Beast of time, lingering, waiting, ever passing. Gnashing of teeth, wailing of babies and waylaid plans; even the best intentions usually go awry. "Like one of those movie dissolves in which you know you're not in the real world, but it seems that way anyways."
The plasticky fakeness grows; sore throat, diarrhea, vomit pale besides strangling malaise. Sleep thirteen hours, do not eat – no recipe for success, this. Weight still dropping, I find myself at one-twenty-two, more beanpole than ever... but cannot help but smile in the face of every musculature emphasized. It is a peculiar sickness, and I am cold. One question: how do you get the stomach flu if you haven't eaten?
Gray pierces the shadow I am becoming, resilience fading and will weakening. Slinking into dustier and dustier corners, I recess from this once proud ideal, an individual disappearing behind layers of expectation, secondary America drowning in the soulless primary, surrounded by faceless driver drones, the traffic of too many cluttered freeways.
"You'd make a great father," he says. Distance makes for such great blinders. "I can't see myself marrying you," she says. No matter how deep the valley, it does not make for less pain.
Words come unbidden from these cracked, broken places; jagged splinters become sentences, then paragraphs. Remembering Heller, I wonder – I may be a writer yet. Demon hurts pile onto quickly darkening pages, ink messily sparing no line. Grayscale, I am split.
Distinctions, then deeply divided and yet same, heart and mind; if you wish, add a third: soul. It may yet be that where the first two intersect, the third resides. "Love with your life, lead with your head." She – always a she – told me this once, phantom wisdom and a friendly smile. Advice unsought, but welcome. Now she's divorced.
Writing, work through the cool calculations of reason and thought, of structure and planned design – mindful, classical. Writing, evoke peals of laughter, rivers of joy, explosions of sadness, depths barely hinted at – emotional, romantic. Neither can be perfected, neither can be ignored.
Combine them, call it Quality, Oneness, God. (Be sure to Capitalize.) Step precariously: too far to either side and the whole contraption collapses. Life breathes for the support of balance, not for lack of disharmony. What risks we take, or do not take, in finding that balance – that, there, is the sum of a life, saved or not, the fray be damned.
I live to dream, ever in pursuit of greater magic. "Everything to excess," once; now it narrows some, to a mild semblance of moderation, but still, patron saint of the church of reason I am not. I cannot be, and will not be. Love is more, no matter how or where you see it.
A nightly ritual for her parents, she tells me, both childhood memory and present reality: whomever returned home first would fix the drinks; as soon as both were home, they set aside that one hour for themselves. Catch up on the day, plan for the next, discuss life and love. The hour was whatever they needed it to be. As kids, they knew not to interrupt unless there was blood; that hour was for mom and dad alone.
I cannot imagine having a full hour every day.
Perhaps this is why friendships are lost, ties severed, goodbyes unwelcome and piling, some said aloud and others in fading whispers. A year adrift, searching in seams, finding hope in all these transitions (three months, three moves; six months, three bike accidents; several injuries), exploring all these options – still, I cannot imagine that kind of communication. Tides of the moon recede, receive. Embers lose their happy glow; charcoal black as night.
What hopes might another year bring? This one, though lacking in identity, has never asked for variety. Will the next bring more of the same? One marked in progress forward even as stagnated by injury; what growth might the next bring? I cannot say, even as the past year has asked more questions than answered. Time, I know; there is always time.
Like time, he says. Gnash away, wail on through. It is what it is, no more and no less. And some questions are better left unasked than unanswered. Trading sweet company for sad silence, red chested stick figures blazing through snow and ice, ankle-biting trails of winter's best; sorrows drowning in sweat, stink, and mud. Numbers and grids, but you can't give me odds.
Time has no math for it. Night beckons. I have no regrets.
Monday, December 31
Monday, December 24
Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men
Bemoaning the lack of content – nothing new in a month, once more – still I do not write. Words – they are but words, her indifference tells me – so often shallow, so often inadequate. Yet, the compelling need, Lamott says, the compelling need to try. Is that need what makes you all writers?
And if I've lost the need, the passion, that overwhelming desire? If there simply are no more words? If silence is all I have to offer, the solitude of long miles and icy steps – what can this small voice say, my footfalls seem to say, that has not already been said?
Structure and themes and weaving plot lines – and still even the simplicity confounds me. Life is not framed, boxed, so easily lent to narrative, not according to these eyes. These eyes, this alien perspective – I can no more bracket it than fill it with empty questions.
Still, more than a little despairing, I cannot help but feel this need to try.
Snapshots of a soggy sofa, a bare room, the smell of ramen sunk into the matted carpet and peeling paint, Damien Rice and tea my closest companions. The year is two thousand and three; the fear is a complete and total lack of direction. In this ever pervading loneliness, fears are punctuation. I have not yet learned to drown myself and these cares in miles and empty words. That will yet come.
It is November; the air outside bites strangely against my Arizona dreams of warm sun and comfortably cool nights. Snow is falling; thick flakes settle uneasily on the peeling Pinyons, disappearing in small beads of water down the gnarled trunks as quietly as they arrive.
I count my friends as most would count acquaintances, stretching the definition to include anyone whom I can comfortably say hello to. Still, there is only slightly more than a dozen. Six long months still stretch ahead of me, and the many troubles of the first month still looming large (mule suicide hardly the least of them), it is an uncomfortable ledge on which I sit.
Sermon-writing, running, storytelling – fine endeavors, but hardly something to hang a larger meaning upon. There is no direction in long days of surfing the web (even the most thorough cleaning can hardly take more than two hours at the rec center), no direction in nights spent waiting for an acceptable time to seek out the sleep that will not come. Fearful of this future, day-counting unravels slowly. This is me, unsettled.
Those days now – just more than four years past – an eternity ago. How do you measure a life? Is it in faiths lost / gained, loves forgotten (does it really matter who forgets whom, or which wounds are inflicted by whom?), careers rejected, disappointments caused? Is it by lives influenced, children raised, lessons taught? By so many measures, I might inflict a cat's jealousy. Still, after all these lives, settled is but a dream. Increasingly larger it may be, but dreams are dreams. Realities only come later, the morning after.
You tell me, proud, that I'm really getting my life together. But this, this is not together – years of college debt stretching ahead, a useless degree behind, stability still something more imagined than real. Together I am not. Small lies, we say, but I fear you believe it.
Separate lives colliding, collapsing and expanding, ever merging, we fret over large things in small ways, small things in large ways. A plundered fridge may draw my ire for days, a smart-ass student yours, yet larger worries - money, school, the future – remain more often undressed, lingering in the awkward spaces of stop-start pauses, that wishful clearing between awake and dreaming. Like time, I remember, always time.
Truth or fiction, these words are neither, and yet remain both. Lost in translation, mind to hand to pen to paper to eyes to fingers to keyboard to screen and then yet more repetitions in this idle editorializing... memories intercepting. Robert Bly hangs in one such void, words once spoken, never since forgotten, the image ever near. Seven spaces for short-term memory aside, this may be one of seven, always; the preacher walking down the steps, the communion wafer broken above him, and as he offers those words, so often practiced over the years, realizing he no longer believes. The story is no longer his; it belongs to his congregation alone. I've spent years looking for that image in whichever poem it was, searching out the fair-haired elderly Norwegian Lutheran. Perhaps he never said it. Perhaps that was the moment I stopped believing. It's hard to say. Like everything else, memory once more commits itself to heresy.
My handwriting grows messier and messier by the line, and I cannot help but wonder what became of that strong-jawed idealist of youth past, he of the party line and literalist of the strangest degree. Six, seven years later, what remains but the jaw?
Not all my memories are physical, but I remember the texture of that rough orange seat, the sight of my row, exactly where I was sitting as those words stretched out before me, the image carrying me away. Later, I remember the crunch of certain snowy footsteps, conversation muffled by the crackling ice, you asking how, how, how it all just slipped away like that. I thought of it like water, ever shifting, fluid as love; you thought of it as a physical body, ever solid, embracing as love. We agreed to put it away, but never really did.
These are the grayscale Polaroids my words struggle to find.
And what of heaven? Hours pass, the serpentine highway dwindling in fogged over rearview mirrors and the road ahead sliding into yet more haze, and we find ourselves here, at this intersection of reason and faith. Familiar to me, it scares me: I cannot let this love slip away, no more than I can lie about what I believe. Forever, eternity in a moment, I think; perfection, sought out with longing, desire quenched by this prescient woman... she knows me too well, and I cannot lie. I tell her, as best words can.
Hours of traveler talk, the question game our code further and further into each others' souls, it comes to a halt, crashing; this the line we dare not cross. Our future stretches before us, hungry and wasting.
Oh, but dance. I protest, dance. Give me but a step with which to play. Goose-pricked flesh in a single note, the dense existentialism of each stride in another run at eternity, or forty miles, whichever kills me first – can that not be my spirituality, sustenance of its own? Can that not be another glimpse at heaven? And of heaven? What of it, I want to answer. Our stories are each our own even as they intersect, weave and waver in this complicated dance of ritual and hope and fear and doubt, and – both most and least – love. Ever waiting, violent implosions veiled in the infinite, a gentle molding: experience in a star's gaze, breath ever recycled (stardust to stardust, planet to planet, black hole to black hole), pure starlight drunk in every heartbeat. Meaning what we make of it, justification and means. Habeas corpus and carpe diem roll together, each complicated by the other. Love is always a sullied affair: consuming, burning, porcelain frailty and alabaster charm. Yet, it cannot help but jump, this doll of a heart, sucker for risk. Gamble large, I explain – and hope to take the house on a small enough sample. Everything to excess it may not be, but neither is it quite full repentance. Some things cannot be changed. Even at a hundred to one, I think I'd take it.
But when, line out, do you realize you've overextended, that there's no fish to reel in and no more time to cast again? At what cost do these risks come? Just how easily does alabaster crumble? And at what heat does sand turn to stone?
Push and pull, playing doubts off hopes and dreams off fears, we parry and tarry and play once more the same old song. It's been written before, and it'll be written again, and yet – I know this – it'll never be the same. For we, I say, are different.
I do not tire of it, nor will I. As long as there is breath, there are dreams. Cynic, romantic, idealist, dreamer; each a prettier mask than the one before. I cannot help but love.
And compared to that, who needs words?
And if I've lost the need, the passion, that overwhelming desire? If there simply are no more words? If silence is all I have to offer, the solitude of long miles and icy steps – what can this small voice say, my footfalls seem to say, that has not already been said?
Structure and themes and weaving plot lines – and still even the simplicity confounds me. Life is not framed, boxed, so easily lent to narrative, not according to these eyes. These eyes, this alien perspective – I can no more bracket it than fill it with empty questions.
Still, more than a little despairing, I cannot help but feel this need to try.
Snapshots of a soggy sofa, a bare room, the smell of ramen sunk into the matted carpet and peeling paint, Damien Rice and tea my closest companions. The year is two thousand and three; the fear is a complete and total lack of direction. In this ever pervading loneliness, fears are punctuation. I have not yet learned to drown myself and these cares in miles and empty words. That will yet come.
It is November; the air outside bites strangely against my Arizona dreams of warm sun and comfortably cool nights. Snow is falling; thick flakes settle uneasily on the peeling Pinyons, disappearing in small beads of water down the gnarled trunks as quietly as they arrive.
I count my friends as most would count acquaintances, stretching the definition to include anyone whom I can comfortably say hello to. Still, there is only slightly more than a dozen. Six long months still stretch ahead of me, and the many troubles of the first month still looming large (mule suicide hardly the least of them), it is an uncomfortable ledge on which I sit.
Sermon-writing, running, storytelling – fine endeavors, but hardly something to hang a larger meaning upon. There is no direction in long days of surfing the web (even the most thorough cleaning can hardly take more than two hours at the rec center), no direction in nights spent waiting for an acceptable time to seek out the sleep that will not come. Fearful of this future, day-counting unravels slowly. This is me, unsettled.
Those days now – just more than four years past – an eternity ago. How do you measure a life? Is it in faiths lost / gained, loves forgotten (does it really matter who forgets whom, or which wounds are inflicted by whom?), careers rejected, disappointments caused? Is it by lives influenced, children raised, lessons taught? By so many measures, I might inflict a cat's jealousy. Still, after all these lives, settled is but a dream. Increasingly larger it may be, but dreams are dreams. Realities only come later, the morning after.
You tell me, proud, that I'm really getting my life together. But this, this is not together – years of college debt stretching ahead, a useless degree behind, stability still something more imagined than real. Together I am not. Small lies, we say, but I fear you believe it.
Separate lives colliding, collapsing and expanding, ever merging, we fret over large things in small ways, small things in large ways. A plundered fridge may draw my ire for days, a smart-ass student yours, yet larger worries - money, school, the future – remain more often undressed, lingering in the awkward spaces of stop-start pauses, that wishful clearing between awake and dreaming. Like time, I remember, always time.
Truth or fiction, these words are neither, and yet remain both. Lost in translation, mind to hand to pen to paper to eyes to fingers to keyboard to screen and then yet more repetitions in this idle editorializing... memories intercepting. Robert Bly hangs in one such void, words once spoken, never since forgotten, the image ever near. Seven spaces for short-term memory aside, this may be one of seven, always; the preacher walking down the steps, the communion wafer broken above him, and as he offers those words, so often practiced over the years, realizing he no longer believes. The story is no longer his; it belongs to his congregation alone. I've spent years looking for that image in whichever poem it was, searching out the fair-haired elderly Norwegian Lutheran. Perhaps he never said it. Perhaps that was the moment I stopped believing. It's hard to say. Like everything else, memory once more commits itself to heresy.
My handwriting grows messier and messier by the line, and I cannot help but wonder what became of that strong-jawed idealist of youth past, he of the party line and literalist of the strangest degree. Six, seven years later, what remains but the jaw?
Not all my memories are physical, but I remember the texture of that rough orange seat, the sight of my row, exactly where I was sitting as those words stretched out before me, the image carrying me away. Later, I remember the crunch of certain snowy footsteps, conversation muffled by the crackling ice, you asking how, how, how it all just slipped away like that. I thought of it like water, ever shifting, fluid as love; you thought of it as a physical body, ever solid, embracing as love. We agreed to put it away, but never really did.
These are the grayscale Polaroids my words struggle to find.
And what of heaven? Hours pass, the serpentine highway dwindling in fogged over rearview mirrors and the road ahead sliding into yet more haze, and we find ourselves here, at this intersection of reason and faith. Familiar to me, it scares me: I cannot let this love slip away, no more than I can lie about what I believe. Forever, eternity in a moment, I think; perfection, sought out with longing, desire quenched by this prescient woman... she knows me too well, and I cannot lie. I tell her, as best words can.
Hours of traveler talk, the question game our code further and further into each others' souls, it comes to a halt, crashing; this the line we dare not cross. Our future stretches before us, hungry and wasting.
Oh, but dance. I protest, dance. Give me but a step with which to play. Goose-pricked flesh in a single note, the dense existentialism of each stride in another run at eternity, or forty miles, whichever kills me first – can that not be my spirituality, sustenance of its own? Can that not be another glimpse at heaven? And of heaven? What of it, I want to answer. Our stories are each our own even as they intersect, weave and waver in this complicated dance of ritual and hope and fear and doubt, and – both most and least – love. Ever waiting, violent implosions veiled in the infinite, a gentle molding: experience in a star's gaze, breath ever recycled (stardust to stardust, planet to planet, black hole to black hole), pure starlight drunk in every heartbeat. Meaning what we make of it, justification and means. Habeas corpus and carpe diem roll together, each complicated by the other. Love is always a sullied affair: consuming, burning, porcelain frailty and alabaster charm. Yet, it cannot help but jump, this doll of a heart, sucker for risk. Gamble large, I explain – and hope to take the house on a small enough sample. Everything to excess it may not be, but neither is it quite full repentance. Some things cannot be changed. Even at a hundred to one, I think I'd take it.
But when, line out, do you realize you've overextended, that there's no fish to reel in and no more time to cast again? At what cost do these risks come? Just how easily does alabaster crumble? And at what heat does sand turn to stone?
Push and pull, playing doubts off hopes and dreams off fears, we parry and tarry and play once more the same old song. It's been written before, and it'll be written again, and yet – I know this – it'll never be the same. For we, I say, are different.
I do not tire of it, nor will I. As long as there is breath, there are dreams. Cynic, romantic, idealist, dreamer; each a prettier mask than the one before. I cannot help but love.
And compared to that, who needs words?
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