Skinny Lattes; Skinny Europeans

There are a lot of single women in this world. I don’t mean that in a creepy way. But the rate of loneliness is going up in my opinion, and so is the anonymity of the world.

Young girls long to get married. Married women long to be single. And the middle-aged single women sit in cafes, as skinny as their lattes, with an expression of pondering. Pondering what you may ask? Maybe the man who left them on the alter? Maybe the poofy cat that she just buried in a lovely spot under that big oak in her backyard. Or, maybe she’s just trying to make up her mind on which sultry, young lady that buffoon of a bachelor will give a rose to. And another sip on your cappuccino.

And that’s life. People living in a reality where reality is not a word. Instead, what they know is a warm, dreary feeling that lifts us up above this dull room, this stuffy house, the translucent sky, till we lie with our backs on the clouds, our fronts warmed in the sun of tomorrow. And to tell you the truth, I like it. Alot.

You read a book about extraordinary people arguing about their love lives only for it to end unhappily, with that precious vase introduced in chapter three (you know the one, Grandma gave it to Ada on her seventh birthday), breaking to pieces. It represents the unhappiness in which poor Ada will live the rest of her life wallowing in.

And that little argument you had yesterday about why your response was a bit too harsh to that simple question seems so much more simple. In fact, it was only because you were feeling overwhelmed by the immense feeling of sadness at all the events that happened to you in the last 48 hours, and had in no way anything to do with the one you were snappy to.

But after the argument, you feel alone. So alone. And then you realize that someone is there. Someone who understands. Ada. Poor, sweet Ada went through the same feelings after that jerk of a man broke up with her over her over-cooked pasta. “I told you it wasn’t Al Dente!” he cried. That chapter will always bring a tear to my eye.

But it’s not pasta that wrecks our mundane lives. It’s the frightening thought that haunts your every step. It bites your heels when you check out at the grocery store. When you go on a walk past the neighbor’s. The thought that no one, no matter what you do, no matter how many escapist novels you drive your nose into, no one will understand. Gives you the chills, doesn’t it? The self-checkout is looking alot better, huh? A few hours on Second Life and I could go to the amusement park without worrying one bit about that.

Little looks, little motions, and your happy reality turns to black as you are sucked into a dismal drone of disappointment. Judgment. Rejection.

But in the long run, what does it matter? Rejection. As long as your content; or content to be discontent, that works too. Or just use a time-worn tradition and jump in front of that oncoming subway. What does it matter.

Or does it matter a lot. Acceptance. Being understood. Do all your hopes and fears, expectations and accomplishments hang on that very knob. Being understood. Like a dirty, old coat, that has been tossed around, used for years, do you throw your hopes on the back of your neighbor’s chair, maybe hang it up on their coat-rack? Does your neighbor know? Or will he forget and use that coat-rack as kindling to battle the bitter cold raging at his door?

Is it better to be understood and rejected? or misunderstood and content?

Let me know. Leave a comment.

Rapid Passing

Life

A current to the sea? More like rapids. I splutter and choke, getting scraped up legs and a foggy head. Every once in awhile , my head goes up, my body down, and I see sunlight. Once in awhile.

Why does it hurt so much? Why does the startling spray make my stomach disappear as my heart fills my body. Why do I contemplate yesterdays now and forget about today's second? I throw my memories into focus and am completely blind as my future fades.

Should I look ahead? Should I look nowhere and just endeavor to float? Should I purposefully swim to the rocky depths and hang onto a boulder till I can breathe no longer.

Things grow up and die; things grow old and disappear; I, caught in time, watch and mourn.

My fingers no longer grasp at comforting hands. My arms embrace no body. I sit in a freezer full of frozen bodies and long to freeze, myself. I sit on a cliff, watching vultures wheel, and long to fly. The cold seeps into my muscles, the depression into my calves. If I cannot fly, then no longer walk.

Deadness embrace Deadness, or just embrace me. Greenest leaves and purply flowers, reddest blood and sallower skin. These things only do i see, and after seeing, pray screaming.

A Hidden Volcano

Is there a sorrow in happiness?
Or a happiness in sorrow?
I see your smiles,
The happy glances at the ones you love.
Yet your eyes show through paths unknown,
The volcano of your heart.

Why do you not show it?
Why do you not show me?
I see it, it's underneath your film.
It's underneath your happy exterior.
Like a wall covered in bright ivy,
Your dying wall lies beneath.

Or in your sadness.
You grieve silently, alone, unhappy.
You don't show me your face,
You don't show me your smile.
How I long for it to brighten these dingy rooms!
These rooms we call our homes.

"Home is where the heart is,"
Then I have no home.

My heart is yours,
But you do not accept it.
Therefore I'm alone.

I live in constant wonderment of you.
Waiting, watching for your acceptance.
When you are ready,
When the wild volcano is cooled,
When the smile shows its face again,
Then I will be there.

Look towards your future, and I will be waiting.
Look to me, and you will see yourself,
Gleaming in my eyes.

A Challenge

I feel like Jean Valjean.

I’m starting to question who I am. What I am. Where I am going. What it all means.

Of course, I’m not running from the law with a child that I took from a sleazy bar during the French revolution, but still, I feel like my life is that confusing.

I want you all to know clearly and truly (take your time, I don’t want you to misunderstand): I…AM…A…HYPOCRITE. That means “someone who is not who they seem to be.” “Someone who tries to deceive.” “A liar.” I lie everyday in the ways I communicate, in the ways that I appear. If you ask me how I am, don’t trust my answers. If you see me smile, have some doubt about my smiling heart.

My relationships are no longer like a sunny meadow. That’s how it was when I was a child. Every laugh bright and green. I turned into a teenager, and my life became overcast. My screaming can’t reach my mouth. I can no longer think straight and a heavy hand grasps my heart at every chance of happiness. Life like the many flashes from a Polaroid camera, I am blinded with hopeful insignificance.

I speak, but the fire of my thoughts burn my throat and nothing is heard.

I write and my pen runs dry before I can explain.

Who, no what, am I?

Am I dramatic, and this is just a farce?

Maybe I’m completely different and no one will understand.

What if I’m irrelevant and no one will care?

Or maybe I’m the most spoilt sinner, deserving of hell, eternal judgment, God’s wrath. Yes. This is truth finally.

I am selfish, proud, and arrogant. I am a perverse fire, I am an unwilling sacrifice. My heart is rotten, like a soured apple, and my soul causes my affliction. I can only weep and moan in my own waste looking to receive the light of God’s eye.

Why can’t we see each other? Why can’t we see each other! Look into a friend’s eyes. Look into your parent’s eyes. Look into your own eyes. I am an unworthy sinner.

BUT

God sent His Son to save you from utter destruction. From unending flame, and unceasing pain. He chose YOU.

Why?

Not of anything in you! Because He wanted to. That’s why.

Now?

Live. Just live. Obey His commands, and love. It is pretty simple. We don’t need to go around wondering who we are. We are redeemed. We are God’s children. Now live like it. Forgive, Love, Endure, Hope, Witness, and STOP! STOP! STOP! Being proud. Eradicate it! Take it out of your soul. Take it out of my soul, oh GOD!


Dear me,

You disgust my soul and everyday I will try to kill you. Take your residence elsewhere and make room for the Spirit of the Living God. Thanks.

Myself.


Now hear my challenge. This is not more fiction. This is me. This is your friend calling for help. Please comment, whether it be anonymous or not, just let me know, let everyone know that they are not in this by themselves. We seem to be caught up in a mess of jokes and sarcasms, we seem to be caught up in stolidness and unfeeling. Let everyone know that you are there, alive, for them. That you care, and that you need to be cared for. This is a cry, a plea, that we let each other know that we are hurting. We all are. Just communicate it.

Not many people will see this. Not many people will care. But I do. And I’m sure others do too.

So please, be a Godsend, and let others know that you exist. As a brother. As a sister. As a friend in Christ.

The Prodigal After-effects

Spring was setting, and summer rose. It was a beauty that ate out your heart, leaving it hollow, needing to be filled with wonder. Like an apple hollowed by a worm, so the sunsets I saw ate me alive. I felt like I needed to grasp it. With my power, keep it where it was, so I could awe for one more minute. I felt like every moment was priceless, and I was letting a Van Gogh slip between my grasping fingers, fingers that grasp like a baby for its bottle.

But this summer was hollow for me. And my life remained so for the rest of my years. It is strange that God makes us to love one another devotedly, but we always seem to break one another, leaving our family desperate and dying. Like Cole left me and Dad. Like Cole broke my heart, not in the traditional sense, but he broke it like so many glass shards that I found in his apartment.

This story is a stunning reality that appeared to our non-suspecting family after years of happiness. It was rain on a sunny day that turned into a black hurricane that claimed lives. Like my brother’s.

Today, I keep thinking of those happy times we had. The time when the grass was green, the neighbor’s dogs would come over and, with their silky long hair waving in the breeze; they would use their weight to knock me over by rolling onto me. Cole hadn’t liked the dogs; he thought that they my might crush me. He was very protective. But that’s what made this day perfect. I knew then, that my older brother, liked, no, loved, his little, annoying, bratty sister.

Another time, I sat by the fountain in the park. I was writing what I felt.

Strangely, I wrote it as perfectly as I felt it. I wrote the whole spectrum of mixed-up light; I formed a rainbow from my non-existent life. I remember how angry I was when he saw. His face was complexly confused while he read my diary; I, on accident, left it sitting out on the table. How insensitive I thought him! But I really was thankful. I was thankful that someone I loved really could understand me.

And I know that he knew it.

As I stared into the fragmented face of the little porcelain boy, I remembered that look the first time Cole ran away. The look that I received when I startled him climbing out the window. Throwing his stuff out. He was surprised at the angry tears that I hoped would burn his skin. The tears that I hoped would make him hurt. And I was happy, because they did. He looked bewildered, took his stuff, and ran.

He was found, of course. He was only 15, and was easily spotted sleeping on the bench in a park 10 miles from our house. It was so pathetic, so frustrating to his spirit. I was ashamed for him, and ashamed to look at him, and ashamed that maybe it was myself that ran him away. Shame. That was what took root in our house.

I wanted to die. Simply. Clearly. I wanted to die and escape these emotional bonds that tied me to the very thing that was dragging me down. I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t sit. I was being tortured by my brother. How my heart cracked and moaned, like the wood on a ship screaming for its past life, free and green.

No longer was there shame in my heart. No longer anger. But a reflective worrisome spirit. Could I have stopped this from happening. Stopped this by not looking at him in anger when he ran. Not being angry for stealing my journal. Maybe it was my fault he did this horrible crime, violating himself. Maybe it was my visit that set him off…

In the back of my mind, I knew the truth. It was Cole that hated Cole. He caused himself to do this. It was a chasm full of guilt that caused him to pick up one of these fragments I’m looking at now…and…

I knew that no longer was the world a green place, full of playful dogs and caring people who loved you more than themselves. How so very proud we are! I wanted to scream at myself. So very proud. I was proud, thinking that my troubles were the only thing that was important right here and now. Cole was so very proud, so proud that he couldn’t look his own family in the face, couldn’t say he cared anymore. Couldn’t be there to protect me. The strange thing: I needed him to protect me, from himself.

I gathered all the random stuff from his apartment into two cardboard boxes. They were full of needles, aluminum foil, spent cigarettes, beer cans, and strange knick-knacks that Cole latched onto when he found them. Like a crab to a washed up soda can. I understood why he latched though. He was trying to find the old joy he knew; the joy that would no longer see his face.

I put it all into two boxes. And I threw them all away. This was not the Cole I knew. This was someone hard and uncaring, someone…who took the easiest way out as to not face the glaring wrong in his life.

I drove home, my whole body smelling of smoke. I was disgusted.

And all I could think on, all I could remember, was that vivid memory, the only one of us together, playing a simple board game. It was just how it was, not anything spectacular. But that was it. Just us, together. Playing nicely. And I didn’t realize the preciousness of that moment. Not realized that the ones I love would soon be gone. Not realizing that my life was a series of images. I was thrust into one of them, but so many more were coming. They started off backlit and beautiful, looking like flowing water from year to year. They then turned quickly into ash.

I could only pray that God would restore some color to my life; I could only pray that this hole in my heart would be mended in time; I could only pray that I could cut out the memory of this apartment that held your death, and replace it with those happy times we had; I could only pray for forgiveness.

Old Men in a Window Shop

She cheerfully giggled again.

“I know right! It makes him look like an idiot.”

“Awww, but he’s almost cute!”

“Yah right! I don’t think so!”

Those hateful, scarlet words that poured out of their mouths, describing the pair of earmuffs that covered the scars; that aching pounding that wouldn’t cease until they were gone; finally, ended.

If only they could…no they wouldn’t ever. They wouldn’t ever understand what it felt like, at least, for now. Age is a hilarious thing to the fools who are right now aging. It nearly made me laugh through the pain. The thought that these pretty girls would someday be sitting where
I am now. Friendless. Without a family. Alone, in hospice.

These young ones always thought themselves so clever. They immediately would recognize…my…disability, then scandalize it as if I had any choice. As if I had any possibility to somehow regain my hearing. To somehow make my own mouth spurt words wherein none could come. A well that dries up, only that could understand me now.

It was picturesque in a way though. Dried up. Dried up like the prunes I was forced to eat, what made me blush from the crassness of the thing. Dried up like the land outside of my hospice window. Dried up like my withered old life. Dried up till there was no water, then left to scald and die. Wither. Fade. Then extinguish.

But the fact that so many had to scorn me, me, in my dumbness. In my sense loss. But little did they know my gift. The gift that allowed me to not only see what they are saying, but to See what they were saying.

I could see that young man’s mouth move when he read those poems outside on the gathering lawn. I hid behind my window for hours, watching, as he waited. He always waited to see her, knowing that she could neither see, nor hear, nor feel him. He was reading as if to someone. Practicing. Practicing to recite it to that shriveled old woman who would not hear him. I wished he would visit me secretly. But I knew there was no chance. The nurses here did not know my gift, and I wasn’t about to tell them. They treated me like a dog, a dumb animal that couldn’t understand its master.

I could picture him in there every day, reciting like a school-boy. Unoriginal and afraid, he came off with so much awkwardness. It was strange, put so much effort in to talk to a living corpse.

Yet as he sat there now, there was no awkwardness. He recited believing. His mouth moving distinctly, his words pouring a fountain of Minty greens and Placid blues. They mixed together with the lawn and sunshine, and created a fairy garden for these never dying poems to reside in. I wished I could get out there and live with them too, discussing many dead poet’s poetry. To talk to the young man.

But I couldn’t…at least, not until 4:00 P.M.: walking time.

What was the use of walking time!? What was the use when I felt like walking all the time, felt like escaping this grey world that was now my home. I felt like walking. I couldn’t just sit around waiting till I was “allowed” exercise. Was I a prisoner in a prison camp?! I felt betrayed. How could my own family…another time.

The man in the Fairy lawn left because his grandmother died. She simply disappeared off the face of the world, like the engagement ring on his finger. His dedication, his earnest poetry was not enough. I never saw him again. But he left happy, because he believed his grandmother hear his words. And I believe it.

I do hope he listened to those poems, not only read them.

I missed hearing words, hearing gentle caressing. I missed the opera music my mother was so fond of, playing on repeat throughout the day. I smiled remembering her practicing in the basement when she thought others couldn’t hear. But, we laughed at her then. Hatefully.

What a blessing to be able to hear. I faintly remember that last week. I remember the sound of my mother’s goodnight kiss, the sound it made on my cheek. I remember my father working in the garage as I tried to sleep. Sharp banging, metal on metal. The snores of my baby sister. She was diagnosed with Leukemia the same month of my accident. I didn’t realize, I didn’t appreciate. My life, my family would change.

I was simply alone. No one stood between me and death, no compromiser, no physical hand to comfort. Just the cold fingers of the nurses, the nurses who had inch-long fake nails. My wife: non-existent. My kids: the same. I lived always alone. Now: I die alone.

Fitting.

And these young children try to harass me, without knowing. These living corpses that have their fun, then pass from memory. The children that try to bring my spirit down. But they don’t realize that you can’t get a spirit down when it’s already three-feet into quicksand.

Marked Walls

I walked past the wall. I stood near the wall. I leaned on the wall. I liked the touch of the wall. It’s differing rocks. It’s warmth from the sun.

So many stones made up the foundation. Some were cracked and chipped, rough, unshapen. Others smooth, white-washed, uncommonly perfect. None were extremely beautiful, but all were different. I liked that.

Behind each lay a vision, a bright unfailing memory. Of the past, of the future. Behind some was pain. Behind some was joy. And behind all were people.

Behind one that was homely, and rough, but clear and white: a boy with curly black locks walked under the wall with his mother, dropping his prized possession. His blankie. He doesn’t notice till later his emptiness.

If you wait but a minute:

A small girl, blonde perfection, also walks past with her mother. She picks up the blanket and claims it as her own.

If you but wait still another 20 years:

A beautiful wedding. Decorated with finery, bright lights expanding the purity, music blazing into brightness. A happy couple sailing around the room. Floating. They greet and hug, kiss and laugh. She, a perfectly blonde wife, he a curly-haired bright-eyed husband.

Two years later:

A baby. It’s present from mother: a tattery old cloth. It’s blankie. It had retained it’s color. Baby blue. It had retained it’s smell. Snuggle bleach.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another stone, black and porous, stood out from the surrounding others. It did not give way on the first tug, but after a little work it gave way. As I pulled it from it’s rest a billowing cloud of smoke spat forth from the empty crevice. And a most horrific sound of wailing appeared through the smoke.

As it cleared, I could just see a woman bent over a lifeless figure, deformed and bloody. She too was blackened and I could tell was in extreme pain, from physical or emotional I could not tell. Her arm was broken. But with that broken arm, she nestled the young man’s head. The car had expelled him upon collision, throwing him into this wall. He had died instantly. His mother had been driving.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yet another stone. This one was broken. Broken into many shards. It’s sight saddened me.

The person behind resembled the stone. Broken.

Her chipped nail polish: broken.

Her eyes: broken.

Her life: shattered.

She sat alone. In silence. In her own wasting away. Her pockets were full, her heart was empty. And she pondered the death of the world. She loved only one person. And she waited here to meet him. He told her he would be there. By this wall she waited to see if she could possibly feel happy. This moment would change her life. It relied on the man she trusted. Yet in her mind a black cloud covered hope.

He did not show.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I laid this stone in its place and walked away. I was weary of the broken stones. There were many more broken ones than whole and bright, and it made me cynical. I left the wall knowing that more stones would be added to it in time. But for now, I could no longer fathom them. I could no longer think of the pain that so easily found its way into every foundation in this city. I tried to think of the happiness here contained, but I could only see gray. I could only see through a magnifying glass, seeing only interiors, not angel-faced exteriors. It hurt too much. And what hurt more was looking into my mirror.

Dull living.

Dull sleeping.

Twilight.