Passing Through

“There are consequences for life.”

This my mom says over the phone as I sit outside my house on Friday afternoon. It’s a tense conversation because we are trying to work together to map out the direction of a fast-approaching future—am I coming home for the summer, where am I working, who am I—but I’m not willing to commit to anything yet. Everything holds possibility and that responsibility is stressing me out. I can feel it like Velcro: the hard, scratchy side warm in my palm, waiting for contact with its softer counterpart. Unattached Velcro is desire, materialized. Desire, wrapped up in waiting—a product of the time line we are born into.  I am quiet until I sigh, saying,
“I know, mom.”

            “No, I don’t think you do.” She says.

Today Tate built a fort in our living room. We called the boys over and cacooned ourselves inside it while Trifon read us short stories found on Google.  One story about a small town ghost, one about a certain Dr. Panini; mad scientist PHD. Google is an excellent holding room for second-rate literature. We made waffles and opened a bottle of wine and held a double feature on my computer. The movies watched: Wrist Cutters and Mr. Nobody. I recommend both.

Brad tells us of a dream he had once. In it he is a soldier, an officer of some rank. There are people testing dynamite, they use a door to keep the flame from reaching the pile of explosives. As Brad keeps watch over them, directing them in their duties, the people began to disappear. One after another they saunter off into dream-darkness. Brad is very nervous—there is no longer anyone to keep the flame from reaching the dynamite.
“Fine!” He yells,
“We’re all going to die!”
Exhausted, anxious, he wakes up in his own bed, drenched with the need to pee. Terror blocks in the emotions of the dream as Brad faces the decision. If he runs to through his door to the bathroom, he risks breaking what his mind is telling him is the only thing keeping his house from violently exploding. Or, if he chooses to not move, Brad wets the bed. We all laugh when he says he chooses to risk the explosion. No thing is worse than a wet bed.

I am caught off guard. I feel unbelievably connected to the moment of choice roiled in fear and confusion that Brad described. It’s a threshold moment that lately I feel often. It’s where we pause to size up the outside world against our own inscape, deem our self insufficient against the odds and our end imminent, yet move on anyways.

The threshold moment can last forever.

There are consequences here, and deep fears that predate self-awareness. Nightly I pass through these thresholds, doorways of final existences and of making peace with life and the end of it. But then I choose to finally sleep or accept death and am through the door completely. Waking up I find myself the same, or at least still whole—physically unharmed. Deep breathing and a filtering sunrise distills my terror. I have returned to the morning, and downstairs my housemates are making waffles for breakfast.

Marking the Blank Slate

I'm having trouble collecting my thoughts, obviously.

A woman makes her play in a dimly lit poker game, and leans over to collect the win.

Bicycle project, South Africa

people doing things,

beautiful people.
please click this link to watch a bicycle photography project from south africa. I'm sick for Cape Town.
mmmm

It is loud here.

I feel easily annoyed lately.
There is a group of three young persons to my immediate right. Their conversation is sharp enough to pervade over the speakers of the cafe and over my little head phones. I tell you this not because you should care, but because the decibel and subject matter of their conversation is making it hard for me not to care.

Yesterday my friend Katty cut my hair.
While we were waiting for our bleach to process we sat on the couch in her living room and ate some cheeses I had brought as a thank you. Hair cutting between friends can be an intimate process. She said to me and to the room, "Sometimes it blows my mind how many people are all living here, on top of each other." I agreed. I feel the same thing sometimes, about this city. I feel it overwhelmingly. 

Today was warm.
Matt, Missy and I found this trail in discovery park that led from the tip of the dunes through a forested path to the brink of a small beach. Not a secret beach, I know, because there were little stacks of rocks and different carvings of names into driftwood -- people must always leave signs of themselves. But it was quiet and lonely and happy enough for us three to believe we were all the world for a few hours. we filmed some scenes for a small movie in Chapel on Tuesday about the end of the book of Joshua. Or at least, the way we feel about the end of it. Its this people, looking for land -- suffering from the sins of their fathers and mothers; learning from the love of their fathers and mothers. Seeking something from a creation that they are holding on to with fists -- though it always seems to be slipping through their hard and earthy palms.

You know, a stone thrown in the water sends ripples in every direction.

Thoughts from El Diablo

my shoulders are sore from pulling so close to my neck today. I've been sitting in this wooden chair for a while, and I've forgotten again to remind my body to not get so tense. When I am thinking, my shoulders pull together and jaw sets and my chin leans down until its intimate nearness to the vicinity of the table I am working on reminds me to pull up, pull up! again before I am unseemly in the public eye: girl, slumped on table, arms outstretched and still typing, drool.

Obviously my goal is to always be attractive.

I'm happily getting lost. In this other world. It's a world where characters have desires and are motivated by them in turn and the movement of words is everything. And it is melding into this world, this one where I lay somewhat prostrate on the cafe table. I am looking around and thinking: what is your desire, and where is your motivation? Is there a motivation?

and then

Oh look, I found it, you just hid it a little deeper here -- lift the covers of a late night text or a casually intimate question and all of a sudden people and characters are sitting maybe too close for comfort. But no no no.
that's not entirely true.

Because something burns brighter than what I am creating. I guess that is the curse/challenge/adventure of writing an art. The thing you love, the thing you chase, to know and to touch, it will always be outpacing you. And that is beautiful.

Just make sure the thing you love can return it somehow too.
A runner needs her water. 

For Fear I've Kept Myself From Posting

Fear is the root of all things.
People say that, don't they.
A rhetorical question, I know -- It's because, frankly, I don't have to ask you -- we all know people say that.

And I guess I believe it too.
For fear I have kept myself from speaking. For fear I have left a question hanging. With fear I've held the quiet parts that would reveal a me
which I fear that I am not ready yet to see.

It's fall in Seattle. I don't know how it is done, but that moment between the 31 of October and the first of November seems to stretch forever. These months are two different worlds. In the cooling blue skies of October I can still remember the summer, but once November opens her eyes I feel unable to look any way but forward.
So I am looking forward.
Two years left of school is a long time.
In twenty years I will be forty.

When I am old, I would like to be happy. I would like to still be able to listen and not just talk. I would like to still be able to eat ice cream and other shit like that, but my grandma had diabetes so we will see.
My mother has pictures of her mother's hands on an old digital camera. It is beautiful: both the pictures and to watch my mother look at them.
I hope you get the chance to someday.

Listen: the way I am going to live is different than what the people say. I am twenty -- I get to believe things like this.
I am going to upheave the gardens of fear patterned into my heart and sew instead the wild seed of love. I am already doing this. Love for myself and for you. For Love I speak and do not speak. For love I question and I seek. With love I hold the quiet parts I'm remembering are me.

Up and down, but our elevation will never be the same.

And loving yourself is one of the most powerful tools on the path toward contentment.

Whose Afraid?

Another imitatio.
I wrote this in the style of much-revered Virginia.
If you are looking for something wise and wonderful, read her "On Being Ill," An essay.


An Ode To the Silent E at the End of Ode:

In regard to the silent O at the beginning of opossum, to the quietest l in the middle of colonel, to the B at the end of lamb, when a group of friends gather upon the deck of a private yacht, mingling in the cool autumn knight, what ideas and concepts are discussed there, with no mention at all of the C that alone holds the entirety of the Y A to the H T, that without it the whole thing could quite possibly fall apart, and does, collapsing upon itself and tumbling into the water where the bourgeois party-goers numb their thumbs in the icy depths and find themselves in debt for the destruction of a rather expensive yacht that is now just a yaht all the while saying ‘I never knew – I mean I never kenew’ because they have finally realized the gravity of their mistake – when we learn of this, that which we can so easily neglect, it is strange indeed that these letters have not yet risen up in rebellion to the abusive authority that has caged them in an iron realm of silence and neglect and solitude since the birth of all spoken languages.