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