autumn.

I'm just gonna keep this quiet for a bit, because who knows how consistent life will let me be.

That's the thing, life gets in the way. I always told people that I never journalled because it was more important to be living life than writing everything down and missing stuff. I don't know so much now. Being the woman of emotions that I am, I begin to think that MY life at least must be written, recorded, commemorated, celebrated. Every great joy and every great anguish ought to be chronicled somehow, cause where's the fun if you don't remember?

I was just watching 500 days of summer. i swear it must be the 10th time I've seen that movie at least, and because I'm a sucker for a sale and it was 10% off, I bought it for a whopping 26.99 the other day. On a whim. Like most things I buy. There's 30 bucks of my life I can't get back! Anyway, there's this one scene in it where the boy is sitting across from the girl on a train and the sun is setting and make them look just ORANGE all over. The light reflects off her eyes and you can tell that he just SEES it. His mind is recording every precious detail of the face that he both adores and dreads. You can just tell in someone's eyes when they're looking at something that means the world to them. I know it's just a movie and all, but somehow Mr. Gordon-Levitt just gets it.

Every time I see that look something in my chest contracts. I see salt. I'm instantly transported to a time, not all that long ago, when life was so much harder and so much more exciting. A time when I used that one facial expression a lot. It reminds me of college and being 17 and secret 10-minute meetings with the person I loved more than anything. It makes me think of green tea smoothies and quiet corners and blogging and Chesterton and the 3rd floor of Hayden Library and the not-so-secret garden at ASU and all of the quiet little sidewalks where the one ecstasy of my life was just holding that one person's hand. I think of the color orange and that song called Stars and the little gazebo where he told me that I 'lit up his world.' Who says that?

It was nothing like the movies - well, the usual movies anyway - but it was so much more fun and romantic and earnest because it was real.

I try to catch that, just that, that terrific and terrifying feeling of pure happiness, in poems these days and I just can't get my fingers around it again. I despise my poetry for its triteness; somehow, as deep as I try and reach, the great dark turbulence of my heart remains a glass lake. Right after I remember the ecstasy too I remember the unspeakable pain first of secret love and then, just as suddenly, love left in the dust. That day when I realized "forever" could actually mean just a few short months. There's nothing like watching one's whole universe walk away on willing feet.

The funny part about all of this is - I'm not trying to be dramatic. Melodrama - once my personal standard for a truly impassioned life - is not my thing anymore. I realize how little it actually adds to reality. It's like gaudy jewelry and bright makeup on a naturally stunning girl. It turns her into a joke; a fraud. But when I peel away the wrapping paper of my one little love story, i realize that there really was something inside. It wasn't a joke or a dream or even a nightmare. It really happened, and it's really over.

Tom eventually loses Summer and realizes she wasn't actually the whole world. Tom is a lot like me. But what do you after summer is gone? How do you start over, how do you get IT back, that elusive thing that just makes two people work? I can't remember the last time I actually enjoyed a date, and the last time I went on one I swore that very night to my roommate and my sister that I was done. I literally flee from every boy who tries to pursue me. Maybe it's my strange little habit of trying to pursue someone's heart. Most people tell me that's the boy's job.

And such is the story ever since love - boy likes Hannah, Hannah runs from boy, Hannah falls hard for other boy who doesn't acknowledge her existence and Hannah quickly invents 101 reasons why she doesn't really want to date him. not really. I was once a marble statue in loyalty's hall and now i am "quick succession of busy nothings". ... Okay, that really was melodramatic of me. ;)

Awesome. And I promised myself that Monday was the last day I would talk about relationships until further notice. Then Tuesday funny things happen and I reopen my heart's little door for the 3459873459731st time. Please, my heart tells the new face, come and sit in my empty room!

Maybe the cosmic void holds some answer that humanity withholds from me. :)

Eulogy to Glitter

My achilles heel is glitz and glitter. I like the stuff that paints the world in colors it is not. There are so many deep, ironic, complex sides to me
and yet I fall for the superficial and superfluous. THese things, in turn, make me like their own. I look and smell like the things I am not; the things
you can see through. And so they call me easy. Easy to look at, easy to knock over. They have no idea how heavy I really am because I'd rather they didn't
see the marble and granite that makes up my feet; the iron my bones are made of; or the painful bleeding red that the right side middle of my chest is.
No one likes to look at that sort of thing anyway. So contour and cut me; mold and undo me. Love is not made, but who asked for love? Love can't be traded
or sold or earned; it is no efficient currency. It is not dependable and often insufferable and most people don't have much of it anyway. It cannot be
wasted on me and therefore I shall not ask for it. And I don't want your feeble attempts either; give me all or give me nothing.

I am the femme fatale; I conquer without knowing it and I kneel on my new empire in tears. And yet my land's landscape is desert, green pastures are for
the less sparkling and the more happy. I can't sing the tune and I can't dance to the beat but I will make these flabby legs and feeble voice try. Forever,
forever trying.

What if I stopped? And for a moment breathed? And tapped into the endless rest that is your own perfect glory? What if you re-made me? What if you break
me? What if you melt my iron and crush my marble and expose the bleeding red? Never, never. Oh I could never. Don't touch me. My warning goes off when
you do that. My stomach turns and I always, automatically, step back. I begin to burn and I hate burning, I hate this smoldering sensation that somehow
I need you. God help me! But not really.

You come to me subtly. You must, for there are few ways to really woo me. You come to me in dinosaur shirts and coffee pots; in pixie haircuts, poems soft;
Sometimes you wear secretary glasses and sometimes you have hippie hair. Sometimes Converse and satirical stares. You have so many faces but your eyes
always come through. Different bodies, different faces, but they all just look like you.


I hate ripped converse and your satirical stare. I hate how much I like you because of both. I Wish I could say "you're my forever best friend".
i do sorta love you but not the best or most. / I don't know you but I'm pretty sure I could. The cliches of the guitar boy are lost on you.
Wish I could say "you're my forever best friend", but I decided I won't till you do.

Deep and dear are the profundities to which my love for you plummets - but its outworkings stay so disgustingly close to the surface. I cannot know
how to delve deeper, and the culture you set me in doesn't help much with that. I beg you for an intimacy that I cannot know with any other human being,
and I surrender to you all of my desires - the sweetest and most precious my desire for love and companionship in a man. It is so old and cliche to you -
it must be. Girls for centuries have been giving up these desires to you. I offer my heart to you, Lord, as a gift, and I will have to offer it every
single day until I'm with you for real. I cannot pretend that I do not have them, which has been my plan of action until now. Simultaneously with this
realization has come a craving for a closeness with you that I know that man, whoever he is, will never fulfill. I cannot know love again unless my love
pours forth from a fountain that I already have with you. In fact, this concrete love can never really come close. Help me out there.

good men sleep and bad men too and the grey faeries dance on your dreams.

Breaking up and breaking down and everything in between that involves cracking.
Shacking and sacking.
Bending and lending.
Battering me, I’m just shy of shattering.
I am the bearer of bad tidings, and destiny’s not much worth fighting
for when you’re the blind bat behind the barrel of a gun.
Target is far; get
a grip and sip a while
on the venom of power souring your shallow soul.
Thieving and receiving this city moves on.
Stepping time or stepping out is your choice.
Don’t imagine for yourself the liberation of a voice.
Sublime, she smiles and the paint creases just a tad in those well-worn smile lines.
She wants you, and quick.
Time for the trees or the thick
opinionated factless political umbilical cords that board us while telling us we’re free.
So lower me down on this faulty lever, lady, severing all ties and brook me no refusal.
Your abuse’ll suffice.

Capably disabling the sable that adorns the thorns of my person, you rehabilitate the saint in me.

The rules of rhyme and reason escape me
She seasons your silence with the violence of the glare stare
Stop! Don’t you look her in the eyes, cruel surprise on the other side of the rippled wave she behaves her quiet act
Fact! You follow her and you ain’t never coming back.
Villain of yesteryear is retired, livin in Goodyear
because an honest hardworking bad man’s out of a job these days.
Lilting and silting the quicksand over your eyes and ears and other faculties
Tilting, your world is tilting
Grey whispers of a silver lining cloud world
unfurled before you in a great variety of sobriety
paralyzed when you realize
you could do anything, you do nothing instead.
Good men sleep and bad men too and the grey faeries dance on your dreams.

and we stare at the sun.

The poetry may not be coming, but the thoughts are, thronging in by the hundred thousand, making me question myself, the things I hold dear, and most importantly, the things that I don't. I feel like I'm staring at the sun, gazing into the most glorious thing I can think of in sheer desperation for some motive or inspiration to move forward. I am static; stationary but never still.

So, let's talk through a few of the things that have happened this week, or, better said, are in the process of happening. Pardon my wars with semantics.

On Sunday my parents came into town, on their way out of it. From Sunday to Friday, our 5 precious last days, they are here spending all of my free moments with me. Today is Thursday.

I feel now like I have something to offer an orphan: a simple "I understand."


Monday night I got my world rocked by Andy Marin, a guy who wrote a book called "Love is an Orientation" and who has dedicated his life to living among and serving the LGBT community. Whoa, right? Who does that? Not a lot of Christians these days. I'm still really struggling through what ministry without compromise would look like in a situation like that, and yet I feel drawn to the oft-misunderstood and ultimately the hurting.

Andy brought up four people who were either gay or lesbian and Christian as well, which I found to be an interesting combination. (I've never really known how far those two could really intersect. I remain confused.) These 4 wonderful people came and talked to us and these 4 wonderful people broke my heart. How can we not see them and love them? How can we reject them and turn them away?

At the same time, none of them were anywhere near where they probably "should be". All of them honestly believe that God will supply someone for them in the future (except for, of course, the bi Roman Catholic monk), same-sex or otherwise. I can't imagine being in their shoes or needing that kind of mental fortitude, and yet...

It's the "and yet" that gets me.

Sunday night we had a belated birthday party for me, which was fun and dysfunctional. We invited both brother floors, which was very lucid of us. Everyone left about midnight, and that's when my Mexican brother and his hippie friend showed up for some late-night pizza and jam session. It was totally impromptu, which is always the best, and we got to hear the angelic tunes of a folk master in hiding. (That would be the hippie boy.) We conjured up some three-part harmonies and some cool new friendships in the meanwhile. It was like our old Sunday nights all over again. My parents are so good at this hospitality thing, this loving kids thing... and I guess I just don't fully understand.

Why leave something you can do so well?
Why leave somewhere where you already making a profound difference?

I guess it's not mine to understand. It's their call, not mine.

Still.

Wednesday night we repeated Sunday night, although this night was much more intensely worshipful. Mom and Dad went to SMF first, and got prayed for hardcore. It was great - I even prayed for them aloud - and that's not something I typically do. Then we went back to the apartment, and there was hippie boy with his guitar, and Mexican brother too. We grabbed a couple guitars and a djembe and rocked out with some mad vocals.

I have to learn how to play the guitar. This is getting ridiculous. Music is my passion and I can't accompany?! Things have got to change.

Everyone left, but hippie boy stayed for a little bit longer, running a couple circles in my mind. He did it again this morning, which was rather an inconsiderate thing for him to do. I told him to stop, and hopefully he did.

and we stare at the sun.
You'd think we would notice our eyes were burning out.

Stop this train

Stop the train

I just want off

I just want to sit on my paint-chipped bench and feel the breeze and close my eyes and sleep.

I don’t want to fight and I’m tired of the edge. Forever almost-toppling has lost the aura of wild and new; it’s all just danger to me now. My rhyme and my jive and my smooth talk have died. My fake strong is all gone and I don’t want to be free

I’ve been 35 days at the job, and I have morphed quickly into the neurotic, nail-biting, never-say-never, wannabe reporter that must’ve been hiding inside me all this time. I’m reaching for the stars – or at least interviews with them. I have way too many ideas and not enough follow-through, but I’d rather be passionate than a really good employee. Not that I’m bad, and I’m amazed at my own actress capability in the professional field – today I’m wearing high-waist black pants, a blue turtleneck, a vest, and open-toed heels. I took a good look at myself in the bathroom today, which I try to refrain from doing on a regular basis, and saw a librarian staring right back at me. She surprised me, but I wasn’t exactly repulsed. There was something strangely natural about seeing her there. And yes, I do comprehend the oxymoron that I just fearlessly utilized.

Trouble is, I don’t know if I can write anymore.

What am I doing, trying to be an adult? What made me think I could do this? Since when are you any kind of writer? Take your pick from the latest sampling of questions plaguing my consciousness. It’s funny – I always thought that humility was supposed to be some sort of life-choice, but it’s becoming obvious that the choosing was done for me. (Wow, what doctrine does that sound like?) I have no choice but this meager, blind, step-by-mini-step lifestyle. This does repulse me.

Growing up is hard. Can I just put that out there? At the risk of unmasking my thinly veiled childishness, I have to say it.

I’ve acquired the all-too-easy yuppie addiction to caffeine, and my twice daily visits around the divider to the cubicle with the pot seem like something out of a now-clichéd existentially inclined movie, with the protagonist some sorry accountant in some other sorry cubicle surrounded by a world of grey and office blue. I try to envision the room with some red or gold or russet in the walls; some warm tones to make us look more human. Warm tones tend to bring out blushing cheeks and sparkling eyes and laughter; warm tones tend to play down the spots and the pimples and that spare tire we all inevitably have, in varying sizes. Not that we’re really afflicted with the cold tones here either – the lights are white and bright and sparkling, like so many revealing hospital lamps. They’re rebuilding something on this building, but it’s too far up for us to see anything but the cranes and platforms it takes to get there, and little splashes of paint and cement are the only window decorations for our only window. They accent the forever overcast sky nicely.

I sound like a downer. A total downer. I should really be ashamed of myself. I really should.

Brick Forest

I am a mockingbird on a forgotten city branch
Sensors set to stun,
I may jump the gun
In the hopes that I could be just like you.


Charged with all the curiosity that kills cats
In a mind changeably green
My senses, still, are keen
And me could never be quite as good as you.

When everything isn't enough

Raw.

Rubbed raw.

I am a mess of all those emotions that I spend all my days trying not to feel. Joy; melancholy; hurt; loss. Lots of loss. I try so hard not to feel them, so I waste away my empty hours. Someone once described it as missing something that you never actually had - it's more like missing something that you could've had, and didn't.

It's hard when you know you tried, isn't it? You did your best, you laid your heart on the line, you put yourself out there... however they say it these days. And it just wasn't quite enough.

I just wasn't quite enough.