Eat a peach.

re-statement of purpose

2012-02-08T15:35:00.000-08:00

you are both lovely. -boy

I want to adopt a big dog and move to a state somewhere. I don't care which one, as long as it has deserts and Dr. Pepper. I will hang out with people who don't finish my sentences for me or make cynical remarks about democracy. I will give my dog a really awesome name, like Smee, and we can give each other meaningful looks when we run into someone who starts monologuing about the hypocrisy of American foreign policy.

I will stop getting my hair cut and spend the money on things that I need, like interesting teapots and subscriptions to non-pretentious design magazines. I'll take Smee out on joyrides and skinny dip in bodies of water that supposedly belong to other people, just to prove that there are some things you can't own. I'll tear down the highway with just my dripping wet underwear on and red, red lipstick.

-I might start being honest, so I don't have to spend so much time doing things I don't want to do. I will buy a real fixer-upper, so I can spend Saturday afternoons out in my garage measuring two-by-fours in a pair of jeans that smell like furniture polish. I will take everything out of a room, sand the walls until they feel slick under my fingertips, and paint the whole thing in one afternoon. There is nothing I like more than standing in an empty room that smells like fresh paint, I will tell Smee, and he will give me that look. I'll wait a few days before moving anything back in, but when I do it won't be hard, since I am of the opinion that all you really need is a good couch. That and a reputable plumber.

-Night is when I'll make tea, the good kind, and stay as quiet as possible so as not to interrupt the cicadas. Maybe I'll find a place next to a river, so I can hear the water moving out in the dark. Even Smee will respect the sanctity of these moments. He will lie next to me on the porch and protect me from all the things I can't see. We'll bless the night, and think about all the things in our hearts that we don't take out during the day, all the things that no one ever sees, take them out slowly and lay them out for God to either raise up or kill stone dead.

2012-02-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

apparently, snow has no purpose at all.

[talk radio]

There's this guy I don't like.

He's tall and charismatic and utterly bizarre, discouraging in the way that makes me doubt my life and purpose and love of God. I used to always forget this and let him in, and he accepted my hospitality and attacked my wellsprings, denied my heart, depressed my spirit. The last time he came over, I did something I never, ever do and just left the room to go to bed.

I don't know where these death-words come from, whether they're brewed in his own self-hatred or neglected mind, but I decided to stop spending time around him, with the same absolute finality I attached to decisions like not drinking anything larger than my head, or getting a swastika tattooed to my butt. It was just something I wasn't ever going to do, period. Winter is long enough as it is.

We live in the Colorado mountains, and last night the snow came. It fell steadily through the night and into the morning, layering foot after foot of soft white on the ground. We woke and made pancakes drizzled with honey, marveled at the drifts outside, celebrated the delicious certainty that today was a day for crocheting and reading thick books and padding around in socks and not working. I hollowed out a cave in the front yard so Norah could have a place to pee, and called it a day. I didn't even attempt shoveling our driveway, or even the front walk, for the same reasons that no one ever tries to tear down the Great Wall by hand or fistfight a Beluga whale.

But later that morning, when I was settled into the couch with a book and a steaming mug of my absolute favorite black tea, I heard scraping outside. I ignored it at first, on the grounds that it might be a wounded animal or homeless person or something else that would require me to go outside and do something, but I finally walked to the window. And what I saw was this man, headphones in, brandishing this overlarge snow shovel.

I watched with mounting incredulity as he shoveled the snow off our cars, and then out our driveway, and then up our walk, for one hour, then two. The drifts piled next to him were above his head, a head that is already fairly far above the ground. He never paused, except for moments when he pressed his hands into his armpits and stared down our street, at the shades of white and grey.

I'm angry at this man in a dull, muted way. It's true that he has hurt me for reasons I can't fathom and in ways that left shards under my skin, and he doesn't seem to have what it takes to realize or care what he's done. But this morning, so cold and white, I had a moment of clarity. I saw and understood that I've hurt him too, and he's the one shoveling my driveway, for no reason other than he knew I couldn't do it myself.

I watched him take out a broom and brush off our cars, mine and my sister's and my roommate's, and it made me think about things like forgiveness and love and what they look like when you're not steeped in self-righteousness and drinking tea and reading about them in books. Today they looked like this: snow falling fast on soaked shoulders, a shovel flashing green against walls of white. A startled smile exchanged through a window.

2012-01-31T15:19:00.000-08:00

do you think I don't know cigarettes are fatal?

[annie dillard]

I'm in a knitting store. It's just been that kind of a week. I can't seem to get the taste of metal out of my mouth.

I'm looking at the quilting supplies. I love the idea of quilting, and standing here makes me feel like the sort of person who can make them. Creating a quilt means taking different things and turning them into something that tells a story and keeps you warm while you nap on the couch, and today these seem like the two most important things I can think of.

There's this thing called a self-healing mat in front of me. You're supposed to use it when cutting squares of fabric so you don't destroy your furniture or craft table or whatever. It's made of this rubbery stuff, so when the razor slides into it the rubber just meshes back together. I touch it, and it feels dense and solid, like the floor of a middle school gym.

There are things I just can't seem to forget. The ones that live so far down they don't make me angry or sad anymore, but they make my chest hurt. There are times when I'm certain I've laid them down, and all is well. And then there are days or nights when I realize I've been mourning my whole life. That there's no such thing as self-healing.

There's a woman a few feet away stacking skeins of yarn on a shelf, bundling the wads of bright wool by color. I let the quilting supplies bend and blur in front of me and watch her, and suddenly I remember being taught to spin yarn, a long time ago, by a field worker who only spoke Spanish. I was terrible at it, and I mostly remember him leaning back in his chair and watching the clouds moving in the distance while I snarled the fiber and kicked the pedal in fits and starts.

He would stop me at intervals, show me again how to hold the oily handfuls of wool, how to feed them into the wheel, how to pedal smoothly so the wheel purred. Then he sat back and let his mind settle again, left me to my tangled wool and black thoughts. Maybe he was wondering how he ended up here, on this porch, with a girl who so rarely and reluctantly strayed from cotton-polyester blend.

Despite this, I liked the wheel. I liked the way the pedal rose up and dove down. I liked the pointed wooden nubs, the way they traded places in a blur, the way wool looks entirely different as yarn but still smells like sun on the back of a sheep. I liked being an agent of transformation.

It's time. This is what I realized while standing in the quilting section of this store. I was never meant to be a self-healing mat, smooth to the touch, with scars just below the surface. A buffer for sharp edges with that impersonal new-tennis-shoes smell. Sister, we're not here to protect the furniture, I wanted to tell the friendly woman stacking yarn.

It's time to be wool, nubby and thick and textured. I feel in my bones that this is more like my body created, always different and perfect for this task. I'm like you, I try to tell the yarn, using my wool-telepathy. I was once part of something living. I remember.

This is what I want, to be able to become something else entirely under skilled fingers, to bend and turn on a wheel, to smell like grass and oil. To change, to lengthen, to claim a nature that makes me new.

2012-01-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

your mama's old fashioned, your daddy don't play

you'll always be this lovely 'cause they raised you that way

[outkast]

Two summers ago, I stole a spoon from a farm in California.

I can't explain my actions, except to say that for some strange reason, this spoon broke my heart. I found it while I was pawing through our disaster of a silverware drawer, trying to find something to stir with, and I didn't really look at it until after I'd tossed it aside on the broad wooden counter we used as a cutting board. There it sat, in a congealing puddle, until after we'd laughed through dinner and went out to watch the sun set on the porch.

I came back inside, and there was this spoon, with sunflowers wrought on the handle and a dent right at the neck. It was a little tarnished, a little too small, the perfect mismatched farm spoon. I picked it up, rinsed it off, pressed the ridges in its design into my thumb, and never gave it back.

I can't explain my actions, except to say that this spoon looked like something I'd like to be. I'm not sure why. It had something to do with how it was designed with a clear purpose in mind, how it didn't belong anywhere, not even with the other spoons, that its age was what made it lovely. I couldn't bear the thought of other aimless farm interns eating with it, maybe breaking it or losing it, never really looking at it. I kept it on the dashboard of my car as I drove across state lines months later, through morning and dusk, and hoped it didn't care that I didn't have any particular destination in mind.

Sometimes I wonder if it misses its California roots. If it mourns cradling astonishingly fresh squash soup on those foggy San Francisco mornings, being held by a different hand every day, the clatter of its companions on the floor when that cursed drawer inevitably broke.

But I hope it's glad for a new adventure. I'm grateful for its presence, like a reminder from God that we need lives built around sunflowers and good food. It reminds me to use it to eat things worthy of my body and mind and soul, to build a good life, one with gifts to give, one with lots of milky black tea and homemade pasta sauce to stir.

2012-01-19T16:09:00.000-08:00

look ahead.

[jeff]

There are so many things I want to do. Become a midwife. Backpack the John Muir Trail at night. Keep bees. Hike across Iceland. Join the Peace Corps. Build a yurt. Make my own clay. Learn how to knit with the fat colorful skeins of yarn on my bed. Raise a fruit tree. Live in the Pacific Northwest. Become an expert at giving away money, encouragement, baked goods. Learn the mysterious habits of clouds. Talk to Jesus like I'm used to walking into His house and leaning up against the kitchen counter, like I know where all the coffee mugs are kept.

I want to farm, to write, to weld, to walk, to listen, to build. I want to grow up. I want my laughter to be a fact of myself, not something that comes and goes, but a fixture like the bones in my hands. I want to relearn how to breathe and throw so many teapots that I can draw them up in my sleep. I want to have dreams that tell me stories I haven't yet heard. I want to not lose heart, not to keep it in the marrow of my bones but on my lips and the palms of my hands. I want to write letters, always, to never stop praying for strength to break from things not meant for me, to cleave to the author of everything I love.

2012-01-15T14:03:00.000-08:00

He talked about himself for hours, again. He still doesn't know my last name. I don't think it will ever occur to him to ask. I know his greatest fears, the town where he was born, what he wishes he'd done instead.

Who is that? Why is he staring? Maybe I should just breathe through my mouth and stare at you. Yup. You're right. It is weird.

Did he really just ask me to make him a plate? Of food? Out of clay? Who knows. She's not hot enough, he said, and I stare at his chins. Do you think that because we don't complain about it, it doesn't matter? Women's Bible study on patriarchs this Tuesday. He's listing all the ways I'm not as developed as him and I don't think he's figured out how to feed himself. I need to study Noah some more? Can you even name his wife?

I'm tired. Let's go. Leave them all. It may be a mistake but we're young, we can always sell the farm and fall in love. Until then let's grow things. Let's adopt the babies no one else wants and knit them very tiny sweaters. Let's invite bees and go hunting for streams and not kill anything until we're very, very sure of our motives.

Let's find the perfect tree to sit under and make kick-wheels to throw pots on. We can break things and make mosaics out of the pieces and grow our hair out- all of it- to stay warm. We can talk to each other, and listen to each other, and laugh at each other's jokes, and it'll be like none of it ever happened, like sunsets and cold cold wine is all there ever was.

I can smell my own bitterness, like burned bread, and I have to leave it behind but don't know if I can do that around them, with all their carelessness. I know I'm doing so many things wrong, and I don't know how to fix it, and I just want to go away where I can't be used, where they have only each other to shout over. I'm not a captive audience, or a two-dimensional image, or a mistake. I'm a woman. And I wasn't made to be this sad.

2012-01-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

i went to the seashore

where it doesn't matter anymore

[the be good tanyas]

I pressed down on the mound of clay, thick and soupy like bread dough, and drew up a mug for the first time in months. I couldn't believe how good the pressure in my wrists felt, how lovely it was to watch the silty water erupt between my palms and stream down my hands exactly like blood, the perfect half-moon slivers of clay under my nails.

I couldn't believe how easy it was, after so many broken and collapsed things, after so much time away, to create this cup on the first try, perfectly. It felt so natural, the wheel singing under me, muddy towel slung over my hip, the conversations taking place on other wheels blending into this pleasant background blur. The cold dirt smell in my nose, the clay sucking at my thumb as I opened up the piece, the way that feeling always reminds me of what my dad says about staring into the abyss, or the abyss staring into you.

I guess I feel like lately I've been in danger of being disconnected from my body, and this- the white fingerprint on my pants leg, the half-smile from my instructor when I looked up from throwing- saved me. I can't fake things well, and yesterday reminded me that the things in my life and in my nature that matter are the ones that come naturally, slowly, like rain that falls miles to reach the ground.

2012-01-02T15:33:00.000-08:00

West Texas is like a body of water that closed around me seamlessly the moment I dove in, and then again when I climbed out.

2011-12-26T23:23:00.000-08:00

find them. love them.
[mother theresa]

My dog bit me today. I got him when I was seventeen and found him locked in a chicken coop in a shady neighborhood, the kind where houses never get sold and men never wear shirts. His water had been knocked over long ago and he was smeared with his own excrement, which would have completely defeated me, but he kept hurling himself against the sagging chicken wire anyway. He was yelping like he knew this was his chance, that the girl in the goofy overalls holding a battered paint can would sympathize with the cards life had dealt him.

I offered his owners twenty bucks, which was all the cash I had on me, but they said, Keep the money, just take him. He won't shut up. He barked nonstop until I tucked his scraggly head under my armpit, lifted his small body to my chest, and when I thought no one else was looking I whispered to him that I would take care of him from now on. He weighed less than the can of paint, and as he shook in my arms I tried to hold him as honestly as possible, communicate my care for him with just my chin resting on his forehead, my thumb between his arms.

He's not really mine anymore. Years later I left, and he stayed with my parents, where I figured he could keep doing what he loved most, patrolling the yard for squirrels and torturing our elderly border collie. When I come home, I start for the back gate where he's waiting and it takes several long minutes for him to recognize my form, my voice. Until then, his growl warbles in his small throat, and he barks at me exactly like the day I found him, like he knows something different is coming and he won't shut up.

Now it's six years later, and today I was snuggling with him when he jacknifed and bit my face so fast it was over before I could be angry or scared. I don't know why he did it, whether one of the other dogs set him off or his age has made him less tolerant of my face up against his, but I was surprised at his teeth, at how sharp they were after years of slick tongue and soft fur and velvety paws. I know nothing of the sharp parts of dogs.

In some bizarre way I'm scared it was because he remembers I left him. As if that was his way of saying, You can go, but I'm not going to remember you if you come back. That's one of my fears deep underneath my skin, that I'm a leaver, that I will be left as a result. I wonder if animals and everything else I love can see that in me, that I might not do the hard thing and stay.

I know this isn't true, that my dog honestly has the long-term memory of a goldfish with head trauma, that he doesn't remember me leaving home any more than I remember being born. Sometimes you just get bit, I told myself, but I still couldn't look him in the eye. I didn't really believe it, any more than I really believe space is a vaccum or that all the wood in a fire turns into ash.

Hours later, he broke out of the kitchen barricade where he was supposed to be sleeping, where my other dog was already twitching and growling deep in her dream. I heard claws ticking on the hardwood floor and his fur brush against my shin, and he settled next to me while I wrote as if it was where he belonged, watching me patiently, silently. Our eyes met, his so tiny and brown, and they said, Forgive me. I forgave you.

I covered his head with my palm, and he settled on the ground with a sigh, just close enough to touch the outside of my foot. He stayed there on the cold flat wood until my sister came and took him back. And I know I will remember this about him when I'm old and he's been gone for decades, these two things. I will remember him teaching me how to love something simply because that's the thing it needs most. And I will remember what the crust over my cheek already knows, this truth simple enough for both he and I to practice, that there is power to erase the mistakes of the past.

2011-12-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

what is to give light must endure burning.

[victor frankl]

I save Saturdays for dreaming. I wake up late and eat hot sticky cinnamon rolls with my sister for breakfast. We boil tea and watch while the neighborhood dogs leap into our yard and wrestle with Norah and Sadie, lunge and dive and play keepaway with a crumpled plastic flower pot, and we cheer and make bets on when they're going to turn tail and flat-out run from our seven-month-old puppy's relentless and savage pursuit.

On Saturdays, I wear leggings all day and ignore people who helpfully mention to me that leggings don't actually count as wearing real pants, and oh, it's snowing outside. They're Smartwool, I tell them, and turn on our Christmas lights and leave them on all day. I get a strong bitter bhakti chai from the coffeeshop/bike rental place down the street and say things to people like, I like your hair, or, This is the best chai I have ever had, ever. They're a little embarrassed, but I'm not. It's Saturday.

The rest of the week, I'm a little confused. I love Colorado, but I feel temporary here, the same temporary way I've been feeling for years, since I laid awake in my dorm room the night before my first college classes and realized that my parent's house was four blocks away but it wasn't where I'm supposed to go anymore.

The rest of the week, I work at a job where I'm not sure I fit and I walk through Boulder, a town that puts way too much stock in reggae music and money. I wonder whether I'll always be temporary and tentative, struggling through a new job or wondering what I can and can't talk about with my new friends and getting lost in a new place where all the streets have names like Aspen and Pine and Fir and Walnut.

On Saturday, I draw it all back together. This day, I know that I'm in Colorado because it's beautiful and unknown to me, because I didn't want to wake up when I'm eighty-three and realize I forgot to move to this state for even just a little while. I see how the ceramics class I'm taking next month at the Boulder Potter's Guild can mean that when I'm forty I'll open my kitchen cabinets and take out a mug and a plate I made. I see how every time I do this, I'm less afraid, I adapt faster, I love harder and sooner and hold back less. I remember that when I was a child, all I dreamed about was exploring, was going on adventures, and on Saturday I realize I'm being true to her in this.

On these days, I let myself picture a town where I live with those who are dear to me, a garden we sink our palms into, a brightly painted front door with a note reading "Come on in" perpetually tacked to the front. I imagine what I want to create, what I want to build, and I don't let any voice come in and tell me I'm not creative or intelligent or skilled enough to bring it to life. On Saturdays, I give myself a break and think about why I was drawn out of His imagination deep and terrifying and given this life, here, now. I hear all during the week how it's impossible to do anything good and the only worthwhile motivator is money, and I let it drum against my ears for now. But on Saturdays, I say, No. I'm sorry you have so little heart. But that's not me.

I'm going to learn all I can now so I can let art rage from my fingertips when it's time. I'm going to explore so when I know where I'm going to stay, I know why. I'm going to learn how be a friend to God, how to love people and not use them now, so I can be a gift to the community I go to, something strong and good. I'm going to learn how to feel lonely or afraid or angry and ride it out anyway, not let it define what I do, the choices I make.

But today, before I've done anything truly terrifying or meaningful, I'm going to declare my independence from things that suck. I'm going to plan my debut into art welding and dream about my road trip up the east coast to the Outsider Art Fair in New York. I'm going to work on my Peace Corps application and wear things that are warm and fuzzy and stupid-looking and only laugh at jokes that I like. I'm not going to care if I feel like I've been misunderstood or if I don't feel cute enough or important enough, because dammit, it's Saturday. Today I have more important things to do.

2011-12-03T14:08:00.001-08:00

Wild deer do not fear death or worry about their next

move as we do. They simply know survival and flight.

[day by day the farm girl way]

Today I am completely happy. I pound up the stairs of the community center and hear the notes of a local bluegrass band, I smell hemp soap and see the crowd at the Amnesty International booth, and I am flooded with delight at being here, at having a role in this town. I am ninety and already looking back on my life and loving this moment, bright in my memory, brushing against the nubby scarves and weathered skin of the women selling pottery, fingering necklaces with slivers of moon and shards of tile, seeing my sister tall against her surroundings laughing and slipping salt taffy in her mouth.

I am loving the crunch of glittery snow outside, the single pure note of a Christmas carol starting up, finding friend and family gifts, seeing people I know laced in the crowd of familliar-anyway faces. I see thirty-year-old mountain men in snow boots and Carharts, with scruffy cheeks and lopsided smiles, lugging children in hand-knitted hats with names like Rowan and River. I see women, brown-skinned, white smiles, their skin soft and worn and folded against their bodies like an extra layer, beautiful and long-fingered.

It might have been a survival and flight month, or maybe two months, or three. I can't remember today, because I smell cinnamon and a small boy just tried to hug me and I found a necklace that's perfect, just perfect, and has morphed from a present for someone else to being clasped around my neck. It's hard to remember today about loneliness or anger or fear, or why I ever spent much time with things like that anyway. I can feel in my bones the fleeting nature of flight, of survival, and know deep down that this is a month of thriving, of diving in. I can smell it in the lavendar pillows, hear it in the tinkle of old women's laughter, feel it in the ridge of the ceramic mug under my fingers.

2011-11-28T14:23:00.001-08:00

The voices of dust, the soul of dust, these interest me a lot more

than flowers, trees or horses because I take them to be stranger.

[Jean Debuffet]
-

There are things I can't do.

I can't ski. Enjoy parties. Swan dive. Network.

I can't flirt or swear or carol. I can't tell the difference between these things, really.

I can't see faces in dreams, or make up songs in my head, or line dance responsibly.

But there is one thing I can do. I can drive alone for hours, days, camp in the desert, on the coast, in the woods. The trees lull me to sleep, I wake when the sun touches my hand. I wake up smiling.

It's not much. I suspect everyone can do this. But still. This is what I do.

2011-11-23T09:46:00.000-08:00

remember Lot's wife.

[luke 17:32]

I don't know God.

I feel ridiculous, because I'm sitting here at my laptop working on an Excel spreadsheet and I don't know God. I'm going to go pick up a sandwich for lunch and get spinach instead of iceberg lettuce because iceberg lettuce is apparently terrible for you and I don't know God. I'm going to get my headlight fixed after work because it's not a great idea to drive in the dark and I DON'T KNOW GOD.

How do you know God? I mean, how do you even go about that? People say, have you read the Bible? and I want to say, um, have you? I don't know how to tell them that every time I read the Bible I end up in tears. I don't know how to tell them that the Bible is a terrifying book, filled with anger and blood and frogs and weeping, rape and death and rising floodwaters and pillars of clouds. I don't know how to tell them that the Bible is a book of men and I am a woman, that to just once read that I am not alone, that He is the God of Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel as well as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would mean everything to me. But it never does, no matter what page I open it to. Why did You create me and forget me, leave me to them?

I don't care about understanding You. I just want to know You, to recognize the timbre of your voice, the pressure of Your palm on my arm. But I can't. Even the sight of your back would leave me blind. I don't know how to know things that aren't bound in flesh. I was raised up in this world, where talking to things you can't see is insanity. I don't want this but I've never known anything else, never seen anything else. Is this why I can't find You? And what can I do?

I don't really know where to go, so I'll start by apologizing. I'm sorry I've stopped looking for you, or maybe that I never really started. I'm sorry I don't confront pain, let these horrors stew in my mind instead until I'm paralyzed with hate. I'm sorry I'm afraid You're not real, and if You are, that You don't love me because of everything that's happened since. I'm sorry I've trained myself to think about You in the abstract because that way I get to look smart and deep instead of having to do scary things, like change my life and my heart. I'm sorry I'm so angry all the time. I don't think I can seek You with all my heart because parts of it aren't there, but I want to try anyway. Please leave a trail for me.

2011-11-21T12:46:00.000-08:00

i loved yesterday. solemn latin chants at church, town thanksgiving potluck at the community center, bowls of steaming chili with cheerful yellow shredded cheese, smiley face note tucked under the apple pie. long delicious sunday nap, succumbing to a food coma snug under a comforter laced with red flowers, waking up to my dog's whiskery nose snuffling hellos. meeting friends downtown for free carousel rides and hot chocolate, late night dog walk, norah's fur black-blue against the twilight snow, watching harry potter at our house with new friends and grilled cheese sandwiches.
-
today, i like this office. i like the warm sun slanting through the white blind slats, the muttering of my sometimes-grumpy coworker, the grungy software programmers, the snoring sound of the coffee machine. I like the multi-colored post-its strung across the wall like chrismas lights, the clean sharpness of the art on the walls, copies of the onion strewn around the meeting table, the sitting-down-to-write feeling.
-
tonight, i will love being home, in our mismatched living room with the rain boots lined by the door, my sister's dark curls splashed against our bright red couch. i will love making food, my dog winding between my legs, the evening growing dim and cold outside our door. this is the most wonderful thing to have settle in my bones, remembering, knowing, anticipating all this joy.

2011-11-17T13:44:00.000-08:00

true or false: i like tall women.

[american psychiatric evaluation, question #54]

-
Third day at new job. Median age, twenty-seven. Fights break out over Star Trek trivia, Labrynth extras. I can't remember what Labrynth is. (Movie? Video game? Both?) Everybody has a great Batman impersonation. I wonder where I was when every single male my age was learning how to do that. Warm office, bright windows. The boss is in Israel and there's a bottle of Jack Daniels three-quarters empty on a Magento programmer's desk. By five, the graphic designers are slurring their TLAs (three-letter acronyms) and monologuing about how they saved Gotham City.
-
Small desk, empty except for my laptop and lunch. I've never had a desk and I don't know what to put on it. Pictures? Figurines? Artfully folded crosswords? I arrange my oranges three in a row, and call it good. How do you feel about writing up this contract? he asks me, and I shift an orange over an inch. If I make it here a week, I'll bring a pencil cup.
-
It's my third day, and in those moments when no one knows what to do with me I write SEO-rich content for websites I've never heard of. I become an expert mechanic or dance instructor. I blog about whitewater rafting, transmission maintenance, Magento programming, seed saving. How about a post on winterizing your vehicle? they say, and I Google it because I come from a place without winter. What's trending in wallpaper? they ask, and I Google it because my parents tore down the rooster wallpaper in our kitchen when I was seven and never spoke of it again.
-
In this office I'm the new girl who can't figure out the phone lines, but on the Web I'm an expert in anything they ask me to be. It's 11 a.m. and I'm John, a Denver metro area mechanic. After lunch I'm Erin, the up-and-coming interior designer who favors whimsical wallpaper borders. And at five I'm Kate, the woman who can't figure out why so many people don't seem to understand what they create, and wonders whether she's becoming one of them.

2011-11-16T13:02:00.000-08:00

hard work is always rewarded. unless you're in russia.

[anne]

i'm going to meet you like

the desert meets the rain

[kris delmhorst]

-
Sometimes I'm scared of things not working out the way I hope they will. Sometimes I feel all the little disappointments, their combined weight braced against my collarbone, and it's as good as a voice saying, You remember how this works.
-
Sometimes I adjust my rearview mirror when I'm driving into the canyon, and I don't recognize the sliver of eyebrow, of cheek that I see. I worry that I'll become the people I'm around, that I'll start running scared. I imagine my voice and gestures changing, nails growing longer, cheeks hollow like my voice, and I pray against that day, that person. I think the only difference between the two of us is whether we remember dreams.
-
I don't really know what to do about it. I pray for water from flint, bread from the sky, years that will humble me and teach me to hope, test my heart without killing my spirit. I pray to remember the flash of the sun against the inside of my eyelids, the sound of water falling. I pray for a future born from the past but different, closer to life, for eyes that we will both recognize.

2011-10-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

anne: that was so unsexy. please slap my wrist.

-
We wake up to the world under a foot and a half of white, nubby socks tucked under fleece blankets, the thud of snowballs hitting our front door. Cram into the Subaru with snowboards, too many people, sleds in the back, open bag of Cheetos to pass around, a Chrismas ornament lashing wildly back and forth from the rearview mirror. Drive up the mountain, further, climb until everyone else is gone behind the driving snow, until trees are the only sentries we see. Car tips into a ditch, lurches under us, grinds snow under its spinning wheels, but we don't care. Get out, throw snow at each other, laugh because our feet can't touch the ground and we can't see the sky and we can't feel our noses and that makes everything funny. We start up the hill, leave the car behind to brood.
-
Screaming, sled spinning, gloved hands against my back, snow flying in my open mouth. Can't steer, turn one way and careen the other direction into a snow bank. Someone else skates past sideways, all of us laughing so hard, our mouths wide open like children, eyes squeezed shut, dripping tears and snow melt. Ribcage heaving, ice water dripping down my wrists, snowfall slanted sideways against the sky but landing gentle like kisses on my neck. Lay flat on my back, snowboard driven into the bank beside me, smile at the grey sky and the way it muffles everything life isn't supposed to be.
-
And then suddenly we're in a snow fight, all of us flinging powder that won't stick, tripping and postholing in the not-ground. We're losing, so we call a truce and then tackle one of the others sideways into a snow bank. He disappears unprotesting into the drifts piled high around us, because we can't get hurt in the snow, no matter how hard we fall. All's fair in love, war, and snow days, and this is all of the above.
-
I feel light, honest, like I will only ever laugh at things that are funny from now on. A yellow truck crests the hill, a friend coming to pull us out of the snow, and we crowd back around the car to watch it lurch back out of the snow bank like a misplaced sea monster. Later there is hot chocolate in mismatched mugs, and kettle corn, and home videos of high school plays, but the euphoric skid down the hill and the ice against my teeth is what I'll remember about this day. Frost crunching in my fist, misshapen snow angels, the certainty that the world is good, clean and powerful as the white falling from the sky.

2011-10-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

guy: there are three kinds of people here-

artists, musicians, and people with two dogs.

me: you know what that means.

anne: yup. gotta get another dog.

now entering the high country

[sign outside nederland]

I took Norah to West Magnolia today, both of us needing to run off the adrenaline backed up in our systems, electricity pounding in our blood, poised to crash through a riot of fall foliage. But we got the the trailhead and the land and sky had silently reversed, broken branches overhead, leaves sheathing the ground. I stood still for a moment while she danced ahead, feeling like I'd just missed a train, wondering about the feeling in my bones. When did they fall? I wanted to ask the tree next to me, asleep, utterly unconcerned. And why does it make me feel this way? It's just winter.
-
I trudge through the leaves while she streaks down the trail, stopping, turning, undulating, this ever-quivering black comma flitting against the gunsmoke tree bark. Silver aspen bodies spear the sky and hold it there, stock-still and unprotesting, as if under contract. The clouds drift in slow motion. I don't realize I've stopped breathing until Norah reappears, bumping my side, and my breath squeaks out as fog, twists and disappears in the air.
-
They're dead, I tell her, while she noses under the leaves, and I hear that hopeless edge in my voice, the one that comes out when the seasons take this turn. There's this certainty lodged somewhere under my skin that you can't get dead things back, and for that reason I'm always braced for my last autumn.
-
We walk for a while before I notice the sunlight on my neck. It feels crisp but also secretive, and so I look up for the first time just as we crest a ridge. It lights up everything past the forest. For the first time, I can see through the trees.
-
The mountains spread out beyond, rose, yellow, glacial blue, white streaks of snow running in rivulets down their crevasses like veins. They stand back from the rest of the world spiralling into winter like ancient guardians, assessing the damage. Look, I tell Norah, but she's fixated on the dead and dying underfoot. The fact that everything else is slumbering makes these distant behemoths seem even more sharply awake, watchful, backlit by the winter sift light.
-
It made me back off a little from my opposition with death. It made winter feel less like a mistake and more like the forgotten birth mother, the real beginning, just with a terrible publicist. I want to remember that there is no despair in the season that sings itself to sleep, that builds a foundation underground by giving itself over to dreams. I want to learn to foster this quiet in my deep, in my forests, learn to let the leaves fall so the mountains can rise.

2011-10-13T22:17:00.000-07:00

leave what you find.
[leave no trace rule #4]

Last summer I worked at this farm, and one day the guy who ran the joint came in while we were eating lunch.
-
We all kind of looked at him, all the interns who worked the farm, because he usually didn't come to the house until after we ate. He would teach us then how to build greenhouses or plant cover crops or whatever. But this time he walked in right in the middle of a flat-out latka fiasco, sat at the end of one of the benches around the table, and rolled a cigarette. We all watched him kind of uneasily. The flystrip hanging from the ceiling fan quivered in the breeze.
-
Let's say each one of you lives to be a hundred, he said, putting one finger on the tip of the cigarette and rolling it from side to side, like he was proposing a game. That is my wish for you, to live to be a hundred and die in your sleep, full of your years. And now you're what, in your twenties?
-
He puts the cigarette between his lips, like he can't just let it sit there, reaches in his pocket for a lighter that he lost a week and a half ago. Let's say the last ten years of your life, you are slowly laying it down, he said, you are slowly going to seed, you don't wish to use any more of your summers, you just want to tell stories and remember. He covers his eyes with one hand, shredded and crisp like tree bark. So. You have seventy summers.
-
My roommate makes a move to go to the fridge, but he goes on. You each have seventy more summers to do anything, anything at all. You could build a place like this, he said, rubbing his hand over his face as though just the thought completely exhausted him. You could move somewhere, move to a huge city, live out your days in a terrace, in a field, in a prison, in someone else's country. You think this sounds extravagant, but that is only because you don't know any better.
-
He waves away the beer she brings him, takes a drink out of someone else's glass instead. One of the guys is watching him with his mouth actually open. I've never heard Bob confide in us this way, but I love the way the words feel, their warm, golden sheen, even though the day has been grey and misty. I do the math and think to myself, Sixty-eight. The thought straightens my spine.
-
I'm not going to tell you what to do with such a gift, the farmer said, and stood up quickly, like a young man with better things to do. But you've been told. There aren't any excuses now. He walked out of the kitchen, batted the flystrip out of his way without looking up, and stood on the porch for a second. He placed the unsmoked cigarette back in his front pocket. I'll be lucky if I have twenty summers left, he rasped to no one, but he didn't sound sorry, just interested.
-
We watch him disappear around the side of the house. Someone gets up to wash the dishes, someone else cracks his abandoned beer and starts humming tunelessly. The sun heats the herb garden outside. It's July, my twenty-second summer. I rub the dirt between my fingers slowly, feel the warmth rise from my hands.

2011-10-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

Therefore, behold, I will allure her
and bring her into the wilderness
and speak tenderly to her
-
I remember the wilderness, the way it looked, but mostly the way it smelled. The lonely cold way of earth pressed against the rim of a lake, the sting of rock filling your nose, the breath of trees leaning over. It smells like everything you don't talk about during the day.
-
There I will give her vineyards
Make the valley of Achor a door of hope
-
A beaten doorway, alone in the earth and sky. It's painted blue.
-
I think of my mother's love of vineyards, remember driving bars into the ground to support the plants, the powdery feel of the dirt in my hands. No water, and still no water, and even as her vines dried up I was struck by the way she nodded at failure, kindly, like they'd met at a friend's wedding years ago.
-
We'll try again, she would say, and this settled in some cavity of my body, sunk into bone, and I am only now even aware of what it bore in me. I am afraid of cold and pain, all their sharp edges, but not of my vines dying in the light of the sun.
-
There she shall answer as in the days of her youth-
-
What youth? If there was one, I don't remember it.
-
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt
And in that day you will call me 'my Husband'
-
I'm not sure exactly what a husband is. I touch the poetry-pouch of my earlobe, the curve of bone under my flesh like a curtain pulled over the back of a chair.
-
no longer will you call me 'my Baal'
-
I forgot that I love you more than the things I hate out of very existence. The smallest gift I could give, but I place it on the floor. There's a wind kicking up.
-
I will betroth you to me forever
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice
In steadfast love and mercy
-
The wild, the vineyard, the doorway. I can't name what it is I want.
-
And you shall know the Lord.

2011-10-06T18:02:00.000-07:00

we sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever, to the silence of God.

[annie dillard]

when i cut all my hair off, this girl was there. and i remember when the shorn strands leaped forward over my brow, she said to me, this is the real you.
-
she told me once that she wanted to go to language school in south america. she wanted to have adventures. she taught nature. her thing was showing parts of the world under our feet to children.
-
when i heard, all i could remember was her laughing that night as I held out my braid, her saying to me, when you came here this summer, you weren't you yet. now you are. this is the real you.
-
a friend called me last week to tell me she fell. it was instant, she said, her voice hollow and salty. she didn't feel a thing.
-
i sat after the phone went silent. i thought about this gift she gave to me. the day before, she was waking up just like I am now. and now she is somewhere else, and I can't thank her for seeing me.
-
nadyne. when you climbed that wall, the moment after you felt nothing under your hands, the moment between when everything ended and everything else began-
-
that was the real you.
-
thank you.

2011-09-10T15:39:00.000-07:00

anne: if you died tomorrow, your dog would care.

me: thanks.

anne: i'm thinking about starting a greeting card company.

-
I'm in Boulder. I came into Boulder to find a glass knob, one for the scratchy green side table we found at the estate sale yesterday. I found a bright ceramic one with flowers painted on it, in a bin gaily labeled Recycled! at a store, which made me feel vaguely heroic. No, no bag please, I said loftily, waving away the saleswoman. What, she replied, you're just going to carry that out?
-
I'm walking back to where I hope my car is when I notice a Victoria's Secret across the street, with huge posters of women in lingerie with pained expressions on their faces. They look like the kinds of women who have really clean cars and cute vintage teapots and give you that look when you ask to borrow a pen at the bank.
-
I'm looking at these women and wondering why they never have tan lines- do they tan naked? How can you take yourself seriously in a career that requires you to tan naked?- when I notice the kid's playset right in front of the store, in the middle of the shopping center. It has a huge plastic turtle with a somber expression and a couple of hollow plastic logs laid end on end, all on that scratchy green cushioned carpet that I assume makes all the difference between your kid bouncing harmlessly and breaking their neck.
-
A couple of boys are playing halfheartedly on the logs while their moms- who look like they tan naked too- chat on phones and blow on coffee. They smile white smiles across phone lines and their sons cling to the back of the turtle as if he's holding up the world, and I wonder what on earth it is like to have children, what it feels like to eject a human being from your body with one guttural roar, whether you can see your hands in theirs from the very beginning.
-
I wonder whether it's terrifying, whether your first thought after this mystery is, What were we thinking? followed by, What now? I wonder how you love them before you know them, what do you talk to them about after they start listening and before they start to speak, why the first thing they know to do is cry, how you begin the work of teaching them everything else there is.
-
I watch the women's brown hands gesticulate wildly in the air, the brown woman-stomachs stretched out behind them with labels like Very Sexy!, and I think about how it all boils down to the kids stumbling through these shiny plastic logs in front of them, their blonde cowlicks disappearing, reappearing.
-
One woman tosses her coffee cup in a recyclables container. She loved a man and this little-man appeared just months later. I wonder about the state of her heart after doing this kind of double-time, whether she stays awake at night sometimes, wondering who her kid is becoming, whether he can make it on his own, whether he's going to be okay when they're gone. I wonder if I could stand those kinds of questions.
-
The other woman stays a few minutes longer and then leaves with her toddler in tow, probably because I've been staring at them for almost ten minutes. She's still talking on the phone but her hand closes reflexively over his before they cross the street, and they go, her with all her son-love and him with his blank spaces to be filled, and I turn and cross the other way with just my recycled knob, my gently-used heart.

2011-09-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

me: does nederland have a dog park?

mom: nederland is a dog park.

-
I wake up.
-
Sunlight streaming through the window. Mattress on the floor, mug of tea next to me, chill like the morning, half-full like my life. Stand up, walk past Norah huffing in her dog-dream, stretched out on her back, paws twitching, chasing- what? I'll never know.
-
Walk into the bathroom, bright shower curtain, soap that smells like cranberries and coconut, sleep scent in my skin. Comb my short short hair with my fingers, feel Norah's downy cheek press against my leg, hear her dog-yawn. We race down the stairs. She wins.
-
Black tea with milk, singing teapot with flowers, hot oatmeal with honey. Walk barefoot across the floor, no furniture except camp chairs, duffel bags overflowing. Open the door to the sunlight, makeshift prayer flags from bandannas, compost box with gnats lazily circling in new sun. Norah streams out beside me, takes all the stairs down the porch at once, runs full tilt across the yard in this primal-genuine expression of joy, and all I can do is pray.
-
Thank you for drawing me here. Thank you for the people in my life who love me, who support me. Thank you for tea, for the curl of muscle in her back legs, for the way I feel my spirit stretching. Thank you for dirt streets and the brightly painted houses that flank them, thank you for the new-person-in-town discount at the coffeehouse down the street.
-
I finish my tea, open the gate, and Norah leaps out into the light streaming in. I place my empty mug on the porch railing. My cup overflows.

2011-08-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

set that bloodless timber alight

[anne]

i miss my dog.

i miss the way she stretches out flat on her back when i rub her stomach, not on her side like other dogs. i miss the way she tucks her head over the ridge of the car window to brace herself when i go around turns too fast, and then turns and looks at me as if to say, You took that turn too fast.

i miss the way she dog laughs, her mouth wide open, the way she whines a little when i don't open the gate fast enough to let her come with me to water the garden. i want to see her prance again, when she catches the tennis ball straight out of the air and is so proud of herself she can't stand it. I want to watch her grow again.

i want her to lie on my stomach, stretch out over my legs like i'm a couch, sit on my head when we're camping and i'm trying to sleep. why does she do that? it's so weird.

i want to bring her on this next adventure and all the adventures after it, to ride with me in the car, to run next to me outside. i want to introduce her to all the new dogs and people i meet. i want to find her a yard, a garden i'll train her not to dig in, a clothesline to run under, a bed inside for cold winter nights. I want to find her dog parks to meet new friends, teach her nonsense things like how to play dead and stand on her back legs. i want to learn things i need to know from her, like how to trust, how to live in moments, how to be simply happy.

2011-08-12T21:19:00.001-07:00

it takes two to make a thing go right

it takes two to make it outta sight

In the next two years-

I might go llama packing in the Wind River Range. I might write, or ride on ambulances, or become a certified midwife. I might save other lives. I might inhabit my own.

I might teach in Pakistan. I might go to a folk school and learn how to weave baskets and make soap. I might start a butterfly garden. I might rock climb until my arms don't fit inside my shirts. I might go shirtless.

I'm not scared of not having what I thought I wanted. I like sleeping on the ground. The cold and I have an agreement. I might summit a mountain somewhere far, far away. I might stop thinking too much. I might start reading even more.

I might design my own maps. I might weld a yurt frame. I might hike Italy's Dolomites. I might admit to my love of feather extensions. I might stay Timberbeast forever.

2011-08-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

i will not sacrifice to the Lord my God

burnt offerings that cost me nothing.

[king david]

-
I woke up early one morning, and the gators were out again. I'd had a strange dream, a light dream, and I was just tired of returning to the weight of everything, to the feeling that worth was a bird in flight I couldn't catch. The desire to travel lightly was so strong I hoisted myself up on one elbow and let the strands spool in my palm, felt their weight, and thought, I can't do it. This is my one claim.
-
There were a lot of dark voices that day, unexpected violence. This is the only beautiful thing that's yours, it warned. You will not give this up. You will never follow through. Be the way you have always been. I would see girls passing by me and it murmured, And how will you compete with them? But I'm not going to compete with anyone anymore.
-
This is why I sat down on a friend's porch last night and raised a smoothie to the sunset, and handed a pair of scissors to my roommate. She said, You are beautiful with long hair, you will be beautiful with none, and when I heard my braid hit the floor with a thump, I knew she was right.
-
I knew she was right because I could feel the wind just up above my neck for the first time in memory, and I ran a hand over the shorn strands and introduced them to the sift light and the breeze. I knew she was right because there is no better place for your first real haircut than at a party at night, your friends shrieking and cheering as you hold the thick golden braid aloft and whoop over the porch railing, into the acre of peach trees and the sinking sun.
-
This is what I have to give today, almost nothing, a coiled braid over a foot long in an envelope, about to be sent off and turned into comfort for someone else. But when they handed it back to me that night I felt in my palms what I'd turned it into, my fear, and weirdly my greed. Above all, my lack.

But on my head this morning, those things are gone. I lick the stamp, and I just feel the sun warming my crown, the wind against my neck, and light, light everywhere.

2011-07-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

you feel like good times we haven't yet had

[bob schneider]

-
I feel good here. I like the silence, the blue. The walking, always walking, listen behind for stories, listen ahead for water. The footsteps behind me, the things they need, the things they're scared to leave behind, left behind. Them so young old, me so old young. We walk.
-
I like the maps, like unfolding a riddle I heard a long time ago, the ways the lines tell me everything, where we are, where we haven't yet been, where we shouldn't go. I like the meandering needle of this compass, so certain, always seeking out just one direction. Wish I could find a compass that points west.
-
I feel good there, when my toes are touching the edge of an alpine lake, when my skin holds that earthy sweat smell, when the roaring of the snow melt blends with the pine trees shouting in wind, fingers black, hair rough and tangled like rope.
-
I feel good putting a shelter over their heads, blowing until a fire leaps up from the ground, making food to fill them, finding water to slate their thirst. I feel good up late after them, talking by the fire with a brother or sister. We tell each other about our lives, the shape they've taken, what has to change.
-
I feel good up late even after that, when I'm the last one left, putting out the glowing coals one by one until it smells like cold meat, until it's just me and the stars. I never sleep when we're out here. The moon is too bright.

2011-07-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

Eighteen was the age that Julie and I planned to both buy

our own farm and hit the road, in no particular order.

[haven kimmel]

-
Some people don't fit in, and they resent it. They spend so many years wondering what's wrong with them, and later what's wrong with everyone else, that they forget the way they were made, they forget how to sing until the warmth in their throat reaches their core, they forget how the feel of dirt against their flat palms makes them happy in an intensely private way. That thing happens to them, the thing that happened to Hitler, the thing that makes you want to control and hate everybody else instead of letting your heart settle to the sound of pencil scratching on paper, your own singular worship.
-
She isn't like that. Her head is at a different angle than everyone else's, tilted up slightly, the same angle most likely favored by ancient queens marching to their doom, but I think she holds her head like that because she likes looking at the sky. When I walk by her we smile at each other. She never pretends not to see me, the way I do to other people sometimes. After our eyes meet, I tend to glance up, just for a few seconds.
-
I hope we walk into each other when we're both in our forties. Someone has to hold me accountable, after all. I hope I'm driving through a town I haven't been in before and I see one of those parades with a really cheesy theme, like the Corn Queen Festival, and I pull over to watch the fire trucks and buy one of those corn-themed shirts that I never can resist.
-
I'll see a really stunning woman waving from the seat of the Cornmobile. Her hair is, appropriately, like corn silk, and she has what people call a million-dollar smile (for reasons that are mysterious to me). I raise a hand to wave and then I notice the woman walking next to the car, throwing candy to the children. She's smiling with her mouth closed like people with really good senses of humor, people who tend to keep secrets. She'll look me right in the eye, and finally I'll remember the horizon.

2011-06-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

O saints, if I am even eligible for this prayer,
though less than worthy of this dear desire,
and if your prayers have influence in Heaven,
let my place there be lower than your own.
I know how you longed, here where you lived
as exiles, for the presence of the essential
Being and Maker and Knower of all things.
-
But because of my unruliness, or some erring
virtue in me never rightly schooled,
some error clear and dear, my life
has not taught me your desire for flight:
dismattered, pure, and free.
-
I long
instead for the Heaven of creatures, of seasons,
of day and night. Heaven enough for me
would be this world as I know it, but redeemed
of our abuse of it and one another. It would be
the Heaven of knowing again.
-
There is no marrying
in Heaven, and I submit; even so, I would like
to know my wife again, both of us young again,
and I remembering always how I loved her
when she was old. I would like to know
my children again, all my family, all my dear ones,
to see, to hear, to hold, more carefully
than before, to study them lingeringly as one
studies old verses, committing them to heart
forever.
-
I would like again to know my friends,
my old companions, men and women, horses
and dogs, in all the ages of our lives, here
in this place that I have watched over all my life
in all its moods and seasons, never enough.
I will be leaving how many beauties overlooked?
-
A painful Heaven this would be, for I would know
by it how far I have fallen short. I have not
paid enough attention, I have not been grateful
enough. And yet this pain would be the measure
of my love. In eternity's once and now, pain would
place me surely in the Heaven of my earthly love.

[Wendell Berry, VI]

2011-06-07T17:05:00.000-07:00

i'm truly sorry.
-
i don't know who i am around you, and i wish i wasn't responsible for her, didn't have to account for her cowardice. i wish i wasn't scared for myself deep underneath my skin, wish i was enough of a woman to walk away from good enough in the first place, wish i was enough of a woman to protect all of us instead of always just me.
-
this is one mistake i can't seem to leave behind, can't bear to stop making. i wish i was different, wish you were different, wish we were back in the mountains again and could start over, me with twenty-three years under my belt instead of just twenty-two. i wish i was sure that would make a difference.

2011-06-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

i see good things for you.

[dara]

-
a year ago, i started getting cold in the mornings. i would wake up early, in the predawn still, and i would be cold, even though i was living in hot places, arizona and california. i was running scared.
-
i would move from my bed-nest to the air outside, where the grey not-light seemed like a dead end. it felt like i was tipping a book off a shelf to read, but someone had ripped out the last page of the story and stapled it to the cover. the days, once begun, were lovely and full of life. but the mornings pressed a palm flat to my chest and said to me, don't bother.
-
i say this now because i woke up this morning in a hostel in california, a year later, and i felt a thrum in my chest, the what's-next feeling, and the air was cold in my tent, but i didn't care. skin is a great insulator. i walked down to the cafe for pancakes, not scared of not belonging, not scared of not having a home.
-
i'm not sure what that means, but it feels like growth. further up and further in.

2011-05-22T17:58:00.000-07:00

some people will live

some will die

some, with help, will survive.

[principles of triage]

-
someday we'll live in the mountains, where the people are clear-headed and split their own firewood. there will be a house, painted blue, and the first thing i'll hear when i wake up in the morning is the swishing pine tree tops in the wind.
-
norah will love to go bouldering even though she'll be like seventy-four in dog years, so on weekends we'll take her rock climbing and try to dred our hair with our chalky fingers. we won't worry about our abs anymore because we've finally come to terms with how damn good-looking we actually are. in the evenings, we'll invite everyone we know over and make tea late into the night and watch norah chase neighborhood kids on bikes.
-
the clear air will do a lot for our stress levels, as in bring them down to nil. mountain people don't do dumb things like use leaf blowers or do a lot of social networking or question the humanity of women, so we will finally all be on the same page.
-
i will try to talk to people, really talk, and try to really love them, and try to heal things that are crooked. i will listen to all stories, even the ones that scare me, and tell my own, even the ones i thought i would never tell anyone, because this more than anything else sounds like humanity, sounds like moving further up and further in, and this is what i want to do.

2011-05-07T15:01:00.000-07:00

i miss my sister. i miss her willowy body, the way she smells like toast, the crisp feel of her curls in my hand. i miss her short eyelashes, her white white teeth, how her fingers are so long and unexpectedly strong, how she always wins who-can-squeeze-the-other-person's-hand-the-hardest contests but lets me get the last pity squeeze in.
-
i miss how she listens to train and the goo goo dolls and the way her brow furrows when she sings along to them in the car, the way she always wears at least one fuzzy or furry thing on her outfit even when it's hot, the way she's oblivious to trends and politics and mean people.
-
i crave her long thin arms, her brown eyes that never break contact, her face unlike mine in every way. when she hugs me my chin just hooks around her shoulder, and she lifts me effortlessly, the only person in the world who carries me some distance at least once a day. she isn't scared of the same things i am.
-
i want her to be here with me so we can do that thing where we grasp each other's forearms unconsciously when we're talking over chai. i want to make her laugh so hard that her face gets all wrinkly and kind of fat and she looks exactly like she did when she was six. i miss the freckles around her nose and on her shoulders, so faint you can't see them unless you lean in very, very closely, which i do.
-
i worry sometimes that there will be a day when i don't know her like this anymore, when i don't remember the thumbprint oval of her clavicle or the weight of her earlobe between my thumb and forefinger or the hollow thwack of her back against my palm. i pray against those days, that i would never wake up and not feel her absence like a cut-off song, a dream interrupted.

2011-05-07T13:58:00.000-07:00

i was at a coffee shop in eugene, laptop on, absentmindedly listening to music and wondering where to go next, when this song came on.
-
they can tie me up, they can call me a clown
but i ain't gonna lose you
-
i'd heard it before but never thought much about it. i can't stand the thought of another man, the guy murmured into my earbuds. i ain't gonna lose you.
-
it made me cry. that day it was the kind of truth i'm scared of, the kind that tells you there's more than you're settling for. the kind that asks you to just walk away.
-
i feel so unreal sometimes, like i'm a substitute for someone else. like the people in my life use me as a stand-in for a person they used to know, a person they lost, a person they hope to someday meet. a sure thing to fall back on. a meantime thing.
-
i'll sing it from my roof top
i'll sing it from the bus stop
i'll sing it on the street drunk to a cop
but i ain't gonna lose you.
-
the pit of my stomach reminds me of the feeling, that i'm last on the list, that i'm not in the photos. it's like being packing bubbles for someone else's life, cushioning the things that really matter, keeping them from breaking, but when the package arrives it's the first thing in the trash. a lot of the time, i feel like filler.
-
throw me in the hurricane
tell the whole world i've gone insane
run an electric shock in my brain
but i ain't gonna lose you
-
but this guy wrote this song, and i remember it because it's so rare to love someone for their worth, not for how good they make you look. i want to love worth like that. i want to remember i'm worth that.

2011-05-02T09:50:00.000-07:00

blow up your t.v., throw away your paper

go to the country, build you a home

plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches

try and find jesus on your own

[john prine]

-
i pulled into springfield, or maybe springville, and i followed a ranch road that took me through the canyon. i picked up two laughing people, stranded by their broken fourwheeler. they piled into my passenger seat, she settled into his lap, twined fingers almost unconciously. be careful here, they said, step on a corner of your heart, otherwise you may never want to leave.
-
they were zion born and raised, and as we wound down the wash into the town they told me where the best spots to camp were, told me that the land here belongs to the people, you can sleep anywhere you want for free. that ridge belongs to you, they said, pointing through the sift light. that cliffside belongs to you.
-
i dropped them off and crossed into a line of ranch houses, with long green fields behind them, gardens, horses, river sounds in the distance. a dog leapt from nowhere up to my open window. i scratched his ears and he searched out my palm with his nose, found what he was looking for, then took off across a bridge, stopping to make sure i followed. i wound into this town of farmer's markets and hand-cobbled mailboxes like this, led by a dog over a road through a country that belonged to me.

2011-04-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

the morning road air was like a new dress.

[their eyes were watching god]

it was the kind of place you'd expect to see a burning bush.

[gap creek]

-
i was planting tomatoes in a field, months ago. i was with a group of other people, and we crisscrossed over the rows like threads under giant fingers. walk, drop the root ball, plant down the row, then turn, on your knees, pat the earth around the plant. walk, drop, turn, kneel. after about an hour the sun came out and shriveled all our talk.
-
except from one girl. when i crossed her i saw her lips moving under the brim of her hat, heard whispered words while she dropped her tomatoes into the cracked ground. i thought she was talking to herself, then maybe praying, because i almost recognized the words.
-
To free you from this fear, let me explain
the reason I came here, the words I heard
that first time I felt pity for your soul
-
walk, drop, turn, kneel. it was then i realized what she was reciting, reeled with the weight and length of what she'd memorized.
--
I was among those dead who are suspended,
when a lady summoned me. She was so blessed
and beautiful, I implored her to command me.
-
the cantos from Dante's Inferno, all of them, beginning with the first and going on for who knows how long. we stopped after a few hours, and she wiped the sweat from her brow and began the walk back to the farmhouse, seemingly content to leave the story there, the pilgrim's journey just begun.
--
my friend, who is no friend of Fortune's, strays
on a desert slope; so many obstacles
have crossed his path, his fright has turned him back
-
i woke up this morning thinking about her, wondering why i never asked why it was this she picked to remember, every word, to hum all day and into the night. a gentle girl in most respects, who sent these plants back into the ground to the tune of one man's descent into hell.

2011-04-24T21:56:00.001-07:00

mom: "smart chicken" is kind of a

relative term. it's like "jumbo shrimp."

2011-04-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

-
i can't see my body here.
[connie]
-

--
Pro-lifers. I'd heard the term all my life. Pro-lifers. The way people tended to say it, with a little bit of an incredulous laugh, told me what it must really mean. Oh, there they go again, those crazy pro-lifers, they would say, and I would laugh too, the same way I laughed in the second grade when someone else was accused of farting.
--
I walked into the clinic four months ago with this warning ringing in my ear, that it would be full of women who drove minivans with self-righteous bumper stickers, women who threw dry ice bombs at Planned Parenthood and never wore shorts, women with tight lips and hands bound with rosaries. I wore a short skirt just to tick them off.
--
I walked in to write a story, inappropriately dressed and braced for I knew not what, but when I crossed the threshold everyone was laughing. No one seemed particularly interested in my womb. I was a little hurt.

Someone asked me what I wanted to do, and I vaguely mentioned Alaska, and she said, Fabulous. You can date moose hunters and sled to work. She tossed a peanut in her mouth, winked at me. They laughed loudly, deeply, like people who sit around fires at night with people who love them back.
--
I loved them so much that two weeks later I walked back in and asked if I could be with them, help out at the clinic, because I never meet middle-aged women who wear faux cheeta-print capes that fall all the way to their feet, women who fought in the jungles of Panama and the African bush, women who pushed the button that burned their babies out of their wombs, women who were enslaved to alcohol or men. Women who woke one day to tremble at the face of God and lived to tell that tale and so many others, to other women, other girls. To me.
--
These are women who will never judge me, no matter what I tell them, women who despise riches and do battle every day without getting paid a dime, women who fight murderous boyfriends and furious mothers and false gods, women who put their hands on a teenage girl's shoulder and look into faces frothing with fury and say, Enough, leave this place. Women who embrace girls who have gone too far, have made mistakes, and clothe their babies, teach them how to raise a human being, speak on their behalf.
--
They do this because this Being has whispered in their ear, Fight. Fight for women and for children, who for too long have had no one to speak for them. I see them crouched to speak to a child and drawn up to their full height to deflect a man, I hear them soothe a weeping mother and loudly make fun of me for being the only virgin present, and I think, Glorious.
--
It seems incredible to me now, how deeply I listen to voices I don't even like. There are so many more opinions in me, I know, forged by people I wouldn't even call to go get coffee, but somehow I let them write both our obituaries.
--
I don't want to judge ever again. I don't want to smirk, act like I understand things, because I don't. Because there are webs of sisterhood and pain, blood and birth and broken babies in sterile trash cans, women with faces like lions and hands that can hold up everything in my world, voices that say Enough, something no one else in the world seems to know how to say. Enough anger. Enough self-righteousness. Enough death. Turn and leave this place. The thing that is left is more glorious than I know how to explain. And this is why I'm for life.

sisterhood

2011-04-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

there are two kinds of sisters.
-
there is the first kind, made of women grafted to you like mismatched tree branches, borne of flesh rubbing against flesh so long the two bodies are bound by layers of dried blood, partially healed skin.
-
maybe you fell in together when you were children, slept in hideous purple sleeping bags on each other's living room floors, fought while wearing too much eyeliner, and you assumed this made you members of the same tribe. but there was no real love to hold you, only scar tissue and folded notes from your free period after lunch.

later you drifted further apart, separated by life, which was meant to bind you together. but when you turn around, strangely, they're still there, the siamese twin hanging from your back, present only out of habit, but never leaving you alone. the sharp pain of tearing that bond is too much for them to bear, and maybe you too, the sudden awareness that you haven't had each other for too many years, the shocking sound of only your breathing in the room. it's a tricky bond, shallow but old.
--
there is a second kind.
--
it is also by blood, but not scabbing, not superficial, not heaped on your skin in layers of childish confidences and hastily resolved fights.
--
it is more that you recognize her blood, wholly intact. you are drawn to the scent and the heat of it, see in her a woman on your river. you turn and walk together true sisters, not because you tried to make it so, to defend yourself from loneliness, but because now you are a woman who has been alone and is unafraid of its hollow threats, a woman who wants to find the other lionesses, wants to lend her strength to a pack holy and terrible.
--
it is these women you find and follow, these you laugh and catch up to, theirs the hands you hold. your blood is the same not for torn veins, girlish arms forced together to join these flows, but because it has always been that way, since the time before either of you were born.
--
brandish the scalpel, perform that surgery, hellish though it may seem. leave all others behind, anger, and fear, and the red crust that violence leaves behind. Find these sisters, women as we were meant to be, with the strength and sense to bind wounds instead of coddle them.

2011-04-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

you are elements combined,

earth, air, fire, wine

once there was a girl who knew when it was time to leave. she didn't make the rules. she just knew how to read.

she would start in arizona, to remember where she'd been, where she first lifted her face up, where she was first alone. needs to be in the wild places that tucked her away, the trees that roared over her while she slept, the mountains she climbed, the fires at night. wants to see again the first place she chose to be. -

wants to go up into utah, be in a landscape she's never seen before, heat and arches, ground flashing gold. her head is full of things she wants to lay down, give back to the ground. needs new things to fill her head, things she can't imagine, make her remember why she was created, what it feels like to journey to a place called zion. she likes the way it sounds against her teeth, thrumming like she just bit into a peach pit. would name her daughter after such a country if she had one. -

has to cross through idaho, forgotten country, because she heard once it was beautiful. wants to stand on ground someone called sacred, even if its name means nothing. wants to be willing to listen. maybe then she will be blessed enough to hear all the things she never expected, thought she didn't want. things she laughed at in her heart like sarai, but needed more than warm soil on the flats of her feet. -

needs to walk in eastern oregon, in a desert but not her desert, because her heart has been limping for months and she needs even ground, wide and unfamiliar sky. wants to drive at night, wants to have a beer and taquitos at a mexican food place with outdoor seating, table all to herself, read a book, flirt with the waiter. silence, sun. hand out the window. -

wants to be in washington state, under the trees that flick by like parenthesis, safe under their years. has to trek to the strange, shining city her sister chose. needs to be with someone who hears her, needs to see this woman's beauty, her element for this season. wants to be with someone else who is looking too. -

and then she will follow this gleaming sea, this progression of dunes and dusks down the coast, through mountains and woods, through washington, through oregon, to california, where the light itself will change. -

she will cross the state line and get out of the car and put the palm of her hand flat against the warm ground, chunky like salsa, because in arizona she cut things down, but here she first learned to coax them from the earth. the land remembers her palms. -

she will wear only dresses on california roads, as per solemn tradition. will buy fruit as she goes, will let the wind dry her hair, will sleep outside so she won't miss his call, in case it comes. -

here she will beg forgiveness, will forgive anyone who has ever been, because her confusion will end one day only if she does this and one other thing. -

here she will remember some things, and let other ones go, will promise to walk, and keep walking, because her life is a trail with her guide just disappearing over the rise.

2011-03-31T18:49:00.000-07:00

leah: i told him about jesus; he told me about spain.

Today I interviewed ballerinas. I walked to a studio downtown with crusty mats and gleaming mirrors and wide hardwood staircases, and talked to the director, a girl not much older than me.

She was beautiful as dancing women always are, with curly hair and a dancer's strong body and the barest hint of her native Alabama in her a's, and she said, It is always important to do something well. She looked at me with severity in her mouth and a smile in her eyes, and I wished that she had taught me how to arch my neck, how to extend my limbs and draw them back in, how to turn these mysterious French phrases into bodysong.

I asked a girl, Why do you dance, and she looked at me wide-eyed. I don't know, she said, like she'd honestly never thought about it, the way I'd look if someone asked me why my eyes crinkled into folds when I laugh. -

The girl behind her answered instead. It frees me, she said, lifting her shoulders, the cords standing out in her powerful neck. And I believed her, because free is how she looked, with the freckles careless on her nose and her strong neck, her collarbones sharp against her chest. She was casual like strong people are, people who can lift their own weight, people who can outrun anything that might find them.

2011-03-21T22:30:00.001-07:00

tamura: i mean, this month, i'm a vegetarian.

next year, who knows? i could be flying to the moon.

there are dark things out there. there are. i hear about them, i see them, and they feel like flakes of rust on my tongue, biting but nothing lasting. just the remnant of what was something else. there are dark things.

but there is a road, and it is that time just before dawn, that time when you're camping alone in a place with cold springs and late summers, and the trees rise up and meet above you.

you're wrapped in a blanket, listening to the hush that feels like a palm against the small of your back, before the birds begin to sing. your nose is cold, and you know that the air smells this way for a reason, the same reason your dog buries her nose in the hollow of your neck where the fog of your sweat is lifting.

this always makes the dark seem so small, when the very air you breathe is a trail. the rest is just grit dissolving in your mouth.

2011-03-21T14:35:00.000-07:00

barn's burnt down; now i can see the moon.

[masahide]

there's rings on my fingers
there's songs in my bones
there's arms on my shoulders
in holes and in homes

there's a hand on my jawline
that turns me to see
the moon in the sky
where the barn used to be

and in that sweet blaze
where sparks lick and smoke blinds
i see over the pyre
what nobody finds

in my heart there's a catch
in my bones there's a might
in my hands there's a match
in my eyes there's just bright.

2011-03-13T22:45:00.000-07:00

she got whatever it is

I can usually gauge where I'm at by how seriously I take country songs. If I catch myself turning them up, holding my breath, waiting for the next line like it's some kind of prophetic word, then it's not looking good. If they make me cry, I'm lost. I really am.
-
If I've forgotten who I am and what I'm worth, if the ticking pulse over my left eyelid won't go away, if I've remembered the things I've done, the things I'm caught in, I am helpless in the wake of these songs. Not the ones about no-account cheatin' men or high school girls from Georgia with great legs, but the ones about farmer's daughters and tall drinks of water. They become the only link I have to the kind of world I want to be in. When the commercials for deer feeders and Auto-Zone come back on, I want to shout, Wait! Come back! Tell me what to do!
-
My problems aren't big. I'm just alive, like everyone else. I'm sad and scared and a little lonely. And right now I don't need windshield wipers or deer corn. I need someone to tell me I'm not the only one, there is a party I'm invited to, there is a man out there who will love me, there is a God who remembers who I am.
-
I need an old man to sing about how he loves his wife, how he wouldn't trade their years of kicking back on screened porches or staying up late in bed whispering and snorting with laughter for anything, anything. How he loves her, how there is no one else that matches her for him, how he knows how she got the scars on her back and the slow rhythmic drawl in her voice.
-
I need to know that it's not about who has the best pair of legs. I need to know this so badly that when I think it may not be true, I feel very young all the sudden, very young and strange, like my little-girl heart has hairline cracks running all along it like streaks of heat lightning that burn and then calcify into something harder than bone.
-
I need to hear songs about people who love each other, people who won't leave, people who didn't give up searching for the things they desired until they found them. I'm tired of songs about people who settled for the first person they convinced to sleep with them or the first place they ran out of gas or the first job they got to pay the bills, staying until they bitterly resented it, needed it, were too scared to leave it.
-
She got whatever it is, it blows me away, he sings, and it almost breaks my heart right back along those lines. It's dumb, maybe, but for the things the world does to my heart and soul, it's the only cure I know.

2011-03-11T20:02:00.000-08:00

you might get out before the devil even knows you're there

It's a Wednesday. I'm at a pool.
-
An indoor pool, which I haven't been in since college, when I worked at the YMCA and accidentally walked through the wrong door. But here I am. At the pool.
-
I take a deep breath. It's a testament to the rearing of my generation, I guess, that I seem to find the smell of noxious chemicals deeply comforting.
-
My friend is with me, a girl I've known for six thousand years. She was a varsity swimmer in high school, but hasn't really hit the water since then. I asked her to start coming to the pool with me, since the first time I swam I doggy paddled a couple lengths and then, at a loss for what else to do, challenged the lifeguard to a game of Marco Polo (he politely declined).
-
We both cannonball into the pool. I like this silent agreement, that there is no other way to enter a body of water. I seem to have it mostly with people I knew as kids.
-
She says, All right then, and sinks beneath the surface. I watch it close over the jagged hairline on her scalp, and then suddenly she's off, springing from the side of the pool, cutting through the water like a seal.
-
She breaks to the surface, already almost a third of the length of the pool away, and starts slicing her arms through the water, twisting her head back in little jerks to take rapid-fire breaths. She is like this tigress clawing her way up a tree, this she-falcon in a free fall. I watch her cut two lengths of the pool and think, This is the most decisive I have ever seen any of us be.
-
And I want that. I want to know where I'm going, even if I'm underwater. Teach me, I said, and she did, telling me what to do, watching my body, saying, Head down, and, Don't look forward, just watch the stripe beneath you. Everything you need to know right now is under you.
-
And I felt snatches of it. Obviously I'm still more on the Marco Polo side of the swimming spectrum, but when I was trying to cut my arms through the water, when I looked at the line beneath me and saw I was on track, when I felt for a moment the incredible power of my body, the potential there to swim in oceans and climb up mountains and run across deserts, I fell so deeply in love. It has nothing to do with appearance. It's so outside that. It's a love of motion, a love of expressing with your body this celebration you feel inside your soul.
-
I finished my last lap and jumped up and down, in the shallow end of the pool. This is amazing! I shouted. My body is amazing!
-
No kidding, she said. Your boob fell out of your swimsuit. Tuck it in and let's go again.
-
I remember now. I love to swim.

2011-03-07T20:06:00.000-08:00

So my uncle found this anagram thing, which I would create a link to here if I didn't have the technological savvy of a load of wet laundry. Google it.
-
When you type your name in, it rearranges the letters to make your new title. Needless to say, I've been typing in the names of everyone I can think of for the past two and a half minutes, which I guess means I don't know very many people.
-
But I've noticed a pattern- the more boring your name, the more awesome your anagram. Poetic justice? I think so. Talk about well worth the wait. Observe.
-
Kate Smith? I'm The Task.
-
Kate Hunter Smith? The Mutant Shriek.
-
Katherine Hunter Smith? Think Truer Heathenism.
-
Katherine "The Gator Hunter" Smith? Neater, High-Risk, Moth-Eaten Truth.
-
I honestly can't decide. I wish my parents had had access to this in 1988. And am I really referred to in some circles as "The Gator Hunter?" You'll have to pose that question to the Mutant Shriek.
-
But until further notice, I'll answer to all four.

2011-03-06T13:18:00.000-08:00

better late than never.

[someone]

delayed new year's rez: a limerick (i think)

i've been scared before, but now i am new.
and there are two things i am going to do.
first, i will swim, i will bike, i will run
i will find a triathlon and go til it's done.
second, and much more importantly
i will find a needle, some yarn, and a tree
i will stand in its shade and then sit on a rock
and will not stand up til i've knitted a sock.

2011-03-03T20:00:00.000-08:00

it's six fifty-three. the world will begin in seven minutes.

[talk radio]

-
Sometimes I just don't feel like living through whatever I'm living through at the moment. I get tired of the questions, the way I seem to circle them endlessly, instead of just ripping off my earrings and throwing the first punch.
-
When this happens, I like to write like I'm old, like I'm through this stage, like the agitation and humiliation have faded into a really good story. I write like I'm sixty-two and telling the women I play pool with about what happened when I was in my early twenties, when I was kind of dumb, when I didn't understand that there was such a thing as grace, when I put too much faith in my ability to get up after falling down a flight of stairs.
-
I pretend I'm leaning up against a counter in someone else's kitchen, the bones standing out in my hands like the outlines of trees in winter, blowing on my tea and laughing about the time I thought I would never be whole again. With my sisters, with the guy who does my taxes, with whoever needed to hear it, it doesn't matter. I just want to be telling it, not waking up to it.
-
I want to have lived for decades, to know that things have an end just like they have a beginning, to be wise enough to remember none of us came into this world with a whole heart, that the best we can hope for is to leave with it healed. But we have to let those pieces go.
-
But when I'm done, I'm always twenty-two again, unsure how these kinds of stories end.

2011-03-02T16:19:00.001-08:00

essay question: what would you do if you were president?

kid: you know those people who sell the tamales? you know how

they always say, God bless you? I would make everything like that.

2011-02-22T14:14:00.000-08:00

we will make holiday.

[aslan]

-
Boulder. Mountains, air cold by four thirty, boys in wool hats. Hot things to drink, man playing guitar, vegan Mexican food, boots made for walking. Wide streets, paved with wide bricks, underneath the earth, moist with snow melt. Wind with a voice, mountains crouching against the sun, silence under the pines. Women's hands, strong and slender, rings on our fingers, songs in our bones.
-
Petaluma. Knitting shops with fat wads of wool yarn, displays of shining blunt needles. Man on the corner, selling strawberries. Sun in my eyes. I never notice until it's too late, him shrinking in my rearview mirror. Hands in the dirt, dishes that don't match. We all stop to watch the moon every night, out in the fields every morning. Brick streets, park benches, the woman at the bank with the green eyes. She said, Honey, you're twenty-two. You're doing the right thing.
-
Flagstaff. Night, Christmas lights twinkling, every store open late, doors thrown wide. Music at Celebration Square, dogs waiting on sidewalks, Thai food whenever I want it, laughing people we know weaving through the crowd, unshaven, long fingers. The smell of spice and candles, an old woman changing shirts in front of the three-way mirror in Rainbow's End, braless, her skin browned and lined, my sudden desire to unlearn my own self-conciousness.
-
San Angelo. Tex-Mex and the parking lot behind the church, chips and chunky queso with women who have known me for years and years, sinking into a bed that feels like arms around my waist. Summer starts in February, the earth baked and warming my feet, my face, the sky. Drive out to the lake like I'm seventeen and bored, watch the night, wish for things that I haven't met yet, can't name. Walk like I own everything, because these are all the things that I know. Nothing that I don't.
-
Where is it? I'm so hungry. I want to walk through every city on earth, every wilderness outside it, until I smell what I'm looking for, until I hear those voices, feel that fire. Where? West to the deserts, south to the bayous, north to the mountains. They say the gas is running out, but it doesn't matter. I'm not afraid of walking.
-
Where is this empty building, wide glass windows, dust motes lazily circling, a brick archway, that scent that makes the skin crinkle along the backs of my arms. I've only caught it twice. Where is such a man, one who isn't afraid to laugh, who blocks out the sun, who tells me things I need to know, who is tall enough to see past me. Where are the streets shining with recent rain, the goat skull nailed to the grill, the women who laugh, pie crust on the counter, sheer curtains lifting in the breeze, front door wide open, sand on the carpet, spinach dip and beer in the fridge.
-
Where is the rock climbing at dusk, the rituals of the apache rose peacocks, the telling of dreams, the hammock at night? I see them in dreams. I wish I could seal a letter, set it on their front porch at dawn, say, I'm coming. A deck built from worn boards, canoe tipped against it, a clothesline with dishtowels and dresses and ribbons, maps nailed to the wall. These things that echo inside me, they drive me wild, they remind me that I am a woman, a daughter, a mother. I will find them, or make them. But where?

2011-02-15T09:40:00.001-08:00

too wet to plow. hope you like to dance.

[rachel]

The other day I saw a picture of a baby girl, sitting on the coast on a blanket, clutching a doll to her stomach, staring out at the milky horizon, the churning waves. She looked so comtemplative, so self-contained. There was no one else in the picture, other than her siblings playing far off in the ocean, but I could tell the shot was taken by someone who loved her more than life, maybe a mother or an aunt.

-
I wonder why we begin as babies, why we don't just break out of the sand or the sea, fully formed, Venus rising from the ocean. Why we flail, bellow our frustrations, chortle our joy, why we spend a period of our lives mute and utterly dependent, but yet still ourselves, still the person we're going to be in our sixties.
-
I pictured this baby girl, her hands long and nimble, freckled with thousands of beach trips just like this first one, rolling out pie crusts on a counter, stabbing earrings through her lobes, cupping her palm against her husband's neck, swiping a paintbrush across a canvas, diving into a lake. Here she was. The beauty of it was none of us know what she is going to be.
-
May you grow like the ocean, sweet girl. May you have times where you crash forward, and times where you recede gracefully, come back into yourself. May you always buoy others up. May you keep some secrets locked away, may you be unexpected and wild, may you stretch as far as the eye can see. And may you guard someone else's beginning and end, the same way someone else guarded yours.

2011-02-06T19:49:00.000-08:00

i never set out to become anything

in particular, only to live creatively

and push the scope of my experience

for adventure, for passion.

[the dark side of the lens]

i knew a guy once, when i was a kid. we went to the same school. he was gone for a while one semester, and when he came back, he had a scar running up the side of his face, from his lip to his temple, a grotesque smile. his fourwheeler had flipped, pinning him in the dirt.

he didn't say much about it. when he was asked, he just relayed the facts, but he looked haunted. he was all blond and cheekbones, and though i'd never spoken with him before, i felt like i knew why.

i could picture him, hitting the ravine, the point where one wheel started to dip down, that moment of nongravity. that second when he began to fly through the air, and the world faded out, and all he could hear was a song, high, clear, and cold. it hit frenzy pitch, it felt like arms around his waist, like the truest thing there was. he couldn't remember anything after that.

that's what left the scar, i knew. a few weeks after that he left for homeschooling because we all watched his face, the place where the handlebar had gone clean through his cheek, even the teachers. we just couldn't seem to stop.

2011-02-05T11:07:00.000-08:00

anonymous girl: and it all happened because i usually get drunk before i get a bikini wax.

-
I want to learn more about microconsignment, make my own ice cream, learn to love the cold. I want to join the Peace Corps, invest in stocks, read the Bible from cover to cover, all the blood, all the gory, ask my questions, know what I believe, not be scared. I want to learn sign language, find a good pair of moccasins, build muscle all over my body so I can lift things up instead of always putting them down.
-
I want to buy a truck, pile blankets in the back, learn how to take a photo that I'll want in thirty years. I want to play my guitar again, turn an old TV set into an aquarium, make a list of every person I remember meeting ever. I want to work as a whitewater rafting guide, live somewhere with a clothesline, create my own line of metal sculpture (Iron Maiden) and sell it in the back of a Mexican food restaurant.
-
I want to be honest, look people in the eye, touch them when I'm talking to them. I want to learn to stop worrying that I'm not enough, that I don't look like everyone else or have the same friends as everyone else or want the same things as everyone else. I want to make people feel good in their skin. I want to beat the world record for holding my breath, even if I never tell a soul.
-
When I was younger I realized in stages that my ribcage was big. Weirdly big, always bigger than the girls I hung out with or worked with. We would be trying on clothes, and I could never zip up the dress over my ribs, even if a girl my size had just tried it on. For a long time it just confirmed what I secretly believed to be true, that I was fat.
-
But one day I was reading, and a voice in my head said, conversationally, Maybe it's because you have big lungs, a big heart. You ever think of that?
-
No, I hadn't. But one thing I don't want to do anymore is try to fit inside things that are too small for me.

2011-02-03T19:14:00.000-08:00

Ceramics makes me tense.

I'm out of step, a little behind. My classmates swear good-naturedly at the mud on their hands, but I have no good nature when it comes to the creative process. I growl in my throat when my walls collapse.

The professor can smell my irritation. I worry I will be like this all my life, loving the finished product, but too tense to enjoy drawing it up out of mud and water. Shoving it aside, putting it off, creating more work for later on, wishing it was glazed so I could put it up on the shelf already.

Ceramics makes me tense.

2011-02-01T20:07:00.000-08:00

If you're in Boulder, the first thing you must do is, obviously, take a hike.

In motorcycle goggles.

Of course, what is a hike without some warm-up...ninja kickboxing?

They made it look so easy in the DVD.

We may have transitioned into yoga at some point.

But mostly we just fell over a lot.

After yoga, we participated in some pre-hike meditation...

And after securing a dedicated if slightly asthmatic sherpa...

We were ready to engage in the mandatory beginning-of-the-hike booty dance.

There was snow frolicking...

And, yes, a little tree hugging.

Okay, a lot. Whatever.

We at the Pine Cone Appreciation Society never pass up a good photo op.

Once in town, we noticed the rocking horses had been downgraded to pigs.

Probably due to the economy.

We also hunted down mermaids in boutique stores...though

for some reason, she looks a little creepmeister in this photo.

Then we engaged in a little rock climbing. The place is called Boulder, after all.

Don't tell Tamura's mom.

And how better to end a day like this, than sixty-eight thousand games of pool...

Played while wearing mustaches.

The first annual Mustachio Bashio was, needless to say, a complete success.

The men simply couldn't stay away from us.

(That's us in the photo. Not the men. I'm not sure where they went.)

Good looking women, the great outdoors, and key lime truffles? Can't wait for next time, B.

Save us some pine cones.

2011-01-26T22:45:00.000-08:00

she went to wedding after wedding, ate too much cake,

drank too much wine, never caught the bouquet.

[tamura]

-
I had a dream. I was wearing this billowing veil, this white dress. Guys in tuxedos tripped past me, straightening their cufflinks or whatever it is guys in tuxedos do. The wind was blowing. I was standing in a doorway. I realized I was getting married.
-
I was getting married. I stood there, motionless in my dress, and a faceless stranger floated to mind, a man in a suit, and I thought, How could I.
-
Suddenly a boy on a motorcycle drove up. I vaguely remembered him from some other season of my life, also that he owed me money. He dragged the bike to the curb, hopped off, and called to me as he was jogging up the church steps. Hey, he said, I'm getting rid of my bike. Want it?
-
Automatically, I extended my hand. He tossed me the keys. I swept my skirt aside, got on the bike.
-
Felt it scream under my palms, between my legs, under the soles of my feet. Couple of revs. Everyone at the church laughed. I released the clutch. They kept laughing, because they thought I was playing around, and I smiled back at them as the bike picked up speed, because I knew I wasn't coming back.
-
And I thought, in my dream, in a sudden rush of longing- I don't want to be the girl who is married. I want to be the girl who rides motorcycles and wears mascara.
-
This seemed to me so achingly profound that I actually woke up.

2011-01-25T12:01:00.000-08:00

i haven't been this scared in a long time

[blink]

I was hanging out with a guy for a while, a friend from my last job, a job where we had to camp together for weeks at a time. And one day, weirdly, I noticed that we had begun to smell the same.

I'm not sure why. But that day I yawned, and my breath had the same musty quality as his after a day and a half of camping. When I pulled off my shirts at night after a run, the pits yellowed and damp like peach meat, his scent seemed to rise from my shirt. Why, I wondered.

And I may be making too big of a deal out of it, but it gave me pause. I thought, do I want to smell like him? Do I want his imprint in my glands? It felt too intimate, like I'd seen his mother in the supermarket clipping coupons. I didn't want to carry it. I just wanted to be myself in my skin.

I think about this sometimes, when I take off my shoes, when I roll over in bed and catch the warm hair smell in the pillow, when my dog buries her nose between my breasts. What does she know that I don't, I wonder. Who else is here, radiating from my pores?

I think of the people I've eaten with, slept next to, grasped hands with, broken hearts, kindred souls, words exchanged in passing. I wish there was a DNA test I could take, someone in a white coat I could ask. Which ones stayed? I would say, while she scribbled on a clipboard. And how long I will carry them?

I just somehow know that when it comes down to it, when we try to trace back our building blocks, it's not going to be about what we remember. Our minds lie to us too much. It's going to be about who we smell like.

2011-01-19T16:31:00.000-08:00

the devil trades in fear.

[mom]

-
-

There's a girl in the third row. I notice her from where I'm sitting in the back, one leg crossed over the other, trying not to check my text messages. It's my second day tutoring at this junior high, and already I'm getting that feeling, the what-am-I-doing-again feeling, the one I get when I accidentally use the kind of yeast that doesn't rise.
-
The teacher is reading aloud from The Outsiders, trying not to roll her eyes when the kids giggle at the drinking references. The girl is sitting a few seats back from her. Her legs are sticking out weird. I crane my neck around the kid in front of me, but I can't see. I give up and go back to ignoring my phone and the no-rise yeast feeling.
-
It's not until the girl stands up and walks to the trash can that I see her legs are artificial from the knee down. For some reason they're too short, her thirteen-year-old girl torso perched atop shins that don't match. Her hips seem unglued from their sockets, and she lurches across the room in fits and starts, utterly oblivious to my embarassment. She throws away a wad of paper, turns around and looks my direction. I stare at my hands.
-
The class period wears on, and I eventually migrate to her desk. She's bent over a brainstorming web with another girl, both scribbling away. I ask if they're okay, or if they need any help.
-
Her partner glances up with the deer-in-the-headlights look I'm becoming so well acquainted with, but the girl gives me a measured look and says no, thanks. I ask her name, and she tells me, and it's a beautiful name, but what gets my attention is her voice, the grace and intelligence there. She tosses her hair over her shoulder and chats with me for a minute, utterly confident, smart and funny. Then she goes back to work. I wander off, dazed.
-
At the end of the class period I end up back in my seat, where I started. She asks her deskmate to drop off the worksheets, starts packing her bag, alone in a sea of idle chatter. Already so far beyond it, like she wasn't even there anymore. And me, sitting in the back, waiting for the bell to ring, surprised she made her own grace. It makes me wonder if I ever really left junior high.

2011-01-16T13:56:00.000-08:00

how could i not have been aware of their magic?

[kelle]

-
I can see it. I don't know if I'm worthy of it, but I love this vision, I don't want to let it go, I want to build it. I see a butter dish with flowers on it, a fist clutching tulle, and I see beauty spread before me like a feast. I want to bring all good things together before this man shouting in laughter, heaving in death, this woman shrouded in wisdom, writhing in in labor. Cloud by day, fire by night.
-
I want to make a life, a beauty, that is an altar, heady and rich, cold stone and crusty mortar, reeking of dust, of blood, of flower stems broken. I want to sing all my days and mean it. I want to warm people to the core. I want to create and build and birth, and laugh at the time coming. It's too good to be true. But isn't everything? I read that once.
-
I woke up from a nap on the couch, and I heard some of the girls celebrating the plum ice cream someone made, and I thought, I love these people. They are so inventive, so ready to cultivate everything they have been blessed with, so tenacious of spirit. They are like this wherever they go, they carry it with them like a pair of shoes, like a prayer. They have given me a glimpse of the kind of eternity I want to be a part of. One long, uninterrupted look at the goodness of growing, of cooking, of eating, of community. How could I not have been aware?

2011-01-09T17:21:00.000-08:00

A boy gave me a rock. He gave me a rock, and I laughed, because a rock is kind of a lame gift. I thought maybe it was a joke or something. But he said, No. You have to break it open.

I asked why, and he said, Because there are crystals inside. I asked how he knew. He shrugged, said, That's what the guy at the counter told me.

I haven't broken it yet. It's still in the open box, eyeing me from across the room. It says, Will you risk it? Will you bring that hammer down? I want to know if it will be just another broken rock. It replies, You're a coward, and I'm not telling you anything.

2010-12-29T17:06:00.001-08:00

the pain of life makes the good stand out even more,

like water rising above the oil.

[kelle hampton]

i won't buy my soul off the rack.

[anitra freeman]

-
For a long time, I never really understood what people meant when they told me they were afraid of life. It was like saying they were afraid of something they were totally in charge of, and that also happened to be delicious, like soup.

I mean, sure, sometimes it does something totally unexpected, but you fix the problem, and it just makes a good story later. You never hear anyone say, Augh, I am so overwhelmed by this soup. They would shake and I would laugh and laugh. Life was my boyfriend. He had great hair. I trusted him absolutely.
-
And yesterday we broke up. I woke up, my face buried in my pillow, and realized for the first time that I have no reason to think that everything is going to be okay. None whatsoever. I thought, Things don't have any reason at all to turn out the way I want them to, and it felt like the time I was eight and fell out of the treehouse in the backyard and shocked the very life out of my body.
-
Look around, said that grating voice in my head, the one that tries to guilt-trip me when I take naps. Lots of people end up alone. Why shouldn't you be one of them? Lots of people are angry and isolated and go on eating frozen dinners for all eternity, grateful that no one is around to leave shoes under the coffee table. What makes you different? You think they were never twenty-two and wanted to dance?
-
So many women never find their purpose, or can't have kids, or lose their jobs and go into debt, or never fall in love, or get those premature eye wrinkles all the way around their eyes, or never start rock climbing even though they always wanted to.
-
Lots of women marry men because they crave their safety and their touch, but they don't love him and never will because he is too small, and they begin to hate each other, and they didn't mean it to turn out that way but that wasn't good enough. I could become the kind of woman I can't stand to see at the video rental store. After all, she didn't want to turn into her either.
--
I laid in bed, because really, what else are you going to do? I laid in bed and tried to tell myself that life was like soup, and we were dating, except I had to close my eyes, because my God.
-
Things stayed bad for a while, even with my eyes closed. But I realized, in stages, that I had to do it anyway, you know, get out of bed and go on being a woman in this world, even though things might happen to me that are too scary for me to even imagine now. And this didn't really make me feel much better, but I felt a little calmer when I realized that I had to do it. I mean, I'm here. There's really nothing else to do but try. It doesn't make sense to be scared when the alternative is not existing at all.
-
But I'm wondering about things, like God and hell and the people who stream around me in the grocery store. How did they get here? What have they done? Why did things play out that way, and are they sorry? Where are the people who are asking the right questions? Who is choosing to live beautifully and courageously? What does that look like?
-
I eventually got out of bed. I only did this because I figured there is probably about one big difference between the people who laugh in the street, and the people who eat frozen dinners all the time. Some of us wake up to a world we were never supposed to be in, and stay in bed.

And the rest of us get up.

2010-12-28T12:26:00.000-08:00

i need your arms around me i need to feel your touch

-
Stomach hurts. Like it's been put through a paper shredder. We're not speaking again. It's been days.
-
I keep forgetting to shower, except when I'm going out with high school friends migrating back for the holidays. I blow out my hair and shave my legs, put on a flannel shirt because I'll end up smelling like a brewery from whatever bar we go to. I got over the whole dry cleaning thing a while ago.
-
Eye makeup, earrings, smile and try not to swear. I started in junior high, couldn't stop even when they did. Ironically, everyone has grown out of it except me, the one who held out the longest. It still leaks out of me sometimes when I'm with them, like smoke, like I'm sucking on a cigarette no one can see.
-
My friends are beautiful, all bright hair and legs, and I feel so secondhand cool with them. Blow the hair out of my eyes, line up the cue ball, ignore the guys who ask what we're doing here. Bowling, someone quips, rolling her eyes. We laugh, and when they still won't leave we invent angry boyfriends. Manufacture our own protection out of thin air.
-
One girl is telling a story, swipes the cue ball from the table with one thin arm. She looks skeletal. Has she always looked like that? I can't remember. Stomach hurts. God, you'd think it was a gunshot wound.
-
I let the laughter roll around me and draw my heart back in. The men I know and the ones I don't, somehow always the same problem, the same mocking howl in my ear. My sister leaving, the job I haven't heard back from. The friends who have already left, who won't be back. My own quiet departure, waiting for me at the end of this season. We eye each other like we used to date.
-
Relax. The dentist told me if I don't stop grinding my teeth, I won't have any left by the time I'm forty. The strain is causing your jaw to triple in strength, he said, but what good is that without teeth? I laughed then, but for weeks afterward I dreamed of them splintering and snapping in my mouth. I spit them out like Tic-Tacs, saved them in prescription bottles.
-
The pool balls crack like lightning. A friend scrolls through her iPhone, shows off pictures of her cute coworkers. Nice legs! crows one girl, while a squinty-eyed guy checks out hers. Glance down, check for bullet holes.
--
Do you want anything, honey? the bartender asks. I open my mouth like I'm about to say something, but all I can think is, Yes. I want my teeth back.

2010-12-25T15:39:00.002-08:00

i know my kingdom awaits

and they've forgiven my mistakes

-
This Christmas eve is cold. We're not usually a Christmas lights kind of family- Dad writes off Christmas decorations as too pedestrian- but this year Mom said, I need luminarios.
-
I didn't take her seriously, but she came home with paper bags and packages of candles, thick and stocky and smelling like vanilla. My sister filled the bags with sand and nestled the candles in like Easter eggs. So it's the night before. And I'm lighting the luminarios.
-
I walk slowly, dipping to set the wicks on fire, and it occurs to me that I love my family. I think about how angry we make each other, sometimes. I think about all the problems we have, how scared we are that things are going to fall apart, because really that's all we know.
-
I think about the disappointment, just under the surface. Marriages, children, entire lives that just went wrong. Choices dictated by fear instead of courage. Words said in anger instead of love, instead of encouragement. How we demand each other to fill us, to be things that aren't possible, and the fury that follows, then the sadness. I think about the changing faces, deaths, divorces. We're like every other family in that way, I guess.
-
But as I weave and dip, touching flame to wick, I feel my love for them, which I too often ignore or forget. It swells like the light billowing inside the paper bags. I feel like I'm lighting their way home, making them welcome. It feels intimate, like I'm leaning over and touching a finger to each of their foreheads, smoothing out the worry wrinkle there.
-
I walk back towards the lighted house, shaking out my fingers. One candle went out, looking like a house with darkened windows. I bend over and light it again. It's effortless. Flame costs me nothing. The more I give, the more I have. Dozens of luminarios, like tea lights on water, glowing lanterns in the sky.
-
I want to say to us all, Everything changes. Things that are cold can suddenly flare up in the darkness, melt the molds that held them for so long, change their shape.
-
The wax drips into the sand. My bare feet sting with cold. The luminarios seem to say, We can take it from here, sister, so I go back inside, morph from flame-bearer back into twenty-something daughter home for the holidays, but that warmth flares inside me, licks my swells and hollows, whispers in my ear not to be afraid, that I will never be cold in the ways I fear.

2010-12-21T09:35:00.000-08:00

anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.

[georgia o'keeffe]

Over the last few months, I've started to write for a paycheck. I cannot tell you what this means for me.
-
This came at a time when my other friends were graduating from college, getting actual jobs as teachers or nurses or beginning grad school, and this made me feel like that weird aunt, the one with the itchy rugs who buys quinoa in bulk and boycotts sulfates.
-
A friend called this our freshman year of life, and though technically I'd graduated from college a year early, I claimed this year as my freshman year of life too. During my extra year, I moved to a city I loved for its mountains and the way people were always laughing in the street. I worked on a conservation corps, where I backpacked all the time and grew to understand life as this thing, this incredible thing, that I'd judged and dismissed like a boy who I then grew to love to oblivion.
-
Then I left for a town further west, with brick streets and late sunsets, live music and natural food. I lived on a farm and grew a lot of broccoli and sunflowers, and lived with good, wild people who helped me understand things. But at the end of the summer the cold set in, and I began to crave the desert. I wanted to be back in Texas, eating tortillas dipped in gooey honey on outside porches, seeing people who'd known me since I was a child in supermarkets.
-
So I came home, not sure about what was next. And farms and conservation corps saved my life, but I wanted to prove I could do it too, you know, get hired by an organization that wasn't always forgetting to pay me. I wanted to write. And Dad was the one who said, Write.
-
How glad I am to have him to talk to during this season of my life, an unexpected gift, since I didn't know I was going to come back home for these months. How comforting it is, to have him explain things to me, read over my stories and tell me he likes them, that I'm a good writer, that this is something I can do, something I'm good at without bending or faking.
-

He leans over the keyboard and he has that dad smell, like freshly printed newspapers and his leather wallet. He makes jokes about how ridiculous AP style is so I don't feel stupid, one large calloused finger tap tap tapping the tiny down key like he's keeping time. Even when I was a kid, I thought Dad's hands looked too big for his profession.
-
My point is, I'm surprised by how much I needed this season in my life. My other point is, everyone needs a father in addition to an editor. It's not good enough to have someone pointing out your mistakes if they can't make sense of the story behind them. I know there are people who have never known this comfort, and for them I am breathless with sorrow.

2010-12-20T11:44:00.000-08:00

there's something sexy about survival.

[waterford spa marquee]

-
I'm going to move to Park City and eat fruit at film festivals and make snowwomen. I'm going to run. I'm going to figure out how to say that I'm sorry.
-
I'm going to learn how to program a kiln and clean a gun. I'm going to grow my hair out to my knees and then shave it off. Solidarity. I will make it a point never to pass up a hug from my dog.
-
I will decide to do it or decide not to do it, but either way I'm not going to wake up thirty years later a coward. I'm going to remember to celebrate. I'm not going to stop changing. Hydrate or die.

2010-12-20T10:38:00.001-08:00

anne: this morning, my lotion bottle fell over,

and it hit a bottle of shampoo, and then that

hit my can of mousse. it was a total domino effect.

me: whoah.

anne: more breaking news to follow.

I hate the world. I really do. I'm done with advertisements and fake nails and OCD things like leaf blowers.

I'm over the Internet and drywall and porn and people who never learned how to like things. (Did you hear she's pregnant? God.)

I'm through with people who do things for money because they aren't brave enough to do what they love, what the world needs desperately for them to do. (But! But-then-who's-gonna-take-out-my-trash?)

I'm finished with total lies, like this whole economy of scarcity, this whole atmosphere of fear, this dog-eat-dog bullshit. (He tells me I'm naive. I ask him, When have you ever seen a dog eat another dog?)

I'm very angry. I want to throw things like lightbulbs and VCRs and spears. I want to turn everything red, draw out the guts with my fingernails, watch them spool in my hands, smear my victories over my belly and breasts and run through the streets whooping.

When I've had my fill of carnage I will turn and leave. I swear to you I will never look back.

2010-12-17T09:06:00.000-08:00

your left lung is smaller than your right lung

to make room for your heart.

[u.s. dept. of health and human services]

Flagstaff. Bike tire marks on doors. Banana chocolate chip bread cut with a pocket knife. Scuffed food boxes set up next to hiking boots, everything tight, together, always ready to leave. Six, seven, eight people to a house, sleeping on Thermarests, floors covered in pouches of tobacco, U.S. atlases, backpacking food.

Narrow streets, bright with Christmas lights, bikes weaving in and out of Subaru Foresters, mountain dogs. Boys from Alaska, air shimmering in sift light, prayer flags nailed to a skylight. Pine cones scattered in forest floor backyards, lovelier than Easter eggs, cold mountain air on wooden steps.

I stand next to a tree stump. I put my fingers in the scar. The sun slips behind the mountains like yolk, the air is cold, and I know that I dreamed about this last night, standing here. I feel the things that I love the most move around me, I know that the unknowable is here. It says, This is only the beginning.

Pine trees spearing the sky, my cairns. Pomegranites bleeding like wounds. Women with strong arms. They are different, but like the ones I remember. Their swearing sounds the same as their laughter.

2010-12-09T10:15:00.000-08:00

mom: come on, anne! powerwalk with us!

anne: i prefer to celebrate my whiteness in

other ways. like tap dancing. and water polo.

and the dragon was enraged at the woman-

[revelation 12:17]

Sweet Darkness

David Whyte

The House of Belonging (1996)

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

-
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

-
The dark will be your womb tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
-

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you

2010-12-07T10:43:00.000-08:00

me: we need to work on our method

for getting our cars to start.

anne: (puts both hands on dash) start, car!

staaaaaaaaaaart! c'mon baby!

(silence)

me: no, i meant, like...learn how to use a jump.

anne: oh. you meant...right.

-
A few months ago, I fell down a flight of stairs. At times like those, it's handy to still have bouncy little-kid bones, because when I am sixty-four after an experience like that I will likely not leap up, yank my dress back down, and shout, Augh! I am, like, sooo embarrassed!
-
Like with all disasters, at the time I was talking on my cell phone, gesticulating a lot, looking over my shoulder. When I extended my foot I was so sure that there was something underneath it that I put all my weight there without looking, twenty-two years on a surface that existed only in my mind.
--
When I started to fall, the instinct I'm always ignoring took over. My phone hit the ground and my arms flew to my head as I twisted into the air, my body already taking the situation in stride while my brain stammered, Wait, but I thought...?
-
And I was utterly falling, flailing limbs, spitting hair. My friend's house is old and beautiful, and that narrow, polite stairway could not contain my disasters. A shoulder almost knocked off the molding. My thigh hooked around the banister and thought seriously about taking it down with me. I actually left a footprint on the wall.
-
I hit the floor, stunned, and almost immediately rolled over and leapt to my feet. Get up, there may be more, barked my panicked brain, but there was no space left to fall into.
-
I eventually lived down all the StairMaster jokes. But for some reason, that landing still haunts me. It comes back sometimes when I'm standing still, that feeling like the earth under me has been sucked away. I teeter on my heels, and absently think about the faint imprint of my foot on the wall, angled towards the ceiling. Walking into nowhere.

2010-12-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

man #1: i'll hire you.

man #2: how much will you pay me?

man #1: do you want money, or your life back?

I'm twenty-two, and I'm in my sister's decimated old high school bedroom, throwing things away.

Everything is here, I think, wading through twenty-one years of accumulated girljunk. Soup to nuts. From wrinkled unicorn sticker sheets to random college papers on Cormac McCarthy or crowdsourcing. Vaguely embarrassing notes passed in photojournalism, more acutely embarrassing journal entries from junior high, brochures about abstinence or job fairs, single socks, broken Christmas ornaments, postcards from high school friends, hemp necklaces from camp. Little jars of Play-Doh, sheets and sheets of stickers, those photos that have stuck it out for years, despite the fact that everyone is just a little too far away and eternally out of focus.

I pick up a rubbery Camp Longhorn bracelet, and I see the sun on the lake, feel cold ice cream on my tongue, hear a girl laughing, her arm around my back, but that's all. I flip through photos of classmates, but only remember weird things about them, like, He only ate Zebra cakes for lunch every day sophomore year, and, She wore a Kerrville Folk Festival t-shirt once. I read notes from old friends about boys I can't recall, fill a bag with bracelets and cross necklaces from dozens of youth retreats.

They are all those kinds of things that you can neither keep nor throw away, except today I'm throwing them away. I'm just tired of carrying around the girl I used to be, all her many versions, feeling responsible for her. Sometimes it feels like she's a younger sister who took off a long time ago and never came back, leaving me with nothing but guilt, her image, and her seven thousand yearbooks. I just want to get rid of the evidence. I crave light travel.

It's when I'm shuffling through yet another stack of papers that I catch it, this scent on the air, in the tips of my fingers. What is it? It smells delicious, like heaven. It's as faint as it could possibly be, the step before nonexistence. It's so alluring, for some reason.

I brush my fingers against my nose, dip my face down and breathe in while flipping through the papers again. It's there, not so much in the sheets as in the air around them. I pull one of the sheets out at random and scan it. It's a form in French, my visa information painstakingly recorded in cramped writing.

And I remember. I remember waiting for our bags at Charles de Gaulle, frustrated, confused, euphoric all at once. I remember this same scent, filling the air, lovely and familiar, jarring in a foreign airport. Heaving my luggage off the conveyor belt, feeling the damp against my leg. Unzipping the outer compartment of my bag and seeing the glittering, crushed glass, shards as fine as sand, as bright as snow.

I've forgotten so many faces and conversations, but not the swell of Brighton Laughter in that sterilized baggage claim. I was twenty, and I thought, This is the most delicious scent in existence. When I am ninety, I will remember the shape of it in my nose, the way it felt like something new, like fear, like this woman I want so badly to be. This shattered perfume bottle was the first thing to greet me in this other country, and someone else might have taken this as a bad sign, but I knew what it was. An offering, an absurdly lavish, broken blessing.

Everywhere we walked that day, we carried with us the smell of laughter, of good omens. For whatever reason, this is what I chose to remember. I saved the visa form. I couldn't find the scent on anything else.

2010-11-25T20:27:00.000-08:00

and I will have blue.

[maya angelou]

it's thanksgiving, and it's lovely. i'm home with family, i have a job, and this makes it seem like anything is possible, like no matter how many hearts i break, including mine, everything will grow up and be more wonderful than i could have imagined. it's cold outside, and i love it in a way that i reserve only for dreams, and naps, and empty rooms with brick and wood and swirling dust motes. i love it like my sister's voice laughing inside a car that i've just shut, like signs i don't understand on unbroken highways to places i haven't yet smelled. to me it's like small trucks and bleached bones and twenty-somethings on farms, like warm arms, like the weight of a book in my hand that i already know i'm going to like.

2010-11-17T20:27:00.000-08:00

me: do you think she's happy?

anne: i think she got what she wanted.

There are days when I am filling up the dog water bowls or wiping off the dining room table with a damp rag or eating yogurt with a fork because all the spoons are dirty, and I wonder what shape life is supposed to take.
-
It's nothing earth-shattering. I'm not unhappy. It's just a feeling, like when I wake up in the morning just after a dream that was too good to remember, and all I can say is that there was a woman with a book and a late-afternoon kind of river.
-
I think about the people I know, how sad they seem, the things we do with our spare time that I never really even notice because we've always done them, like watching television and surfing the Internet endlessly. I think about how upset I get when I feel like I can't do exactly what I want, and the deeper sadness I feel when I realize that I'm the kind of person who gets upset when I can't get exactly what I want, and it's not okay.
-
It's like waking up one day and realizing that your mother left you when you were three, and that's kind of a big deal. Like there are all these things, this wisdom and these relationships and these days you should have spent watching her swan-dive into a river, that never happened. She should have taken you to a neighborhood diner too early in the morning to eat pancakes with her girlfriends or held your chin in her hand while painting bright red lipstick on your too-young mouth, and she never did, and maybe she was never capable of that kind of poetry anyway.
-
And one day you're sitting in a library, looking up something about the judicial system for a really boring school project, and you see a photo of a woman in a business suit with long brown hair leafing through a binder, and you feel your loss like an open wound in your gut, like a mocking howl that goes on and on. The chain was broken with you, it says. How could you give this? You can't even name it. And you're crying like the small girl no one ever reminded you to be, over a reference book, over a stock photo of a woman who has hair like yours.
-
I just wonder what our relationships are supposed to be like, what our lives are supposed to look like, how we're supposed to feel. I know we're supposed to feel the sharpness, the scary, the glory and the bloody, but what we really seem to feel is numb, and I don't think that was supposed to happen at all. It's like bleeding out inside a plastic bubble.
-
I don't want disappointment. Or satiation, her cuter but infinitely scarier sister. What I want is the capacity to live differently, to live at all. Or at least break the bubble and go find someone who knows how to put on a tourniquet.

2010-11-15T14:56:00.001-08:00

She said, I'm scared I'll break you, like the time I was seven and knocked my grandmother's star clean off the wall.

I am scared you will be swallowed by the black holes that I fling, the thousands of reverse births, the vases that implode on my wheel, the prayers sucked back down my throat and regurgitated as howls.

What if my God is a statue in your door, my fist a pillow at your back, my fear a well you draw from? My heart to you an open padlock, a forgotten combination.

What if my language is Braille, the non-tongue, felt and not heard, pebbles against your thumb when what you wished was a windstorm in your ear? No.

That is why, she said. Please don't ask me again.

2010-11-10T11:48:00.000-08:00

She said the trouble was that she was not a real person;

she was trying to become a person.

[The ghost of the weed garden: a study of a chronic schizophrenic]

There would be no purging, I knew, unless I asked all the questions.

[Maya Angelou]

I was burned, a few summers ago, during a weekend with friends. It was one of those weekends where we camped out and ate cheap Mexican food with our fingers and wore as little clothing as we could get away with.

A day spent floating on the river left my chest seared so badly that I hissed between my teeth when anything touched it, even the flat, broad palm of the sun. I couldn't bring myself to look at what I'd done. I kept my eyes locked on my face while putting on makeup in the mornings, as though the skin below my neck was a deformed child, or a man weeping in the street.

I didn't heal for a long time. For weeks and weeks the wounds remained, scabs tracked across my flesh like roaches, my skin crusted and weeping like that Italian sculpture of Mary Magdelene. It will heal, be patient, said my mother, a woman who has lived for years and has seen the way things are.

I knew in my heart that this wasn't true. I looked at the curve of my breast, the white skin suddenly swirling into a mottled, angry purple, the transparent strips of skin my fingers tore off like the waterlogged membrane of a boiled egg, and I knew that this time, I had damaged myself beyond repair. All summer, I went to class and went to work and hit the treadmill at the gym while the skin over my heart curled up and withered like dead leaves. I saw it clinging to the inside of the shirts that I pulled off at night.

I shed myself gradually, like a snake, the purple fading back into white in stages, like some bizarre, slow-motion reverse sunset. My flesh knit back together, slowly and methodically, as if under the hands of a pensive, squinting seamstress. I should have been relieved, but when I cupped one hand over the healing skin so I could only see the part that was never burned, I knew the score. Things never go back to the way they were.

These days I can barely make out the slight discoloration just above my left breast. There is a jagged line, so faint that I am the only one who can see it, or maybe that's just because I'm imagining it. But for some reason, it haunts me. I wonder if it will resurface when I age, the damage blooming over my heart like a badge. I wonder if cancer lurks beneath the surface, biding its time, waiting until I have more to lose.

It's true that I have no faith in the goodness of things, in this body created to renew itself, like waves on a shore. I was raised by credit card bills, the cultural anecdotes of skin damage from tanning booths and emotional baggage from one-night-stands. Anything that feels good, looks good now, you'd better believe you'll pay for it later, and the bill comes at the end of the month, never the beginning.

This is why I watch my healed skin, affronted, suspicious. It's so hard for me to believe that the damage I inflict can simply leave one day, a day like every other, simply walk off and leave me open-mouthed and braced for impact.

2010-10-27T15:40:00.000-07:00

kate: ...and then, she will call me in a fury.

anne: at which point you will set everything straight.

kate: no, i will be too busy avoiding everybody and eating pie and, uh, kayaking.

anne: oh no. not pieyaking.

anne: i've got it. the theme for our chicken coop will be "coop d'etat."

kate: oh! oh! marie antionomelette!

anne: the pheasants are revolting!

kate: off with her egg!

dad: have you both been drinking?

this fall is special, precious to me. i want to drive an old land cruiser on an older farm and eat pumpkin-based foods. i want to make it a point to see sunsets and not lie to people because i will just not feel like it anymore. i want to listen to a lot of tom petty and work on my laugh lines.

i want to rest. i want to soak up the desert part of texas like it's tea, the unsweetened kind, because for some reason that's always seemed more refreshing to me than water. i want to turn dirt into soup mugs and grow strong, strong, strong.

i want to shed all the space and time that i don't need. i want to get ready to travel light, but in the meantime travel happy. i want to be with my dog so we can hug each other. i want to coax something out of the ground, even if it's only myself.

more than anything, i want to learn something about kindness, something about being patient as the earth. something about loving in all the places where it's long since fled.

it feels like an arranged marriage sometimes, the way people talk to me about God. they say, You need to love him deeply, now, you're running out of time, or, Don't you want security? Don't you want to get into heaven? This is the only way, as if you can throw terrifying and sacred words like heaven around, act like it's a club in san francisco with only so many spots sanctioned by the fire marshall, and God is someone you have to name-drop convincingly in order to get in, and Jesus is the starlet on your arm.

the deeply painful part is, i feel like it is an arranged marriage because i feel like i'm not talking to him, just to other people who know him and are counting the days until we tie the knot so they can finally breathe easy. and maybe i see him, from the back, once or twice, talking to a woman at a bar or tying his shoe before he gets on the elevator, but i never see his face, and he doesn't seem to sense me. i avoid him like i have a crush on him, but i don't. i've just never liked consolation prizes.

what has to happen, like what happens in all stories about love, is i have to leave.

i have to leave and go somewhere else, somewhere where no one knows this guy. i feel guilty, like i draft dodged or tried to pick up my dry cleaning without a ticket, but i'm also secretly relieved. time passes, and i change in a couple of big ways, or maybe in a lot of small ways, and my hair grows longer and i lose the shape of the life i had before and take up something trendy like basket weaving.

then, incredibly, i see him one day. i recognize his back, the only part of him i know well. he's listening to someone talk about their wife, and his hand is touching their elbow so gently that he probably doesn't even realize he's doing it, and i'm not sure how he got here or whether he's here because of me or for someone else or if it's just a coincidence, but for the first time ever i kind of want to hear his voice.

not talk to him, yet, just listen to the tones rise and fall, and the silent spaces in between, where he breathes and listens and bleeds. i sit back on my haunches and lean against the cold brick of the building behind me and don't think about much of anything, just feel calm, like someone is threading my hair into a braid, slowly. i watch his hands.

days later i start looking for him, but he's gone again. this time i'm the one who gets left, and that is entirely different than leaving someone you didn't think you wanted. i think i see him three separate times, and my heart bounds in my chest like a startled deer, but i'm mistaken. i talk to people who've seen him, and they're not pushy, they just say, he'll be back, relax, will you? have a bearclaw.

but i don't want a bearclaw, because life is mysterious again and doughnuts kind of ruin the effect. and then, finally, i see him again, when my curiousity blazes out and turns quiet and inward. he's walking towards me over a hill, like we have a date, and i see his face, and it looks like his hands. it's not the guy i thought i had to marry. at least, he doesn't match the description.

when he reaches me, i turn and walk with him because that feels like the most natural thing. we're quiet for a while, but i catch him smiling a couple of times, off in the distance. i feel like crying, for some reason, and i also want him to give me some kind of signal, that it's okay, that we're friends even though i forgot him. i have a headache kind of coming on, because of the wanting to cry and all, but what really hurts is my heart and i can't stand it anymore so i screw up my eyes and whisper, i am sorry. i am sorry. his shoulder brushes mine. i feel his arm wrap around me.

i start blubbering, choking out words incoherently, trying to get everything out at once, everything that i fear and hate, all the things i'm so deeply ashamed of, like it's poison and i can't bear even the aftertaste of it for one more second. he listens for what feels like thousands of years. when i pause because i feel like my chest has caved in, he says, sister. you have known grief. i cry until i am almost certain that i am going to die. i think i have broken both of our hearts.

he is quiet for a long time. i think he wants to make sure that i am okay. then he begins to speak, and i listen, but what he says is not what i expect. he doesn't talk about the poison, like it evaporated when i let it out, and he doesn't deal in things that no longer exist.

instead, he tells me things that i have felt the ache of all my life, that to be a woman is not cursed, that the person i am terrified of being does not in fact exist, why i was left behind. he asks my name, and i tell him, and he laughs in the happiest way and murmurs my real name in my ear, like the most delicious secret, one you suddenly remember you heard a long time ago. i feel the way you feel when a boy on the street tells you that you are beautiful, and you feel like you will never need to hear it ever again, because this one time was so wonderful and filling and enough. except i know this time it really is.

and when i come home, i am laughing and can't stop, except for the times that i get so excited and serious that i can't even speak. the people in my basket weaving class are alarmed at my joy and try to get me to lie down. the people in the doughnut store understand my silence and offer me an apple turnover.

knowing him now makes everything that happened before seem kind of funny, or maybe kind of sad, but it doesn't matter to me, in the way that once you've given your speech for your oral interp class you almost completely forget how much you'd been dreading it. it's like life, except more frightening and infinitely more exciting and with clearer, colder air. it's like love, except so much deeper, more encompassing and mysterious, closing over your body like warm ocean. yes. it will be like water.

or better yet, tea.

2010-10-18T09:48:00.001-07:00

i knew it the moment i touched her. it was like coming home.

[sleepless in seattle]

-
someone said, she has a gift. these words are precious to me. they sound like someone wrapped something up when i wasn't looking and laid it in my soul, like there is more to me than the woman awkwardly scratching her ankle at the post office, or trying to reason with her dog on the corner of bishop and concho street.
-
it sounds like even more than that. it sounds like i am a gift to the world, like that saying that is so awful to us is true- thinks she's god's gift to the world. like i am a being that can help, can heal, can bring back good, can rescue people. it sounds almost too good to bear.

2010-10-12T21:13:00.000-07:00

me: ugh. i never enjoy parties.

anne: that will all change, at my first annual mustachio bash-io.

-
I can't remember what age I was when I realized that I didn't love other people. I think it just occurred to me one day, while I was staring at my desk during the SATs, or driving with my hand out the window, caressing the airstream.--
-
To be honest, I felt vaguely weary towards them, strangely jealous, like the planet was populated entirely with younger, obnoxious, over-privileged half-siblings of mine. For the woman checking her lipstick in her rearview mirror, the boy staring at his feet on the train, I had nothing. I have a tendency to be practical, I think, which is one of the very worst things a human being can be.
-
More than anything, I felt a desire for them to be responsible for themselves. I was fine with sitting next to them in second period, or maybe eventually partnering with them and starting a bank or something, but past that I wanted them to sort out their own blood. I would see homeless people and it made me angry, how they had the audacity to be needy, how middle-class discomfort was their livelihood.
-
This changed in the weirdest way. I went to junior high with this guy named Justin, who carried dog-eared comic books around a lot and had kind of a soothing voice, for someone who slouched so much. He was my stand partner in orchestra. He left a birthday card on our music stand on the day I turned fifteen. By the time I noticed it, he was walking out the door, pulling on his backpack over his jacket.
-
This was not when I began to warm towards people. Actually, I was not kind to Justin like he deserved. I cringed a little when he talked to me, because he played with Magic cards a lot and hung out by this tree at lunch, where all the unpopular kids ate. My friends made fun of me for a week when they found the birthday card in my binder.
-
I never saw him again, but years later, I woke up one morning thinking about him. Not in the random old-classmate kind of way, but involved, intense. Almost like I was worried about him, or maybe in love with him.
-
I did some serious soul-searching and determined that I was not, in fact, in love with him. But for a long time, I thought about him. Every day. All the time.
-
I felt an urgency for him that drove me to radical action, for me anyway, which was prayer. Honest prayer, something like fervent prayer, I think for the first time in my life, prayers that were less like conversations with God, and more like the noise you make in your throat when you think someone is about to step in front of a bus.
-
I would be checking my email, or rubbing the polish off my nails, and have to squeeze my eyes shut, lost for a moment in this bizarre, unidentifiable despair, my hands gripping the sink, like a mother or a wife. God, I would say in my head. God. Don't let it happen.
-
I wondered about him, where he was, how he was doing, who he was hanging out with. I imagined him lonely, afraid, aimless, and feeling rose in my throat. I worried that he was sad, in trouble. I wanted to take my fifteen-year-old self outside and take her down to the ground for her hair-flipping, her eye-rolling. You didn't deserve him, I wanted to tell her, once I had her in a half nelson, her cheek against the concrete, spitting hair. You coward.
-
And then, like a fever or a flood, it receded. I don't mean that I stopped caring for this boy- a man now, I guess- but rather the strange sense of urgency about his well-being did. It was replaced by a sense of peace that felt almost anticlimactic, like when the thunder exhausts itself and the rain finally starts to fall.
-
To this day I don't know what it was. Maybe he needed prayer, and I was the only person connected to him with enough of a guilt complex to deliver. I do think God wanted me to pray for him. Maybe for his sake. Maybe for mine.
-
I'm not sure why it happened, but it left me different. It really did. Not completely, not all the time, but in my life afterwards I began to change. Not like I was in love with people, but like my heart had warmed towards them, like it had gone through the low heat cycle in a microwave.
-
It turned me into less of a bystander, I think. It's like someone told my heart that we're all in this together, and my heart said, Hmmm. I hear ya.
-
It convinced me that there are some people out there who need a sister, need someone to look out for them, even if they've never met her, even if she's the snob who used to sit next to them in seventh period. It made my throat constrict, wondering who has maybe been praying for me, who saw that I was hurt or distant during a season of my life, who woke up at night to whisper my name to a silent room. This, more than almost anything else, seems unbearably holy.

2010-10-12T20:51:00.000-07:00

despair is a slow death, and a lifetime of

anger is like a lifetime of heavy drinking:

it shows in your face and your eyes and

your words even when you think it doesn't.

[shauna niequist]

-
-

I used to not trust old people. Things have changed now.

I think that when we are young, we are almost universally good at deception. You can hide behind the promise of eventual redemption. When you are young, no one can tell if you are good or not, because your face doesn't have to own up to anything yet.

But then you wake up one day, and everything is different, because you can feel it coming, the thing that was never supposed to happen but is going to take you somewhere else. Everyone else can sense it too, in your breath, in your eyes.

By the time you are old, really old, have lived for almost a century, maybe loved, certainly worked and bled, you have either really begun to die or really begun to live. The camp you have chosen is apparent.

This is why I trust old people now. Young people are a different story entirely.

2010-10-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

God's tabernacle was only a tent. God lived in a tent.

[edward markquart]

anticipation danced between

each of their dreams,

as a small voice whispered-

get ready, it's coming...

I think about Marilyn Monroe when I brush my teeth. This is because my sister taped a deck of Marilyn Monroe cards to our bathroom door, for some Anne reason. I mostly like it, except for those mornings when i wake up looking kind of like Woody Allen. I can see her judging me.

There's a lot of cards that show her all sexy, lounging around in black lingerie or leaning forward to show her cleavage, smiling that glassy smile. I bet midway through her career she got really tired of photographers hitting on her. That's what her smile says to me, anyway.

But there's one card, just one, that shows her young, her hair long and unexpectedly dark, wearing kind of a dorky bathing suit on a beach, one hand self-conciously pulling up the front of her suit. It reminds me that her name was actually Norma Jean, that she went to junior high somewhere and maybe didn't like lasagna and sweated a lot on her first date.

This makes me smile a little, and consequently drool some toothpaste, but then I just feel sad. Because Norma Jean died a long time ago, and she was too young for it and didn't seem to grow into herself, and now her much-coveted body has had decades to rot to the bone.

And it seems likely that God had some hard questions for her when they met, finally face to face, maybe walking towards each other on the side of a hill. I imagine him as terrible but also unexpectedly gentle, and he maybe wanted to know things like why she used her beauty the way she did, to seduce men instead of inspire them, to make women feel small instead of glorified, peaceful.

Maybe he asked her why she committed violence against her body, on that last night and all the days before that. Why she allowed the world to name her instead of listening to the one He whispered in her ear.

I worry about all this, because I know in my heart that these questions are coming for me, too, that there is a Being who will come upon me one day like a waterfall or a shadow, and the only answers I have scare me. I do the things I do mostly out of vanity, and cruelty, and fear, and I am somehow certain that Norma Jean had far more justification for these actions than I do.

I don't say this in a he's-coming-so-get-your-act-together kind of way. I just think about this girl on my bathroom wall, and the little I know about her story feels kind of like a warning to me. It feels kind of like I don't take the things I do seriously enough, don't realize that thousands of little actions are making me the person I am, and she looks a lot different than the person I like to think I am.

I brush my teeth and wonder about meeting God, what a strange and terrible and wonderful thing it will be, whether I will have decided before that day to love more and loathe not at all. It is a fearful thing indeed.

2010-10-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

ryan: we should have hoed these beets earlier.

chris: gee, ryan. you sound so debeeted.

kate: yeah, don't beet yourself up about it.

scott: remember, a beet in the hand is worth-

bob: this ends now.

put down your sword.

[jesus]

It's a Tuesday. I am sitting outside a questionable burrito joint with two other girls. We are all scarfing things that were most assuredly not grown using sustainable practices.

We've been living on this farm all summer, and are supposed to be food snobs, but today is a Tuesday and so quinoa and potato-lentil pancakes just aren't going to cut it, thank God. We are eating overpriced chimichangas in town and trying to remember the last time we showered.

This turns out to be a real exercise in memory recall. This also has a lot to do with why we're sitting outside.

Susan narrows her last shower down to Thursday or the day before. I am swirling my straw around in my glass and wondering whether we should get some tortillas to go when she adds, Last night I dreamed that I was stoned.

Lesley and I look at her. There's a joke in there somewhere, but I can't remember how it would go.

Susan crosses, uncrosses her arms, says, I was buried up to my waist, in the ground. Then they started throwing rocks. She laughs, humorlessly.

I tried to shield myself, you know, with my hands, but what are hands against men with rocks?

I twist the hairband on my wrist around one finger. I remember crushing my hand between two rocks earlier in the week, the terrible words I'd hissed under my breath, the mark it had left in my skin.

I think it was because of the article yesterday, Susan adds. About a woman who was stoned for adultery. In Afghanistan. It took her half an hour to die.

We sit in silence, in the California sun, aware of the pulses pounding in our throats, our cauterized wounds. I wonder about the reporter who covered her death. Did he watch? Did he hear about it later? How does something like that even work?

I couldn't think of what to say out loud, so I tried to speak to this woman, silently, in my head. I told her, You are too holy to be murdered in the dirt.

She replied, Yes. And you are too young to die in your sleep.

2010-10-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

do well.

[mom]

she's not really a bake sale kind of woman.

[cindy]

I was driving back from Ballinger the other day. Driving through this part of Texas is all sky, no earth, mostly silence.

I felt the vibration first. Then I heard the thrum of an engine rise behind me. I adjusted my rearview mirror and caught a flash of black, of leather, then nothing.

Then a motorcycle hurled past me on the highway, like a tightly muscled cat caught in a sprint. I turned to watch it pass, and I saw a woman on the back of the bike. I saw her face for an instant, and thought, Here she is.

She had her head tilted back, one hand gripping the handle behind her, one finger looped in the belt of the man driving. Her eyes were closed, like she was listening to a song she hadn't heard since she was a girl, something half-forgotten and strange, something she still couldn't get enough of. She was tall.

Her hair was long, whipping behind her like waves, bleached like bones in the sun. Her skin was tanned to leather, constellations of age spots running from her cheeks to her hands. A tube top kept a loose rein on her body. Everywhere you looked, there she was.

Here is woman, one of her faces. I saw it in her, the thing that magazines and television tell me is so elusive, is tied up somehow with slim thighs and really white teeth.

This woman was old. She looked dangerous, but she also looked like a mother. Like she could break the end off a pool cue and pin you to the table, then cup your face in her hand, calloused from gripping handlebars, soft from Jergen's lotion. She probably has a daughter somewhere, I thought.

She is free. She loves things like roads and leather. There was a line on her face for every awful and wonderful thing that she has done, that has been done to her. She was absurdly beautiful.

People would say, She's a hundred and seven. What is she thinking, wearing a tube top? No one wants to see that. But I'll tell you this, no woman alive has her body.

She has an originality that it will take me fifty years to match. I bet she laughs when people tell her what she can't do. I'll bet that when she drives the bike, her husband can't keep his hands off her.

I saw her man, too. He was old, massive, like a tree that shields everything. He didn't look like he'd be modeling Clavin Klein briefs any time soon, but I saw his arms, his shoulders, the massive muscle rippling there, his age making him, if anything, stronger.

I thought, Here is a man. He knows where to take her, he can protect her from anything. She is safe in his arms.

My point is, it felt good to see a woman, next to her man, without the sarcastic commentary, without the jury of my peers shooting them down as not sexy enough.

There is so much more to it than we realize, and they're not slowing down to give us any tips. They have a pool hall to get to.

2010-10-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

anne: yeah. kate has lots and lots of free time.

me: what are you wearing? is that a fitted bedsheet?

anne: lots and lots of free time.

the pain of a broken heart is not so much as to kill you,

but not so little as to let you live.

[not sure]

- when i was a kid, i would hang out in lowe's a lot. my parents went through this home renovation phase, and they would let me stay in the kitchen mock-up section while they picked out paint thinner or whatever.

i would walk through the tiny fake kitchens, each with their glossy granite countertops and sinks that didn't work, and i would pretend that I was somewhere else, somewhere without any substance maybe, but nothing depressing happened and all the empty cabinets had a coat of high-gloss paint.
-
i would pretend to be thirty and open the drawers, looking for the spices that my thirty-year-old self would have organized. she favored cumin and cloves. i would look over the sink and pretend i was looking through a window onto a garden, a secret kind of place, with trees whose branches hung really far down and the sound of water trickling somewhere.
-
i would reach down to scratch a bloody mosquito bite on my ankle, and imagine i was petting my dog. she would be one of those dignified kinds of dogs, something English maybe. she would curl up next to me while i drank tea in an overstuffed armchair and read really good books.
-
my eight-year-old self understood how this was going to work. she knew what she wanted. she didn't think much about what she was actually worth, or what other people would or wouldn't be willing to give her.
-
she didn't think much about whether it was selfish to have a pretty kitchen when other people didn't have food. she didn't wonder about how much that kind of kitchen would cost, once she figured in labor and tax. she didn't try to figure how many months she could make the payments on those granite countertops once she got laid off. she just liked it. she figured that if she liked something, she might as well set her sights on that instead of something she didn't like, or nothing at all.
-
my twenty-two-year-old self is just confused. there are so many people who spend so much time explaining to me that i should trust their whims, not my instincts. what they want me to do is wise, what i want to do is foolish, selfish, misguided. i try to be honest, and the only things they have for me in return are derision and silence.
-
i have a solution. design your own kitchen. i'll invite you over when mine is done.

2010-09-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

If eastern Oregon was a man, he would smell like campfires. He wouldn't have a house, because his motto would be, Why settle. He would wear a hat low over his eyes. He would know things.
-
I wouldn't have to explain myself to eastern Oregon. When I felt cold with hate towards this world and the things in it, he would start a fire. When I had to leave, he would give me a knife for the gators. Eastern Oregon always has an extra.
-
When I finally came back, he wouldn't be there, because you don't stay in one place very long in the desert. It's not how it's done. But he would have left a trail for me to follow. He would know that I could take it from there.
-
And when I'm finally ready, I would find him again. It's important to watch for his hands. It's the surest way of recognizing him. I would bring him a gator head as a souvenir, and that would make him smile. I'm the only one who can do that.

2010-09-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

i know this woman. she makes me so happy.

i know hardly anyone like this. that is part of the reason why she is my treasure. but mostly it is just because of her, because of the way her heart is.

i feel safe when i'm around her because i know that it isn't crazy to be good, to be loving, to have your eyes fixed on the middle place. she laughs at dangerous and scary things, like warrior queens do, and so i know where she came from. i can see divine fingerprints in her skin. she has a scar on her index finger, and when i saw it i knew that it meant she wasn't afraid of fire.

you are a shield, a compass, a sister. we are of the same tribe.

2010-09-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

anne: there's nothing better than being halfway naked, except being completely naked.

life is good. i forget this sometimes. it's easy to talk myself out of living. sometimes it takes me almost a full afternoon to walk myself back under god's arm. longer if it's a tuesday.

there's a scaly voice with armpit breath who only speaks one sentence, all the time. she has no originality, but i have to give her points for cutting to the heart of it all. she says, hey, you. who are you kidding.

i hear her when i look up wilderness EMT classes or wonder if i want to try living in washington state for a while. i hear her when i'm registering for a welding class or planning my garden at the farm. i hear her when i notice my split ends or forget to put on deodorant or when my vase collapses on the wheel in ceramics, dissolving into a puddly mess in my fingers. she whispers, hey, you. yeah, you.

but you know what? i'm going to do it all anyway. if armpit breath has a problem with that, she can crawl back to hell. may the rest of her existence be one long repeating first day of junior high. life is good and mysterious and god's palms are on my shoulders.

time to garden.

2010-09-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

Despair is most dangerous in survival situations, even more so

than panic, or overconfidence. Despair saps the will to live.

[Backpacker magazine]

me: what is your favorite thing about your face?

woman: the fact that it heals.

One day I will be thirty. I will also be camping. I will be eating over a fire, spent and in love, and think irrationally of fashion models.

When I was younger, I craved this perfection, the even, hairless skin, the thin limbs, the wide mouths. Their bodies were invitations, altars. Mine was a story with a rough beginning and an even more uncertain ending, always a length away from me, always under critical observation, like a stranger who is unknowingly sitting at my favorite table in a deli.

Now I see. I see how I cannot live without her, and more, how I cannot Live without her. My legs like pillars, flexing when I run, collapsing gracefully when I need to touch the ground. They hold me up, bone and sinew, breaking only under extreme violence, and then healing stronger than they began. My feet walk the whole earth over, testing for purchase. From the moment I first stood I have both ignored them completely and trusted them more than anything else I know.

I will splay on the ground and boil water for tea, and remember when I used to think all I wanted was to look strong and beautiful. Now I am strong and beautiful, something I never expected, and the difference makes me laugh, and it also fills me with sorrow. I'm sorry, I will tell myself. You are no disappointment, but the temple of a ghost both strange and holy. You are earth with breath, the mystery of a soul walking in dust. Fashion magazines are irreverent, their editors and contributors heretics, I will conclude as I fall asleep under the sky, pillowed by my hair, warmed by my blood.

2010-08-25T16:52:00.000-07:00

i just didn't want to be that woman who cries on airplanes.

[nancy cline]

Ode to a Sweater

Little knit sweater. You hit me
right where I'm most unflattering.
And I like you for that.

You came to me when I wasn't sure
who I was. You said,

I am a sweater, so I don't know who
you are either, but
I will keep you warm anyway.
At least down to your bellybutton.

Thank you, small sweater. You will forever
remind me of camping in Oregon
and how I found safety in trees
and silence.

2010-08-22T23:03:00.000-07:00

singin' their heads off

protected by the holy ghost

flyin' in from the ocean

drivin' with their eyes closed

[patty griffin]

i just wanted you to know that i miss you.

sometimes you might think that i've forgotten, but i haven't. i miss riding in your old car and listening to the foo fighters. i miss our crazy hair and excessive eye makeup and how we never really felt guilty about eating taco bell or skipping classes.

i miss our feet out the window. i miss working on our tans and microwaving things that aren't good for us. i miss waking up in the morning and leaving to go get a burrito. no damn makeup. we looked good without it anyway. i miss even earlier than that, before we could drive, when we could only walk, when we didn't really have the whole eyebrow-tweezing thing nailed yet, when we never worried about paying each other back.

i'm sorry about the fighting, the bleeding. sometimes i felt like we were negatives of each other, like we sometimes needed that to forge parts of our own identities. we should have been more careful. that's one of the things i miss too, though. the way we didn't care.

i haven't really managed to nail that kind of uncomplicated with anyone else. it might have been the circumstances, but i think it was you. i think that you are good at being real around people, for better and for worse. i just wanted you to know that i remember.

let's do that again sometime. i know that we both tweeze our eyebrows and own too many pairs of shoes now. i know that we've both been gone for a long time, that when we're together we're silent from the weight of things that have happened, that we haven't shared. but let's go skinny-dipping somewhere. cellulite be damned. i haven't waxed my bikini line either. let's get tattoos and swear to never tell our moms. let's go somewhere fun for days and get in a fight and come back with lots of really great pictures.

anyway, that's all. i just think that the world is a scary place, with lots of things like insurance policies and manila envelopes, and we should stick together. come back. burritos on me. i'm pretty sure i still owe you money.

2010-07-30T22:54:00.000-07:00

The boy was talking again. The best way is to slit the throat, he said, and tucked the chicken under his arm like a slightly sweaty businessman with a binder. Just cut the jugular, not the windpipe.

He talks quickly, with a trace of a lisp and that contrived air of authority unique to boys of most ages. I want to propose that we practice on him first, but the rest of them are talking, joking, dividing up the bird while she watches us. Their arms are crossed over their chests as they lean forward, occasionally rending the air with spastic barks of laughter. There is the same sheen of nervous anticipation in everyone's eyes.

One of the girls beheads her, her eyes hard and eager. The bird's eyes close, even though her beak continues to twitch. Everyone descends on her twitching body like buzzards, cameras extended. Their Facebook profile picture of the week. Make sure you get the blood in the picture, someone says, posing. I walk into the kitchen.

I don't want anyone else to know that I am physically ill. It wasn't the death of the bird. That is necessary, natural. I can't bear to see the disrespect of my race. We have no empathy, not as children, then not as women and men. We don't see sacrifice as sacred, we can't see past our own senses of entitlement.

Everyone is laughing now, because the bird looks silly with her feathers ripped off. I absurdly think of Jesus, naked, dead, and I wish that we could see something that makes us silent.

2010-07-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

it's like a room full of pictures.

[neil young]

damn it all. i'm just going to disappear.

[susan]

i think driving through the west is my natural habitat. if i never hear another person talk about spirit animals ever that would be okay by me, but if i had one it would be a salmon. we both just know where to go, and it's always by way of rivers.

when i stay in one place too long, i can't seem to remember what i am. my laughter feels strange. the mornings start to feel cold. and nothing makes me bolt like cold mornings.

but when i'm flying through the desert, through the woods, through the mountains, i can feel the force of myself again. she waits for me just outside the city limits, eating peaches and waving at strangers.

when i get out the air smells different so i start remembering things. i braid my hair and bring cherries for the road and wear my six-feet-tall chainsaw boots. my housemate told me once that he only pays attention to posture, not height, which sounds true. then again, he's shorter than me.

i don't plan, because the best way to go is to go. everywhere there are wonderful people, and they give me everything i need. what they can't give me they tell me where to find, and i find it. i sleep outside and when i wake in the morning, on a sand dune overlooking the coast, or in a silent stand of trees, i am like a goddess, the last thing sculpted by the hand of the deathless Divine.

when i go west, everything is new. this solitude is sacred. i have never in my life been less lonely. i never so inhabit my strength, my beauty. who is this woman, i wonder, coming out of the wilderness. leaning on her beloved.

2010-07-26T19:27:00.000-07:00

i come back home without my things 'cause the clothes i wore out there i will not wear 'round you

[the avett brothers]

zach: you've been oregonified. i can see it.

-
There was a woman at the camp shower. I stared at her because I couldn't stop. Also I knew she didn't mind.
-
The part of me that still makes up stories in my head was convinced that she was a mermaid. Maybe the first and last one. Her face was like the good kind of gingerbread cookie, creased and browned by warmth and growth. Her eyes were like pools set in her brow, deeply green, and looking into them was like looking into an underwater cave.
-
But the thing about her that felt the most wonderful was her hair. It was both golden and white, thick and extravagant, piled on her head like treasure. It was smooth, lovely, with a sheen as if she'd bathed in rainwater. I told her that I loved it. It felt wrong to let her go without confessing my thrall.
-
She laughed, ran a long-fingered hand over her face. I can't do a thing with it in this heat, she said, not believing a word, and waved goodbye. It used to look just like yours, she said over her shoulder.
-
I cannot explain the hope that this gave me.

2010-07-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

we kill evil.

[the meat purveyors]

A couple of my housemates have asked, What is your sister like? What are you guys like together? They picture someone blonde, someone who fights with me and taught me how to tweeze my eyebrows.

There's only one way to explain it, and it's one of my first memories. I tell them, When we were little, we woke up every morning before the sun rose. Every single morning.

We would slide out of our beds, almost simultaneously, our skinny girl bodies dancing on the cold hardwood floor. The Lion King alarm clock was off, on the grounds that it was just hellish to hear "Circle of Life" at that hour. Also Mom had confiscated the batteries after I'd tried to eat them. What woke us every morning, we still can't say.

My sister would kneel on the floor so I could stand on her back and unlock the hallway door. In silence, we would glide into the dining room, push two chairs together so they were facing each other, and crawl up in them like they were a bed. I remember Anne's hands wrapped around my arm, pulling me up.

We sat in front of the glass wall in our dining room, legs tangled, the same sleep scent in our skin, and we would watch the sun rise. Sometimes whispering, sometimes in silence. This ritual was so natural, so unplanned, so undiscussed between us, that it took me years to even remember doing it.

This was our worship, before we fully understood our own language. The sun called us, and we obeyed. We revered the same things. This is how I knew that she was my tribe.

If I sense that I should stick with the short version, I say, We don't believe in sitting. We sprawl. We listen to americana music in our bras and plan cross-country motorcycle road trips. We also accept songs about porches and political criminals and kissing on Sundays.

When we see something we like, we like it. We moved to Arizona because we heard her call, like the sun so many years ago. We love the wilderness. I am so proud of her, I want to tell them. She camps in feet of snow and wields a chainsaw as easily as most women our age wield a pair of eyelash curlers. She wears eyeliner in the woods. When she laughs, you know she means it because you can see every single one of her teeth, and they are perfect.

We don't trust people who only listen to good music or eat things that we can't spell. This may make us sound close-minded, but we are really, really good at spelling. We only have important discussions late at night, in kitchens. We learned this from our mother. We have one preferred method of settling fights, and that is by throwing underwear at each other. We learned this from our father. It works.

When Anne wakes up in the morning, she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I have known this to be true ever since I became capable of thought. We have rules, like, Thy must wear an apron while cooking, and, The word poot will always elicit hysterical laughter, and, What's mine is yours. This excludes boyfriends, which doesn't matter because neither of us have ever had one. Men are too intimidated by our beauty. And our poot jokes.

I tell them, when I am with Anne, I laugh so hard that I can actually feel my body shutting down from lack of oxygen. When I am with Anne, I know that everything will be not only okay, but wonderful. Her hands are on me, pulling me up.

We look nothing alike. We share no single feature, save our blood. But when people see one of us they know this. I couldn't form this into words when I ran screaming after her in the backyard, whooping. But what I meant to say was, We share a core. She is my tribe.

By now, of course, every single one of my housemates has died from old age. But that's okay. She can have their room.

2010-07-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

Over time, however, it has been discovered that bees have wild, natural, unique needs that must be met regardless of their domestication.

[The Dodecahedron Hive: Sacred Geometry for the Honeybee Population]

there are two groups of fungi.

i can't spell either.

[my notes]

I came inside just in time to see him down my last beer. He laughed, said, Hey, don't judge me. We both knew that I didn't care about the beer, but it depressed me anyway. I just couldn't think of a single thing that tied us together, other than the fact that we were alive.

Anyway, I judge people mostly based on their front doors, how they untangle Christmas tree lights, and by the scent they carry in their skin. He didn't have much to worry about, since it was the middle of summer and we shared the same unremarkable front door. We all shared the same scent too, some mixture of whey water, cilantro, and dirt. I didn't have the energy to explain this.

But he came up the stairs later that night, after I had just woken up from a nap, and he carried with him the smell of food cooking for dinner. It was the kind of smell that was so close to comforting it pained me. For some reason, it made me homesick in a way that nothing else ever had, not college, not life abroad, not sleeping outside in winter. I felt acutely human.

I wanted to tell him, We are all bound together whether I see it or not. I could not exist without the spray of your sweat on my forearm when you sling your head back. Your dirt-encrusted boots next to mine on the porch weigh me down, tie us both to life.

How exquisite it is to have aquaintances, to have this kind of camraderie, to settle into others not because we know each other but because we are both human. To have that be enough. To spend a life surrounded is a grace that I am only now beginning to appreciate.

2010-07-03T20:44:00.000-07:00

she's as strong as a mountain

she's as safe as a house

[moe]

me: are you going to drink that entire glass of milk?

susan: well, it's five o'clock somewhere.

I'm at peace. My stomach is full, my mind is straight and far away, like a receding ocean. I fill my skin, I breathe in, then out. The sun touches me where I need it.

Some days it's strange to be alive, but not today. Today I feel like I'm a kid on my grandmother's porch, in Texas. I would step outside, line my feet up with the first step, and when I smelled the grass and felt the heat and saw the plum trees I knew that I belonged there as much as the swingset against the fence.

What happens, most days? Why do I feel like something someone forgot to put up?

But. Not today.

Today I am absolved. I can exist in love and be loved, despite the parts of me that don't fit, don't say what I meant to say. Today I know that I can have the sun on my hair, the dirt under my nails. Nature is generous.

2010-06-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

never start a power struggle with

poultry. the poultry always wins.

[greenstring tip #4]

lo que quieres está aquí.

what you want is inside.

[convenience store sign]

All of the sudden things just got easy. Sometimes I still get that feeling, like I'm something someone forgot to put up, but I don't really feel like that's a problem anymore. All I want to do when I wake up in the morning is eat bananas and listen to Tom Petty.

Bob talks to us in the afternoon, after we've finished working on the irrigation lines or planting. We make him tea and sit outside, sundazed, on the porch under the willows. He rolls a cigarette, places it next to his cup. He usually talks about cover crops or how to order seeds, but yesterday he came late, stared into space for a while, then said, The land is like a woman. I watch his hands on the table. His nails are like broken glass.

You have to prove yourself to her. Be there year, after year. Show her your love. She will always know if you haven't really given yourself to her.

He makes like he's about to light the cigarette, but then places it back on the table. You can talk to her about it, of course. Make her promises. But she will wait until you live it out.

You will love her for years before she gives you the mysterious parts of herself. And there is much you will never see at all. You wouldn't understand it if you did.

He leaves. A tractor drones in the distance. I'm not really sure what to put in my new notebook, so I draw a picture of a cartoon spider. She looks confused too, and I take comfort in this.

Bob is one strange dude, we say, and rinse out his tea glass. Someone shanghais his unsmoked cigarette, and the conversation turns to what we're eating tonight.

I believe him, though. I saw his hands. They bore the unmistakable signs of unrequited love.

2010-05-30T21:38:00.001-07:00

----- anne: i had the nightmare again.

me: which one?---------------

--------- anne: the one where i'm on a cruise.

--- me: that doesn't sound so bad.

anne: in the eighties.---------

me: oh! God!-------------------

joyce: i never understood why we can't lose our patience.

someone tell me what i'm supposed to be saving it for.

I've been driving for days through the desert. I love the desert, I'm from the desert, but when we stare at at each other too long over the dash I remember the part about woman being made in a garden.

This was why I thought I loved California, when I saw her dryness change into sloping hills, into vineyards. I'd decided on sight that I already loved her outdated Route 66 motel signs dotting the highway, her farmer's markets. And when I crossed over the water in San Francisco, I felt bouyant, the same way I did the first time I rode a plane, and I laughed out loud like a child. I was pretty sure I loved California for that.

But when I finally reached the end, when I turned off my car and opened the door to Petaluma, I thought- no. I don't love any of those things. What I love is this air.

I love the way it smells, the hint of the ocean it carries, the green riding in it. I can taste the fields it floated over, the sea it came from. It crowds out all other thought.

I had to laugh again, because of the way it cleared my head, the way it made me feel. Like it could sustain me more than the dry air of the desert. More than the ocean air, thick and velvety. This was air that had what I needed most.

This is party air. It makes me want to eat tacos, drink beer, smile at strangers. It makes me want to sleep outside and wake up early. I already feel taller.

I had to share this with someone, anyone. My pool of contacts was limited, having been in the city for three minutes. You have wonderful air, I told the hotel concierge.

I didn't expect much of a reaction, but he looked directly at me, smiled, and said, Yeah. I know what you mean.

2010-05-27T19:20:00.001-07:00

mom: i may not be sentimental. but i travel light.

It's summer again. I'm leaving Flagstaff pretty much the same way I came, with an appalling amount of junk in my car and in need of a haircut.

It's that time again, the leaving time, the assessing time. Why this place? Why, ultimately, not this place? Which direction now?

Sometimes I could go for a different kind of mindset, one that plans things out more concretely. I want to answer that question like this: I'm going here because it's good for my career, or because it's close to family, because it has clean water, or good-looking men, or a relatively low concentration of sex offenders.

But it never happens that way. I ask, Where to? and the rest of me says, Eh, how about a good time in a bad neighborhood? Life without a bluegrass bar is ultimately not worth living. Where is the highest concentration of peach stands in the United States? I must be near a river or I'll disappear. Then it gets distracted, probably by something shiny.

This is unhelpful, especially if you're not really sure exactly what a bluegrass bar is. Life right now is a little like swimming in the ocean at night, everything above me briefly illuminated when the moon comes out, then just as quickly plunged back into darkness. There's something scary about it, but also something seductive, close, comforting. I can't see my way, but the sea will always support my body. I can't breathe, but the air inside me will eventually draw me up.

I don't know where it is, but I know the way it's going to feel. My insides know that, and relax. If only my GPS was the same way.

2010-05-12T23:31:00.000-07:00

i'm working my way toward divinity.

[bette midler]

-
It's a little after eleven when I pull into the darkened parking lot on the east side of town. I pull into the emptier side, kill the engine, and hit the red button. I hunker down a little in my seat. Norah sighs audibly.
-
I know I'm in trouble when I make eye contact with the carhop. It's that guy, the one who smirked when he handed me my drink last time and repeated the order- large cherry coke, easy on the cherry flavoring, two extra maraschino cherries, heavy on the ice but not too heavy- in that tone. Thank God I just got a large Dr. Pepper this time. Semi-extra ice.
-
He stops just outside of my reach. Squints a little.
-
Then he smirks. The cur.
-
"Back again?"
-
How did this happen? Usually I rotate between the three Sonics in town to avoid being judged. Did I miscalculate? Have I been making the rounds a little too fast recently? I settle for a politely confused look. -
-
"Seen you quite a bit recently. I admire your brand commitment." -

And I, your roller skates. I laugh airily, while trying to kick the empty Sonic cup on the floor of my car under the passenger seat. "Not sure what you mean." I reach for my drinks.
-
He shifts a half inch back. "Double cherry girl, right?"
-
Wow. I hope that one doesn't stick. "Well, that was a, a long, you know, time ago- is that my-"
-
"'Semi-extra ice?' I mean, who else could it be? Do you really like our ice, or what?"
-
"Do you really like tips?"
-
At this point Norah decides to intervene, probably because she's wondering where her cup of water (no ice, preferably room temperature) is. She sticks her head out the window. Blinks sleepily at the carhop. When he reaches out a hand to pet her, she ever so timidly licks his fingers.
-
Game over. She even got her water upgraded to a large. If I'd shown him that trick where she raises her paw, he probably would have thrown in a bag of Sonic ice, gratis. But I am no opportunist.
-
I can't wait to have babies.

2010-05-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

there is less in this than meets the eye.

[tallulah bankhead]

a guy told me maybe a week or two ago that i was gorgeous.

we were at safeway picking up milk duds. he's a good guy, a good friend, and he mentioned it offhand while he was scanning the arizona iced tea. i remembered it today. it popped into my head while i was looking up frownies on the internet. it's this product that reduces wrinkles.

i was shocked when i remembered him saying this. because it seems like the kind of thing that i should have dwelled on, should have gone awww in my heart, should have smiled about later in the day while i was walking my dog or checking my bank balance online.

i didn't. i didn't because i almost completely forgot about it after it happened. not because i get that a lot, but because i so thoroughly didn't believe him.

i so thoroughly did not believe him that i'd disregarded what he was saying before he'd even finished saying it. I so thoroughly did not believe him that i didn't even realize that i thoroughly did not believe him.

i don't think i even registered his comment enough to thank him. in fact, i'm pretty sure i responded by asking him if we could pick up some spackle before he dropped me off. i wish i was kidding.

and it's only now, while i'm online looking at anti-aging products, that i'm digesting what he said. why did it take this long? and why am i looking at frownies? i mean, come on. i'm twenty-one.

i want to know who told me to shut down when someone called me worthy. probably the same person who insinuated that i was showing signs of premature aging. when was the last time i took for granted that i was beautiful, good? when i was sixteen? twelve? six?

nothing comes back. i remember the to-do lists that altered with the season and whatever grade i was in, longer hair, a deeper tan, growing shorter, etc. etc. i have no memory of the feeling that i was designed by a professional. if i ever did have it, it was before i was old enough to remember things. what does that mean?

there are no words. it's too disturbing. my friends and family love to love me. for whatever reason, the other voices in there somehow ended up being louder. i don't even know where they came from. i don't even remember hearing them, and yet, here we are. me and my aptly-named frownies.

i think we've all been lied to. i think we've been deceived to the point that we can't recognize ourselves. my friend with the iced tea is the first honest voice i've heard in a while. i can't make up for my week and a half ago wall, but i'm hearing it now.

it's going to take a while for it to sink in, for us to be reintroduced. but in the meantime, i have my milk duds.

2010-05-10T21:00:00.000-07:00

me: this bag of salad has a flavor of

"mild" and a texture of, um, three.

anne: whoah. going for the hard sell.

midwives do not fear life. [the red tent]

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this person asked me once why i believed in god. i think this was the first time that it really occurred to me why.

i thought, two hundred years from now we will both be rotting underground, and the world will look the same, and the air will smell the same, and your children's children's children's children won't know your name or your story. right now your body is rocking, slowly, imperceptively, your blood coursing through the tangle of your veins, and there is nothing you can do about it save taking the edge of something to your own throat.
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there is nothing we can make grow, not plants, not animals, not our own children, not ourselves. we can only watch this theater, shout together with joy and hold our palms over the wounds til it's all over. we are here to absorb, to choose, to counsel, to heal and protect, but every part of our reality was formed and spinning in the void of space before a word had crossed our lips, before we knew we were.

i know in my bones that joy created my world and i am here to find it, to know it by its truest name, to come up against the silent things that i fear and yet refuse to let them take hold of my heart. i know this because, honestly, look around. everything is growing and dying on a timeline set by someone else. there 's really nothing else for us to do.
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also, watermelons. i mean, come on.