high hopes

"I made you a sandwich."

"Really?"

"It's really bad. I'm sorry. I'm so bad at sandwiches. How can I be a trophy wife if I can't even make a decent sandwich?! My plan is ruined!"

"Well you could always be a model, or a prostitute."

"I'm glad you have such high hopes for me."

destellis

There is no way to tell the story and I don't have much time.

There was a moment in a guitar with bandaged hands and a ukulele in the snow and mittens swing dancing with a gold star, a song floating through the flakes in our hair and soaring towards the clouds, all of us miserable and beautiful and trying to stay sane in the most wondrous of ways and I remembered we are made of stars.

I have to do homework now but I thought it was important that as he called over his shoulder "Thank you for existing" there was nothing else to say because the words were too heavy to let go, and instead settled solidly at the bottom of my lungs as I stood in the wind after the music left and became a snowman of serendipity.

Okay I really have to go now.

Remember the star stuff.

snow

"We need to do something about the snow."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Something."

"Should we hug it?"

"It would melt!"

"Oh."

"I relate too kindly to the snow."

socks [pt. 2]

my stepdad bought a bunch of new ski socks.

i am not allowed to wear them.

i lost my own sock just right before he bought them.

it looked exactly like all of his.

and i cannot describe how difficult it is to find a piece of hay in a needlestack. especially when you're colorblind, and cannot seem to explain the importance of hay to anyone who finds you searching through their needles. in their closet. in their bedroom.

bottom line is, it's okay for the world to be winter as long as you've got at least one sock. but when both feet are cold, and the heater is no longer reflective of buddhist enlightenment, things can begin to collapse.

explanation: (a short story)

MORAL: Always invite the king to dance parties. Just kidding. Don't do that.

Life Suck

I should be doing homework but trust me this is really important.

There was this building next to the mental health center, the one next to that barbecue place with the giant horse on top. And I used to get dropped off there in between the two buildings, where there was a little alleyway just wide enough for a car and there was some form of construction going on.

The funny thing about this place - this kind of stuff is always funny - is you'd go in and pay five dollars to talk to somebody and the change they'd give back was always this awful, torn-in-half kind of money that'd never even come close to a vending machine. And in the waiting room everybody either read newspapers or magazines or untied and retied their shoelaces, and the little kids would play with the terribly beat-up toys that'd never even come close to a thrift store. And you could always tell who was waiting for someone else.

But anyways, on the wall of this building - the one next to the center - there was a sentence.

Life suck. Deal with it.

Life suck.

Life suck.

This is really important. Do you understand how important this is?

There were these windows in the rooms and you could look down outside at the building next door and there it was. It was the answer and it was staring you right in the face, unpunctuated, unprecedented. Life suck. Deal with it.

If we could just deal with it, right?

Like, how hard can it be to deal with how much life suck?

Seeing the people in the waiting room though, I mean come on, there are kids in there. You can't just close down the entire mental health center because the answer's painted on that wall. You can't do that.

I guess this isn't as funny as it was at the time. You're just going to have to trust me, it was hilarious. I forgot about it until now. I should've gone back to get a better picture but by then I had already figured out the second part.

You'll laugh later. You'll laugh when the man with the socks on his hands holds open the door for you and you'll laugh sitting inside the barbecue place with the giant horse on top. You'll laugh. Honest.

mourning sentence

I don't really understand how the heating system works in this house. It has a grand feeling of redemption.

Last winter, there was a piece of cardboard nailed over the vent into my bedroom from the previous summer. Every night, I would go around the house and collect every single blanket I could find and layer them onto my bed and curl beneath them as the frost collected around my window and it was hell getting out in the morning. It never got warmer as the night drew on, I just fell asleep cold and woke up cold and would lie there for an hour each night imagining what hypothermia feels like and if I would really wake up the next morning or just freeze there. It only got better when spring came and the ground defrosted along with my sense of purpose.

I could've removed the cardboard.

I could've asked for more blankets.

But this winter, there is no cardboard over my vent. And, as if making up for lost time, my room is a furnace. It's almost like the heating system feels bad for me, letting me freeze through last year, and has to give me double the heat required for the entire house in my one small room.

It feels like an incubator at night. I dress like it's summer and hide only halfway under the blankets and hear the rush of the heat barreling towards me and I never told anyone about this problem because it's not a problem. It's bliss. It's serendipity. It's apricity.

Mornings are the best. The heat comes on and off hourly and at around six it bursts through and fills the room and is delicious. Absolutely delicious. Mornings are the best. I love broken heating systems.

My parents were gone all week and last night the three younger kids spent the night at their cousins' house. My sister slept in our parents bed and I slept in mine. It was just the two of us and we could have thrown a party or something but, after taking care of little kids all night long for a week, nothing sounded better than one night of good sleep.

This morning, my sister opened the door at eight and turned on my lamp and said, "God, it's warm in here. I love how warm your room is. I'm gonna go make coffee."

I was just in the space between sleep and awake and thought to say "It's like heaven on earth," but by then she was gone and it's not quite like heaven. Heaven is not what the heat in my room is. Heaven is not apricity. It cannot always be such a thing, because sometimes heaven is sad. Heaven makes people scream at the sky and makes children cry. Heaven is where you go as a reward from a nice life, even though people don't really want to leave their nice life anyway, if they had the choice. It cannot always be helpful, because of course it's a nice comfort and a nice hope for some, but not for all those left behind to live alone. When those left behind and those passed on cannot touch, when all this time they were each other's afterlife, heaven can be a sword to their wrists.

That thought is much too sad.

I remembered, as I lay there, sitting in Social Studies and learning about Buddhism. And I asked why Nirvana was such a good place to go, and if reaching enlightenment meant the end, why would anyone try to find it? Endings are so sad. And the teacher tried explaining that the core belief in Buddhism is that Life is suffering and I said without thinking, 

"But it's not."

And then I tasted the words and remembered the winter when I slept in the cold, and when I went around school one day asking people if they were happy, honestly believing that everyone was hurting together and was just pretending to smile, pulling it off like actors in a play. I remembered how every single person I asked meant it when they said they were happy. And all I could think was that they were fooled, that they were manipulated, that it was some sick maniacal coping mechanism, happiness. How can you be happy when there is garbage in the bellies of birds and harpoons in the bellies of whales and "pellets of poison flooding [our] waters" and when things are as bad as they are? The world is insane to smile. 

Life then was suffering. Life was blankets that never got warmer. Life was garbage in the bellies of birds and sorrow in the bellies of children. Life itself was painful desire and only death was hope.

I felt the heat begin to fill the room and rolled over, still holding on to the last thread of sleep. I thought about nirvana. I thought about hope. I thought about how proud I was to taste that stupid classroom comment, "But it's not." It isn't. Not when life is pancakes in the morning and pretty letters in the mail filled with new hope and new names. Not when life is handkerchiefs with cats on them and playing a cello for someone for the first time since the recital years ago where you cried. Not when you're lying in the grass in autumn and the birds are chasing the storm coming in and the leaves are falling down and a baby is sleeping on your chest as the skies close in.

Not when there's a piano being played with crooked pinkies and a heartbeat thrumming against its garage door beneath your palm as its rhythm fills your bloodstream and raises your pulses to match the same time signature.

Life is not suffering when the heat comes on and the door opens and the light hits your eyelids and your sister sits in your spinney chair and sets down her coffee and says, "It's so warm in here," and, after all the things you could have said of heaven, the first sentence as your squint and stretch and open your mouth is

"It's basically Nirvana."

sadie hawkins

"Are you gonna ask him?"

"To what?"

"The dance!"

"Oh."

"Are you?"

"No."

"Why?"

"I can't dance."

holding hands and standing on the moon

Holding hands is one of the purest things in the universe. I believe this very strongly. That in all the vast space of time and dimension, in all the galaxies to ever have existed, holding hands is one of the most glorious things that ever has been.

I mean, sure the moon landing was cool, but have you ever held hands?

It isn't just a simple, average pleasure in life, like daisies and pennies and morning dust. It is entirely special. Here is the hand that makes you human, fingerprints completely your own, creases in your palms that people use to tell the future. The hand that you use to write love letters and type eviction notices, hands that build and tear down and wipe tears and wash dogs and harm and hurt and heal. The hand used to tie a child's shoes the first day of school, and to put a flag on the moon. Hands are special. And you are using them to hold onto each other.

"Shady," you are saying to yourself, "if you can say such nice things about hand holding, why are you so bad at it? Why don't you do it more often?"

Why don't you go to the moon more often? Because you don't have a spacecraft, of course. And maybe you do have a spacecraft, but it's not a very good one. It might not make it. This is like the state of my hands. My hands are not beautiful, and holding them would be such a waste of beauty, it might take away from the pure and subtle power of the act.

Why else don't you go to the moon? Because you're not an astronaut. You don't know how. You don't know if you can. Serious stuff can happen out there. Space is a dangerous place, and what if you don't make it? What if you get in the spaceship and manage to take off and then something happens out there and you're stuck? Holding my hand would be very cruel of me to let you do if it ends badly for you. It takes away from the beauty. It takes away from the meaning.

Let's say you are an astronaut and you have a spaceship and you know what you're doing and your hands are soft and warm and beautiful and there are no more excuses. When it comes down to it, you're not on the moon because the sight of the earth from such great heights would be too much not to wonder at, even if you are told not to. And the more you go to the moon the more you realize that you cannot wonder enough at it. The more you see it, the more you fear it will not be the same. You fear it will lose its meaning. And maybe the moon doesn't realize how many poems exist because of it. And maybe it doesn't know how much it means to you to be standing on its surface. Maybe you are just another boot print, just another flag, and the moon does not care whether or not you marvel in its beauty. Because a hand is just a hand.

Maybe holding hands is not to everyone else the way it is to me. Maybe it's just a thing that happens, like daisies, or pennies, or morning dust. Maybe it isn't this insane pathway to the soul where all things are connected and you are suddenly a part of something, a part of someone, in a form so simple and childish and raw you cannot mistake it for anything other than the purest form of beauty.

I don't know.

It could only be like daisies, and not cosmos.

But it sure is something.

dreams

I keep having dreams where I say 'literally' in an incorrect way and people get really upset.

I also keep having dreams where Martensen is making sandwiches. In different settings. Like sometimes in my kitchen, sometimes in a prison riot, sometimes on a mountain, sometimes with a bunch of seals.

I keep dreaming about seals.

Reoccurring dreams are not something I have very often. Except for that one about flying with Shrek.

I'm really scared to read those books about the meaning of dreams. I just don't really want to know why I fly with Shrek and why Martensen is making sandwiches he never eats and why I must be punished for incorrect uses of literally. I just don't want to know.

I'm going to regret posting this.

Is it?

Is it a new year? Is it?

I don't think people are really accepting that it is in the middle of the night in the middle of winter that we decide to begin anew. As if all we ever were is now behind us, looking back, and all we have ever hoped to be is new and bright before us, straight ahead. All that, just in a split second, is changed.

Is it though?

Nothing has really changed in the transition from 2013 to 2014. Just right then. In that exact second from 11:59 PM Tuesday night to 12:00 AM Wednesday morning. Stuff changed in November. Stuff changed in May. Gradually, of course. Stuff changed in pieces, in footfalls, in moments taped together into notebooks of forgotten memory, shaping a person into who they are by the to-do lists they've etched onto sticky notes still stuck at the wall beside their beds -- that's how stuff changed.

We arbitrarily decide that NOW, midnight, January 1st, we are going to reflect and plan ahead. In the middle of the night, in the middle of winter. Most of us drunk. Now.

There's something just a little off about that, you know?

And of course it gives us hope in the dreary dark of our ages, in the streetlights shining down upon our dust, promising a sun rising and a spring coming but promising it all too early. It gives us something to think about when the cold crowds in and when the waters overflow. It forces us to answer exactly who we are and what we are doing. It forces us to straighten our backs and steady our plows and look towards the horizon.

What next?

Those of us asking ourselves that every day - every day when the sun comes up to watch it rise in absolute awe at the ongoing continuum of life, at the raw and steady beating heart within the universe, to know it is not in us to know what each day brings - we do not pretend to see when we look ahead. We see colors and we hear voices but we live solidly on the line of time and do not dare step forward.

What is a year? A number changing on television one night? A single solitary moment in which what all had been now never will be? Does it all collectively bunch together and get thrown away and replaced all at once? An entire year?

What if each day was a new year? What if each sunrise held suspense, held possibility, held the chance at beginning anew? If we stopped taking for granted the passing of our time here, if we held each moment lived in an ephemeral state of awe, if we captured our lives over and over, each passing face photographed into film, if each day were an entire year... would we live it?

[Just a thought.]