I’m still wondering what it is I’m trying to say here –
as if I am expecting the day to come when I receive the revelation of a
prodigious epiphany that will shake the entirety of the earth – and I will be
lifted into the air and I will spill the seeds of my words in the hearts of men
and then fall. With my purpose having been finalized, and all the words in me
having been spent. The gnawing compulsion I have and the itching of my
fingertips to simply write something – anything – will be gone; and all will go
back to the way it was when I was silent and mostly dead.
I like to look for the spaces in people as I silently comb
my eyes through them to find the places that gape, and wedge myself in.
I’m sorry I’m so nosy.
Pain makes people human to me. Once I can feel for them – empathize
with them and learn their secrets – I love them. And in each of us are these
black places that start as tiny cracks that grow into echoing canyons. Canyons
lined with words, guilt, fear, stories, nightmares, shame, memories, hope. My
arms and thighs are raked with these canyons; and I've come to love myself
despite them, because I feel that it makes me more real – even if it causes me to
be more difficult to love.
The lonely hearts club.
“Tell me a secret.” I always say, leaning in close, my lips
curling at the edges.
But what I mean to say is: I cannot reach you – you are
untouchable – allow me to look inside of your most secret places and tell you
that you are perfect to me. So that I may come to understand you in exactness,
and accept you so that you may never be lonely.
We hide the spaces to keep ourselves feeling whole. And maybe sometimes we cling to the spaces and
make ourselves into addicts – to people, to alcohol, to our self-perception, to
the verdict of others, to drugs, to unrealistic dreams, to love. Maybe we think
that by throwing all those things down into the blackness, we will fill it back
up, giving someone the footing they need to make it to the other side.
I like to look for the spaces in people. So that I may blow
myself up four-thousand-times and lovingly pour every tender word and every
hopeful feeling I’ve ever had into that darkness. I do it not for me, but because
I have felt such a sorrow in my life that I have made the decision to never
allow another to ever feel that same sorrow.
Recently however, I have been stretched taut – with streaks
lining my flesh, and careless footprints down my back. But I feel that by
constantly expanding, acting as a human Band-Aid, and caring far more than I
should, will eventually lead to its own repercussions.
But I have decide to stop worrying about ‘eventually’, and continue to cram myself into spaces, and just
deal with the trouble compassion will bring me if that time ever comes.
Isolation from those I love has been difficult – living so
far from everything I have ever seen and known – after finding adoration for
the land where I was raised: the tall mountains dominating the skyline with a
silent power that demands reverence, the frost that blankets the morning and
suspends the movement of life – if only for a moment, the secrets hidden away
in tall branches and behind the climbing boulders, I miss my thinking spot and
being touched by people who genuinely love me. But over the past five
months, I’ve learned how to combat the solitude. I’ve always done well on my
own, been contented with just spending time alone and was able to easily find
happiness within myself. But it isn’t until you no longer have the option
available to be with another that you begin to miss it.
I’ve found that I tend to take up more space than ever I
have – sprawling my body over the sofa where I read like a blanket, or filling
the dining room table with heavy books and fresh-cut flowers to hide the empty
seats, or how I sleep with one hundred pillows on my over-sized bed so that I
always have to fight for a space for my body to mold itself into.
I’ve come to
learn that sometimes, you just won’t have enough. That you won’t have enough
money, that you won’t have enough vacation days, that you won’t have enough
hours in a day, that you won’t have enough sleep in a night, that you won’t
have enough hello’s and too many goodbyes.
So although it has been difficult, I have been able to find
a beauty here un-matched by any I have yet to see; setting my insides aflame
with child-like awe.
I have a room in my home with windows of windows, lit only
by the sun. Where I can write the sunshine into my pages, and spectate with
open mouth at the thickness of the fog in the early morning, and how palpable
it tastes on my tongue. I live near a botanical garden – that is spread
abundantly over acres and acres – each plant tenderly labeled with care,
gardens of roses and free-flowing water with long docks and hanging branches.
In the evening, the un-hindered skyline leaves the moon satisfied, and together
we stretch out on the rug and contemplate the turning of the stars.
It has been refreshing to have an unmarked foundation of
which to build a new life upon. With the land and the people untainted by
prejudice and corrupted memories. But even here, so far away from home, I find
my past in the most unexpected places.
When I was in the eighth grade, a boy tried to teach me that
even when someone doesn’t love you, you need to be beautiful to them. Or else
people will write you down on a scrap of paper like a bad secret, and push you
into the spine of a book – leaving you on the shelf for some unfortunate reader
to find. He called me ugly, and stupid, and fat. I took all of his words and
wrote them under the surface of my skin – as a reminder that sometimes the
world is cruel, and that sometimes it hates you, even when you haven’t done
anything but live in it.
So one night, not many nights ago, I saw the familiar face
of that boy – the face that had painted itself beneath my skin, still twisted
in disgust as if it was yesterday. He saw me as I saw him, and with a tilt of
his head he asked if I was the girl who used to love him.
I could say nothing, I just stared into his eyes and I saw
the emptiness that lay there – the insecurities, the arrogance, the selfishness
– and I could not believe that for so many years I had carried the words of
someone who never knew me so close to my heart, and allowed
those words to mold me. So I opened the cavity of my chest and pulled out
everything he had written beneath my skin nine years ago and noiselessly
dropped them in his lap – because I had no use for them anymore – and left him wearing
all the words he had tried to drown me in.
When I was in eighth grade a boy
taught me that you can’t keep the world out of you – that it is ugly, bent,
with torn corners – but you can turn it into something new, like a pressed
flower left tenderly in the heart of a forgotten book, nine seasons after someone
else tore it from the ground.
~C
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