Ruptured

Dull rain lit like ash on the windowsill. A dolorous roll of baritone thunder murmured something urgent and unintelligible into the ear of a girl sprawled quite indecently over blanket and sheets, wrapping herself around the glorious few seconds between sleeping and waking. The pale blue walls of the apartment sharpened into focus, reflecting the grey day forming outside. The girl rolled onto her side, allowing the still-damp strands of her hair to swing softly down the back of her neck. The ceiling fan swung calmly round, rustling her bangs, sending grey twilight children flickering merrily onto the glossy grey walls. She lay placidly on the wrinkled white sheets, opening her eyes just as the illuminated numbers on her clock morphed to an angry red 6:30 AM. A menacing buzz clanged loudly in the chambers of her head. With a bare arm she reached for the snooze, dully sighing as her hand limply met the black plastic.

Just then-- a cacophonous crack startled her from her cottony haze into the damp reality of the early morning apartment. She gripped the bedpost, a thick panic swelling in her throat as her eyes adjusted to the white wooden crib on the far side of the room. A bare nail stood sheepishly empty against the stark, slick wall; a heavy wooden picture frame lay conspicuously sprawled in three splintered pieces against the cherry hardwood.

A sleepy murmur ruffled through the quiet, and the pink ribbons on the side of the crib began to rumple and sway with the waking of the baby's tiny new fingers. With an inclement release of air the girl felt the paralysis dissolve from her limbs, and she moved quickly through the damp February air to lean against the wall beside the crib.

How small the baby's face was! How each fold of skin crinkled into itself, the cloudy blue eyes looking with sage intensity into her mother's. They were blue like the rocks near her grandmother's house in Cape Cod, right before a storm; they were the exact color of her father's when he was tired or moody.

John. His eyes tickled the back of her mind in the color of the blue-grey smog sticking to the apartment window; they stared solemnly at her from the puckered face of this small child.

The girl moved to the window, collecting under her fingernail a wide ribbon of the white paint peeling from the windowsill. His face grew fuzzy now; a damp mold had begun to grow on his memory. She squeezed from her mind a picture of the last day: he sat there, in the green kitchen chair-- just so-- his feet propped on the seat of the blue chair, business section of the newspaper in hand, the white oval sticker from a piece of fruit hanging from the front of his lapel. He was there for a moment in painful clarity-- tufts of raucous brown hair sticking precariously from his soft white scalp-- and just as quickly he was gone.

He was becoming blurry-- browning at the edges; growing a film. But the receptionist was very lucid. She couldn't have been over eighteen, the ambitious little tramp, with her smooth white face and her jade-green carpetbag, running appraising cold-green eyes over the eight-month belly of the professor's wife and smiling smugly to herself with those cherry-tinted lips. Virginia. What a wretched name. The girl tightened her grip on the windowsill, the grey rain-mist sending chills of paper-thin lightening down her spine. Virginia. How he had adored her.

The girl unclamped her hand from the window, shutting out with a little rattle the ruffle of car horns and the moody black sky. She hadn't had the spirit to remove his chair from the table-- the black coffee mug with the three little chips on the lip still sat, just so-- the wicker basket filled with business charters and the red-and-green arrows of stock market reports. The black stump of an empty cigarette still sat crumpled by his placemat, cold.

He had wilted. He had no spirit for the world of ironed grey suits and chipped ceramic coffee cups; for domestic housewives in white cotton aprons and the petulant wails of fragile and unwanted children. He did not want bran with his coffee and eggs; he wanted fire.

The girl's feet thumped dully against the floor as she moved toward the three broken shards of the picture frame that sprawled beside the crib. She picked up each separately, carefully; storing the first two on a shelf beneath the windowsill. She painstakingly cradled the third, but it slipped from her hands, hitting the hardwood with a wild crack; shattering into innumerable splintered fragments. The girl bit her lip, shell-shocked, until it drew blood. The baby began to cry.

"No", he had said, when she tried to hand him her coat. He stood starkly in the doorway, the beautiful lines of his forehead creased into a well-rehearsed mask of white pottery. Ugly pottery. No sobs ripped her, her body did not wrench, nor her teeth rattle feverishly; her eyelids did not swell with water. She sat white-faced in the green kitchen chair, wisps of sleep-matted hair falling to her face; a slight tremor rippling through the hand resting on her belly. She had handed him her coat.

"It's cold out there," she said levelly. His eyes met hers with a sort of desperate bitterness as he turned to the door.

"Tomorrow will be colder."

do you know who you are? this is who i am.

i think that discovering yourself is something that everyone should do.

i also think that everyone should have a mission statement. here's mine:

To love God and love His children; to serve God by serving His children; to live blessed in the joy and peace of the Father while working as a healthy limb of the body of Christ to spread His sunshine to my brothers and sisters on Earth.

i am a junkie/sucker for:
ingrid michealson; scrapbook paper; buttons; Twilight; foreign languages; classically beautiful boys; cultures; scarves; Anthropologie; reading; regina spektor; notebooks; colorful sharpies; carmex; musical theater; facebook; Free People; the Bible; wholesomeness; Christian boys; daisies; singing; syntax; poetry; tulips; linen; handwriting; colorful pantyhose; diction; cardigans; ballet; postcards; harps; historical fiction; The North Face; vampire weekend; ribbon, Chacos; Hello Kitty; hygeine; loving people; teaching; texting; baby names; band-aids; children; wool; apples; FiberOne granola bars; hymns; organic-ism; shiny shoes; Special K; sunshine; hair barrettes; embroidery thread.

things that disconcert and/or anger me:
abortion; hyperstereotyping; too much faux fur; the national deficit; pork; abuse of language; too much makeup; apathy; dyed-blonde but naturally black hair; mayonnaise; vanity; velour; lipstick; unfriendly churches; mindless rap music; hyperhypocritical Christians; macaroni and cheese; cheesy Christmas movies; heels; too-tight pants; ambitious bikini-wearers; liquid foundation; maneaters; superselfishness; frustration; precalculus; sinus infections; running; unfulfilled affection; goat cheese; stray animals; uncomfortable shoes.

i like to keep the "like" list much longer than the "dislike" list. i've found this leads to a much more enjoyable existance.

"it's funny how you find you enjoy your life when you're happy to be alive."
-relient k

i want to live deliberately. i want to suck all the syrup out of life. i want everything i do to be an act of goodness, and an act of love; i want the rest of the world to realize the joy of grasping how long and wide and deep is the love of Christ our Savior. i want to be His little ray of sunshine in a world made dark by our own pollution. i want it to be as happy as i am.

i think this is beautiful:

"whatever's in front of me, help me to sing 'Hallelujah'."
-bethany dillon

this is who i am. do you know who you are?

soli deo gloria!

(the first half)

A dirty sort of sunlight seeped through the stained white blinds of the office building, diluted by the harsh yellow glow of flourescent lighting. A small girl sat inconspicuously in the corner, arranged quite uncomfortably in a black metal folding-chair, her feet quietly tapping with the rhythm of the typewriter against the blackish-burgundy carpet. She sat anxiously, in turn playing with her fingers and tracing small cartoon animals on the wall with her fingertips. The yellow-green wallpaper had begun to unfurl at the bottom, the dusty strips curling and shriveling like brown winter leaves. Her eyes took in the cat-eyeglasses of the receptionist, black and silver and turning up at the top in a merry sort of sliver; the plastic picture frames from which stared out the lumberjack-looking husband, the four exceptionally plain-faced children, the unhappily crowded family reunion. The receptionist stopped typing and the girl looked away.

Her breath quickened and caught. She swallowed painful amounts of air in a quick attempt to regain composure. The receptionist deliberately cleared her throat, scraping her chair against its plastic mat and conspicuously removing to the far corner of the room. He stood silent in the doorway, the tinkling of the door's bell sounding silly and out of place against his strong outline. She started at his feet, memorizing every inch of his body; the wear marks at the tips of his asphalt-stained work boots, the timbre and texture of his leather jacket, every crinkle and crease in his plaid flannel shirt. He smelled like deep musk and too many cigarettes. She could not look at his face.

With thick fingers he fumbled with two moth-eaten white woolen gloves, stuffing them quickly into his pockets. She studied his hands- hands that for ten years had written Christmas postcard after Christmas postcard, each from a different state, marking them with stamps of quail and birch trees and Frank Sinatra. Hands that wrote large but very neatly- with thick little blobs of ink at the end of each line. They were large hands, stained and rough and cold.


(....now someone in the writing class will write the second half! :])

encore, dissention

let me bury this coal
in the warm innocence of
stark white hands,
my breath returning to me warm
against the spicy-scented
flannel of your shirt.

let it be cupped in your hands.
let it evaporate like so much steam,
like so many leaves after the final storm
of autumn.

let it burn in those fraudulent suns
that are irreconcilable differences and
flourescent lighting.
let my face be hidden from
the painful throb of abstract violence
in the immutable scratch of your hair.

success

The Swiss are a clever lot. The Swiss with their chocolate, with their watches, with their four national languages- with their famous neutrality and abundance of boarding schools- have life figured out in a way that Americans with their stocks and bonds and sugarfree frappacinos cannot master. Standing stout, obscure, landlocked by cloud-scraping mountains and clean Romansch air, Switzerland is the happiest country in the world.

A very wise person- a Buddhist philosopher, actually- once said that a country's success should be determined not in terms of Gross National Revenue but Gross National Happiness. I think that this is one of the most ridiculously legitimate statements to ever leave man's mouth. It kind of shocks one into realizing how strangely the past centurees of advancing humanity have clothed and clouded things that as humans we intrinsically know (and makes one wonder what other salient truths will be surfaced by cow-worshipping monks of the Hindu Kush).

My father, a well-off engineer with a pension and medical benefits, drove this peg of truth into my skull. One day he shook his balding black head and declared that he would never work until he died. He said:

"What a miserable end that would be; what a miserable end to a miserable existance."

And I sat and I sat and I wondered how this tired old man could truly be a glorious example of American prosperity. This red-blooded, tax-paying, Conservative, Presbyterian, tired, old, successful man. Successful and unhappy. From rags to riches; the clear-headed immigrant; the Semite, grown overweight and bitter; four cars and a marraigeable daughter; wealthy and miserable, the American dream.

Success?

Perhaps we have a thing or two to learn from the Swiss.

post-Gershwin melancholy

The wind-chilled fibers of the car seat prickle my back like sea anemone; like hair folicles shocked straight by goosebumps; something which should be warm, but has turned frigid and spiritless. Your small white hands are folded cleanly like two linen napkins, but I see the way your fingertips clutch the inside of your palm. My hands clench and unclench around the soft edge of the seat. The two of us sit all looming and silent like after a funeral, like something has died, but we can't quite put our finger on what it is. Behind the warm gauze of the subwoofers lulls a stagnant silence.

Three dozen teenagers in tap shoes and stage make-up invade the calm conscience of the asphalt parking lot like plain-clothes police officers, cradling alternate identities in their chest. The last of the audience has gone, marking the lot with a dully empty echo; with gaudy strips of streamers trailing the black hardtop; with the waxy shells of empty gum wrappers and yellow paper candy boxes.

The sky is not black like velvet or like skin, but like funeral garments. The trees wave their branches like melodramatic aunts in mourning, I think, and I gaze angrily at them because they do not really care.

I feel like the leaves, which I know to be all salmon and yellow and rust-colored, but now look like tired newspaper-cutouts, hanging limply and silently in the charcoal-tinted haze of early morning. Above our heads a streetlamp bulb fizzles and flickers, struggling for a moment, and exhausts. The outline of a printed program, propped wearily against the cold metal of the railing, crackles with the light and turns black.

The time flashes out all green and flourescent from the dashboard but the numbers are all slurred together like an unintelligable accent. The moon has hatched far above our heads, its mottled dimples smiling on a scene split by a sound sense of vacancy.

A tight ache sets into my scalp, protesting four hours housing several dozen bobby pins. I fear that if I remove them, the rest of the world will unravel with the cold pin-curls of my hair.

realignment

I had seen

the veil on the face of the sun
the smoke in the stain of the sky

I had heard the crunch of
bone in the crust of the earth

(the earth moved quick
but i stood static still)

I had not tasted
the words that unravel the sky

beading mercuriously on your lips like blood

I did not know that esteem could be wrinkled by time
I did not know that skin could crinkle like silk

invisible children

right now i see the sky--
you're staring down the barrel of a soldier's gun.
i push my allies aside--
you cry because you haven't one.

you cry for assistance,
but you cannot make a sound.
i look to Heaven to help you
but all i see is the ground.

i raise my hands to hold you, but
they're filled with something else:
i cannot really love you
if i'm tangled in myself.

but our father holds your hand
through every damp and lonely night
that's spent in the dark
because those like me ignore your plight.

the same sky gives us air,
but this breath could be your last.
if only our pride had not dried up our love:
what happened to the rest?

i promise Christ i'll love the ones
He loves like He loves me.
so why is it i can't see past the
fruit of Adam's tree?

when we could wrap you in our arms,
we sentence you to die.
your life is fading quickly....
we close our eyes.

i raise my heart in offering
but each beat is a song of filth.
how can i love my Father
if i only love myself?

i'm sorry, child, you must depend
on calloused souls like me.
your cries grow stronger, but we say,
"all i can do is breathe."

you raise your small hands
from a mottled dark life
in a desperate cry for help.
you moved us, but instead we slept.

forgive me.

wake up, drowsy Christians! you are sleeping through the War!

Christians around the world are being persecuted for their faith while we sit on our laurels and complain about how little God has blessed us. We are blessed beyond all measure... we are drowning in His love. God loves our brothers and sisters as much as He loves us, and He expects us to help them. We should be encouraging and loving them while they sit lonely in cold, dank prison cells for the simple crime of loving our Father.

Do something.

www.prisoneralert.com

This link provides information about imprisoned Christians around the world. Pick one and write them an encouraging letter! The least we can do is let them know that they are loved and valued, and that their work is not in vain.

Spread the word.

virgin musing

your face is hoarse and
dully hot, the swan-song of august
finding inch after inch of my
skin.

i feel your lips
like two halves of a dried raisin
but softer

your scent swelling,
bubbling through me to rest in the backs
of my eyelids.

an unfamiliar taste sticks in my mouth like liquor would,
bald and dangerous.

(i think that my mouth must be full of
gravel)

the virgin musing:
i am alarmed to note that
no tremor marked my spine;
the heavens did not unravel

i'm a harpist playing second fiddle
to a heady casanova,
discovering unpublished oceans
and burning the map.

incongruities

perhaps one day we,
staring through a sky bruised purple by
pollution,
will remark how unfitting it is
that top-down on
this charred black pavement
we do not feel like kings.