Sing to Me

Recently several of my friends have fallen in love and rather quickly been broken by it. Utterly torn apart by feelings they don't understand nor will ever be able to reason through. One repeats to herself how stupid she is, while the other has committed to being the first Methodist nun.

Joe and I both have nightmares of the other leaving or falling out of love or cheating. In my dreams I scream and scream at Joe and at everyone, and no one gives a hoot for all my hollering. It's terrifying. I told my friend about these dreams. She thought that they couldn't be the sign of a good relationship, that there wasn't enough trust or something. I told her it had nothing to do with trust, that these terrifying dreams had no hold in actual events, no sensibility to them. When you put all of yourself into one fallible being - your hope and your future - you rely on that one person's love for everything, which means everything is at stake. How much love and joy does it take to balance the inevitable sorrow that follows the act of giving yourself up? The extent of my love and my neediness terrify me. And my dreams are full of sorrow. And life is beautiful for it.

In the words of C.S. Lewis:
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation."
So Lewis is a little over the top, but can see what he's saying.

In response to my friends' sorrow, I wrote them a poem. It is a rough draft, a love poem from the perspective of a future boyfriend. From my own perspective because I love them both.

Before She Sang to Me

Again, through the fluttering leaves of a tree,
the light plays her toes
like fingers fluttering upon a piano,
like a spell becoming,
like the being of my dreams materializing
in the late afternoon.

I am distracted from my game of solitaire
by thin skin covering blue veins,
by a broken blue toenail
that is caused by the weight of being human,
by the curving calluses I am anxious to touch
lest they explode in an opus released,
a concerto that is roaming wildly in my fingertips.

I could watch the light play her 'til dusk,
then, perhaps,
she'd allow me a turn,
a touch,
a beautiful sound for her to make.

For within one foot, she holds the wisdom
of an ancient upright, salted lightly with dust,
and the majesty of a Steinway grand
on a white marble stage,
the light from the stained glass windows
reflecting a myriad of colors across the concert hall,
and I, as I pause a few paces away,
wish with ache, like all non-musicians,
that I could play the piano.

How we cause wildfires

On the other side
Of that mountain
You will find nothing
But everything the earth was
Before you.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

I highly recommend you to read this book, especially if you enjoy poetry. It is simply a masterpiece.

"He would pick up eggshells, a bird's wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp's nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jack-knife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses. At such times he was as forgetful of her as he was of his suspenders and of his Methodism, but all the same it was then that she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own" (17).

Much love and busy-ness.

The Bazzzzz

Life, the cereal.

Cereal for breakfast is always eaten out of a bowl. All other cereal is best from a cup. Soup mugs count as bowls. And no one in his right mind would eat cereal from a travel mug. Cups are best. They are portable. They remind me of childhood.

Moments She Might Have Told You Of

She ate saltines over the new keyboard while you were gone. She could see the crumbs between and underneath the keys, getting crunched with every letter she typed.

She felt you hiding under the stairs, checking the mail. You asked her to explain her words, but she could only point to certain phrases and settled her eyes and ears on the bend of wind on the other side of the window. The birds landed on her sloping shoulders.

She used to play hymns in disguise on her piano, but not really in disguise because you didn't know any hymns and each one she played was new. Hallelujah came to mean something new. God became the moon and the moon reigned the night, smiling through the green, textured curtains upon your blessed bed.

She watered tomato plants because she loved what they gave her. She watered the strawberries for the same reason. With the summer heat seeping from the concrete through her shorts, through her skin, and heating her bones, she decided never to have children. Her children would not be heartbroken by their futures. Her children's children would not have to worry about water or read about gardens as something of the past or fear their own country and its people. She was selfish and compassionate in the same moment. She would take this moment of tomatoes and strawberries and warmth with her to eternity, and she would never let her children suffer a life with its absence. Her hands touch the driveway and grass simultaneously.

She'd rather have danced than talked with you.

She knows that this will be our year.

Happy New Year!