I'm standing in that spot where the tracks interlace.
You're screaming, "Just pick a path, sweetheart!
Just pick a path."
But the volume of your voice makes the hazy air
Swim in and out of focus, tracks twisting back and
Forth onto themselves and I can't tell the past from
The future.
Hands clapped over ears, humming loudly, swaying
On feet with knee socks bunched up around ankles.
Just pick a path, sweetheart. Just pick a path.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
shore to shore
Because I think that when I think of the world, and I mean the whole world, like one of those maps spread out over the family room floor or a globe that glows from inside out, then the continents are like slices of earth as if someone took a cookie cutter and cut these chunks out and dropped them, floating, onto that big blue surface of the ocean. And when you reach the edges they drop off into nothingness. Here's the land. Here's the sea. Here's the line that divides them.
But I can't think that because I've sat on beaches in so many different states, different countries. I've sat on that line that isn't a line, half on shore, half in water, being pushed up and pulled back by waves that will not be contained. I've watched the tides flow in and rush out. I've touched that line, ran it through my hands, come away with shell fragments, sea glass, and scratches. This is land and this is sea. Come back tomorrow and it will have changed.
Because isn't everything like that, in a way? You can't say this is where one thing ends and another begins. Our brains aren't quilts made by ten-year-olds with scraps of torn up fabric stitched together, plainly obvious when one thing switches to another. Our lives aren't pinstriped and painter's tape. We're blurred.
You're sitting on a beach right now, on that ever-shifting line. What do you think about that? Can we use this to describe everything? Because we're all here, in this world, living about our lives, experiencing the what sometimes seems so random ecstasy and melancholia that inhabits the human experience, trying to make sense out of anything, trying to be what we can. And when we're making rules (we call them laws because we'll always pretend to be grownups even when sidewalk chalk and fruit snacks haven't yet lost their luster), we forget that there aren't these cut and dried categories that people and places and thoughts and being fit into. You're not in this pit or that one. You're somewhere in between along with the rest of us, and we're all looking around, hugging our arms around ourselves, scared to death to be found out that we can't fit, we don't fit, we won't fit, into that perfect mold labeled "expectation." I'm sorry, but I don't. Because I'm nineteen different people and they're all flooding together, like wave upon wave upon wave, hitting that line, forcing it back and then forward and then back again.
You know when you cross a state line and you wouldn't know that you'd crossed it except for that sign and suddenly the speed limit's changed? Blink, and you'll think you're in the same place. But told that you're somewhere new, you'll think you're there. This is coming off so much less profound and important than it actually is in my head. Because maybe that's the one jagged-edged cliff that stays constant -- the eternal wall between the messes of thought and putting them down into something concretely comprehensible for the rest of the world to relate to. Because I swear we're all quite the same, living as well as we can, trying to line up our lives that are not made of straight lines, panicking when nothing goes quite to plan.
Scattered and more scattered. Like sneezing. Like running away. But you'll always leave a trail.
Perhaps a great adventure is in order. Perhaps the great adventure will be different than I see in my head, with less backpacking around uncharted jungles and more sitting in coffee shops, writing letters. Because these are the small things that make life livable, worth something, original, mine. Because this life is mine. And I'm living it for me. And coming into the very solidly comforting knowledge that I do not want to be anyone else.
Wonder.
Words and words and writing and reading and book buying and sometimes page numbers are the only definition I can see in my life.
But I can't think that because I've sat on beaches in so many different states, different countries. I've sat on that line that isn't a line, half on shore, half in water, being pushed up and pulled back by waves that will not be contained. I've watched the tides flow in and rush out. I've touched that line, ran it through my hands, come away with shell fragments, sea glass, and scratches. This is land and this is sea. Come back tomorrow and it will have changed.
Because isn't everything like that, in a way? You can't say this is where one thing ends and another begins. Our brains aren't quilts made by ten-year-olds with scraps of torn up fabric stitched together, plainly obvious when one thing switches to another. Our lives aren't pinstriped and painter's tape. We're blurred.
You're sitting on a beach right now, on that ever-shifting line. What do you think about that? Can we use this to describe everything? Because we're all here, in this world, living about our lives, experiencing the what sometimes seems so random ecstasy and melancholia that inhabits the human experience, trying to make sense out of anything, trying to be what we can. And when we're making rules (we call them laws because we'll always pretend to be grownups even when sidewalk chalk and fruit snacks haven't yet lost their luster), we forget that there aren't these cut and dried categories that people and places and thoughts and being fit into. You're not in this pit or that one. You're somewhere in between along with the rest of us, and we're all looking around, hugging our arms around ourselves, scared to death to be found out that we can't fit, we don't fit, we won't fit, into that perfect mold labeled "expectation." I'm sorry, but I don't. Because I'm nineteen different people and they're all flooding together, like wave upon wave upon wave, hitting that line, forcing it back and then forward and then back again.
You know when you cross a state line and you wouldn't know that you'd crossed it except for that sign and suddenly the speed limit's changed? Blink, and you'll think you're in the same place. But told that you're somewhere new, you'll think you're there. This is coming off so much less profound and important than it actually is in my head. Because maybe that's the one jagged-edged cliff that stays constant -- the eternal wall between the messes of thought and putting them down into something concretely comprehensible for the rest of the world to relate to. Because I swear we're all quite the same, living as well as we can, trying to line up our lives that are not made of straight lines, panicking when nothing goes quite to plan.
Scattered and more scattered. Like sneezing. Like running away. But you'll always leave a trail.
Perhaps a great adventure is in order. Perhaps the great adventure will be different than I see in my head, with less backpacking around uncharted jungles and more sitting in coffee shops, writing letters. Because these are the small things that make life livable, worth something, original, mine. Because this life is mine. And I'm living it for me. And coming into the very solidly comforting knowledge that I do not want to be anyone else.
Wonder.
Words and words and writing and reading and book buying and sometimes page numbers are the only definition I can see in my life.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
impact
I’m constantly banging into that thick, transparent wall in between the explosion of thought and feeling and emotion and affection and the entirety of me that whirls around faster than I can follow between my ears and how it spits itself out onto the page, into an email, in pause-filled stammering sentences. I wish, so desperately wish, that I could convey to you the depth of the things I think, feel, am at any moment. Because the people, the dearest ones, in my life (probably you) do nothing but intensify the cacophony of chaotic colors swirling and smashing into one another in the way I see my world. And I have yet to find a suitable outlet to show people the extent that I care, that they matter.
Because people have this way of having profound impact upon my life. And I think that’s important and it’s something I want to share with them but I don’t know how to do that.
How do you… how do you let people know their significance? In words that sound stale and overused and grey in scribbled ink on torn out notebook paper? Because it’s more than that. You can’t be put down in words. But that doesn’t mean that you are not of immense worth to me, to the world.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
definition
Sometimes I think my life is defined by the number of birds on the side of the highway I pass on the way to work, with eye sight shaded and music turned loud, fingers out the sunroof. How do birds get hit by cars? I mean squirrels, sure. Those morons are always sprinting across the road just as the UPS truck is pulling out, death wishes with furry grey tails they are, when they're not tight-roping across telephone lines or lurking in unsuspecting dumpsters. Possums, of course; blindly lumbering under your turning tires. But birds? Crows and pigeons and sparrows and gulls? They have the gift of flight, something we've longed for since the dawn of wishful thinking, and even they cannot avoid an instant, two-ton death?
There is a crow that's lying along that road, the name I don't know though I've driven on it nearly every day since I was eight-years-old, near-flattened to the black-top near the turn off for school. I saw it there yesterday morning. I saw it there yesterday afternoon, a little more flattened, a little more grey than black, turning into the cement on which it lay. I saw it there this morning, one wing sticking up straight, perpendicular to its death bed, the feathers fluttering in the breeze of a car zooming past at a breakneck thirty-six miles per hour, as though waving in greeting as I pass on the way south: "Have a good day." Will it be there tomorrow?
Sometimes I think my life is defined by the number of empty cathedrals I walk through, soaring ceilings causing cricks as you crane your neck upwards to make sure you don't miss a thing, because holiness hides in the highest of corners. Something about these big, empty rooms, sectioned by pews, organs, altars, demands reticence, slow steps, striding forward along the aisle way, can't stay still and stand in the back. Breathing deep, there's a certain smell that encompasses these old spaces, no matter where - Paris, Scotland, Seattle. They smell the same, like old books: a lingering presence of the thousands of feet who have paced these cement floors before, mounted these steps, gazed adoringly upwards at circles of glass and stone and story. So you breathe deep, closing your eyes, careful to let the exhaled sigh echo not too loudly.
There is a rainbow flag fluttering from the pole outside St. Mark's Cathedral, the church I'd only visited in the casualness of night before, the sanctuary coated in college students on blankets, in strangers leaning up against the same pillars, in hipsters straightening plaid as they stand for the apostles' creed. There is a earthy heaviness that accompanies the low-lighting and male harmonies of Sunday nights, the organ highs and lows that resound to the handful who'll stay after thirty minutes of can you call that church? There is still a reverence though, in the quietude of the wind of whispers, the shifting to face the front chapel. But walk in at one in the afternoon, and the light will knock you back, steal your lungs, and leave you, mouth open, staring.
"Oh my..."
The buckles on my boots jingle in the bright-white silence, bouncing off the thick-set columns holding up a dark-paneled ceiling. There's sunlight streaming through those many-paned windows. There are designs on those lanterns, blue and orange. No fear of tripping over someone's prayerful sleep. A lightness in the embrace of heavy holiness.
Sometimes I think my life is defined by reaching out. A note, an email, a letter, a smile. From you, from me. An acknowledgment that we are not living isolated on this tiny rock hurtling through space. We are not birds, hopping across busy streets, forgetting our wings in the face of certain destruction. We share things. We recognize the weight of what it means to be alive, to be breathing, to make choices, to say or not say what we think. We sink down onto that wooden pew that creaks under our weight, in the middle of the high-ceilinged sanctuary and know that someone has been their before, has felt that same awe, has breathed that same sun-lit air.
There is a crow that's lying along that road, the name I don't know though I've driven on it nearly every day since I was eight-years-old, near-flattened to the black-top near the turn off for school. I saw it there yesterday morning. I saw it there yesterday afternoon, a little more flattened, a little more grey than black, turning into the cement on which it lay. I saw it there this morning, one wing sticking up straight, perpendicular to its death bed, the feathers fluttering in the breeze of a car zooming past at a breakneck thirty-six miles per hour, as though waving in greeting as I pass on the way south: "Have a good day." Will it be there tomorrow?
Sometimes I think my life is defined by the number of empty cathedrals I walk through, soaring ceilings causing cricks as you crane your neck upwards to make sure you don't miss a thing, because holiness hides in the highest of corners. Something about these big, empty rooms, sectioned by pews, organs, altars, demands reticence, slow steps, striding forward along the aisle way, can't stay still and stand in the back. Breathing deep, there's a certain smell that encompasses these old spaces, no matter where - Paris, Scotland, Seattle. They smell the same, like old books: a lingering presence of the thousands of feet who have paced these cement floors before, mounted these steps, gazed adoringly upwards at circles of glass and stone and story. So you breathe deep, closing your eyes, careful to let the exhaled sigh echo not too loudly.
There is a rainbow flag fluttering from the pole outside St. Mark's Cathedral, the church I'd only visited in the casualness of night before, the sanctuary coated in college students on blankets, in strangers leaning up against the same pillars, in hipsters straightening plaid as they stand for the apostles' creed. There is a earthy heaviness that accompanies the low-lighting and male harmonies of Sunday nights, the organ highs and lows that resound to the handful who'll stay after thirty minutes of can you call that church? There is still a reverence though, in the quietude of the wind of whispers, the shifting to face the front chapel. But walk in at one in the afternoon, and the light will knock you back, steal your lungs, and leave you, mouth open, staring.
"Oh my..."
The buckles on my boots jingle in the bright-white silence, bouncing off the thick-set columns holding up a dark-paneled ceiling. There's sunlight streaming through those many-paned windows. There are designs on those lanterns, blue and orange. No fear of tripping over someone's prayerful sleep. A lightness in the embrace of heavy holiness.
Sometimes I think my life is defined by reaching out. A note, an email, a letter, a smile. From you, from me. An acknowledgment that we are not living isolated on this tiny rock hurtling through space. We are not birds, hopping across busy streets, forgetting our wings in the face of certain destruction. We share things. We recognize the weight of what it means to be alive, to be breathing, to make choices, to say or not say what we think. We sink down onto that wooden pew that creaks under our weight, in the middle of the high-ceilinged sanctuary and know that someone has been their before, has felt that same awe, has breathed that same sun-lit air.
There is a restless itch behind my heart, something that says cry out to every person you pass that they are important and significant and matter, something that says be still, be silent, and be there. Something that asks is this enough.
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| (source) |
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
here and there
Because pretty soon we're going to look at one another from different cities.
Because this day will never happen again.
We'll be.
Because this day will never happen again.
We'll be.
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| (photo credit) |
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Powell's in Portland in Pencil
Kneeling on concrete, cold where the floor meets bare skin, hands chalky from flipping pages, from breathing in wisdom, that old book smell. Now here, looking out at bricks and fire escapes and one ways in the Pearl District, sitting at a counter in a room that almost just smells like bodies, pretending to belong.
Fingers trace the spines of small press chapbooks, eyes ache with too-old contacts, with sleepless nights, with life (there's life in these words; there's life in this complication; this is life. We were missing it before). We're all aspiring writers: what are you going to do to stand out?
I'm more and more rapidly approaching the point of just wanting to say "fuck it" and do this. Fuck distance. Fuck social expectations. Fuck the rational or the right or the over-thinking. If I say fuck enough, will that make me a hipster?
I'm a person who needs to reach out and hold on to things, which is why God and conversations are hard and people and letters are easier. I need something to dig my nails into when I get scared, when my heart starts pounding, anything to stop the shaking. I'm not saying you can't leave. I'm just saying, don't be mad if I accidentally hold your hand every second that we're together because that makes you more real; that means that you're not just inside my head; that makes you distinct from me and could there be anything quite so liberating as coming into real-life contact with another individual, with someone who is not the crazy mess that is everything my senses take in, but is you, is real, is solid, is something that is not me. You mean, I don't have to be isolated all the time? Shut the fuck up.
In conclusion, this city is a hipster zoo and my breath is only steaming up the glass.
Fingers trace the spines of small press chapbooks, eyes ache with too-old contacts, with sleepless nights, with life (there's life in these words; there's life in this complication; this is life. We were missing it before). We're all aspiring writers: what are you going to do to stand out?
I'm more and more rapidly approaching the point of just wanting to say "fuck it" and do this. Fuck distance. Fuck social expectations. Fuck the rational or the right or the over-thinking. If I say fuck enough, will that make me a hipster?
I'm a person who needs to reach out and hold on to things, which is why God and conversations are hard and people and letters are easier. I need something to dig my nails into when I get scared, when my heart starts pounding, anything to stop the shaking. I'm not saying you can't leave. I'm just saying, don't be mad if I accidentally hold your hand every second that we're together because that makes you more real; that means that you're not just inside my head; that makes you distinct from me and could there be anything quite so liberating as coming into real-life contact with another individual, with someone who is not the crazy mess that is everything my senses take in, but is you, is real, is solid, is something that is not me. You mean, I don't have to be isolated all the time? Shut the fuck up.
In conclusion, this city is a hipster zoo and my breath is only steaming up the glass.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
seven and eighteen
So, I crashed into a wall at about an hour ago. Not literally; don't fret. Just one of those walls that jump out at you while you're shuffling along at half-a-jog, keeping up the energy, keeping up the positives, keeping up the motivation. That wall says, "Maybe not," and all of a sudden you're sitting in mud at the base, with brick-burn on your face, looking up.
Maybe that metaphor was too extended.
My brain has reached capacity. I can't find the right music. Countdowns. Words (listen to how the keys click). A general state of shaking, deep breaths, long blinks.
Joel said today, "You're certainly not alone in your uncertainty." There is a hopefulness in that, a solidarity, an essence of community. My brain is muddled with abstractions, with trying to speak what I feel and trying to feel what's right.
Maybe that metaphor was too extended.
My brain has reached capacity. I can't find the right music. Countdowns. Words (listen to how the keys click). A general state of shaking, deep breaths, long blinks.
Joel said today, "You're certainly not alone in your uncertainty." There is a hopefulness in that, a solidarity, an essence of community. My brain is muddled with abstractions, with trying to speak what I feel and trying to feel what's right.
Just sit for a minute, resting your head against the wall, humming to yourself, gathering the nerve (strength? determination? sheer will power?) to stand up and clamber over to the other side.
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