deep lakes and other eternal resting sites.

This place feels so forlorn;

like the small childhood house I used to live in but now revisit with a sad smile curling the corners of my lips, and a heavy lump in my throat. I drive by slowly, remembering it to be so much larger than it looked. With green shutters and a red picket fence – now painted black, with a yard cluttered with garbage and my climbing trees torn out – leaving only brown splotchy dirt behind. The lump grows as I remember the wonderful girl who lived with me there. Her name was Courage. She taught me to feel my soul exhale each time I laughed from the pit of my stomach, to dream as big as I can – and if I couldn’t quite touched what I dreamt, to imagine it and to be proud of that – and to lie with curiosity in my eyes to look up at the flowers instead of down at them, in order to see just how new the world could be with a different point of view.

I’ve moved, in a sense, to another place. But this will always be my home. A small forgotten dwelling, in an insignificant cluster of tired looking houses, on the outside of a town looking in. Courage is always with me, though others shake their heads disappointedly and whisper that I will never find a husband because my standards are unrealistic, my dreams are impractical, that I need to grow up, get a “real job” and a “real life”, that the world revolves around money and that if you don’t have enough of it then you are a nobody going nowhere.

But I don’t want to believe them because I have to embrace these dreams, imagination, curiosity and courage as a part of my humanness, of who I am, and how sincerely and fully I love.

I don’t care if those who have it all figured out tell me that the way I see things is abnormal, or unreasonable. Because I guess I feel that it’s the most beautiful part of who I am.

I wish I could speak words as elegant as the ones that bleed from my fingers into my pen and onto my paper.

I don’t want to go to a movie, or eat overpriced food.

Take me to your favorite place, and let me find the reason in your eyes. Take me home and show me where you sleep – and I’ll promise not to laugh at the mess. Show me the window you stare out of most, and show me what you see, so I can see it too. I don’t want you to impress me, or try to move me to amazement. I want you to love me, and to know you’ll stay when it’s hard. I want you to laugh at my bad jokes and understand that I am just as messed up as I promise I am and simply not care.

For I have known men who could hold my hand without touching me, and kiss me from the other room. I have known men who knew punk rock better than they knew the feel of my fingers. I’ve known men who didn’t hear my voice until I said goodnight at the door per the conclusion of a yawn swallowing evening. I have known men who grew up too soon, cared too little, and drank too much. I’ve known men who were artists, tech masterminds, and professional jerks wearing suits of insensitivity and brass buttons.

I don’t need love, but it’d be much appreciated. I can put layer after layer of blankets atop my bed, lay upon the mountain of insulation and keep myself warm, but I’d also love for you to gently fold back the covers and invite me in so that I can wrap my legs around yours to keep warm. I can watch Wuthering Heights alone and dry my own tears, but it’d also be nice to press my face against your chest and dry my tears with your soft cotton tee while you hold me close and stroke my hair. I don’t need love, but perhaps it’d be much appreciated.

~C

how easily time slips through our fingers.

i. An eco-friendly covered cup sits next to me. It’s been empty for a while now; I've waited all afternoon to say: “Oh this? Just a novel I’m working on.”

ii. I want to write as I wrote last year – of the goodness in the world, of infinite faith, and brief captured moments of beauty – rather than to write just to expunge the bitter tastes of life. I haven’t written in a while – yes I realize what a bad joke that statement is; seeing as I hardly ever put my pen to the paper anymore. A great many adventures have ensued recently, but every time I begin to write them down, I end up hating my words and scrapping it all frustratedly. 

Perhaps I don’t wish to print my happiness in permanent ink, if it is in fact merely impermanent. For I know that if it all vanishes back into long work days, and short cold nights, then I will re-read these words and be drowned by the tidy little paragraphs – caught up in a better time – and forget to open new windows and doors that happen to present themselves. 

iii. This year has been a year 

of faking it, wearing burgundy lipstick and dark winged eyes, making detailed lists, ensuring my voice-mail doesn't get too full, watching my weight and flipping off my scale each morning, learning to smile without permitting my lip to fold up, looking in the mirror and accepting that my forehead has frozen into my thinking face and left a permanent thoughtful crease between my brows.

a year full of nights. Of sleeping with windows and hearts dangerously open, letting the sometimes biting breeze makes its home beneath the cracks of my eyelids, recognizing that blankets are never enough to warm my cold cold bones, staring emptily at the pages of the journal I never really seem to fill, watching my pile of feathered pens dry up, wondering to myself if the life I live now is all it will ever be, and fearing the rapidly turning pages of the calendar as I watch fearfully with eyes wide open

a year of staying focused, trying to be the adult that I am expected to be, ignoring my internal monologue of endless questions asking me what I am doing, struggling to never let on that I am somewhat lost and sometimes lonely, and often so confused. Tasting the blood as I bite my tongue to keep from screaming, and struggling not to ask strangers to tell me what it is that I am supposed to do next, and where exactly I am supposed to go from here. 

vi. My writing had become a reflection of my blind ambling through an empty existence; the only light in the darkness were my dreams of another life that was not mine and wistful thinking for romance painted with a golden brush. 

I had forgotten that life is far larger than the drive to work with sleep filled eyes, or the rush to complete a task minutes before it is due. I had forgotten that keeping friends was more important than making money, that my soul was more important than my body, and that there is always love waiting to be found in the most unlikely of places if I only took the time to seek it out.

v. Forget about the things you had, And all the things you lost. 

Before you let your heat drunk breath, Grow cold and turn to frost. 

~C

dear diary.

If I could, I would tie swings and tethers from the tallest trees in the thickest forest for us to settle upon. 

Away from the lined roads, boxed buildings, and neat rows of cement blocks of cement blocks -- a cradle in a wood that isn't graphed by a man with a map and a hard hat. Away from the corrupt; where the treacherous lie in guided halls and warm corridors, and the saints die in dark alleys and forgotten corners. Away from the lips curled in pretty vengeance, glimmering eyes in a state of inhumanity, and sharp, ruthless laughs. 

I will sit on your lap with our feet dangling high above the ground, your arms will wrap around my waist, your chin will rest comfortably on my head, and we will watch the leaves change colors together. I will watch the fleeting kiss of the leaves meet your dirt-flecked toes as we swing back and forth. I will watch the rainwater gather in the pearly gray sky, to lightly trace the curves of your skin. I will watch as your long fingers and warm hands crawl without word into the crevices between mine. 

You whisper in my ear that I am too young to be this old, this sad, this aching; and make me laugh through my tears when I simply want to mourn at how cold and dark the world can be. 

-- 

i. My ears are so full of your words that I wake briefly in the night, run my lonely hand lightly across the pillows, fingers searching for the mess of hair and the rough edges of your jaw, but you aren't there. When I am half asleep it as if my soul keeps forgetting that you are not mine yet. 

ii. The clothes I wear are so loose, so that others don't notice the traces of your absence mounted on my skin. 

iii. In the day I allow my mind to wander with thoughts of you, and catch myself staring intensely at a speck on the floor. A question hangs in the air for a moment too long from the boy(s) that sits across from me: asking me what is making my eyes twinkle so brightly, and the curves of my lips blissfully arrange. All I can do is hide my secret smile by covering it with a dainty sip, and simply say "nothing at all". 

iv. I dream of you crashing through me -- so I will no longer have to walk the many miles to close the distance that separates us. 

v. In the past, my hand has become sore from being clenched shut so tightly, that I opened it to anyone who wanted to see just how empty it was. Like many television screens showing a movie at a department store. 

vi. It aches not to hear your voice or to feel you close to me, but it also ached when I was touching the face of another body that was not yours. When I ran my hands on the shoulders of a boy who was not you. But they leave me once they realize that they have merely rented me from you for the day. They leave angry for all of the ill invested time spent trying to take something that was never theirs. 

~C

waldeinsamkeit.

My covers are shoved unceremoniously onto the floor, my limbs splayed haphazardly, and the thick curls of my dark hair sticking to the nape of my neck.  My heart won’t stop beating, and I can’t help my incessant exasperated sighs.

I’m too exhausted to get up and turn off the blasting heat (turned on by the nimble fingers of my ‘must be undeniably mad’ flat-mate) but I know that I will have to do it eventually before my skin becomes only tender sweat seasoned flesh encasing my slow-broiled organs.

If my tale was a book, and every life experience was to be labeled with a chapter title, I suppose this particular time of my life would be called: “Conscience”, or maybe “Finding truths”. That is if a poet or someone who has a tendency to lean toward the love of prose is penning my tale. However, a more than likelier title would be: “So tired of hiding the truths from the people I love, and purposefully isolating myself in fear of judgment, that I could just spit.”

But that would be too long of a heading to make a very good title.

I never wished to tell anyone the truth, not a friend, nor a relation, or a supposed love. If I fabricated my life, bending the truth to create a persona of an individual that is entirely its own -- unique, yet undeniable in character -- then how could I possibly become attached? I would smile inside and chuckle to myself. What a good jest. No one knew me. Not really. And that alone made me untouchable. For those men with long metal fingers could thrust their cold hands down my throat to extract what they believed to be my essence, my soul, the clock that made me tick. But the joke was on them. Because they had nothing to hold over my head to hurt me, because what I allowed for them to know was controlled and calculated.

Why can I not love them? Because they do not love the real me, therefore, they cannot love me at all. And it is easier to not love someone who does not love you, than not love someone who does.

I remember when I was barely twelve, sitting in an uncomfortable wooden box desk in the portable classroom just outside the main building of my middle school. I recall my eyes following the veins of the crude sketch on the white board of a human heart, only half listening to her as I imagined the different colors I would have used if she had asked me to draw it instead.

While rustling through my bag to find my plastic box of colored pencils to map out the idea on my homework, she said something that caught my attention.

The human heart is approximately the size of a fist.

I remember stopping my hands from their quest to examine them; curling my short fingers tightly into my small palm.

I remember thinking that this was indeed an impossibility; that the way I could feel so ardently and love so passionately must be larger than my frail hands, something more powerful than my twelve year old fist.

When I rode home on the bus that day, instead of staring out the window per my normal routine, I stared intensely down at my hands. When I got home I ran into the bathroom, tore off my shirt and climbed up onto the vanity to look at my reflection in the mirror. I held my fist over the place I imagined my heart to be. I could feel it beat beneath my fingernails. It was then that I noticed the split and broken skin on my pinky finger, and upon closer inspection of my hands I found scars, callouses, and thick veins protected only by a thin, near-translucent layer for protection.

I was afraid. I knew with my fervent and desperate love, I would not last long in ‘the real world’. I would soon take a bad fall and shatter to pieces, never to recover.

So now, older, through an impenetrable shadow I often sit in a grimy corner. No one put me in that corner, but I chose it for myself long ago.

 “I lie, you know” I warn them, a smile tugging at my lips. I never tell my own origin story, and if I do – not accurately – and never the same way twice. Rumors are started by people who watch what I leave behind, perpetuated by those who wont know the truth or find closure; and spread by those who didn’t know more than what they were told. What is truth? Never trust the truth. A lie is simply a lie, but truth is subjective.

“Stay away from this corner,” a sign cautions, “its awfully cold there.” But men read it and laugh arrogantly, saying that they will wear a sweater.

Then after their visit, they leave shaken, and their friends will look at them, shaking their heads with pity, and say that they look so cold now.

I lie because I am so convinced of my own destruction, that I’ve never taken the risk of being destroyed.

This personality characteristic I was always so certain of. Until a few evenings ago. I found myself caught up in a conversation with a soul that I didn’t know very well, when this individual asked me a personal question. I had answered it a million times before, a thousand different ways. But as I confidently started to speak, I gagged, choked on and then swallowed my pre-conceived story. I found that suddenly, I had no desire to act, or to pretend. I simply no longer cared.

Something happed a few days ago when I was on my knees, talking with my best friend.

I believe that he changed my heart.

A character flaw that has plagued me since childhood – an anxious desire to keep my secrets hidden in a locked box, and an avid need to escape the judgment of others – disappeared so suddenly and drastically overnight.

And for the first time in my life, I am discovering myself through truths, however subjective. And although I may not be the desperately mysterious,  tragically poetic and heartbreakingly misunderstood dark beauty that I have always wanted to be, I’m learning that I’m actually okay with simply being me.

I still have so much to learn, and so far to go, but I feel like I have not just taken a single step forward on the path of self-actualization, but perhaps I flew a few miles instead.  

~C

stop here.

“I’m not sure what I want to do, but – well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

A few weeks ago I spent the weekend in a house by the lake that was the color of sage and murky skies. With white shuttered windows that lined the walls; that with the sunrise – tinted the room a dusty rose. It had a feel of a cottage, yet with its gentle nautical décor, you could almost taste the salt of the sea.

 Each morning I woke early in the sleeping house, wrapped myself snugly in my blanket with only my eyes and nose peeking out and walked with stealth out the back door, sitting comfortably on the stairs of the porch to watch as each star was blown out by a somnolent wind. I am but an invisible cloak, lucid drifting like warm waters dancing along the coastline, salt kissing washed pebbles without romance, transparency burning into the core of my vacuum.

 I caught myself sighing as I gazed longingly across the landscape, and found that I had indeed fallen in love with the hazy fog that settled stagnant on the grassy fields, as well as the wild lavender that grew – compelled – into the cracks of unkempt asphalt of a forgotten time.

As the house would slowly shake itself from the cobwebs of the night to greet the rainy days, I watched settled at a contentedly comfortable distance. The entire adventure had ultimately been a new experience for me. It had been quite some time since I had allowed myself to spend time in a curiously large group of individuals. Large groups had a tendency to intimidating me. There was always too much to look at, too much to take in, too much to experience; not to mention that I never quite knew what my role was in them. But I spent those few precious days sitting blissfully on the beach, draped in a damp towel; my wet hair trickling cold water down my skin, and my feet buried in warm piles of sun-soaked sand.

Now I sit hunched over my notebook, hiding huddled under my bright yellow covers; to create a camouflage from the evasive sunlight, which peeks uncertainly through the crack between my curtains to see if I’m awake yet.

One night a few weeks ago I drove around the city with a friend. I sat in the passenger seat, pushing myself against the door and nervously biting my nails as I always do. The night was warm and the windows were down; and I wanted to stick my head out into the rushing air like dog but was afraid of losing my self-controlled demeanor. I chattered about nothing in particular, my mind all too self-aware as I tried to decide how to position my legs to keep me from looking uncomfortable. The music was loud and kept causing me to lose my sentences, and then panicking as I tried to find where I had left off once again.

Suddenly I found familiarity in the landscape and the turns of the road and told him quickly to stop here.

We sat idling on the outskirts of the small town I grew up in, where the highway winds off into a dirt path with not quite enough gravel to cover its dusty canvas. There isn’t anything past this point but the dying wind combed fields, besides the muted colors and the near purity of the atmosphere. The headlights of the car beamed across a field, as if in a scrutinizing fashion. I unbuckled my seatbelt to step out of the discomfited air of the car and into the cooling breeze of the night. I ran my fingers over the skateboard decal that had been slapped onto the face of a no trespassing sign hanging on a splintered fence that read: “stop here.” It’s bold and hard. It hasn’t been worn down with the weather like everything else here seems to have been.

Stop here.

 An angry black X had been spray-painted onto the back of a fallen lawn chair, and someone had scribbled permanent marker faces all with dull flat eyes.

I knew this place. I had a story here. I walked out into the beams of the lights and into the field without as much as a glance behind me. I pushed through the tall grass; remembering it being much taller than this. I heard my friend call after me, and paused to ask myself why I was so impossibly head-strong and willful before continuing forward without a sound; feeling the warmth of the lights slowly melt into the darkness. When I reached the clearing I smiled. Because although it was not exactly as I recalled it to be, I knew it was the same place.

I dug the toe of my shoe into the dirt and scraped it around – waiting patiently for my frantic friend to find me – my eyes drifting along the edges of the clearing, the corners of my mouth twitching. My eyes settled on an old shirt, and I allowed my mind to wonder who the owner was. How old they were, why they left it lying somberly in the dirt, whose name was written on their heart, how their tears tasted, if their mother was kind, whether they belonged under the sunrise or the sunset, or if they were more alive in the lake or the ocean.

Noisy rustling from behind announced my friend, and pushing through the grass started loudly spouting frustrated questions.

 I wanted to put my hand over his mouth and tell him to be of a more respectful of nature, that this was a happy place.

I ignored him, and started pointing excitedly, and talking animatedly. I told him about my pink unicorn kite, and how my older sister had a dragon kite that I was jealous of. I told him about how years ago after church my Dad would drive us over here and fly kites all afternoon to keep us from going home and waking my sickly mother. I told him that my Dad used to tell us over a mouthful of tuna fish sandwich that the wind was magic here. And I realized when I said it, that I still believed it. I told him of the time when my little sister’s kite blew away and we split up to find it, but spent the day playing marco-polo instead.

When I was finished I looked at him expectedly, waiting for him to say something – although I didn’t know what would be the ideal response – instead he seemed annoyed about my running off, and commented how we should probably be heading back to the car now.

I felt a little disappointed, but I don’t know as to what I was expecting. I walked formally behind him, and with a nostalgic glance behind me, I wished for that different, happier time so long ago.

I shut my eyes tight. Pulled in a hard breath; fast.

Stop here.

the girl who became a tree.

It smells of everything summer: I walk in mannered footsteps – stilted and out of place from the casual saunter of the glistening tanned bodies.

I lie here in the sand and fall in love with the way the sun can momentarily paralyze my frame by its sheer power and magnificence. The sound of elated cries, wordless chatter and laughter are captured by the wind and scamper lightly up my skin – playfully toying with the folds in my dress and tossing about my loose and unkempt hair. Groups of boys flicking bleached frayed hair, run spiritedly by; their bulky physiques pumping sweat and relief from their bombshell shoulders. And further down the beach, young teenagers siphon alcohol from their bloodstream when their eyes become too frosted over with the steam of their summer loves’ kisses. As far away from myself as I was able to situate, large clusters of girls leave their skin out in the sun to dry, that the crust of their figures will capture the attention of the ocean eyed boys. 

What a lovely day to run away. With work, family, friends, and other responsibilities screaming for my attention I could bear the war on my time no longer; I was being spread far too thin. So, I conveniently contracted a horrible virus which I called into my boss with my deepest regrets, and opportunely left my cell phone at home. I drove and drove, tearing through one audio-book and into the next and continued on without stopping until I hit water.

I didn’t whisper a word of my leaving to anyone, and it was so freeing.

It felt so liberating to be alone, with just myself, my secrets, my thoughts, and my dreams. Finding any time to write is difficult with my being so hard pressed for time, which leaves me so impossibly trapped because I say so much more with my fingers than my tongue; real words with real feelings, not my pretensive babble I am liable to spout out at every given opportunity.  

I am so entirely carried off in the season of summer. I feel overcome with the desire to stand on the spot where the sea kisses the shore and feel the sand being swept from beneath my toes. Or to stand high on the tips of the nearby cliff rocks, caught between the safety: solemn and unchanged, and the danger: wild and unpredictable. Or to swim out until my arms and legs become too exhausted to take another stroke, to sink slowly to the blackest deep, and gaze into the belly of the beast with the skin of my own two eyes.

How romantic of a thought. 

The air is so different here. Full of spices, and nostalgia; it brings out the old romantic in me. I breathe in the warmth, the peace, and the autonomy and breathe out the stress, the tears, the worries, the sadness, and the fear that I have allowed to overwhelm me recently. I picked up (yet another) job this past week. I hate money and consumerism, but unfortunately we cannot go through this life without either.

This new change of pace actually hasn’t been too dreadful; I am a maid for exceptionally wealthy individuals. My boss says that we are above the work we do, that what we do is menial and lowly, but I don’t agree. I truly do not believe that I am above anyone, no matter their status. However, this new work has really been quite the fuel for my creativity. I have been imagining tales of murder, adventure, romance, tragedy, comedy and mystery. I spend hours a day just dreaming up beautiful narratives, which is something that I haven’t had little time to do, a deep passion that I had almost forgotten entirely. 

However, there has been a downside. One of the houses that I worked at (A beautiful several million dollar home with custom furniture and architecture) caused me to absolutely decide that I would never want to be wealthy, and realize just how perfectly blessed I was for my humble upbringings.

This is what transpired: a mother of three came bursting through front door halfway through my shift, arms heavy laden with shopping bags, and a baby in the crook of one arm. She pushed her jeweled sunglasses up onto her bleached hair, her French tip acrylic nailed hand flying through the air as she spoke to me. “My friend’s brother is getting married this weekend, and by Gods will I must find the perfect dress. I am leaving little Denver with the boys. They can take care of him just fine, they have done it before after all, but lord knows I can’t take another minute of him.” And her high heels on the travertine clicked hurriedly away as she dropped the baby off in his crib, and hastily ran out the door. I thought nothing of it until I heard a loud, “Mom? Mom??” from upstairs and with a pounding of quickened feet on the steps; out into the living room rushes out the two boys she had referenced, looking no older than seven. “Did our Mom come home?” They ask me, looking hopeful. “Yes, but she just left.” Looking disappointed they ran off. Now, I doubt I need to explain the reasons why I was so upset, and just how horribly irresponsible, and disgraceful that type of behavior is. Leaving a newborn in the hands of two six or seven year old boys to go shopping because you are “sick of them” is simply disgustingly selfish, and negligent.

Now, perhaps I am being too judgmental; but perhaps I’m not.

Anyways, That is in short the extent of my life. But now, I have a desperate ache to fulfill all things above mentioned, and yes, be jealous that I have to sleep in my car tonight.

~C

When I think of you, I think of ocean ripples under a dream-like sky in the vast universe, a blue on blue on blue quilt, patched together between a handful of sunrises and sunsets.

I think of that burning June afternoon when I stumbled into your room with a fistful of tears and a map of the world, with plans to drive as far north as I could and never return to this brokenhearted place with its one night neon motel signs and suburban bass back-beats. Your suitcases were strewn across the carpet and your clothes draped on sun stained furniture, your deep eyes focused on the crashing surf just beyond your window. I whipped jagged shards of my broken little heart at your fingers and asked if you could stitch them together and you did, you did, kicking aside neatly stacked cotton shirts and unfolding a yarn knit sweater for cold lonely nights and draping it across my shoulders.

I sobbed into your shoulder and you rocked my tear stained body in your arms until I managed to drag myself to lean against your wallpaper, your smooth words rolling from your tongue and pouring into my fractured veins. I could never forget the salty tints you washed from my eyes with your windblown marine heartbeat that day, the day you told me I didn’t need to be perfect to be loved.

she's waiting for him.

My gaze was dull this morning; wrapped in the quilt I kept tucked in the back seat of my car, sitting on a boulder at my favorite spot by the lake. There was a silence in me that reached far past my sleepy lidded eyes, and deep into my heart.

I took a sip; the tendrils of mist clouding my thoughts slowly carrying me away into another world, which I've yet to decide upon the certainty of its existence. I am drinking tea in a coffee cup, gossamer and brick in layers, like irises with no pupil; the liquid heats my fingers the bone, and sears the sheets of skin, but soothes my hurried blood. 

In my mind I heard the nervous fumbling of the sound of rubber soles grinding against uneven pavement – shuffling feet and the shallow breaths of cold air that pierced my lungs. I saw the pouring rain. My hair dripping water like icy fingers running down the small of my back and the bumps on my skin raised with the chill. The webs of fog would blanket the sky, and the darkness of the enchanted night would cause my chest to ache with its exhilarated pounding.

I would find a place – a bench perhaps – and sit.

“Can I offer you my umbrella?” might be the first words I would hear him say.

A small smile would lift the edges of my mouth, and with my eyes still blissfully closed I would say, “no thank you. I like the rain.” I would then look up to greet kind eyes, and my breath would be stolen from my lungs, and my heart would skip merrily down the road.

Perhaps that would be how I would meet him. Doing what I love the most – lost in my mind, and found in the night.

Maybe we would take a canoe, fill it with pillows and blankets, and float on this very lake in each other’s arms. The willows on the shore would hang low and sob salty tears into the water. With quiet giggles and whispered secrets, we would cut gracefully through the water, and he would listen to my catastrophes because he wanted to. And in the warm summer night, fall in love too far from solid ground for even the lighthouse to touch us. We would call it: skipping away, because unlike me he would be afraid of running away.

He would think I was beautiful. Not beautiful the way of proportion, or scientifically speaking, or the worldly expectations of It. He would see my lakewater eyes speckled with flecks from the ink of my pen, dancing in poetry, in loss and love. He would see a lost child, a determined adult, and a wise old woman and love me for my uncertainty.

 That night he would trickle his liquid sunshine through my mapped out veins like a bullet through smoke, and later people would ask while shielding their eyes, what had changed. We would talk of the mysteries of the universe until the stars faded into the soft pink light of the dawn. 

I sigh. And pray to God that my story will consist of more than simply a curt hello in a crowded work space, or a single’s ward soirée.

~C

if you can find me.

From half a notebook where thoughts formed into the shape of clouds, I write and piece together the shades from my eyes onto a page; my mind turning on a spit over an open flame, producing steam as a whistling kettle. I get sideways glances and curious looks from passersby’s whose interests have been mildly piqued, but not enough to ask why I am writing from the top branch of a very public tree.  Perhaps I simply appear to have it all together, and indeed would never fall off of the branch because of the official looking crease between my eyebrows, and the intensity of my challenging gaze.

The sky is a solid blue today, but I find myself missing the textures of the billowing firmament  blooming over the mountains – ever changing – and the wind’s whisper in the air, shifting between budding branches.

Winter is beginning to release its bony fingers from the tender flesh of spring as it is lying down to set into a plump slumber.

I am writing without a well-defined purpose now, simply absorbing the pleasure resulting from drawing a black ink pen across a blue lined page, simply to splatter my emotions onto an empty canvas. I am writing letters to the dead willow’s ashes, the bones of the ocean and the island’s craggy skin. I am writing to you, in everything around me.

I cried the night I realized that I was in love.

I fell in love as we watched the sunset – with the light disappearing from the sky, slipping between the fractures in the mountain; the dusk rushing in as the last tinge of reddish orange evaporated into a fine mist hovering forever around our spinning bodies; as we paused for a fraction of a moment to stand in the fading light as the feathers of warmth brushed past our skin, tearing our eyes away from the submersion of the world for us to gasp for air before we drowned.

I fell in love even knowing that between the meeting of our fingertips – I would never have you; as surely as the Earth tilts and spins, the fire in your eyes would melt away as easily and as quickly as the dimming light.

So I dropped your hand, and looked into your face as I watched the colors fade away into a blank empty stare, and almost felt relieved because solitude is so much easier to bear as I wait for my only. He is the cold lone star that burns up every quiet layer of my paper night.

I cried when I found myself one night, standing on the slick pavement with the dim light of a city streetlight washing over me; when I found myself on the stained porch steps of a vacant flower shop eleven bus stops from home; when the skies opened in the blackness and the rain ran icy rivulets into my eyes and down my face, when my sneakers were drenched, I just stood there and wondered whether his eyes were blue or brown.  

~C

when you can't sleep at night.

I don’t think I have felt anything as simultaneous lovely and acrid as the anguish that planted itself in my stomach the evening my parents sat us all down and told us that a member of the family was dying. The anguish grew and grew and ripened and blossomed into sorrow, that through their words “lets just keep this between us” became a silent, inwardly growing pain. I secretly envied the girl in my class whose father had passed away in the night, with no warning at all. Because the building up until the day when that person was no longer in my life – the sheer waiting – left no room for me to seek closure from something that hadn’t even happened yet.

It had felt as if the carpet beneath my feet had been ripped out from below me, and I was caught in the state of panic right before you hit the ground. Most days I didn’t know whether it was a Monday or a Saturday, and on my bad days I didn’t know what month it was. I just looked out the window and wondered how the snow managed to sit on the trees so confidently in the middle of August and pressed my fingertips against the glass, leaving greasy smudges.

I remember that when I walked through the halls of the school, the feeling of being suffocated by them, I remember folding my arms across my chest so tightly to keep my insides from spilling out all over the classroom floors that I would leave eyebrow raising bruises, and how food would make me gag because I couldn’t get it past the giant lump in my throat.

 One day the school counselor pulled me into her office, she had a small sandplay box on her desk and candy in a bowl. She told an uncomfortable thirteen year old that she had been informed by nosy concerned friends that I had been showing alarming signs of depression. Fuming inside over the feelings of betrayal, I laughed and convinced her that it was all a misunderstanding. When she finally let me go I walked straight out of the front door of the school and into the rain.

That was the day I skipped class for the first time.

I remember feeling as if a tidal wave had washed in, destroying my way of life, and creating nothing but a desolate wasteland.

The cement sidewalk was a not a stranger to my feet, but it was one of those days when it rains more under the sycamore than around it.

 I remember seeming to slip in an out of consciousness as I walked with no particular destination in mind. Thinking that all I really wanted was to bathe in a summer sunset in this warm rain with a fox, or a soggy book, as any memory of my past is drawn out of my soul like poison from a wound.

I dropped down onto a bench, waiting for a bus to take me anywhere but where I was when I felt someone sit next to me. I didn’t want to open my eyes, so I pretended I hadn’t heard him, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

He was thin, but tall, with a face worn by the sun and bright eyes that crinkled like wax paper when he smiled. He asked about my long face and despite his age, limberly matched my crossed legs. I liked him right away, as he neither talked to me as my better, or as if he perceived me to be a child. I lied and told him that I was suffering through the loss of a loved one, because in my heart she was already dead.

He nodded; the back of his eyes filled with the joy and the heartache of a well lived life, and for the first time in a long time I felt that if anyone could actually understand what I was feeling, it was this man.

He told me that through the hurt the world will keep turning, that the tears will eventually evaporate from my cheeks, the burden of nothingness on my lungs will be whisked away like a pile of fine powder in a spring breeze, and that I would find it easier to breathe again. He told me about how the seasons end, and the snow disappears, and how the clouds are blown away after a rainstorm. 

I had heard all of this before, from after school TV shows, and overly zealous strangers. But what they didn’t like to talk about is how the snow is always there. The clouds are always there. That whenever the principle of the conservation of matter is brought up, their tight polished smiles would twitch and they would stop talking and begin to glare with their shiny dark eyes because I wasn’t willing to accept the hands reached out in fictitious sympathy. The truth was that they don’t like to think about how the water molecules still weigh heavy somewhere in the world, and how gravity will never let anything go.

 But this little wrinkled man didn’t tell me that I will forget because human memory is so fleeting and pitiful, he didn’t tell me that the grief would ever go away – but that like the seasons, it would eventually change. He said that one day my anguish will grow into a love, an understanding, and that when hearts break; they have the chance to grow back stronger than they ever were.

I sit now in my room, waiting for it to be time to go to work, and I remember what he said to me only because it applies to my life now. I am not suffering through the death of a loved one, but the heartbreak of friends that have been swept up by a train that leads out of this town, and onto a better life that does not consist of me.

I try to listen, and to stay close and reach out to the howling wind floating from those who had once held my heart, screaming and moaning their way into my bones. But now it is March, the year is fading faster than the winter leaves, and the sky is as clear as it will ever be – grey and bleary, grey and as infinite as life–

I will never forget. But one day this ache will become a love – an understanding. And life will move forward, not because it has to, but because I want it to.

~C

silence.

 Winter swept through paths of asphalt and over rooftops, people, wood – sleeping only though a drug-induced rest; dreamless, empty, and merciful – ending the quivering pinpricks in fingers and toes, becoming nothing but blissfully unattached. It hasn't always been like this; no, not at all.

 I was swallowed up in the bitter embrace of the season – caught in the lazy passing of time – oftentimes with nothing but the delightful pause between the inhale and exhale of a wintery breath to occupy my thoughts. Nights filled with memories of snow glittering in the lamplight, and naked trees that looked so frozen against the glow of the night.

 Our whispers caught in the wind; and as I watched them being swept away, I imagined old spirits who would riffle through them, plucking out our hopes and dreams, to deliver them to a God who believed in us.

Remembering, remembering, a memory.

A warm blanket over heads, a fence that I loved, the absolutely aspen trees, pink blushes in the darkness, a world of water and awe, candy that is really plastic and false advertising, and a gluttonous fish.

I watched my fingernails grow – and once they were long enough, scratched out the eyes of those memories and politely asked them to go and hang their blind selves.

There is nothing left for me here in this town. It is time for me to move forward. This time, there is no running away, because there is nothing to run away from.

Nothing to run from but myself.

~C