can't go home

The sunlight slides down the wall, and now it pauses, just before it puddles onto the carpet. The apartment is warm. And motionless. The wall stares back at me until I actually see through it. The room disappears in a late-afternoon haze and I step into a memory of incense and wood smoke;  of dust on my tongue and leaves in my hair. Of joyful dancing, and my sister’s hand clasped in my mine. She younger than me, but her hands are so much larger. She wears a large steel ring on her pinky. Her nails are bitten off, receding into her cuticles. There is dirt on her elbow and across her shoulder. But she doesn’t care. I can hear bagpipes and the beat of a drum – a bodhran ticking away, puncturing the evening air. I can hear voices, conversations filtered through years of looking back. I turn my head trying to make out the words.

                In the memory, my heart is light and free. I go running through cobble-stone streets, my sister hastening after.

                In the late afternoon, the sunshine flushes pink, and disappears into the floor.

My heart feels ill. There is no smoke and incense to comfort it.  

fireworks

I called taunts over my shoulder at him, prancing through the crowd, and ducking easily in and out of people’s paths in the darkening evening. Some stopped and stepped back, startled, and to those, I gave a little half-bow before continuing on my way.

It’s not every day that you get to be a hobbit at the nation’s largest renaissance festival. Coming to this place dressed as Frodo Baggins was a little like showing up at Disney Land in full Mickey Mouse costume. After a full day of revelry,  I had become accustomed to the attention I received: people stared, giggled, or even went so far as to ask for a hug or photo. Some touched my red curly locks and asked if it was real. Some jokingly tried to steal the One Ring hanging down in front of my vest, which would cause me to jump back and whip out Sting, my trusty orc-fighting sword… at which point my level of dedicated fan-girl-ness would usually scare them off. Some actually believed me to be male, which made me feel accomplished (the tight sports bra and careful study of boyish movements only heightened my acting) ;  however, the look on their faces was priceless when my space-cowboy boyfriend came sailing into the conversation just to grab my ass.

I had said boyfriend by the hand now, and together we made it up a slope to the stone arches of the jousting arena.  My bare feet were covered in dirt and the grass felt good to my soles. It had become completely dark, and in the shadows of the pillars, I slid my pack off my shoulders so I could stretch out my arms and casually arch one around the space cowboy’s neck.

I waited with bated breath as drums began. Peeking over the heads of the crowd, I could see the jousting field lit up, flames licking across designs spiraled in the dirt. The heady music grew; the people yelled, screamed, bellowed; and a lone man danced across the grounds with a torch. With slow-motion grace he bent to light a cannon.

For a split second, nothing happened.

And then a thunder blast sent us reeling back, as great plumes of fire and color blossomed in the night sky. Gem-colored rockets shrieked as gleefully as its onlookers whilst spiraling into impossibly chaotic showers.

But while the magic roared on, I found my gaze wandering to his face, alternately lit between the explosions – thrown into darkness in one moment, then washed with a daylight shade of gold. His glasses caught each firework and gleamed; I could hardly make out his eyes behind them, but  I knew from the quirk at his mouth that he was reminiscing. And that it was a happy memory. Perhaps a childhood one. I nuzzled my face into his neck, breaking his reverie, and he hugged me tightly, fingers trailing through my hair.

I no longer watched the gunpowder show; all of my attention had shifted to him. Thoughts of our imminent separation began to seep into my excitement, and I clung to him, burying my face in his chest. Soon the emotion was overwhelming, not knowing when I would get to watch fireworks with him again, or hold him, or brush hair out of his face, and tears leaked down the length of my nose, seeping into his jacket. It was with a great strength of will that I lifted my head, caught his eye, and brushed my lips over his. He kissed me long, cupping my face in his hands, and I loved the taste of his breath. Even with my eyes closed, firework patterns danced across my eyelids in dazzling colors.

Before long the spell ended. We broke apart as the show came to a booming close, and the crowd jostled us forward. In silence, we held hands as we walked under the dark sky. I carried a strange mix of sorrow and joy that felt heavier than the pack across my shoulders. And I knew that this moment – this geek-infested renaissance fair – would hold so many memories for years to come. I clutched the thought to my heart like a medieval amulet. 

the mojave

The sun beat down through the windows, and burned our skin. Our lips cracked and peeled; our voices were hoarse. And still the road stretched on, hardly deviating from its straight and narrow west-ward course. We had no cowboy instincts to guide us in this country. This was not a movie. We only knew to continue to plunge on into the sand, hardly straying, just like the asphalt path forged before us. Our eyes grew tired. Our thoughts turned homeward.  It was eternity.

Purgatory.

Hell.

Everything came to a point at the horizon, and this we stared at for days. The flat arc of the desert  was a fresh novelty at the start, as we  marveled at the lack of advertisements, houses, and people. But eventually even the other cars on the road drifted away and we were left alone in the wasteland, with no other soul to speak to except each other. Soon the center point, where the road stretched like a string of grey taffy, disappeared into a dizzying flash of water. As the sun grew hotter, the mirage spread out towards us, until I started to feel we would hear the refreshing whoosh of our tires splashing onto the shore. But always, the pale lake shrunk away from us, mile after mile, and the hot water bottles left in my car did not soothe our cracked mouths.

stuttering starts

I oftentimes wake after long hours of talking to people I haven’t seen for what feels like decades, in my lily-white dreams. Sometimes it really is a decade; sometimes they are dead and I am remembering happier times. But when they are alive and well, and I feel fondly towards them, in my half-awake state, I wish to continue the conversation I had with them, sitting to their right on a bar stool, sipping at my rum between sentences. With my eyes still closed, my body still warm under the covers, I think well of the world, and want nothing more than to see these people again, and talk idly, as we did between classes in high school, or out in the fields of the midwest. But in the true waking hours, as I sit with my tea in front of my computer, I do not know if they feel the same towards me. There is a strange social wall that appears when you move or go off to college; if you don’t call your friends once a week or write them letters... they are suddenly not your friends. They disappear off the edge of the earth. They are living their own lives, just as I should be living mine, but there are so many moments when I think of our old camaraderie, and I sincerely, sorely miss the jokes, the banter, and the pranks. But we are older now. Older than I realize, I think. And such a time is not to come again.  I linger over the keyboard, hesitating to even say hello. It should not be so difficult to reach out to a friend. But after many years... it is.

lately, i remember

It is the midnight hour, and my bed is quiet and warm amidst the torrent that lashes against the sides of the house; and nonetheless I shudder because I am cold on the inside. When I was little, I used to think the flash and the growl of thunder rattling the windows was actually a band of tigers, roaring and fighting to get into my room. I can remember sitting under my quilt, just as I am now, but with eyes wide with terror, wondering how to get them to go away, or find someone to save me. I can remember finally pulling up enough courage to slip past the door and go running down the dark hallway to escape. I’d come barging into my parent’s room, and crawl into the empty side where Dad sometimes slept. Of course there were no tigers in Oklahoma. My mother tried again and again to make me understand this. But without fail… every summer thunderstorm after dark, I’d find myself waking up, hearing the growling, and seeing the striped faces at my window in a flash of lightning.

I’m grown now. My imagination plagues me still. But I know that tigers cannot get me here. Still the rain lashing against my windows fills me with a sense of dread that I can’t shake; an unrelenting fear, that plagues me from my childhood. 

muscle memory

The moon is nearly full.

I know this, not because I can see it, hoping to catch a side-long winking glance in the 1 AM sky from the rear view mirror, but rather because I am due to start my period in the next couple days. The moon and I are linked; she and I wax and wane like two long time girlfriends, synced in their tides.

Tonight, there are remnants of storm clouds: ragged banners left in the front yard of some celestial bachelor party. And I can't see her, the moon, and I miss her quiet silver company along the road. But there are other sources of light to guide my eyes and tires on the pavement – modern spindly creatures, hunched like sentinels, dim orange heads ever watchful.

And my feet have fallen into a familiar pattern upon the gas pedal, my hands turn automatically, and my pensive brain wakes to make the realization that I am in an old neighborhood, a place of memories: the smell of cut grass, the taste of fresh lemonade, the scrape of chalk on the driveway, bright powder on my hands: it is a place of childhood.

Left on this street, right on that one, come to a pause at the stop sign, marvel at the great live oak in the yard across the way, and turn into the cul-de-sac; still on autopilot, running a path burned into my internal navigation system a decade ago, I park in front of my house, and turn off the headlights.

It is a struggle to stop myself from unbuckling. It is a battle to stay in the car, and not go traipsing through the backyard to find the garden key under a stone, and go in through the porch door. Because this is no longer my house. Those bushes are new, the front door is a different shade of green, and there's a different car in the driveway. Complete strangers live here now, in my living room and kitchen, and I am completely unaware of their existence –
that is, until I start thinking too much late at night and end up back here again.

This course of travel is useless, and serves me no purpose, other than to feed a growing sense of nostalgia as the years slip by. And I cannot simply delete it out of my brain, nor the muscle memory from my body.

Haunted by empty roads, I put the car in reverse and find the way back to my home in this time period, still looking for the moon that has been there for me always.

write

I’m a writer.

I write stuff down

In notebooks, on paper napkins, on skin.

I find the paths unwalked and wade on through

Never stopping for a moment to consider turning around.

I weave words together, and temper them like cold iron

So when they reach your hands, they will know just how to pierce, or heal.

I create the landscapes you see in your own dreams

Memorizing where I wander when I stare off into space.

I paint with my hands in colors I discovered as a child

Borrowing from nature or the tall structures man has devised for himself.

I hold up colored glass to my eyes, to see the world in a different light,

Watching the shadows of a sunset in a strange hue of green

And it is what keeps my heart alive when I discover I am confined.

You must understand –

I’m a writer.

I write stuff down.

I cannot be tamed, or cured.

You must let me run my course;

I am Chaos.

I am not dangerous in small doses, I promise.

But someone may have been waiting their whole life for what I have to say,

For what I see as truth and beauty, bound together and inseparable,

May save their life

Or change their mind.

Do not hold me back.

I am a writer.

I write stuff down.