These Times We Speak Of
Too often I have seen relationships torn apart by a lack of humility. You will not listen to me speak, for though I am a few years behind you, and my experience not so extensive, I cannot be a fool when I look at how you treat each other. I surpass you in wisdom and maturity, and despite my lack of years, I see you dying. Your love cannot live on this way, you trials will only increase. My words go by the wayside as you kill for authority.
The day your love has died, you will scream at me and beg me to tell you why I didn’t try to stop it.
Oh, but I did, dear friends. You would not heed my words. Who is really to blame?
I am exhausted and to the point of falling face first forward into the floor just to get blessed rest. But no, it cannot happen, not this way. I must not give in to weakness. The depression that threatens to smother me until I gasp for mercy will not win. I am not a simple pawn of trial or of pain. I will run with blood and tears before I let it consume me.
I don’t understand the way people work anymore. They hope for better things but they constantly aim themselves at the edge of the cliff. They say it’s going to change but then they plop back down in their same old easy chair and swig back the same old self pity. They beg for help but then let their hand snap your head back when you offer words and consolation. You were there at their sick bed but then they swallowed the toxin you’d rescued them from. It was nothing to be proud of in the end.
Sanctuary of Blue Light
I’m sipping on hot spearmint tea and wondering whether I should have made the Nepali green tea instead. It’s perfect, warm in my throat and my hands, sweetened lightly by a spoonful of sugar and patience.
My room mate is sick and coughing harshly in her sleep, and I can’t help but want to give her my tea, my health, my rest, just to stop that awful sound. It hurts me to think that she’s ill, not for my own well-being, but for hers.
I’m starting to lose focus, glassily gazing into the buzzing calm light of my Christmas lights. So clear and so blue, like pinpricks of a perfect glimpse into a deep sea… They put me to sleep, they make me think, they give me hope of beauty in such a tiny form. I want to touch them, but there’s this fear that if I do, they’ll explode in a shower of sparks and never return. I can make them glitter when I wave my fleece blanket by them. Oh, the wonder of static!
Only a few more hours… I need this schedule to work out or nothing will… putting these thoughts aside, I close my eyes and bask in the sanctity and sanctuary found in night. The fridge hums softly, my breathing, the occasional clinks in the heater. Curling up closer with my snuggie, I gaze again into the sea of azure. I just watched a Honda commercial about dreams and suddenly remembered how much I love Clive Barker… every brushstroke, every letter… so beautiful and terrifying and sweet and cold. Such a tumultuous wave of emotion and art that it takes my breath away every time I turn the page.
Everything about the night seems sacred. The whole dorm heaves and contracts with hundreds of souls breathing, windows expanding and doors swinging open and shut. The sounds are scarce, the heater, the fridge, a cough. Even outside, if the weather is rough, there is a window through the storm to the eye, calm and still and clear. I am trying to find that eye in my heart, and am still fighting the cold and snow, but I know it’s here somewhere behind the clutter and some pain. I will find that clarity, that breath of fresh air. I can’t wait until it snows.
Closing my eyes and laying my head back against my chair… so soft and so warm… only a few more hours. I can make it from here. I don’t want to sleep, not yet. My body is screaming to rest, but night hushes it with a engulfing rebuke. These moments are sacred, the only one awake in a sea of those sleeping. The halls are so still, taking a well deserved rest until the waking of the early few who break that solemn code.
Night is solitary, contemplative, sacred and still.
Cheek and neck illuminated, gazing at the wall. What will tomorrow bring? How long will I sleep? How many hours until home, until the only people who truly love me unconditionally will have me in their arms? How can I escape from this void of utter lonliness? Christ is an assistant in this time, but there is a part of me that craves my family. I have given up on my friends for that kind of love. I have shaken the dust off my sandals and walked a separate path. My heart hurts too much to stay where I’ve been.
Three more hours… I will make it still.
Where Am I?
I’m sitting at a small table with a leaf pattern on it. There’s a soft ”whirring” sound in the background. Large windows overlook scarce lunchtime traffic. The atmosphere could be described as… awakening. The air seems to swirl with warm vapors of comfort and happiness, reflecting early mornings and cold winter nights, even though the sun outside finally glows with traces of June summer. And the feelings associated with the chair across the table are bittersweet, since the chair is empty and her mind journeys back to February when it was not vacant, and when the world outside was still so cold. But she smiles on that chair with anticipation, knowing it will be filled sometime again, sometime soon, with a warmth that cannot be drawn from inside a mug or from this radiant sky.
The door opens, and two sets of feet shuffle across the ridged threshold onto mottled tile. One pair is large, sporting size 8 brown slip pumps and a scar across the upper ankle where the kitchen cupboard caught it on a loose screw. The pair accompanying barely size up to the ankle, wrapped in yellowing jelly sandals, bouncing up and down with joy, attempting to graze tiny eyes across the busy counter. Leaving the ground in the strong arms of someone known, the jellies disappear around a corner, replaced by silence in the absence of the jumps.
The occasional break for conversation wafts like the welcome vapors across the small seating spaces, jumbled in the void of faux rafters on the ceiling and chrome on the walls. An intercom crackles as a window opens occasionally, and the jellies are back, then slapping away. Next to the writer, an empty cup holds residue of some unknown delight, a dirty red straw protruding from the smeared rim. It is discarded.
While this place is so comfortable, the door opens to one strange face after another, still void of the one she wants to see. This beautiful day breaks open for newness and discovery, and surprised exclamations of joy and things unexpected. Grinding, whirring, stirring and clanking, clashing with the thwap of a sandal on tiled floor.
As soon as they had come, they have gone.
And she is left alone. The table seems so small as her feet brush the legs of the ajacent seat, and her briefcase squeezes against the wall. There are so many memories in this worn place, with its scuffed leather, chalked stone and varnished wood. The atmosphere is a blanket of the familiar, the known, the loved and the unseen. She could count back on the times she had journeyed to this place, amidst hail storm, blizzards, sweltering summers and dreary storms, both from earth and her own tears. This room had seen her anger, her despair, her joy and consternation, every turning aspect of her emotional facades.
And here she sits now, letting all the moments weigh down upon her as the morning changes, and faces leave their impressions behind.
A line is forming, and she is just another item, just another dollar in this gathering of consumers, waiting for satisfaction guarenteed.
Life is short.
Stay awake for it.
pointless
Destroy me from the inside out
She doesn’t live here anymore
Tearing out the pages, one by one
ripping them to air between her hands
She doesn’t live here anymore
her walls falling inside
bricks and mortar crumbling on our heads
knocking me unconcious
bloody shards of wisdom at her bruised feet,
destroying her from the inside out.
It’s over
and she doesn’t live here anymore.
So Enchanted
We’ve seen the groups on Facebook, we’ve seen all the movies, we’ve had the dresses, we had the hair. The Barbies lay tucked in next to us at night, and we dreamed of our true love (even though we were too young and thought boys were gross) while curling up in our Beauty and the Beast sheets.
And still, life can just be a little enchanted.
I just love the fact that Disney can mock themselves. In fact, it’s the only way that mockery should happen. When we can laugh at ourselves, not only is it done tastefully, but also with more honesty and love. And that is why I love Enchanted. Disney looked at themselves, knowing they could make more, and then allowed themselves to make a masterpiece out of their own flaws, realities and history. It’s touching, funny, warm and attractive to all, old and new Disney fans alike, and of course, Patrick Dempsey adds that especially attractive touch 
.
How do you know that she loves you?
Oh, that she would be angry at you.
To touch you gently, confusion in her eyes,
and then the looking back
to meet your eyes
and then you know
all is right.
Free association. Sitting in the digital dark of the digital darkroom, my mind is blank and my eyes weighted heavy with the morning light, flourescent and harsh upon my retinas.
From breaking the “normal habit” as if this feverish log of my life in prose consists of a normal activity, I’m writing one long run on (which is really reduntant) for indeed a run on is naturally long, leading us to believe it “runs on”.
As if that could be so. It is most unlikely that I would put a period, or method of pausing leading my sentence there, but easier to believe if you consider that life does not always consist of periods, but sometimes semicolons; We collect our thoughts and continue dribbling them on, like a small child drinking a milkshake, until there ’s puddles on the floor and unhappy infant with no more milkshake, left uncerimoniously in the high chair
until someone has pity and hands over some Cheerios, not the equivilant to the milkshake, but in the youngster’s hunger, doesn’t really know the difference, only knows that it seems as though it might be milkshake, and if they give it a chance it may prove to overall, be better for them : They need nourishment to grow, unceasing,
much like this stream of conciousness that finds itself soaking into my paper, like a bleeding heart into the bedroom sheets after the idea’s brutal and spastic murder.
Perhaps I’m merely wasting space, but I could continue at a later date. What are we wasting our time for here, sitting in a corner with a total unrealistic view of the world and typing, typing, typing on my blog and staring at the glowing, dying printer, disconnected from reality and hoping that the silence will be golden,
but now it has been tarnished, sallow, dim and still, melting on the fixtures and dripping on the floor. Foot steps in the glimmering puddles of wealth, leaving scraping heel marks on a Berber carpet.
And then the tick on many keys, twenty six and then some, problems arise and a finger stumbles to the colons or a number, and soon backspace is so often used that the label is oily and rubbed away to b…k…p.e…
no longer found and no longer needed, since surrender has been accepted and the white flag has been raised.
This is not so much nonsense as it is the workings of my brain when nothing else excites it, when the world is not worth my wonderings and I am tired, oh, so tired, of all the drama and the doldrums of
my school day, and then look at the clock again, again, seconds and a
minute and I’m on my way home, but what did I do today?
I woke up and went back to sleep, eyes wide shut.
May I have a Giga-bite?
I hate technology.
No, really. You say I’m kidding, that I’m spending all my time writing posts to no one on this sea of humanity affectionatly called and cursed the Internet. Let’s be realistic now. This is not technology… it is merely a tool that takes technology to form it. But the chips, the wires, the bytes, the megs, the shock of it all… that I hate. It makes me feel as though like life is not worth having to endure when we evolved to total dependance on these boxes from Hell. My phone? I need it to contact my parents, and it dies.
Quote of the day from Kramer:
“Come on, you archaic piece of junk!”
“Don’t insult it, it’s a nice computer!”
“I wasn’t talking to it, I was talking to you!”
I resent that. I am not archaic.
‘Twas almost one, and Sleep evaded Her
How are we ever going to decide what we are doing with our lives?
For so long we wander the dusty paths of time, a splintering cane sprouting from one fist and a tarnished locket, flowing chain and latch in the other hand, twisted around the gnarled fingers shaped from so many nights of merely hoping, gripping to the wicker chairs and banisters of the only memories we have. Hoping that the next twist and turn in the garden we pace might lead to the sea, a fresh breeze lifting our hair and stinging our blurry eyes. For inside the locket lay understanding, and its picture was whipped away in its last viewing. Another heeled footprint and tripping over stones, the sky is darkened and we see not the storm that dost approach, but within the tempest, our very selves.
We feel the wind, and all that we know is fire and Heaven and our own two feetm stumbling along the cliffs. Sometimes, we long to leap, knowing that somehow we shall fly beyond it all, knowing how to stretch the wings now blooming from our shoulders. Or sometimes, we watch the surf from high above, let the gulls serenade into submission and lay down upon the bracken and watch the soft clouds of fall shape and somberly shift as the wind changes, turning its ethereal face towards the sound of winter’s voice. When winter is silent and fall is dead, we smell the lavender blooming beneath us and stand up into spring.
The midnight hours beckon with a ivory hand, whispering soft secrets in our ears, the darkest we ever will know. As moon is veiled by inkblot stars, we watch the nothingness and find in it our greatest longings, and all the answers that wracked our tormented brains until we tore out our hair in frustration. Nothing was our answer, but with that we could never be satisfied. Nothing is intagible and unfufilling, warming the soul as embracing a block of ice might do. Yet still, we cling to anything, even if it be Nothing we end up finding with the early marches of twilight feet.
For when we fall to nothing, it becomes our brother and our friend, for better to have Nothing than for Nothing to have Happened.
And in my own, these midnight hours, I let my mind out to wander, its ponderings so soporific that I can only dream of their masked truth. For what is truth but interpretation? What defines the limits of the mind at midnight?
Only time and slumber.
Will The Real Jane Austen..
Please… stand up.
Ah yes, another year of Halloween. The leaves are turning lovely shades of red, much like the faces of the people watching the “French Maid” parade go past in the hall. The air is colder, like Mr. Vauter’s disposition when he sees yet ANOTHER mask covering some “smiling student face” (haha grimace grimace).
I accept the fact that this holiday could be labeled as Whoreloween, or carving some Slut-O-Lanterns, but I really enjoy dressing up. Being a lovely Jane Austen this year, I accepted my fate that someone would mistake me for a saucy wench, yet no one did! I got Mary Poppins, Some Medieval Lady, Jane Eyre (“But I don’t want to be the ugly governess, mumsy… make them stop!”) and finally, “some sort of green poofy lady”. I was fine with that, heck, that was it. But I enjoyed the day, say for the elastic digging into my skin and this cursed bodice cutting of air flow and circulation. I love the sleeves, but they snagged my papers. Yeah… trying to (ironically) take an English test and having my Romantic-era sleeves bend the corners or my essay. Curse you, Miss Austen!
Now having a conversation about… bodices with Kramer. Uh huh….
Whatever.
I’m not going Trick-or-Treating.
Do you remember the 70’s?
Obviously, no one here does either. At least, they are too uninspired to care about remembering that their parents lived through that era. My parents could care less about that era, since it was full of sixties backlash, and age 12 was maybe too young to embrace the wild side. Me, I was born for this era. As Mr. Usher puts it, “You’re that…retro kind of gal. You’de be the fifties girl wearing sixties garb and listening to Pink Floyd.”
Amen, brutha.
While it was a deathly liberal time, still laced with the stereotypical “sex, drugs, and rock and roll”, it was also a chance for artistic license and freedom. I would have thrived!
And I must finish at another time. The bell doth call me off.
