July 23rd, 2014

I don't want to write. There isn't anything to say. But there is. There
are a thousand beautiful things and yet this sleepiness, this fullness,
is pushing me into my bed and I can barely make my fingers fall against
the keyboard hard enough to coax the letters onto the page. Today the
sun was hot and my skin is once again kissed red. We laughed so hard
at dinner that I think I watched the notes of my laughter break against
the rafters of the restaurant. My lips are dried from the sun and burned
swollen. I don't mind though. My hip still hurts, but I also don't mind that.
Tonight Caitlin said how happy she was to have found us all, and I had
just been thinking about the miraculous nature of life and the way God
bears out his love in the simple things, like the beach and dinner with
friends. A thunderstorm falls but never breaks up the heat and so I lie in
the dark with the fan on, feeling the food move through my stomach and happiness
move through my veins, and I am glad that I can still feel salt and sand on my skin.


You will not want simple things, but in this, you will mistake wrong things
for complexity, for intrigue. Everyone will tell you not to marry him, to leave
him, except for your mother who knows the depth of your love and who sees
all good in all things, but who secretly, although she will not burden you with
this, fears your eventual reduction at his hand. In the end, when you do command
your feet to walk away, you will confuse preservation for failure for many many
years, and ruin plenty of good things in the process of this mis-attribution. And
then, one day, when you are 30 and sweating alone in your room with your dreams
and your tea and the fan that feels very human as it blows the blessing of coolness
towards you, you will know that it isn't failure, and it isn't even right or wrong,
and that, no, no! pain is not complexity and pleasure is not simple. How deeply
nuanced it is to be loved, to be loved and really known and reflected back to
yourself in all of their shining eyes, the many pieces, the many angles, the many
girls within you who had been silent and sleeping for years.


July 22nd, 2014

Tuesday and there are endless opportunities to get it right today. I woke before 6, just after the sun, with a red pain in my left hip. It was as if someone was inside of me, scraping a rusty nail along the bone. I drove home when I could move and painted white over the peach color I had covered the walls with 13 summers ago when life was very different. The yard was waist high and ruined when we first walked the property. My father saw only what could be, and so it became that, a beautiful, tailored, acre of garden, chicken, and manicured rose gardens. How lovely, and what privaledge to know that no matter where you landed with this family, with this man of a father, beauty would radiate out from his hands as they thoughtfully tested and weighed the dirt for its potential. Now the yard has won again, has taken back its name from my father, who has since returned to dirt himself.
It is the forest around sleeping beauty's castle, which is not an untrue metaphor for all of our hearts. But, I am sharpening my blade. Soon I will come home, not to paint over the past, but to fight the feral yard and bend it once again into a shape of recognizable beauty, in honor of his vision, what little of it I could ever see. I will even take his ashes and scatter them through the garden rows, although our mother grows pale at the thought.


July 21st, 2014

Imagine how quickly you'd get into heaven if you converted an atheist though?
Brett says, mirth and salt clinging to his lips. We laugh and I throw my head back
in a way that Kelly says "is like those women who are extras in movies and when
the camera pans out for a full restaurant shot, they laugh expansively". It is Monday
and the day was a failure, really, if we're being honest. And we might as well be,
since this is a book of truths. And if we're being honest, it's not a book, but rather
a long scroll that you would wear as a dress if you could. Brett is writing poetry
and every time a message from Rich comes through, something deeper than the
last time stirs. If I drank, Brett says, I would fuck with that. The drink smells like
pineapple and coconut and I want sunscreen and rocky beaches and to be alone
there, thinking these thoughts and feeling my longing. I forgot what it felt like
to want, to feel desire in the back of my throat. The air is cold tonight, and a breeze
comes through the screen while I, like a caged animal, pace, and write, and fold laundry.
My legs ache with a thirst for the street, my mouth aches with a thirst for his sweat.


Another poem is moving inside me so vigorously that I stop typing to vomit. The spinach
wasn't even digested and I'm not sure if it was the salt of the soy sauce or the too-sweet
alcohol that curdled it all. It feels much better to be empty, but this is a dangerous thought,
a dangerous shaking in the limbs which feels like cocaine and inspiration. There is nothing
like it, and how close they are, those two. Today was sour too. It began so sweetly, but
fell apart like cardboard in rain. My head is addled and my room is in shambles. The
laundry is daunting and when people spoke to me today, outside of Rich and Brett, I
could not hear their words for my distraction at the movement of their lips and my complete
inability to make sense of anything. I want to be alone. I want to be alone in a clean and
empty room. I want to be alone and empty in a clean and empty room. I do not know what is happening to my body and my mind is contorting and shaking. Perhaps it's because I could
not find my Bible this morning. My Bible and I have become a sort of joke, but the people
who tell it are gentle and loving and I know their kindness will be paid back to them. I wrap
my mouth around the word "trust" and sink my nails into a night that wants to wrestle me to the ground.