I am the Ever

This is something I wrote literally two minutes ago and it is extremely rough, but something worth working on I think. I'm not exactly sure what my goal was with writing this, a combination of sweet food and sorrow, and it moved into bodies of the earth that the dead are our ever and are forever in the ever of our world... Most of the time things like this don't make sense and I hope this makes just a little bit of sense.

The inside of a mourning group is a wind tunnel. Souls swirl together in some hellish wide-mouthed image that Mr. Munch knows too well but doesn’t know it like this. When the sky opens its ducts and allows its heart to split apart like two clouds traveling across the sky, slowly pulling away from each other like cotton candy from the paper stick, like cotton candy from your lips. The sky fell on top of me, it ran down my head over my cheeks like rolling hills and inside my mouth, it dripped over my sloped nose and onto my chin like syrup over the edges of pancakes. It found its way deep inside my shoes and soaked through the stockings I decided to wear today even though I hate stockings, it soaked nonetheless just like sponge cake and strawberry juice. The birds fell around us and echoed their wailing through the tree branches, bouncing off everything that reverberates sound so their voices wound around the tunnel and fell into beat with us and the falling, their little bodies and fluttering wings beat against the ground. My little body and fluttering wings beat against the ground. A mallet beating meat, thinning it to transparency, my face fell into the mud and yearned to be buried into the sea along with her, my one true Gaia, shouting from the depths of my, depths of me, depths of my heartwoodcorpsecoreskeleton.
I am the cotton candy stuck to your mouth, clinging and holding on to your lips, dissolving on your tongue in sweetness spreading across your soft and red, warm cavity. I am the clouds pulling apart, swelling with years of wetness, soaked with the sorrow of every land and filled to capacity, reaching across the velvet night onto your cheeks, in your hair, down your face, crawling inside your shoes to keep your toes company. I am the hills of rolling cheeks, cheeks of rolling hills, green with pasture and dotted white with woolen life. The teeth of lambs bite my verdant skin and nip off bits of nourishment. I am the rushing waters of time filling the spaces between your fingers and ear drums as you leap into my body of azure sparkling just for you.
Inside a mourning group the ever is for ever and there is nothing else left except the birds on the ground and their bodies beating, beating, beat and their songs, their song, filling the spaces between now and ever and accompanying us into the ever of for ever until I am no longer the cotton candy on your lips and I have dissolved into your sweet sweet teeth, nibbling my green pastures for your sustenance and lapping at my azure skin for relief. I am the ever for ever. I am the ever.

ee cummings

the most delightful of all things exist inside his words. I want to crawl into this book and live there for a while

"in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why, remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me"

There is a sadness coursing through me, a wave of ocean that wants to drain itself out of my eyes. I think it's out of loneliness but I'm in the middle of the world, in the middle of the U.S. of all these people and things and animals and life. It's hard to realize your friends aren't your friends anymore. This transitory part is difficult to get through, sloughing off the old and holding onto memories and looking for new, looking for more. Music is my friend.

"and if you ever get lonely just go to the record store and visit all your friends."
-Almost Famous

"calling come on thunder, come on thunder, sometimes when I look deep in your eyes I swear I can see your soul. Sometimes when I look deep in your eyes I swear I can see your soul. It's a monsoon" - James

I had a dream last night that she was in a bed that was her bed, it looked like a condensed version of her room with those pictures of mothers holding babies. The other two lived there also, they could talk through the hall way and Jake told him it was enough. She had on a sweatshirt with Jesus as an angel on the front. It was blue and strange and I laughed at it. My mom was there but she was doing something else, maybe she had just made jake and I breakfast, something like that but Susan wanted to go out to breakfast, she just wanted us to go with her. He suggested someone, who they used to go out to breakfast with in Portland when they lived there ... I don't think they even lived there. But it was like she had just been away for a long time and had forgotten things that are here. It was her, her smile and laugh and hair. The only explanation I have is cold medicine.

PostSecret

Every Sunday for about two or three years now I've read postsecret, something I know a lot of people do especially a lot of my friends. I have never written to PostSecret but more often than not it makes me cry. I guess I am just really into humanity. I love the beauty and genuineness in all people, the possibility of having a real human connection instead of just walking past people without wondering. This is why I write, this is why I write about people in particular. I want to get it, I want to have this overwhelming connected feeling all the time and if I write about them and if I create them, then they are a part of me and my writing and my life. People who are happy, people who decide to be real instead of putting on their facade of "in-person" talk and personality, people who really care about the world, others and the things that they put into the world, make me want to be a better person.

I am really just a major sap who wants everyone to be happy and real and see the beauty in realness but I want that as part of my life too, I want to be real, I want to have that personality of truth and genuineness. I want to talk to that kid over there sitting on the couch by himself to let him know that I see him. Although, I could be a total pompous jerk who has every good intention but why does that kid need me to say that to him, or to even say hi? Sometimes I just get too far inside my own head. Too analytical of everything. I think that's how a lot of writers/artists are though. Instead of just experiencing things, there's a lens of distance to experience something and still analyze it and take it in a different way to later use it for a creation.

It's like that argument between Yeats and Whitman, I can't remember which said what but the argument is one thinks you can only be happy in life OR work not both and the other says you can have both. I'm somewhere in between right now. That's okay I think.

Twenties' Angst?

I am feeling really angsty right now - I'm just sick of things going wrong with the Bullsheet. I'm trying to handle it with the grace and poise I know I could if I was someone else, but I'd really like to just scream and kick and wonder who is out to get me!? Knowing no one is, and it really is just my stupid mistake for never fact-checking and relying on the good of people. One more reason that human beings are not to be trusted. Although tomorrow or maybe in the next couple hours, I will change that point of view and go back to who I am always, the person who thinks everyone is inherently good until proven otherwise, that naive child inside me who never relents her voice of joy and positivity. Sometimes I hate that child deep down inside me. It's a good jimminy cricket though, I guess, it could be worse.

What I've been Missing

I just realized that this is what I've been missing- just watching people interact with other people. I'm in the library doing my work for class and got distracted looking at this group of friends talk and interact, their hands flying animatedly. And in my head I thought up the scenario. As an introvert, I don't need interaction myself, necessarily, all the time, whatever, but I do need to watch other people interact I think. Just to know that I'm not the only one, I'm part of "this body, this breathing." This mantra helped me a lot this past weekend while I flew to see Jake and back. The plane went up and I envisioned myself, the plane, the airport, the city, the state, the country, the continent, the world, all bodies, all breathing, that I'm just part of. It helped me remember to connect my body to my breath to my spirituality and soul.

So here I am in the library, part of this body, THIS breathing, and I'm a little more calm, a little more centered, feeling less alone and less stressed about the stack of articles next to me. This body, This breathing, this is doable, today is okay, this body, this breathing

Recurring Thought

I just had this moment, staring at my computer. I felt completely and utterly overwhelmed by all of the things which I have to do and those that I want to do and how I am completely incapable of completing a book-sized project, at least a good one, anyone can write 160 pages of crap, but I want it to be wonderful. It's not going to be wonderful. I don't have a job for the summer/rest of my life, but I don't want one. I want to travel and I hope I don't prevent myself from doing so. I have this huge fear of holding myself back, and that fear of doing it itself, holds me back. I feel completely disenchanted and immobile in my writing and creativity and life right now because of busy work from other classes. I shouldn't have to fill my time with a certain amount of credits while trying to write a book that is required for me to graduate! How rude.

So in doing all this thinking and being immobilized by myself in my creative circle, I thought (actually I said it out loud because no one's here to think I'm crazy for talking to myself) "you don't have time to freak out" and it hit me - I had a dream about saying that about a character. Which, of course, led me to think that I am a character, this life is the story. Blah blah blah, but I am a character in one of my stories, kind of, but it's not really me, it's the me that I'm afraid to be I think, but she's a much scarier me anyway, not a lively happy me, but a dark and edgy me. I'm not even sure what I'm talking about anymore. The point is, I have this recurring thought of not being able to freak out because of a time limit, my characters not having enough time to freak out because I don't have enough pages. I don't have enough time to get things done because as a human being, I require sleep. All I do is read, stare at my computer, and go to work and class, I do not do anything for myself anymore. Yesterday I went running. I hate running. I despise running. But I did it for some reason unknown to me and I did feel good, I felt better, but it's not creative. Or is running creative? Could it be? I wrote in my journal once, after a professor told me he hated personification of inanimate objects: "Could a tree be seductive or curvy if I want it to be?" Why couldn't a tree be seductive, and is that personification? The tree isn't talking, it's just seducing.

I could drive myself crazy with my thoughts.

Just a minute ago when I said that out loud to myself, "you don't have time to freak out," I began to realize why writers, artists, tend to go crazy. There's so much to be done, your story is never told, or never told properly and how can one be satisfied if it is out just that it is out? It has to be the right way.

I think that's why I've really been into performing my work lately, there isn't much of a venue for this for short story writers though. Maybe I'll make one. Yes, that's right Laura, take one more thing on, you don't have enough on your plate as it is! Create a venue!

Ah to be five years old again and laying in my bed, tracing the outline of the brown and blue flowers on the wallpaper in my bedroom, day-dreaming about how one day I'll be great. When will that day come? Can I just have that wallpaper back, please?

Camera

I have a beautiful Canon Rebel XT 35 mm SLR, and I barely use it ever. I really want to start taking more photos. I want to do portraits and self portraits, I think I'm going to open a flickr account. I'd like to do the 365 day sp challenge, I think. Jake and I once went to the photo gallery in Buffalo (that I'm completely blanking on the name for at the moment) and saw this woman's self-portraits for a full year. It was awesome. She didn't just do one every day, I think she did three every day and they were almost all in the same place - her bed. It was bizarre but beautiful and reminded me a lot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed protest "bed peace" "hair peace" I love that, I love the photos from that too. Yoko Ono did a lot of performance art, which I'm not sure if a lot of people know about, I only know because I took an art class at Denison and these two performance artists joined our class for a week to teach us and collaborate with us on a performance piece. The woman performance artist did this piece once where she laid completely naked on a table, covered with tiny little plastic babies, like the ones found in "kings cakes" for Mardi Gras? She said she had little plastic babies everywhere for a couple years and just had them in her purse because she had purchased so many. Well, back to Yoko, she did this performance where she sat on stage and invited people to come up to the stage and cut a piece off of her clothing. Apparently at first people were conservative and then started taking larger and larger pieces. I guess it was to see how far people would take it, and which gender would take it the farthest and what that would mean for women and sexuality and whatnot.

I have completely forgotten the purpose of this post.

Oh right, I want to start a Flicker.

I'm starting a lot of projects lately so I think a Flickr would be a good addition. I've moved on from painting to more textile art. I have two old pairs of Jake's jeans that he said I could draw/paint/sew on whatever I want. So I'm going to draw on a bunch of designs and then sew over them - I just need a sewing kit now and a bunch of cool colored threads and some buttons and beads. He said he'll wear them when I'm done, I hope so, that would be cool - like walking art. Other than that, I'm trying to create a book, like an artist's book, but I'm going to turn it into a cook book/story book. We'll see where that goes. Life just seems so much more apparently important than school work at the moment.

Sophomoric

I am so utterly confused by how people act sometimes. Earlier today I felt like that 10 year old person, with her soft belly and parted hair and bangs, walking onto the playground looking for someone who would want to hang out until recess was over and finding that everyone had paired up. I was blissfully unaware, or tried to keep myself that way. I think I always knew though. Regardless, that's how I felt this morning. Like everyone else had paired up and left my standing in the small-stone gravel looking from right to left and deciding on a swing, only to be told that that swing had been "called" by someone. It takes me a while to trust people. I have a hard time letting parts of myself go to other people and showing them who I am, but in the spirit of making new friends last semester, I allowed someone to be my close friend and see inside my deepest thoughts. We had, what I thought, was a mutual agreement about confidence and secrets. Today I found out that I was sorely mistaken. This is all about me, "I, I I," after looking at those three above lines I saw how self-centered this is, but that's what a blog is isn't it? Or can be? Whatever. I am upset and hurt because someone that I thought was a new best friend hurt me deeply, cut me to the core, by telling a secret of mine to one person and then to ten, and knowing that somehow of course it would get back to me - took a month, but it did. It's just immature to think that even if someone thought there was an issue between me and someone else, that that person wouldn't just come to be to begin with, instead they chose to spread rumors about me. How hurtful, how immature and how insensitive. Jake kept telling me this morning to just not tell these people anything about myself anymore and that these are only a small representative of humanity and that not all people deserve to be doubted. But that's how I feel, no one deserves my trust unless they've proven it and it was clearly my fault for allowing myself to trust this person with my secrets and self. It's stupid and cynical and doesn't feel good, but it feels self-preserving. Too many people have hurt me. All I can really trust is myself, I guess. And in reality, the only person that I will have forever, for sure, is myself, this body, this person. I guess that's the reality of humanity. I'm in a really low cynical mood right now and this is quite melodramatic, I realize, but it's how I feel and sometimes you just have to get to that bottom point to get to the top and it's just venting right now, which is the purpose of a blog.

I'm writing some new poetry and stories for my project, maybe I'll post them soon.

Two Dollar Radio

I have a tendency to find something I want to do and to ensure I actually do it, I don't tell anyone about it until after I apply or contact or do whatever necessary to get that thing. I did it with the Bullsheet, I didn't tell anyone I was applying and it was just my thing and I got it, and now I'm Managing Editor. I didn't tell anyone about Two Dollar Radio, I just applied and then I got it and tonight at some point I will receive my first assignment. I've got an internship with a publishing house. I tend to play these accomplishments down to myself, I'm not sure why, but I make it out to be not a big deal but it's pretty cool. Well, regardless, check out www.twodollardradio.blogspot.com pretty soon I'll be doing posts for them in addition to reading manuscripts!

Things I like and dislike

Like:
-brisk weather
-apples, but not sour ones
-cappucinos
-italian, everything italian
-houses that are converted to businesses
-writing with someone else and being separated by our ear buds but still sitting together and working
-dancing alone
-incense and candles
-windows open and wind coming through
-showers
-stickers
-really good comfy jeans
-hugs
-the artist James who sings the song "Sometimes"
-"Treehouse" by I'm from Barcelona
-Making mixed CDs for people, even if it is "over"

Dislike:
-sundresses when it's supposed to be fall
-heavy walkers
-loud generators outside my window
-not being able to find my own place
-ripping my favorite jeans
-hot and humid weather in september when it should rain and be chilly
-Using a phone that has a cord attached.
-itchy eyes, even though I took my allergy medicine

Today I'm content but also really unhappy. I would really really love some Fall weather, I shouldn't be complaining but I really dislike this hot weather, it's humid and awful and it's FALL. Also, I really dislike the pressure to dress up for class as though I am about to be in a J.Crew catalog.

But I'm content because I had a cappucino and it was prepared perfectly, proper amount of foam, even though they say it can't be done with skim milk. And, I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Granville writing pages and found that Granville has a Two Dollar Radio publishing house here... maybe I'll get published after all? Who knows.

I know summer's almost over

but...
I want bubbles, and fluffies to blow off into the air and a tutu to wear and someone to dance around with.

I guess it's just because I've been so alone lately. I'm not too into this apartment by myself thing. I need people around and I have never before given it so much credit.

Moving Prompt from "Juicy Pens and Thirsty Paper"

When I was two and a half years old we moved into a new house. Norwood Avenue would belong to someone else with its pear tree in the yard that fed us succulent fruit and its porch swing that rocked me to sleep in the cradle of my mother’s arms and voice singing “you are my sunshine.” The moving men came in their large truck. The men lumbered like rhinos, their tanned skin taut across their bodies – it looked as though it would tear if they strained too much lifting our furniture. I thought they were stealing my belongings. My clown lamp with balloons for light bulbs in red, blue, yellow and green and my rocking chair with purple flowers parenthetically around my name on the dark wood. They loaded my crib into the rumbling and angry truck as it chugged down the street I sank inside with loss. My identity was in my bedroom, the room that now was only four empty walls with a crumpled piece of paper in one corner and dust in the other. I clung to my Nana’s shoulder – her soft paper-thin skin comforted my cheek and her arm wrapped around me like a seat belt.

My mother and her mother took the car to the new house. On the street with trees like a forest top, reaching together and creating a canopy, a harbor of home. When I get on my first bus ride to school, coming down the street and seeing the safety of the trees ahead, it feels more like home than my clown lamp did when I was two. The pair raced home before Nana and I and even the movers, they all set my room together like it was on Norwood. When I walked into the bedroom it looked just like my room but instead of one window I had two and my rocking chair was next to the closet. I found a magical door in the wall and there was a radiator emanating heat in winter. I had a lamp on the ceiling.

When I was six I thought the magical door could never be opened, it was sealed shut. I thought if it ever could be opened it would lead to a magical world outside my bedroom. That year my father opened it and the excitement ate my vocal chords while I stood there anticipating the other side. He cut the seal with a knife and used a crow bar to pry the door off. There were no hinges, only a wooden plank. He opened the door because the bathtub had stopped working. I didn’t understand how the magic door could help until I saw, there was no world inside the door. There were no magical people or new friends. There were pipes and dripping water. Disappointed and angry at my father for showing me reality, I began to loathe my room. It once was a mystical place and turned into a harsh cold room with pipes and bright lamps just like every other room.

I turned fourteen and decided to give my room a second chance. I reclaimed the mystery for myself. Instead of having a stark white ceiling and pink walls I wanted colors and statements. Dad refused to allow me to paint on the walls. Instead I plastered magazine clippings to the ceiling around the bright lamp in the center. It took weeks to find clippings worthy of my bedroom. I stood on my bed and moved it steadily throughout the room to give me height.


Before we moved into the house the people who lived there were named the Claytons. There is a toyshop in Williamsville, the village next to the town where my house is in. I don’t think they owned it though. The girl who lived in my room was the oldest just like me and she had Scarlet O’Hara wallpaper on her walls. It wasn’t on the walls when I moved in, the wallpaper when I moved in was flowery with blue and brown and pink flowers on a white background. I know she had Scarlet O’Hara wallpaper because her brother came to see the house when he was in Buffalo one winter. He walked around the house telling us stories about when they lived there, like they used to play elevator in the pantry under the stairs that we use to store pots and pans that we don’t use every day. He also told us about the wallpaper in my bedroom and showed us how there is some in the wood ceiling of the attic. On our attic door are flowers painted in neon green and yellow and orange. It says “attics are fun” and the man said that his family didn’t put that there, but that it was there when they moved in. We liked it and so we kept it too. Ever since that time he writes us a Christmas card updating us on his family and their lives and tells us he misses the house and neighborhood. Other people’s houses are not gross like that woman from the Real Housewives of New Jersey says they are, they are in fact rich with history and stories similar to our own and give us glimpses into the house’s life before us. I love living in someone else’s house, it becomes our own home and is my house but still has the life of another family inside it.

Denison Fashion

Are high-waisted skirts in, or are they IN!? Everywhere I look there is a plain white thick-strap tank top tucked into a knee-length high-waisted skirt. Sometimes belted, sometimes left alone. Some have pockets, some have none. But most girls on this Midwest campus are keeping kids in China sewing overtime with their (fashionable?) choices.

What I am most confused about is the level of conformity. Why is it much cooler to be wearing the same exact thing as all of your friends than to be doing something different and more daring. It's just clothing, after all. What really fries my bananas is that at Denison one cannot simply go to class in sweatpants or even jeans and a regular t-shirt without being considered sloppy. God-forbid one hadn't showered before class - "are you sick?" That would be the response. Because only the ill don't shower and wear sweatpants to class.

The only time sweatpants are allowed is if you have just come from the gym. And no, it is unacceptable to be sweaty, flushed, or showing any signs of said trip to the gym. One must have impeccably matching sweatpants and tee-shirt (preferably sports tank) in order to be considered worthy of normal conversation.

Lastly, there is such an enormous pressure here to look a certain way, act a certain way and to produce academics above and beyond the majority of American campuses. The stressors that my peers place on me alone are enough to make me burst. I feel so overwhelmed with pressure to be a certain way while excelling academically. I would bet that at least 75% of women on this campus feel pressure to weigh less, and/or have eating disorders. In Burlington, I felt so free to be who I am, no pressure to act, look, be a certain way. There was acceptance of difference and celebration of differences. Here, difference feels scorned and frowned upon. It's hard to escape and hard to stick to your guns in such a high-anxiety situation. I don't want to lose the person I have become and I can already feel her slipping away a little. It's not "cool" to eat healthy. Here, "healthy" is a RedBull and a poptart. I don't want to eat chemicals. I don't want my vegetables to be frozen or my fruit come from flavored filling. I loved cooking and making good-for you meals in VT. I miss the great city that was a block away, that I was in the middle of. People drink too much here because there's not much more to do and because we're trapped on campus.

I know I'm full of bad things to say about Denison. There are good things. Beautiful campus, alumni support, great friends, big and pretty library with comfy chairs. But I miss the acceptance. I miss the celebration of different people. I miss dance parties in the kitchen every morning.

I've just been down recently (since moving in) it will get better. I hope.

exercise

I feel like I am constantly trying to decide between caring about what I look like and just accepting me how I am. I can never decide which to choose. I don't know how to get to that middle ground of accepting how I am and trying to better myself for me instead of making it about superficial aspects of me.

List-writing season is now upon us again. Thank you, Denison, for making me stress like crazy. The thing that inhibits my writing here is the general smell of snobbery among most people. Not everyone is that way, but it sits heavily in the hallways of the writing building. Things must be done a certain way and there's minimal room for freedom which seems contradictory to me since it is Creative Writing. That's how it is though. I need to write more stories, and more of my one story. It's due tomorrow. I have to fill out a blue paper that I think I lost somewhere which requires I choose a title now instead of at the end of my project, can you say IMPOSSIBLE!? seriously, it's ridiculous. So, now I have to choose a title for a project that could completely change and not be pertinent to the title anymore in the end. And I don't think my title of "Everything Sucks Sometimes" will go over so well with my instructor. Maybe I'll call it "Humanity and Tragedy" just for now. That's broad enough I think.

I need a cookbook, if anyone feels like mailing me one. That would be wonderful.

Off to make more lists! Woohoo!

An old passage in Stream of Consciousness

The snow fell coating the ground, freezing rain freezing pain freezing time, I don’t really want to rhyme. But the way it fell everywhere, tiny marbles of water getting everywhere, inside my skin, grains of sand, rain sand, finding their way into my body. Inside my veins, just like you. There was snow like this when you looked at me the way the hail falls into my clothing. In a parked car, where so many good things happened to us it seems, outside of your house, next to a streetlamp’s flooding light so no one could see inside, no one could see the way your voice touched me. It’s always slow, slow slow slow, words, words words words, in normal voices and then whispers quiet conversation and as it gets quieter you get closer to my mouth, watching rosy lips move with a voice coated in want. Closer, until you can smell my hair and see the tips of my lashes, and a hand on my face, on my neck, smoothing out the edges, until your eyes lock onto mine and draw me closer, fingers pressing into my skin making prints, so I know you mean it, lips pressing into mine until the words dissolve. You kiss me until my voice dissolves. I like being voiceless. I like losing my voice to your kiss.

Morning Breath

I heard a mother say once that the sweetest smell she could think of was her baby's breath when she just woke up. Morning breath is disgusting though, isn't it totally repulsive?

I didn't get what the mother said until I lived with my boyfriend. I've kissed him before right after waking up, still thinking "yuck," but I love him so it's a small sacrifice. Waking up next to him in our own house in our own bedroom though, I wanted to take every moment we had and put it in a jar to keep with me.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed. His just-woke-up stupor was slowly lifting away into the air with each deep breath and slight yawn. I curved my still-sleepy body around his. He stretched, arms up and reaching, muscles straining and tensing only to release and sometimes getting caught in the tensing and pinching for a moment. And he fell back onto me. He likes to put his head on my chest right near my neck to hear me breathing. I like to brush his black curls back with my fingers. For a few seconds like that, it feels like the world has completely stopped and the only motion on Earth comes from our lungs breathing and my fingers grazing his forehead.

His lips were on the skin between neck and chest and his breath hit that place in small puffs. If I moved my head the wrong way I could smell his morning breath, and yet it was still so sweet. Because we were in our room, because he is my person and was wrapped up in my arms, beautiful and full of contentment, the smell was bearable and cherished in a way. It was a moment shared only between us in a way that I know no one else will be capable of contending with.

We lingered in the moment a little longer than normal. We watched the sunlight sift through the yellow curtain, against our plant's thick green leaves and over my crystal on the sill which created a rainbow across the wall. The stillness within us was a forever kind of stillness. It was irrevocably our moment.

Breakfast

The potatoes in the pan were slick with oil and crusty on one side, worm-like onions laid on top of each thick slice. I picked one out of the searing hot pan and watched as my fingers turned pink at the touch of the potato slab. I blew on it fiercely, hoping to cool it off because entrance to my mouth was imminent and approaching quickly. The roof of my mouth burned slightly upon the potato's entrance but the crisp outside matched with the fibrous mushy inside turned into a pulp on my tongue with barely any chewing.

The first time I burned the roof of my mouth I was four years old. Dad used to pick me up from pre-school to go on "dates" with me. We'd go home or to McDonald's for lunch and then to a movie or the Science Museum. I forget sometimes the effort my father invested in me and the time he spent to ensure I felt loved and supported. I burned my tongue on one of our "dates" eating homemade macaroni and cheese at the same kitchen table we eat at every night. It was an uncomfortable and foreign feeling that I never wanted repeated. Much to my dismay, it happens about once a month, more frequently when I purchase coffee from a coffee shop. The brown syrupy liquid is always so enticing, steam snaking off the top and the promise of a sugary bottom, but also extremely hot. Heated to a temperature beyond that of a normal household coffee maker, coffee shop coffee almost always burns my mouth and it is always my fault for impressing eagerness on the cup pressed to my mouth.

Oil ran down between my fingers, onto the webbing of skin that earlier today had pressed down hard on a mat to keep me from slipping during "down-dog." My tongue reached out to lick the orange-ish oil and it made me think of sweat, collecting on my upper lip. The salty, oily liquid infused with paprika had a similar taste to sweat that beads down to my lips on particularly hot days.

My feet padded across the carpet in our kitchen to the green and blue granite counter top. I pressed the red button which turned on the T.V. and searched for "Law and Order." I have recently become a "Law and Order" addict, thanks to my sisters. There is something carnal and completely luring about watching a show that includes surprise, wits, and crime-solving. It becomes rote after a while, but it still feels engaging rather than mind-numbing. In a milky-white bowl there are strawberries perched on top of one another, a small pile of green heads and seedy red faces. I pluck one from the top of the pile, a medium-sized one. The large ones intimidate me with their promise of juice running down my chin and the small berries always seem to be a bit tart for my liking. It's like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I found one that was "just right" and pulled off the green leaves and popped it into my mouth. I felt it burst between my teeth, the seeds falling off their skin and the flesh turning to juice.

Eating, especially when starved, is an intimate, romantic act with ones-self. It can be private and luxurious, like taking a bubble bath with candles. Just a few tastes is all it takes for satisfaction.

Road Trips

iPods changed my family's car trips forever.

I was ten years old when we rented a car in Arizona and drove around the Grand Canyon. Travelling through the look out points and desert, my sisters and I smushed in the back seat. We giggled, made up games, told stories and explored our relationship more than we had time to during the school year. I secretly looked forward to car trips because of those opportunities. The radio on was our background music. We let it slip our minds that Mom and Dad were in the seats in front of us and that they could easily hear us, allowing our games and stories to go to private places where only sisters are allowed. Places that are for sibling-ears only, we told secrets and showed our true emotions, said things we wouldn't usually say in front of our parents.

Travelling to my Grandparent's or Aunt's house had the same affect. The stories and games and talking with each other. It was as though there was a secret bubble inside the car that only we could enter and everyone outside the bubble didn't exist. It helped me become a better person and sister in my most formative years.

My sisters only had a few years of car rides like that before the iPod was created. I was sixteen and still looked forward to car rides together. That Christmas my sisters and I all received our first iPods, small nano iPods, we were far from the first in our friend circles to receive them though. Later that day we drove to our Grandparent's house for a gift exchange and I was looking forward to the hillarious joking that could take place, my sisters have seriously wry humors and side-splitting sarcasm. We got into the car, I left my iPod in the house anticipating the conversation but my sisters had their's in hand. I sat next to the window behind my father driving and my sisters put their ear buds in, listened to their music the entire car ride. There was no laughing, no conversation except small quips between my parents and I. I felt tears beginning at what I knew as the end of our car ride bonding.

Age fourteen, we went to Sanibel with a couple other families for spring break. My CDs and I were inseperable, I begged for a CD binder before vacation so I could bring all 250 CDs with me. Along with that blue vinyl binder came my walkman, adorned with stickers I had received from the doctor and larger headphones that covered my ears. We rode bikes on vacation and I kept my walkman with me, figuring out how to ride and hold it at the same time. It was only possible to listen to one CD at a time and I listened to it straight through - the way the artist intended it - so far from how music is listened to now. If I wanted to listen to another CD, I had to figure out how to bring it with me. My walkman didn't fit in my pocket, it occupied one hand or a tight shorts pocket.

It still disappoints me when, in the car or taking a walk, my sisters bring their iPods and I refuse to do the same. So two of us have a soundtrack and I listen to the sounds around me, hoping they will catch on some day that all I want to hear are their jokes and laughter.

I had forgotten

I had forgotten that it was the 12th, that it was also Thursday the 12th. The day down to the day of the week of a six month anniversary that no one will ever want.

I decided to start going to yoga at the same studio that she went to, the one that I had only been to when she was there or with her son. This was my first class alone.

The first time we went, it was all three of us, in the car before class she told us her secret competition with the teacher - so secret, he didn't even know. At the end of class there is a breath meditation on "Ohm" for one full breath and she tried to hold her's longer than the instructor's. I listened at the end of that class, after my own breath had ended as had her son's next to me, and everyone else fell out while one male and one female voice still rang. Just as slowly as it started, the instructor's breath ended and there was one ringing voice left, her's. It sounded as true and clear as a toe dipped in water creating concentric circles.

My class Wednesday on my own was liberating. I felt like "yea, I can do this by myself." We laid down at the end of class to relax and meditate. There was a small rumbling in my diaphragm and it traveled slowly up my throat to my sinuses where water began to collect in the corners of my eyes. I didn't understand it and just kept breathing. My hands, out to my sides, palms turned up. Something pushed into my left palm, heavy like a glass paper weight but soft like fleece. I didn't dare open my eyes.

"Everyone turn to your right side and slowly, gently, push yourself up with your arms to sitting position."

We all did as instructed, no one rebelling and staying horizontal to fall asleep.

"Now, breathe one deep breath in and we'll let it all out as one Ohm."

My breath filled my entire cavity, diaphragm expanding and my voice rounded out of my mouth creating the letter O until I could no longer and hummed an M. The woman behind me, Jean, with her long dark hair and olive skin, her son sitting next to her on a mat, had just joined the class late. A surprise, but a welcome one. Her voice behind me was pure, someone who had clearly sang before. As each Ohm dropped out of the group, there were two voices left, one male and one female. And as the instructor's voice - lower than the female's - fell to silent, we all heard what I thought I would never again hear, a thick female voice ringing at the end on "mmmm."
Thank you Jean.

The Tube

I went to London last summer for three weeks to study Shakespeare and all that English nerdy literature stuff that people like me, people who love libraries and paper that's bound together, love. I actually teared up in Westminster Abbey for shear astonishment at all the greatness surrounding me. Yes, I cried in front of Jane Austen's tomb, and on top of Darwin's. But the point is, that is who I have been for twenty one years.

When I was fifteen, I was considered pretty cool. I had the right friends, wore the right clothes, my current boyfriend claims he was intimidated by my so-called "status." The status that I had no idea about, I thought I just had friends. I didn't party like them, I didn't go to their parties and if I did I drank pop. Alcohol wasn't of any interest to me, neither were drugs, clearly the uncool thing to do is exactly what I chose. The things I put value into were not social climbing and playing the "pass-out" game - a little game where kids force themselves to faint, it was the thing to do, no drugs or illegal substances involved - I was so much more interested in Hemmingway and how he achieved certain effects. I sat in my english class Freshman year of High School with my favorite teacher. She encouraged us to write, allowed us to talk freely and eliminated the boundaries of teacher-student, book-test. To her, there were no right answers and English was not a dead subject due to the dawn of technology. This teacher made us write freely at the beginning of each class, "Put your pen or pencil on the paper, your head down, close your eyes if you want to, but do not take that utensil off the page for fifteen minutes." Those were the most well-spent minutes of my High School career. After the period of time she would ding a bell and we'd raise our heads and she called on us to read our pieces allowed, whatever we wrote, there were no expectations for intelligence or even coherence, just that you wrote for fifteen minutes without stopping. I raised my hand, for the first time, shy me who never wanted to read-aloud in school, raised her hand. I was the first to read my piece. The experience was so absolutely mind-blowing. Here was a teacher, standing in front of me, someone a litte younger than my parents, asking me to be creative, asking me to share it, without bounds, and then commending, praising my work. Unbelievable.

As a creative-writing major in a private, liberal-arts university, that High School Freshman English class was the ONLY time that has ever happened. There are so many rules now, creativity is encouraged but not in any kind of real way. You're told to be creative, rules aren't broken so that you can be creative. Rules are not pushed aside to allow the space to become free and flowing.

The same teacher asked us what books are for? Why do they exist? What is their purpose? I felt that the teacher and I had bonded a bit and I felt free to speak my mind without judgment in this class, so I raised my hand again. Everyone had been offering reasons why books are important. I didn't have anything intelligent to say, just something honest that I felt. "Books are an escape." The teacher looked at me a little strangely, as if to say: "at least she's not doing drugs." I felt like my answer wasn't really right, that I shouldn't feel like I had to escape, but I did, and I loved books for creating that space for me to run through.

Until I met someone who became that escape and who taught me how to create my own escapes within me, books were it. Writers became my best friends, plot lines were my hallways to run through, the characters waved to me as I ran trailing pages behind me, ink drops left instead of footprints.

I've now figured out that it isn't all that normal for a fifteen year-old suburbanite to feel that she needs to escape and that my childhood has been exceptional. I now get why an adult who had been through much much more than I cocked her head to the side in curiosity. Not to dim my experiences, but there is a view of students in suburbia, that they are the image of perfection, they have wonderful houses, homes, dogs, two cars, fences - picket or otherwise. Teachers are only human, but they need to let go of the stereotypes too. We all do. We all need to get out of our own heads sometimes. I have met a lot of people and thought "what an idiot" "I wonder what could be wrong in her life" without thinking "Maybe she had a shitty day." Our heads, as a whole, are so far inside themselves and into their own thoughts and pasts that we can't see to the other side of what's in front of us. We need to be more conscious of the people around us because their energies and lives coincide with ours, so as a selfish nation, we can think selfishly in order to serve others - think of yourself, and how your close mindedness to one person will negatively effect you.

My father came up with an analogy of ducks. He says that some people on the outside are as calm and serene as ducks, but beneath the surface their feet are pedaling furiously to stay afloat. Ducks also have feathers that wick away water. Sticking to this analogy, we need to allow negativity and bad energy to roll off us just like water off duck feathers.

I think the point is that we are all, just ducks. Pedaling furiously under the surface to keep afloat, just wanting to take a break.

We are all just ducks.

Ob La Di Ob La Da

Life goes onnnnn hey! la la la la Life Goes On. -the Beatles

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It Goes On" -Robert Frost

This is what she has taught me. Whirling through the kitchen on her toes, wooden spoon in hand diving in for a taste of the sauce we made. Her lungs puffed out like an elegant bird ready to "squawk!" "Ob La Di! Ob La Da! Life goes on!" It is the foremost memory I have and it has the best message. Even though all of our lives will end at some point, life, in general, goes on. Through the small inconveniences, the large stumbles and no matter how far we fall - it goes on. The mother still feeds her child, the store still runs, the cars still move on the highway, the birds still perch in trees, the rain still falls. It feels like it is over, the dark consumes from the inside up my throat and into my mouth, a tiny hand with suchers sewing my lips shut before I can scream. It seems impossible to reach beyond the finality of that feeling. With one hand up, reaching, shoulder back and opening the chest to allow the heart to breathe, Extended Warrior, life goes on. We are all warriors, on our own paths, cutting a path in the over growth, snaking around obstacles and moving them and finding a way to still be ourselves with all the weight that seems to push back. We move forward as does life. Everything can suck sometimes and the comfort of being alone surrounded by nothing but air and down comforters feels safe, but that is the most dangerous place to be. Accepting our source, accepting interconnection and the life of life, the existence that occurs with or without our participation and deciding to participate, revel, and celebrate in it is the safest place.

She taught me a meditation on Yahweh that she did lying down flat on the ground, palms up. She concentrated on the Hebrew letters, yud, hay, vuv, hay (I didn't transliterate correctly, as close as I could). She filled herself with breath, beginning at the feet, "Yud, hay, vuv, hay" and back down, emptying the body of breath, envisioning Yahweh, Adonai, Hashem, Shachinah, filling her up and leaving again. I sat on the edge of a mattress while she in her black office chair that swivelled, faced me. She drew the letters vertically on a page and explained to me her theory of the person, the the letters look like a person. Enforcing her meditation, the Source filling her up and leaving with each breath, the Source being the breath, and the letters stacked to make a person, made more sense to me in that moment than ten years of Sunday School had ever made.

These are the things I carry with me. Recognizing the Source and my origination within it, the breath, the spirit within us, Ob La Di, Ob La Da. Life, it does go on, with each breath it steps forward.

Ain't Nuthin But a G Thang Baby.

G-mail.

The best thing on the internet is a free e-mail server. Quite the prevalent business nowadays. When I was younger we had AOL, America OnLine, so you're not confused about which country the company came from. All of America was OnLine thanks to AOL. It was my first e-mail account, Star4Ever, I know, but come on, I was twelve. From there I discovered chat rooms and news pages. Who knew that a chat room wasn't actually a room but a page, which isn't REALLY a "page" but a window on a computer screen, a two-dimensional block of writing and buttons that will connect you to people with one click.

My best friend in High School was Anna, she didn't know that she was my best friend because I was such a crappy friend but she was it for me. Her bipolar had taken over for most of the school year so we hadn't hung out a lot. Anna's mom was a completely pure and wonderful person, pure meaning genuine, meaning she didn't shit around. Her bird-like laugh "cockadoodledooed" inside the car until neither Anna nor I could hear. We were going to pick up her best friend, Julie. They hugged, allowing their cheeks to touch in such a tender way I thought they were sisters. Immediately their hips were attached and inseperable. No part of my fifteen-year-old mind thought "they met in a chat room." It just didn't happen that way when I was fifteen! Anna's mom was the first person I had met who had an online friend in real life. I had an online friend, lots of them actually, one in particular named John, with whom I am still friends. He's a writer, only five years older than I am. He critiqued my writing and helped me along my way, we talked on the phone occaionally, his dark gristly voice on the other line was so alluring. Then he got a Facebook page, and so did I when I got into college. We were then Facebook friends and the picture in my head was not the picture on his default. It was a disappointement. It makes me doubt eHarmony and dating websites. Looks aren't everything, but physical attraction is a major part of all reationships. We're such a visual culture. I thought the internet was going to change that but it only increased it. Now, instead of seeing the occasional photo of a person online, there is a subtle competition happening for the most photos of oneself on websites such as Facebook. There is an entire MySpace culture vying for attention via strategically taken photos, mirror fully utilized. My youngest sister grew up knowing how to work a computer and "artfully" take a photo of herself without her face being splashed out by the flash reflection in the mirror. Ellie, my sister, grew up without realizing there was a time when webcams and microphones and joysticks didn't always come with a computer. We had a separate microphone that I used to sing into, I had no idea its actual use, perhaps my Dad used it as a dictaphone, I used it to fulfill my rockstar potential.

The thing is, now, my boyfriend's family members all met their significant others on a dating website, the same one in fact. This has become totally and completely normal, all within my short lifetime.

What, I wonder, could possibly be next?