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?