, or even a grocery list in many moons.

I've been listening.

Have you ever said a word over and over again until it was nonsense? Try it. Fork. Fork. Fork. Forkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkfork. It's hardly gibberish, it's worse because it's the same meaningless nonsense Mork and Mindy blabber, even to the insane and alien. Suddenly, a real thought is forced by relentless echo into redundant silliness. I've been listening to my thoughts become blather.

They had significance, once upon a dream. But in my silence they have circled and swum inside my head and through their dizzy dancing have been reduced to a hazy din as appealing and distracting as ceaseless buzzing of a tired fluorescent lightbulb. Not good for productivity or a glowing complexion.

I've done to my poor thoughts what constant fifth-grader repetition does to the word fork. By refusing the object it's purpose I've reduced it from a useful utensil to onomatopoeic balderdash. Suddenly, all I'm left with is a sound, an echo, a song, a game of no skill at all. Over the past couple of months I've gotten good at this game. TV, sleep, easy books, the same songs over and over again, and always that nauseating buzz of what I know melting away into what I knew.

I have been without a certain depth of conscience and consideration that makes me a person I could delight in being. Keeping confined to my own section of the Universe as I know it, I have reached out for very little, taken very few chances and never once allowed my own reason to get a word in edgewise. Being back home in the naked Northeastern Colorado landscape hasn't solved all my problems, but out that window under a sparkling layer of disappearing snow, is a cracking parched land that has finally, when I made myself look, reminded me of how untrue I've been to the girl i strove so desperately to hew from that exhausted soil.

All this time, I've been mistaking the alarm of my disloyalty for a petty migraine. A call to the truth about myself has been lurking in the drone I've learned to tune out, waiting for it's moment to remind me of the voice and depth I owe to my life. So that sucks. Wasted time makes me angry.

Fork.

pretty pretty princess

Today, I got to be a princess. I swear to G-O-D himself. On a random late-afternoon coffee run, I talked a friend into humoring me with a trip to The Costume Shop.

I was five stinkin' years old again. Iced coffee in hand, I made a beeline for the fat mascot heads. I looked Tigger right in his gaping hollow mouth and grinned toothily. I had to check a mirror to see if all my teeth were there in fear I had actually, physically regressed.

After that it was all down hill.

Even before i put anything I was knight questing for a single costume to try on. In fear of agitating a sweet dressing room attendant I chose a limit for myself ahead of time. I swept through rack after rack of other lives I could slip into and out of. Running my fingers across every sequin and bead that could have been mine in some parallel universe I lost myself to the imagining.

When I found myself again I was inspecting with surprising discretion an entire rack of romanticism. I found Shakespeare's Viola in a courageous, sturdy gown of tan and green. I found Juliet in a dazzling purple garb that sang out with loss and hope. Astounded and slightly abashed, I found myself in a sweet dress of delicate gold and white. With flowers on it. I kid you not. Fragile gold fleurs twirling shyly down the entire skirt.

If you know me you are laughing. Stop. I'm not kidding. This little tomboy will come put your lights out if you make fun of my dress. I'll never be able to explain how I looked into this dress and fell in love, when it is so utterly not me. And still.

When I slid it on, zipped it up, and adjusted my girls, I was shocked.

I lit up. I remembered hours spent in my backyard as a kid, with one of my mama's old bridesmaid dresses spread out around me. I felt our prickly grass against legs that had yet to be shaven for the first time. The far too advanced heft of a book in my bitten fingers, warbling Disney songs and waiting for my prince to scale the chain link fence. I shone. The black smudges squatting under my eyes were outshone by, (could it be?) a blush. Promise bloomed in my chest, and a sudden surplus of blood poured into my limbs lightening and stretching them.

Have you ever wrapped yourself in even the tiniest dream come true and watched it's perfect graceful drape from your shoulders and pool on carpet? It is effervescent. I blossomed in the light of it. Vulnerability suits me. Hope kick's purple's butt as the color that best lights my eyes.

I got back home just in time for some crappy news. I found waiting for me the tear stained trimmings of a life misattended. Just general pooptastic life stuff. You know.

I got a little overwhelmed, a little snuffly. Ok, I kind of cried like a baby. I walked into the bathroom for a tissue and watched my face closing up with exhausted frustration. I saw myself become ordinary again. I watched all that joy get zipped up behind someone else's betrayal. I got ugly, fast.

I was completely amazed at the careworn face in front of me. Where did the princess go? Joyful naivete gave way to a brow furrowed in amazement. Couldn't she live in this life?

The longer I looked in the mirror the more I began to wonder at the simple idiocy. I had chosen that dress because I saw in it the recovery of something so lost to me in my every day. These (oh so naughtily pilfered) pictures bore witness to the fact that the girl in the mirror and the girl in the dress were the same. Worse yet: same girl, same hair, same makeup, same day. Within hours of each other.

Fledgling bravery took root somewhere in the burrow that had formed between my eyebrows right about then. It flourished in an instant and even if it didn't magically transform me back into a princess, it brightened me.

My reverence must be preserved for that stolen fifteen minutes twirling in the dressing room mirror, curtsying to myself in the evening sun. The world musn't keep all it's princesses locked away in dreary towers of hardship, or even mediocrity. We must keep ourselves glowing with our fairy tale hopes. I should try harder to open myself, in spite of the world.

What? I should.


I should dress like this every day.

p.s. Thank you to the Costume Shop for indulging me when I stood in front of the mirror for far too long and talked to you about 90's cartoons. And thanks for not telling when you totally knew I was taking pictures with my phone every time you left the room.

you should thank me.

I saved your life today. No really. I really and truly did. If you are reading this page, I saved you from untold annoyance.

Today I denied myself for you. I put aside my childish self-indulgence for the sake of your comfort.

What did I do? Well, for starters, I refrained from putting a playlist widget on my page. I almost felt the need when sprucing up (a.k.a. procrastinating the actual writing process) to add an adorable little "iLike" to my blog.

I thought some Van Morrison and some Tegan and Sara might be cute. I thought it would give you a little glimpse into the labrynth of my frequently empty mind. I wanted to awe you with my eccentric and ridiculously cool tast in music. I'm twenty-one now you know. I have depth and range in my music selection and was entirely prepared to knock your socks off.

Ok. I'm lying. I did not save you.

I saved me. I put up the widget and then I came to visit my page. So I could get the full "wham-bam thank you ma'am" effect. Music + background + sweet text = a blog you want to go back to again and again. (I mean who really goes to a blog for what's written in it, right?)

Anyway, I got back to my page. And the iLike started playing over the top of my iTunes. Suddenly I got all flustered and in my annoyance couldn't remember where the controls for either music player were. So I just had to listen to that racket.

Let me tell you, The Kooks layered over the top of Dinah Washington should be considered an attempt to deafen a person.

So I took it off. I decided to save you from that horrific caucophony. You may listen to whatever inspires YOU while reading.

You can thank me later. Or by reading again tomorrow :)

borrow

From this distance her feet make no sound on the asphalt. It's disconcerting. I can see the sweet orthopedic roundness of her sneakers moving too closely to the ground to be silent. I can hear him talking of course. If I looked over I'd see his blue eyes aflame and his red hair glowing with the rush of whatever his mouth is saying. The action has a sound. But there is no sound to shadow her cheap shoes. Shuffle alone, no scrape.

I can hear cars rushing forward in their near-gravitational necessity to get where they are going faster, sooner, first. Maybe they are pulling her sound away with them. Maybe that sad shuffle has hitch hiked it's way into happier shoes.

Above the sneakers are the remnants of two long, pencil written notes, scrawled on brown paper sacks. They've been folded and unfolded a thousand times by clammy hands; probably crumpled up and regretted, thrown out by hands of hesitancy. Two brown paper notes, pasted around her ankles to the place where slender calves used to sunbathe on afternoons like these, some two-score years ago. You can see her dreams were written on it once.

But those ankles, even wrapped in all that worry-loosened paper turned tired silk-shirt skin, are too small. She's still a child under it. Ankles that small can't be anyone else's.

I can't look at ankles that small shuffling so close to the ground. . Things that tiny should think they could fly. She's wrapped up in that old wish-paper from head to toe. I know it's there, under a thick kitty sweater, out of place under this blaze. She's pulled it close around her: a blanket against the chill of her loss. Unjustly huddled under so many crumpled promises. It is an ill fitting garment, sewn for another.

She's only three feet from me now, and finally I'm found the scraping like snowshovels, scooping away the drudgery piled in front of each of her steps. Her sigh shakes out of her chest, and shakes the world.

I am not comforted by this arrival, but I know she should be.

Those tiny hands should be held. I should remind her she is a child. It's never happened to me, but I know how it happens. I know how I would scoop her bone china skeleton into my arms and pull her in. I would breathe her in to show her that I am unafraid of the cold, waiting aroma of time passed. Forehead to forehead she could see the absence of fear in my eyes. My bravery would vaccinate me against the hysterical fear of the age epidemic. I would kiss each of her knotted knuckles until my anxious breath loosened the knots in them. I would look in her eyes and seek out the place un-hidable in her eyes. I would wait until she felt the strength to lift her feet.

I would lay her so close to me that she could pretend again that my unlined shoulders were hers, and she could convince herself that the pallor of my freckeled skin was the tangible evidence of her innocense restored to her. She could have for all those elongated seconds the unlabored breathing of my chest, transferred to her, and the unmitigated glow of all my potential for as long as one can hold an old woman in a parking lot, without having the authorities called. I would not correct her. I would plump her with my youth, and pet her cheek until the burning rush of my own circulation had ironed away the days from her face.

My body would be her body.I would not shift impatiently, or brush away the flakes of her age from my dress. She could look into me, as if I were a mirror, and imperfect as I might be, return might retouch me with the softness of an implied, pretended nostalgia.

I would not promise her my life, or renewal. But I would stay long enough to see the first two steps after she left my arms appear as if they were in preparation for flight.

Unto our nuclei we would belong to each other. I would give that to her. Because I see ther child's ankles, and I know her hunger. Because she knows my weariness.

But she's not looking. And I've no voice for calling out and no breath. The ten, now twelve feet flight from my lips is impossible.

I'm sorry.

the melty crayons

I'm drippy. In every way you can think of. I've been a bit of a whiny melting mess. This big strong block of a Bohunk is softening, sliding down myself and pooling at my own base. I've become a slipping muck fo me to step through. And then the loveliest thing happened to me today.
I learned that melty can be pretty damn cool.

Maybe all this melting madness, this mud-luscious glory is it's own season.

Maybe a change of my state of matter is what it's going to take to make a statement about how I need to change what matters?

Or maybe the ridiculousness of my foot stamping, sleepy eyed, droop---

Maybe this nightmare pliability---

Is just where I need to be?

Or maybe it's a stairway...to someplace better

p.s. these accidental glorious little goodies were purchased at the dollar store, and the pictures were taken with my phone . :) and it was just the project i needed. I suddenly feel so much less droopy.

the Rumpelstiltskin effect

This is a chemical reaction. My reptilian brain sucks, basically. There are scientific explanations for why I'm doing what I'm doing right now. There is a shockingly beautiful, intoxicating, delightful, overwhelming, multisyllabic word for why my laundry isn't folded, why I don't have a new job, why there is a big fat plug in the faucet that's turned on full blast, trying to purge this feeling.
I read it in a book. I also paid a very nice hippie lady a large percentage of my savings to tell me that. I thought she was just going to tell me I was not right.I was broken. I really and truly assumed she would assauge me with kind words about how it was a terrible inability to do what I'm supposed to, but that she could give me medicine for that.Or worse, that all she would say was "Mhmm," and "I'm so sorry that happened."

But there are words. Real words that have an entirely different meaning. There are two words that mean i am not constitutionally incapable. In a thin volume, with a beige with darker beige cover are two words that turn my blood to the trembling neon hue of hope.

Tonic Immobility.

Those words are the biggest words in the whole world today. Those words mean that somewhere beneath everything there is a Rachel enhanced. Myself, aglow. It means that since it has a name, it can be fought. It means I will be my own, someday, maybe.

When a human being perceives danger, chemicals are released in the brain that are supposed to tell how to proceed. Our bodies are supposed to tell us how to go through the motions until we can really figure it out. If our senses gather that there is time enough to flee from whatever opponent accosts us, regardless of what it is, we are to flee first. Run. I could not run. i was not fast enough; there was not time or refuge. Upon the failure of flight, something rises up within us. More fear than courage, it boils within us if there is hope, and if our senses asses that we might have the strength, even for a little while, we fight.

For most of us those are the only instincts we'll ever encounter. The threat passes, or is fled from, or fought off. But mice, deer, possums, and Rachel's know of another sort. Mice go limp in the claws of cats, knowing they cannot fight, or flee. Deer stop dead in freeways, paralyzed in opposition to their very will to live. Possums play dead. Rachel's freeze.

We humans with our "higher functions" have another side effect of this tonic immobility called dissociation. We separate from ourselves. I would like to steal the thunder of this chemical reaction by saying that this separation is merely a manifestation of shame at being in the same category as mice and possums, but there is some parasympathetic nervous system chemically mumbo jumbo that would be very frustrated if I didn't give it it's moment. The privilege of dissociation is that I get to watch from the corner as I eff everything up. As theunstoppable ocean of my life breaks agains my immobile toes, eroding my perfect red nail polish.

The moral of the story is this, I got tired. I couldn't run. There was nowhere to go. And I was too damn tired to fight. So I froze. Like a snowman's pee.

But now, it has a name. Haven't you ever felt that burst inside of you when you can finallly put a name to the inescapable fears of your mind. It's like the delicious warmth of a sun-ripened raspberry breaking open in your mouth. Like the release of a bubble popping on a child's fingertips. The incubi that come to haunt you in the night are suddenly robbed of something when given over to their rightful names. The names seem to tame them, to lull them. It's as if you've been pushed against a wall and had your hair pulled and your nose bloodied by some horrible, freckled, snotty, bully and suddenly, his mother comes into the room and swats him across the butt.

It can be such a saddening feeling when it happens to the lovelier things of the world. It's almost worth knowing that when a sonnet tries to match that stomach as a hot air balloon notion it will fall nearly as flat as that chastised bully. All spiderweb flutterings of eyelash against our cheekbones can never compare to the real feeling of lips soft and kind and forgiving against our faces, and still we give them over to language. We seek out the words... AHEM>>>>>

Because I know it's name, it cannot have me, and that is my justification. In spite of the Rumpelstiltskin effect, I would bear faulty testament against all the sweet tinglings of my heart in the name of being able to look something in it's eye and call it it's rightful name.

And so I am encouraged, and thawed by two not so little words: Tonic immobility.

Thank you.