Quiet Me

something unusual, because it's almost valentine's day and i'll be needing this someday.


Quiet Me,

put your hand

on my Chest,

deep in the crevice

where my snow white bones converge.

the umbrella

the canopy,

keeping dry and warm,

my life coal heart,

the remnant ember

of a well-settled fire.

Place palm on solid sternum-palm

from which stoney stiff fingers stretch

and entwine again

'round my back,

knuckles a rolling mountain range,

from nape of neck

to curve of hip.

A circling safe

to protect my Core.
rest your hands atop those Hands

and take the Vow that they have took

to protect the tender places in me.

Recite with them that reticent prayer,

eyes veiled

beneath such gentle certain lashes

raised heavenward

away from all sweet chaos.

beg,

at the altar of all that is sacred

within this Hallowed Hollow:

a thrumming tomb,

a grateful grave
to all my Pretense.
Feel the heathen drumming

from within this living calcium cage

and let you not be
tepid

in your requiem,

but know the Passion
of that savage Percussionist

sounding out his feral palpitation.

Answer it,

with still lips

and sure eyes.
learn that Rhythm,
and Quiet Me.

phoenix?

This town is beautiful when it's gray. Even tear stained by the gods it has a freshness about it.

It rained my first three days back in Boise, and it rained again on what were supposed to be my last three. It's waiting to rain now. The entire contents beneath the lid of the world are breathless with waiting.

When I was a kid, I loved going to visit my Meme in Louisiana. In the summer time the rain would wait in the air, like it was playing hide and seek with you. It would crouch under the atoms of nitrogen; bury itself in the oxygen and wait. You'd hear it behind you and turn around: swear you could feel it on your shoulders. only to see that it had reached out of the night air to tap you on the shoulder and then retreated back into the living breeze. It would hang heavy and then crack open the sky and pour down from the very needles of the pine trees. The rain made each and every point, leaf, and stem a spigot. When we were kids we would wait until God made every vertex a firehose and head for the nearest hill. We'd wait for the water to start it's frantic downhill rush through the deep drainage ditches and all 8 inches of water was churning with our excitement, and we'd plop down and let the waters sweep us away. It was a dirty bathwater slide through the kudzu of the south; it was bliss.

The rain here is more timid.

On my flight here, I had a layover in Phoenix, and when my plane came down through the Arizona clouds, I found the city aglow. Below me it was spread out like a living thing, interstates, freeways and thoroughfares lit up along the edges like veins in an MRI and the taillights of the cars were red bloodcells flowing through them; pulsing houselights, neon signs reflecting off the glass, the metal all streaming vital luminescence, overflowing into the night sky. It went on forever, and as we came toward the center I could not see a place that was not Phoenix, alive flowing. I was overwhelmed by it's beauty, and by it's waste.

I saw so much light and energy. I saw a thousand cars running with maybe two people to each of them. I saw empty parking lots aflam with flourescent reassurance. It was an abomination, and a miracle. In the middle of the red dirt desert sprawled this gluttonous creature, alive, breathing, creating waste, destroying and making a hundred thousand million thoughts and products and messes and people. I was so deeply touched and I couldn't stand the thought of the plane lowering before I knew whether the city was the cancer or the cure. As the runway came up to meet us, I felt cheated. I needed to know whether or not I was horrified or awed.

It's not really raining anymore here. But the clouds are waiting. Hanging in the air like they have something to say. Like the moment right before a breakup or right before the first I love you. They are the policemen waiting on the doorstep to give you bad news. There is a holding out sort of feeling, like if honesty can be procrastinated long enough, the truth might change, but the water will come again before the afternoon is out. There is news in the air; a charge. The hairs on my body stand a little taller.

There is news of who I am becoming. Of this place and of me in it.

I feel the need to apologize to this place, the trees, the wet concrete and the earthworms pulling themselves across it. My guilt at all the things which I have broken is sour milk breaking across my senses, but I am aglow wityh possibility. I just can't figure out if I'm the miracle or the abomination. I want to dance a thousand unholy celebratory dances beneath the mournful drips of a slowly cheering sky. I look at my fingers and see the glowing pollutant of a wasteful and miraculous girl. I see the freeways in the blue veins of my arms and against the misty pallor of the day, my metabolism sets me to the flamegolden hot glowing of the million Phoenix streetlights, each cell a home for forgiveness, and hope. I am a submerged in the expense of a human life and am brought to my knees by my willingness to revel in it utterly.

I feel too many cheesy things beneath the baptism of this day. Loss and hope are together, conjoined in airy coitus; all sweat and joy, tension and release. There are no lines between what I have lost and what I will gain; they are entangled in the making of something new. The over-Phoenix night sky and the Louisiana deluge's are bright and red-faced with the tender creation of brand new things. It has all made me midnight salty skin and deep muscle tired like a child who couldn't stop her fiery dirty feet from dancing.

It is all coming together, and from here I know it will diverge again into strangeness and the chasign chaos of becoming who I am, but today, just for today, I feel the tenderness of the branches of my time here brushing hair and sweat from each other's faces. There is symmetry, and there is the electric waiting of the skies to tell my truth. For now that is enough.


P.S. I swear I don't always feel everything this intensely. i'm just creepy sometimes

i've got this feeling

This blog kind of sucks, but here goes.

I am breathless. Gasping. Every time i yawn I stop dead in my tracks and make myself do it again, just to feel my lungs stretch out, Just to feel the dirt, the skin, the life, settle in my lungs.There is simply not enough air. I want to breath in the atoms of every living thing; I want bigger lungs.

I have an irrational and complex love of everything. Tonight, I am touched by the scent of salsa, and the falsetto of Regina Spektor. I am brought to my knees by a picture of myself, a sunset, and hair dampened by a downpour only willing to relent to my wish for a peaceful goodbye. I have a ravenous love for the feeling of sheets agains my legs, on the first day I've shaven my legs in well, awhile.

This blog is about my way home. My way to myself and all that implies. Some days it feels like I've been gone a very long time. Some days, the thing I feel most vividly is the distance between myself and the girl who rations her openness like butter pats in the second world war.

December for me is typically a time of listening to the Counting Crows' "Long December" on repeat and analyzing and reanalyzing the reasons I have to believe that this year will be better than the last. But this year I didn't. I distanced myself even more thoroughly than I ever have from that deeply feeling mass of human intuition and reception, and refused, completely and utterly to analyze anything. I didn't want to be like all those other pitiful little messes who felt remorse, who wanted to change. I didn't want to associate myself even remotely with anything or anyone that felt.

I played, tittered, drank, debauched, and just generally spent the greater part of the last 3 months proving that I was just as capable of worldly callousness as any testosterone chugging pork rind of a man I met. Let me just tell you, it's been a quality couple of months. Grandma would be so proud.

None of this is easy to admit, I'm even blushing now, with no one in the room but my iTunes and the rapidly dissipating particles of the unadulterated joy I experienced tonight.

And then it happened. I was busy trying to be callous, and laugh away the truth, and I looked at that picture, heard that song, and smelled that smell. I felt the sheets against my legs, and the dam broke. The truth fell open in front of me like an old book. I love. I love the feeling of tea as it slides into my stomach and nests there like a sun swallowed; I love that I can breathe out it's warmth in gusts of flaring heat and fog my own glasses. I love laughing until my chest hurts and I can hardly hold myself up. Sometimes, when I'm feeling rebellious I love the roll of the word "fuck" as it bounces off my tongue. I love you. Really. I don't even care how well I know you, I probably love some piece of you.

I still love my first real boyfriend. He's happily dating someone else. He's a republican. And still, i love him for what he taught me, for dancing to the sound of crickets and the way he shook when he told me he loved me, because it was beautiful. I love it because it ended and I cried myself to sleep for months. I love him because I was in mourning for so long and because dear God, what's the real forever and always wrinkly and fat together kind like?

I love my mother and father because of all the times they broke me into a million little pieces and I learned to put myself back together, I love them breathlessly for the times they were doing the putting back together.

I love fingerpainting and the smell of garlic. I love batman.

But I reigned it in. I understand that this post is similar to the last, but humor me. I'm back in Boise this week. I'm in love. With the parts that hurt, with my shame, with my hope. I feel a lovely self-awareness and a ferocious desire to feel nothing but exactly what I feel and to know, truly what that means.

I made so many mistakes in this town. I broke so many hearts. I broke my own more times than I care to count. It's February 2nd. It took me 33 days, and I still don't have a real resolution, but I've got this feeling. I feel like every inch of me is stark-ass jiggle-nasty native villager naked to everything. Good thing I shaved my legs, huh?

P.S. I promise something a little less....hoaky tomorrow, I just couldn't sleep, and my lungs wouldn't get big enough.

feverpitch

I try to date like a man.

I can do nothing else in my life so manly as dating. Women are vulnerable, you see, needy. You can see right through us. Even the cheaters and the liars. It's in the way our bodies curve in or out. Love is like gravity for a woman, and we make satellites of the most tender parts of us. When in love we orbit, some in more obvious ways than others.

But men maintain a certain stoicism.
They are better liars. There hopes do not find a place within them to settle and magnetize towards their love. Something casual and dangerous lurks in the love of a man. It can pick and choose. There is no irrational chemical burn in their veins, no withstanding martyrdom.

So I try my best to date like a man.

I do not make myself transparent. I ignore phone calls. I hold myself in check. I do not squeal, I do not gush. I am careful. I can flirt and multitask as well as any man. I can go out at night, and know exactly which phone numbers I give out with be ones who might be kind, might be real. But mostly, I know they will text me the next day, with texts about "chillin soon" which will chill me with the surreality of it all. It is not possible that people are not hungry for each other, except in body. I know somehow it's not true.

But I see it. Eyes glazed and so far past pretense as to not even care if I hope. Eyes with intent and the desire to hunt. The ones that will say anything.

So I limit myself. I tell myself I can see right through all of it and suddenly, when I choose wrong, I am as shocked as a child who touched her fingers to the perfect orange flame. But I am a child in so many other ways. Once found, my vulnerability is naive and bottomless. I become a well of forgiveness, and unabashed tears flow freely if violated. Once penetrated, the core of me is sunburned skin, open wounds, and a toddlers trust, all in one easily trespassed package. I am a doll undone, filled with all the world's rot, and sewn shut again, with the loss inside me.

I am a cry at feverpitch, and I am lost. It's strange and rare. My pain is the blackest and most priceless of gems. I cannot keep it safe. And worse still, every day I'm growing new nerves, new loves, new ways to hurt. In each and every moment a millimeter of skin grows succeptible, even with all my trying.

So I try to date like a man. But I am a woman. And I am the soil that will not fallow. I am made a great arch and a great fool by the gravity of my love. And gravity is ever so strong.

"--He was once found on the Well-Regarded Rabbi's lawn, bound in white string, and said he tied one around his index finger to remember something terribly important, and fearing he would forget the index finger, he tied a string around his pinky, and then one from waist to neck, and fearing he would forget this one, he tied a string from ear to tooth to scrotum to heel, and used his body to remember his body, and in the end could only remember the string. Is this someone to trust for a story?" Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated.

And so I am bound, like the madman in the story, to everything that I believe. I have tied myself to myself in order to remember all the things that I must be. As a writer, I am naturally one of history's self-swaddled string things. I am bequeathed the duty and the desire to watch as people act, and commentate on the hasty race of minutes through the years. And as the years enter the pubescence of decades and matuure into eons, I take note, and in order that I might remember the beginning, I tie it to yesterday and string each today like plastic beads on my elastic memory. I have front row season tickets to the tournament of our humanity, while each and ever belligerent soul fights for his or her right to be the most impervious to their faults, and therefore the most fallible.

I have taken note, and kept notes since my bitten fingers found the poise of a pencil and I have built my ideas about the world from notebooks filled and overflowing. Slanting sidewalls of spiral notebooks, clothbound volumes half filled with sloppy ballpoint texts, evolving from bottom to top. A foundation of titled rhyming verse, in junk store ledgers, easing up into the free form poetry etched into floppy disk, then CD and nearing the top transparent walls electric with attempted blog prose, and the glowing Verdana font of Facebook notes.

All that I know has or will be housed in what I write, and in what I can't. In tying together the days, I've opened doors, eyes, hearts, and lives and inadvertently scared the living crap out of myself. It's always been about bearing witness; in speaking the unspeakable things all I have wanted was to connect those who thought they must be seperate. I started to get scared when I started to succeed.

And then there were more strings. To remember to be deep I ran a string in one ear and out the other and tied it round the back of my head: reigns for a mind whiche needs a strong lead to direct and maintain the trot of the romantic elite. Further and further I entrenched myself in expectation. I could not be shallow, I could not be untrue, I could not be uninspiring, and for Christ's sake...no more princess dress blogs! I needed to tell the truth and unburden myself, but with the delicacy of a face atop the shoulders which woud bear my load, suddenly the strings which made me remember myself were inummerable.

So there I was, up to my metaphorical scrotum in my fear of forgetting the days, the lessons, the rules, the hours, the minutes, the expectations. I managed to hogtie myself in it all.

Is this someone to trust with for a story? Is this someone to trust with your life? Am I, one of the madmen of the world, she who you should trust with the annals of your humanity?

Can I be trusted with all that I have seen, to do something real and bright and hopeful with it all? I am afraid of my own yes. But there it is, most ardently, yes. I can build a fortress unto the stars, stacked tale and life and leaf and instant upon verse and bat of eyelash, metaphors jointed and mortared with assonance piled and ornamented with lies more honest than a lovesick teenager's eyes. Ceilings vaulted with lofty attempted eloquence can make a place to take refuge against the harsh truths of the world.

I can do that. I can hem and haw and tie myself up, tooth to toe, and unravel myself again like a child 'round a maypole, and make right my hesitation. I can. I think.

and we'll get you fixed up in no time

Apprehensive

–adjective

1.	uneasy or fearful about something that might happen: apprehensive for the safety of the mountain climbers.

2.	quick to learn or understand.

3. perceptive; discerning

At the dawn of my life as a writer, this word was with me, it is with me now, and unless some miracle of confidence comes and blows a whole lot of pretty colored smoke up my butt, I have very few doubts that it will be with me in some measure until I die. In first grade, I asked a teacher to spell check the word in something or another, and she proceeded to tell me it was not a word. Well I'm here to tell her this: Honey, please. It's not just a word, it's a way of life Mrs. Hawkins.(P.S. you were right, 2nd grade was for punks. :)

It's a very confusing word because it implies both uneasiness and understanding, which are two words that haven't always been friends. Typically what we crave most desperately, comingin a close second to connection, is understanding, and when we cannot have understanding the uneasiness seeps in. It's like a slow flood through a neglected basement windowell. It drips in through the cracks of our knowledge and trickles down our walls and we never even see it coming. Moist misunderstanding saturates our carpets; a swamp beneath the tread of our lives. It festers, and eventually the stink of uneasiness comes once how very clueless we've been.

Apprehension does not imply this sort of slow progress. It implies the last of the stages of grief. This word infers uneasy acceptance and understanding. We know what is coming, what is in store for us, and both because of and in spite of this understanding we are afraid. It's a calmer fear because the danger has been assessed and we have been allowed the luxury of preparation.

I have lived with apprehension about my writing, my looks, my heart, my intentions, my future, my talent, capabilities, and most ardently, my relationships.

In a labrynth of loss and return and of the volatile rumblings of volcanic involuntary gypsyhood, I came to expect a certain selfishness from people. I began to expect certain selfishnesses from those around me regularly, and with time and growing apprehension to take those pertinences for my own at all the worst junctures, or after I'd already given nearly everything worth having away.

The point is not my innumerable fallabilities, it is that I am surprised. To my most delirious delight, I have stumbled on the truth. It started with a note from my cousin, Mikki, my childhood best friend and partner in crime, with whom I spent many panic driven evenings trying to clean the water spots off the giant mirrors after our baths so we didn't get in trouble for splashing. She told me that my family missed me so badly that they wanted to pay for a plane ticket for me to come there for Christmas since I hadn't been bothered to make the Idaho to Kansas sojourn any of the previous three years. At first I assumed that her extension relied mostly on polite pleasantries and the temporary nostalgia left-over from our time as Power Rangers.

Then a week or so later, I found myself with mangled feelings and a raised voice on a very long distance phone call, a very long distance from my happy place. A friend of mine, who I didn't even realize was a friend asked me why I was wasting so much breath and energy being angry, (of course he asked me in the lingo of a farm boy train engineer with a few very colorful four letter words for good measure). Assuming, basedon my previous understanding of life, people and relationships that I was backed into a corner, I began to defend myself, pretty snottily (I was in double trouble, and I'm only human). Because of the way my life was for a very long time, and because of the way my apprehensions always ran things, I found myself presuming to need a new place to stay since I had just pretty heavily insulted the roof over my head. I had definitely been uprooted for lesser transgressions.

I hung up the phone and went outside into the cold night expecting some sort of absolution from the prairie. Wishing for my conscience to be blown clean and the knowledge that I was, yet again, going to have to change everything, took hold of me.

"Get your ass in here and put on a coat, just cause your pissed doesn't mean you have to freeze to death."

And it was that simple. I was brought a coat. I was hugged, tickled, forgiven. I went inside.

A few weeks later another cousin of mine called who does a lot of work with non-traditional medicine and made me a very generous offer of help for my horrible eyes. His simple explanation, "Rachel, I love you. I don't care how long it's been. Come see me, we'll fix you up."

Have I really been this stubbornly afraid?

I have this song that I'm pretty obsessed with. It's called, "A Walk Through Hell." It's pretty amazing and it has this part goes like this "And I'll hold you in my weak arms like a first born, first born, first born." And you have to get in all three first borns, because the rise of emotion is really what does me in every time. I am suddenly aware of and uneasy with the fact that I may have been staring this sort of love in the eye all along. There are in fact tired arms ready to take me in, weary from being held out to me, when I knew I was alone. I understood that people were weak and confused, everyone around me as much so as I, and so were to be revered, treasured, but always seperate and on our own paths.

Our survival is based on our learning curve. How long does it take us to understand that the orange and black stripey cat thing likes to bite? How long does it take us to figure out that sticks rubbing together long and fast enough might make a fire? How long does it take to realize the guy who winks at us from across the bar is not dating material, no matter how good he is with his hair gel? So we learn, we think. We take the simple bits of information we can gather and we fortify ourselves with them and prepare for what we know is coming. Discovery shows us which things we are to be apprehensive of, and what is to be anticipated. What happens though, when our learning curves become malignencies, and all that we've been taught passes it's ripening point, and the rules change a bit. All the coins of our knowledge that we've managed to hoard becomes obsolete. What happens when we see a lovely orange housecat, who is dying to purr in our laps, but all we see is the tiger?

My reckoning is here. Now, that I am officially out of the jungle, maybe it's time to find out what each thing is for itself. I want to touch and feel and see and try everything.

I think what I'm trying to say here is, this just isn't working for me anymore, Apprehension. You've brought me through a lot, and I'm not sure if I'd have survived without you, but now we are holding each other back. I'll always love you in some way, but it's time we move on. It's not you, it's me. Okay that's not true, it's both of us. We've outgrown one another. I let you get bigger than me, and I'm too big to hide behind you. We have to let go, we'll always have Paris, kid. Wait....yeah, Humphrey Bogart does that one way better than me.

the deuce

I am not a big believer in happy mediums. You can ask my dad or mom, who are both reading this at some point and shaking their heads, either laughing to themselves with pride and thinking "That's my daughter," or wishing the other were within a hundred miles so they could say, "She's YOUR daughter." No matter how they feel, and no matter how little they agree on, they will both tell you the same thing; I suck at happy mediums.

A few days ago I had to google myself into a corner before I could convince myself to begin to work on my portfolio so I could BEGIN my freelance writng career. That night, I started working on my first novel. Yeahhhhhhhhh. About that.

It's just who I am. When I work out I run 5-6 miles as fast as I can stand, and I'm constantly and creepily looking at the screen of the person next to me at the gym, making sure I'm pushing myself harder, running longer, faster, and at a higher intensity. Not because I need to feel superior to them, but because I need to know if I'm just a lazy dork who THINKS she is doing a good job, or whether or not I'm actually doing a good job in the scheme of things. (Although I'm sure my ego doesn't mind seeing higher numbers.)

When I bake a cake? It's a four teir masterpiece with alternating layers of chocolate and white cake whipped up from scratch, with layers of homemade ganache in between and entirely coated in my freshly whipped cream and topped with slivered toasted almonds. I'm just weird.

When I cook? Chicken pot pie, with both the crust and cream sauce from scratch with real butter and cream and veggies sliced a la me. Served wheatfield golden and steaming.

I'm such a creeper. I waited a month to buy new boots, even though my old ones were nearly intolerably stinkerific, simply because I could not find the perfect boots at the perfect price. But I found them eventually. When I tried photography the first time? If every single photo wasn't gallery worthy it was hidden instantaneously, like the crazy uncle in the attic.

When it comes to people in my life though, I'm like a cat with a cardboard box. It's all good. The horrible Las Vegas t-shirt my boss brough back for me from Vegas? Exalted profusely and worn with pride, because ugly or not, he thought of me. If anyone else cooks, hamburger helpber is gourmet and if one of my friends writes "i like cheese," and wants to know my poetic opinion, I swear to you I will find something to like.

So what's my obsession with being the master of all things? I know I can't be the only one. There have to be other obnoxious perfectionists out there. So why can't I just make myself understand that nothing has to be perfect. And it definitely doesn't all have to be perfect the first time!

What this boils down to? I am stuck at the first paragraph of Chapter 2 andwondering if anyone knows hypnosis and can make me understand my own damn words. I just wish sometime I would give myself a chance to just do something. I want to bake an ugly confetti sheetcake and put storebough frosting on it, and know that it will be loved just as much. I want to go for a walk and say, "Oh, man, I worked out today! Pizza time!"

But instead, I don't work out. I cook and no one eats it, because really? Who can eat real cream and butter these days and not feel like they should go see the cardiologist the next day? And I write the first chapter of the first book of my writing career, and then I play on facebook all day because I can't find the perfect transition into what I need to say next. Because what if this story that is so beautiful and original and alive in my head falls flat because oh I don't know...I've never written a book before?

I need to be nice to me. Because expecting to change the world right this very instant, expecting to have a pullitzer winning novel by the end of the first chapter in the very first draft ever is getting me precisely squat.

....ugh..anyway. I gotta go see a cup of tea about Chapter 2.


(also..sorry there are no pictures lately. my internet disagrees.)