216

Often times I’ve heard people quote life as being a “balance of holding on and letting go.” I’ve come to believe in this entirely. I anticipated to write something surrounding this quote for the past five weeks or so. I’ve always been a mindful girl. I think about longevity, I think about things in terms of the linear. I think about the eventual. And I think about the blissful end.  This tends to happen in almost everything I do. Accessorizing  for a wedding, planning a trip, or even setting a dinner table. I always think of the beautiful end. Photographs, footprints, sounds and conversations. What I want. This is not to say, however, that I think all the time or I need therapeutic sessions preaching of the “now”. I can do the “now” but I can also see beyond it and sometimes this feeds my soul. Other times it shakes it. Maybe I’m referring to faith. I really dunno.

What happens when you’re holding onto as much as you’re letting go? What happens if you can’t foresee the so-called “blissful end”? Some vague walking watch suit might say “that’s life for you” but that does not answer my desire or thirst for contemplation.  You might wonder what I find so conflicting. I’d rather not be ambiguous.

 I  left the city I grew up in two years ago and moved away to another city, not so far away, under conditions of a university student. I was so scared but I knew it was the greatest thing I had ever done. Even if it was just under three hours away from the familiar.  I was also beyond excited. I had an entire world to learn. How to cook and domesticate myself in such a new and unfamiliar place. I had to learn how to share who I was with others. Where I had come from, I was rewarded for being myself. I always had a spot reserved on the football bleachers. I loved the people I knew and they loved me. It was such a pleasant upbringing. It was open and caressing. I had to learn new people. And, ultimately, I had to learn me. When there was no one around to ask me how my day was, I’d ask myself and I’d think about it. I’d fix where I’d gone wrong. And when it was Friday morning, I’d load up the car and head 3 hours North- where they knew me, just to feel confident again. But those visits gradually grew infrequent. I learned how to walk from a local pub in two inch heels. I learned that “let’s go for coffee” meant “let’s be friends”, I learned that laughing attracts people. I learned how to create a life with new people who were just as brilliant and beautiful as the people from my fresh history.  I still cherished my friends from senior year, but also learned to accept change and the people it had invited into my life. I met someone I completely fell in love with unexpectedly. A pack of skittles and a history class. We used to study Rock n’ Roll together. He kissed me after reviewing Carole King and James Taylor. I didn’t hear a thing.

I grew to love the place that scared me. And I just grew. Some people refer to this place as a geographical dud. Maybe it is. There’s no ocean, nor boardwalk or lantern restaurant. But that’s not why I love it. I love this place because of the people that have invited me into their lives without contemplation of who I am or where I come from.  And now I am leaving it for very convoluted reasons. Ultimately, I’m leaving it for schooling. And I’m back at one. And I’m back to being scared. And I doubt that it’s the same kind of “I’m scared” as before. This is much more emotionally confusing than that. And I can’t put my finger on it. I think this time I really am broadcasting from ‘Radio Nowhere’. I truly am lost. I have beautiful people, loving people in the city I grew up in. I am thrilled to see them, too. But I feel as though I am leaving in the prime of a new life. Like a baby wearing shoes for the first time after she has learned to walk barefoot. It’s trippy. Or maybe like that kid who learns how to ride a bike without training wheels only to have them screwed on again. I feel like I am perhaps moving backwards in the motion of moving forward and it is exhausting yet hilarious to recognize.  Even so, the people I have met and fallen in love with, if genuine, will always be there, training wheels or not. And I suppose in moving backwards this is my motivation. To appreciate and love the people who tell me “it’s okay” and truly believe that it is. I couldn’t ask for anything more.

I leave in under four weeks. I’ll be 20 soon. Big deal, I know. The only thing I am completely sure of is the highway, the one I drive three hours North of this place and three hours South of that place. You should see those fields when the sun’s rays are upon them. A scarecrow would even appreciate them. It’s good stuff. And you should see the Honey Bee Farm. The white sign is faded. Perhaps the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen. And you should see how fast those lines on the road pass you by. When you’re about 45 minutes away from Calgary, Alberta, 15 minutes from Nanton, you’ll see a farm with a smiley face painted on the siding of it. That’s when you know you’re close. On exceptional sunny days, the sky is completely blue and you can see the windmills in the distance. A Bruce Springsteen album shot. Makes you want to kick up dust with your boots or wander in your jeans. Makes you want to touch everything. Makes you want to feel everything. Your senses are alive. It’s like understanding a Bob Dylan song for the first time without the raindrops.

Ev’rybody knows
That Baby’s got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls.
She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.

I think that’s what I know best right now. 216 Km. I thought I’d know a lot more than that by this time. Not really.  I remember a lot of things and I’ll be 20 soon. My room here is empty. I have a fully charged camera.  I plan to document my attempt at flying a kite in what could very well be the windiest city EVER. Beyond that, I plan on fishing with my love, sharing champagne with him in a field (lame? you haven’t lived),  painting a canvas, going out for cupcakes and tea, hiking, cooking a Martha Stewart envy, and doing something irrational like sleeping in a motel for an evening. Possibly try a cigar. No doubt, dance in a country bar ’til the lights bring me back to some Memphis country fair I might have seen in a past life.

My start to 216. Radio Nowhere. I remember a lot of things. I’ll be 20 soon.

Then he said yes I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to highway 61

Lucky

I didn’t realize how lucky I am until I thought I had been cheated on.

Even on this frosty March night  in my plaid pajamas with my cup of neo-citron placed near his book titled The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, I cannot help but giggle about it still.  I remember not so long ago, perhaps two weeks ago, wanting to rip out every page of that book in fear and hurt. I remember wanting to box everything of his that I had or anything he had ever given me and sending it back to him with a vague, pristine note on the very top of that box.  “Oh, boy” I remember thinking. I sat down on my bed, overwhelmed.

Perhaps I should explain the situation a little better?

I had just received a blackberry thanks to my parents who had  provided me with one free of cost. Some sort of Telus plan where a free blackberry could be tossed in.  Should ‘blackberry’ be italicized? Not sure. Anyways-

 I never imagined I’d have one, just as I had never imagined I’d fly first class, namely because I don’t want to. I like riding economy class, it allows me to say implicitly “I’m just like you and I’m going somewhere”. I also prefer telephone wire.  I suppose a part of me, however,  felt it would be convenient to check my e-mails at hand, thus I accepted the prospect of a blackberry. Might I mention I’ve also flown first class- by accident. Naturally, this is beside the point. I am a person of paradox. You’ll never see the end of the road when you’re with me.

 So I now own a blackberry. Installations of all sorts are required, one being my e-mail account.

I was notified about two weeks ago that I had received an e-mail from my boyfriend. I thought it was so strange considering I scarcely use this particular account installed on my blackberry. I did, however, use this particular account twice a day, every day for three-almost four- months while he was traveling Europe. This of course was almost a year ago, so I was very surprised that he had written me on this particular day for I was to see him that same evening . I truly was mystified as to what this e-mail entailed.

He writes: “I just finished reading your letter. Thank you, hun”

I was captured. I hadn’t written him a letter. What was he referring to?

“I’m sure you will bust through the workload and go home at 4, after all you said you can get a lot accomplished in a short amount of time once you get down to it. Are you gonna call at 430 still or after work?”

But I’m not currently employed. Who is he e-mailing? Did he accidentally send me an e-mail intended for someone else’s eyes?  Holy Moses…HE DID

I scrolled down in a panic. I told myself to breathe. “Just breathe.” Among telling myself to breathe, I thought of the many ways you can slap a person. There’s always the solid back-hand. I’d never try to physically hurt him. But it felt good just thinking about it. Nobody plays me like a slide guitar. Nobody.

“You are my sunshine”

But he says that to me. Just me. I began to crumble. Confidence shattered, I stared bleakly.

I could feel my hot tears ready to charge upon my cheeks, armed with anger. CHAAARRGEE! I sat on my bed and placed the “berry” down beside me. I wondered how this could have happened to me. How he could have made the mistake of sending it to me in the first place? Nonetheless, caught.

 I wondered what I was going to do. Killing him was not an option. I glanced at his book on my desk, among other things, his chocolates for one. I delved into the chocolate box, overwhelmed with streaming cheeks. Oh, the epitome. I’d pack up his things- minus the chocolates. 

I increasingly grew aware of my defence mechanism: to rid the evidence.  I would rid the evidence that he had ever entered my life, let me fall in love with him, and left me heart-broken with a box of chocolates. So, so terrible. Packing up his things would be the best thing to do. Why would I even want the  physical memory of him. Nuh-uh. “So long, baby” as Aretha would say. But I cried like any tough girl would.

I didn’t even recognize that I had received a reply to an e-mail, thus I was oblivious to the fact that he would have had to “forward” an e-mail to me, in order for me to view it if he had, in fact, “replied” to someone other than me. I started getting to work. The books he had given me I had wanted to read. “So much for that”. I started a pile.

“Who is she?”, I said out-loud.  Bitterness swirling in my mouth. I knew it really didn’t matter. She could have been a beauty queen, a cocktail waitress, or an intellectual- it didn’t matter for  I had been cheated on. It didn’t matter why for I had done nothing to invite such betrayal. I can’t imagine many people who do deserve to be betrayed. What a simply horrible thing.  I was furious. Tears still hot. Furious.

 I picked up my blackberry and scrolled, nonetheless.

I wondered who she was. Some big-shot. Yeah, some big-shot.

I scrolled to  read the e-mail she had sent him.  I disliked her already- she was kinda funny in an un-obvious way. Just his type, I thought. Sarcastic. Potentially cultured.  Punctuation could use some work.  For whatever reason, likely the fact that I was overwhelmed, I completely overlooked the fact that this “big-shot” liked the same spicy chicken meal by President’s Choice- enough to include it in a lame e-mail. I love those things. Great micro-wave food.

An affair to remember, indeed. I continued to scroll, contemplating how she signed off.  Did they love each other? I clung to the prospect that his belongings were on their way out. A nice pile by the head-board.

“Love, Cassandra”

That’s how she signed off.

It was me. It was us.

This was an e-mail from June of last year. He was in Europe and I was in Calgary. I suppose my blackberry was trying to load my e-mail history and I had received an e-mail from our relationship history. So much for the tears, and the chocolates, and the jealousy, and the hurt, and the temper. I left my room and paced the hallway outside of it. I dried my tears with my scarf  and felt my heart beat steady itself.

Moron

Needless to say, I felt like one of the world’s most unintelligent people. I could see it- front cover of People magazine, me and my sheepish smile, eyes nearly shut, sub-title reading: ” Are you smarter than Cassandra? Take the test!”

That’s just what that moment was- illogical, irrational, unintelligent. I am head over sneakers for this person. He is not capable of betrayal. Truly, there is not a bad bone in this person’s body. He corrects me when I’m wrong, he explains things to me, he refreshes my perspective on most things, he reads poetry to me, he holds my hand whenever he has the chance to… the list is infinite. This is a person who allows me to recognize the enormity of the infinite. I only knew the definite before I had met him.

Why in the world, would I imagine that betrayal could stem from such a relationship? Impossible.

Calm down. Get real.

I spent the remainder of the hour reading old e-mails from him while he was in Europe. Upon every e-mail that was listed by his name, my heart skipped a beat. Gushy, I know!  Every emotion compressed within 10 minutes, I had exhausted myself and retired to lying on my back on my bed.

I couldn’t help but think that we have such great capacities to love. We often don’t recognize what we have until it is threatened or gone. I think our capacity to love is a miracle. But we have tricked ourselves and deluded ourselves into thinking that when things are good, they are too good, and thus something is wrong or bound to go wrong.  We find reasons as to why things crumble. It is, essentially, a very threatening way to live. It is a very mindful way to live and, ultimately, a very defensive way to live.  We can hurt people like this- we can hurt ourselves, I believe.

We try to prevent things from happening, or we take responsibility for things that are evidently out of our control. We try to blame something or someone for our unhappiness. We do many things. We fix many things and we solve many things.  But we do not surrender to the “now”.  We do not recognize that it is an honor to be in love, nor do we recognize that it is an honor to have friends that we can express ourselves to. We do not recognize the honor it is to be loved and to love someone in return. We can take particular relationships for granted because we try to protect them more than we try to honor or appreciate aspects of them. It’s a motherly flaw and it’s a loving one. We try to protect what we have all the time. We try to avoid threat. We delude ourselves into thinking there is a great negative force out there  that can ruin us all if we let it. Love doesn’t stand a chance in sight of it. Such delusions.

I believe, from this experience, among others, that the only thing there is to be conscious of is love.  There is no reason to evaluate, underestimate, or be weary of love. It is simply there. It is simply present.  We hurt ourselves by rejecting love that we delude ourselves into thinking isn’t real- for whatever reason. It can happen and it does. Divorce rates are at an all time high. Over 50% are failed in North America. Delusions?  Doubts? Could be so many things beyond my 20 years of understanding. Nonetheless, I can’t help but think of what William Shakespeare once said:

“Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt”

Portobello

Portobello Road in west London, England. 

Market in mid July.

Between Golborne Road and Westbourne Grove.

Give me Portobello

 

I shot the moon

And now feel the color blue

I said ‘ I love you’

I shot the moon.

 

Give me Portobello

So I can find my way to Notting Hill Gate

So I can escape your mode of  ’deliberate’

 

I shot the moon

And now feel the color blue

I said ‘ I love you’

I shot the moon.

 

You are my wine and honey.

You burn me with all your sweetness

You asked me how I knew

And to you I said that I saw you

In Milan, Venice, and Torino

On all the dusty trains

I wrote you letters and cried when it rained

 How I missed you so. It’s how I knew.

You are my four seasons

I have one hundred and ninety three reasons

 

Give me Portobello

To distract me from your doubt

To heal me from what I had to say out loud

I love, I love, I love you

Forgive me for catching my breath

I just had to without your consent

I mean true with the courage I didn’t know I possessed

Without regard for what you could or could not express

 

 

So give me Portobello Road. Give me this.

To rid my blue and the smoke left

From shooting the moon

After all, I love you

Critic.

  My recent, yet very frequent, conversations of “direction” have bothered me so very much I have adapted to concealing my feelings and thoughts of contrast. 

There.

Dinner parties, telephone wire, introductions… it’s all about “direction” in life. What are you doing? What is he doing? I am exhausted of it and offended by it for I never base a conversation or my feelings for a person by their “direction”. I want to know what makes you satisfied, I want to know what you’ve heard lately, I want to know how you feel about the places you’ve travelled, I want to know if you’ve read anything or said anything that made you realize something. I want to know if you care for others, I want to know what you dream of or long for, I want to know what you think about destiny, how you feel about nature or the destruction of it. I want to know your profound moments. I don’t want to know how much money you think you’ll be making in the future. I don’t want to know if you surround yourself with successful people. I don’t want to know what possessions you think you can attain in the future. I don’t want to know if you can “make it”. Of course you will. And  I want to believe in who you are.

It’s been driving me mad. A friend of mine recently flew in from Ottawa and we conversed over a cup of tea discussing what “life” entailed for us. We both contributed our idea of “life” to be a giant playground. It was most uplifting and I felt, however fleeting, that the world is a playground, it is not something similar in idea. There are so many experiences to be had, so many things to be taken from the every day. If you just say “yes” to opportunities that unveil themselves to you, you could be frightened and fulfilled. My friend and I agreed that if a person were to do what made he or she happy and fulfilled that happiness in the every day, no one would feel inadequate or feel the need to revise and edit ones self.

I am frankly exhausted and jaded of convincing significant people in my life that I am sound in direction. No one knows what their direction is. It just happens. It’s like telling someone that on June 23rd of 2009 you’re going to fall in love. You can’t say something like that. You can’t tell someone the details of your future either, a future that is not theirs but only ever yours.

Through these mixed emotions and struggles and tears of facing the arrogance in the question of my direction or the ones that I love I can only ever really turn to three people at the present moment. The very thought of these three individuals makes me weep for my very gratitude for their constant presence in my life. These three individuals never ask me what material things I think I can attain in the future, how much money I think I will make, or any other artificial, meaningless persuit. They believe in me. They don’t ask questions like that. It doesn’t mean anything to them. I’d like to talk about one of them. I’d like to talk to her now as if she were here.

Sarah,

I have your sweater here. I was cleaning my room, packing and unpacking and I chose to wear it. I apologize. It’s a really comfy sweater and it smells like you. Creepy? Probably but I chose to do this anyhow. I’ll wash it and give it back to you tomorrow.  I was thinking how that corner of this room needs attention. Postcards, picture frames, picture cut-outs and I thought of how you won’t be here next year to sit in that little corner with me. How you won’t be here to understand my thoughts or my doubts. I wondered today how I’m going to be here without you. It’s not a teenage-like phase; “who am I going vent to?”  It’s a soul thing. I see the ocean and I think of you, the frosted windows of coffee shops, intricate patterns, newspaper print,  the color yellow, the smell of rain, and muggy sunlight… I think of my dear friend. So you see, it’s a soul thing.  I had a very brief conversation with someone this morning. For identity purposes, I’ll persist with the confidentiality. I’m sure you can guess who. But the direction of someone dear to me was in question. And I know this was all said unintentionally but it hurt me so. Since when were we defined by the unknown or that which we cannot honestly confess to know? Do you remember that one dinner party? I know you know the one I’m talking of.  Most of the questions we were asked and judged by were questions that we can only pretend to know the answers to.  We know our passions, we know what makes us happy, we know what we are capable of, yet it’s not sufficient. I want to know where you’re going to be in ten years. Ha. I know that you are my best friend, among three, because you don’t ask me what I’m capable of. You just know. This is my inspiration in writing. Those that truly love you and know you, are not preoccupied by challenges you might face. They are just there to believe in you and have faith in you. I want to thank you for this. You ask me questions. But they never question my integrity as a person or simply who I am. You accept, accept, accept. And you love, love, love. You know something the old sometimes don’t understand. Something that makes you wise, literally, beyond your years. Beyond our years. You know that “…without people in your life to love and share splendors and doubts of this place, you are nothing.”

A professor once said this to me. And I know you understand it. And I know you understand it for soulful reasons not the lame logic of contacts for prosperity reasons.  I don’t really know where this is going. But thank you for loving me enough not to question who I am or who I can be but believing in me and who I can be. Your love gives me the courage to venture out into the open without regard of judgement.  You give me the courage to live (the way I want to) and I want to thank you for your faith. You don’t demand your faith in me to  be proven by my success as a person. You don’t make a mockery of my life and prove your faith like science. Thank you for your faith and for something beautiful.

I guess that would be all. I have yet to sort the attic. I’ve started collecting things for my own home in a short few years. It doesn’t scare me like it used to. I’ll have to show you the wine glasses my mom gave me. I think they’re quite charming.  See you tonight at Adriane’s house.

Love,

Cassandra

 

 ”Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live” – Leo Tolstoy

76

“The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.”

When I first read this I stopped in the middle of the road to read it out loud to my friend Jon. It caught me, and coffee cups usually don’t. “… Just stop in the middle of the road?” was all I heard Jon say. I looked around and the parking lot and surrounding streets were vacant. “Oh, right, all the cars…” I had replied. I looked up from my cup and he was clearly confused. I urged him to look at my cup as I read fragments of it out loud to him. I’m not sure if my cup, or rather the words on it, did anything for him but I had decided not to throw it out; rather I kept it on my desk beside my typewriter. When I came home that night and placed that cup on my desk I couldn’t help but stare at it. It was just some silly coffee cup. Thousands, perhaps millions of them, ordered and made personal by the requests of extra-mocha or whipped cream. In that moment of trying to grasp the reality felt by words on a coffee cup, I thought of William Carlos Williams; when he said “there are no ideas but in things”. Nobody can ever say for certain what Williams, a poet, meant by this. For me, however, this quote is voluptuous in suggesting that it is only in things, or objects, that ideas are manifested and meanings prescribed. This coffee cup and the words on it, this “thing”, made me uneasy. I wanted to know why; why these words on this coffee cup did what they were manufactured to do. Intentional inspiration to the masses; “the way I see it #_” How many dreamers, much like myself, had stopped to read #76 out loud in the middle of a street, I wondered. Objects and intention of idea; I was lost in it all.

When I initially read it, I felt like I was meant to. My energies, in my recent past (and perhaps present) have been committed to thoughts of commitment. (I know!) I’ve thought that if I had commitment, epitomized in three (little?) words, I would feel liberated to roam and live and experience, knowing that I would have someone to love me through, and to the end, of it all. Commitment is epitomized in love, in my opinion. If you are committed to your work, you probably enjoy it and love the consequences of it. If you are committed to a person… it is because you love them. Naturally, for me, everything equates to love. I believe we base most, if not all, our decisions on love and passion and desire; subconsciously and consciously. Even so, having read this, it made sense to me. In recent, I’ve felt like I’ve needed to hear the epitomized. I’ve needed to hear “I love you” because that means that everything will be okay. No matter what. I need the consequences of those words, too, or the personification of those words; to have someone run their fingers through my hair when I can’t help but contemplate my mistakes; someone who will take my hand in theirs and push it up to their face, telling me that I am not inadequate when I feel that I am. Someone who does everything in their power to let me know that I am not alone in my doubts; answering the phone when it rings past midnight to hear “I just don’t know”. Someone who, in affection, doesn’t attack my doubts by interrogating the consequences of having them in the first place. Someone who ultimately understands. Someone who is committed, and therefore, someone who loves.

Composition #76 made perfect sense to me. I could be liberated if committed to and because this made sense, I was uneasy. Am I that dependent upon people for my happiness? At the notion, my soul gasped. This evaluation of my happiness and its derivatives frightened me. I resolved, given time, that it was not my dependence upon people for their love and light but rather my lack of independence and personal wealth of light and love. It’s never too late for a soliloquy. Never.

It’s not what I haven’t heard or what I haven’t felt that should matter. It is perhaps what I have heard and what I have felt, moreover, what I could- on my own. You can comfort yourself and you can regain yourself without someone telling you to, moreover, how to. I need people, and I need love, naturally, but I also need that awareness of ’self’. I am liberated by the commitment in love that others offer to me, but I am perhaps lacking in my liberation in ’self’.

Somewhere in between the ideal and the real, I’ve misplaced my ambition (my liberation, really); my ambition to graduate with a degree in high recommendation, my ambition to use that degree, my ambition to learn for life through places and people. Somewhere… somehow…I have doubted myself and my life possibilities in ambition. It’s easy to give up, and the consequences of doing so are messy. Often times I am threatened by failure or the very idea of failing. This makes it difficult for me to commit to anything. If I commit and I fail, what then? I’m humiliated to the very core. “You’re good, kid, but just not good enough.” In contemplation, I am certain that by hesitation, my “internal critic”, and (ultimately) fear, I cannot access my life.

“To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.”

It’s not the commitment of others that could alleviate my life congestion of hesitation, criticism and fear. It is only ever me. Just as it always will be. If I am committed to myself and that which I see for myself, I could avoid these occasional soliloquies or these so-called “quarter life crisis’”. If I committed myself in work, play, and in love, without complete reliance on others when in doubt, life could be wondrous. My life is not void of the wondrous- not in the least, but it could bursting of the remarkable. You can be your worst enemy, critic, and barrier when you neglect to commit to yourself and to keep the faith. I wanted to take my studies abroad to Prague or Vienna for my third year of University. I worked so very hard my very first semester of university in hopes of maintaining impeccable credentials worthy of Prague. Prague lost its whimsical possibility and I then focused on my writing and the happiness I experience from writing. I received a paper back from a professor my last semester who left me a note on the very last page expressing that my paper was “non sense” and that I have “no creativity and little thought.” It destroyed me and I did not write for months. Since then, I did not take school seriously. I think school often confines creativity and attempts to define and manifest “right” from “wrong” progressively. It can be frustrating and discouraging. Wounded by realities that impaired my magical thinking, my belief and faith in what I could achieve, I never recovered but rather spiraled deeper into indifference to my ideas and dear dreams. When one is indifferent to one’s self, he or she is virtually impaired from his/her surrounding world; priorities change, and what we yearn for is languid in arrival. We become reluctant upon failure; our commitment diminished or tarnished, if ever so slightly.

“The Way I See It #76″ reminded me of Prague, of writing, of desire to know places and people, and of my capabilities as a person if I simply cared enough about myself to commit to my aspirations. It’s not selfish, really; it’s life. If you don’t ask yourself what you want and you don’t evaluate how or why from time to time, what you want is muddled somewhere in between the possible and the so-called impossible, and you tend to side with the latter. What you want is lost, and you become just as lost; sometimes beyond retrieval as you begin to believe in the impossible.

“…remove your head as the barrier to your life.”

Shift Happens

“Maybe I’ll just write about it”. Sarah stared at me blankly (I thought) after I had said this. To this “blankness” I urged “what?” She confidently answered; “you’re growing” and gave me a smile before furiously jotting down notes for her essay due tomorrow, a masterpiece, no doubt.

We are still here in the coffee shoppe; today’s last destination before she drives North to the city we once shared. This morning we had visited an art gallery, paced the festive streets and took pictures of one another jumping in fallen leaves. It’s been ideal, at least for me and I know I will miss her immediately, once she leaves.  There are few people I can sit in front of with whipped cream on my upper lip; she is one of them.

We had first entered the coffee shoppe in our season’s attire; blue jeans and blouses. It’s a Billie Holiday kind-of day.  I think of Chet Baker and New York,  Central Park, crosswalks, and the pace of leaves; the way they mimic the pace of Broadway. If they only knew the streets they could sweep. Billie is never alone, though. I feel B.B King in my boots. Autumn can do that to me. Autumn allows me to feel rhythm and it can become apart of it, too.  All these sounds; the whipping of my hair, the graze of leaves on the street or the quick jingle of a store door- bullied shut by the wind. This season, like poetry, is language embodied. I can’t help but fall in love with it. I am in love.

I hold onto my beret as the wind tries to steal it. Sarah and I take our strides and laugh. BATTLE OF THE ELEMENTS. I try with force to open the door of the coffee shoppe. It’s reluctant of course. I step through the shoppe smiling and looking down at my boots. I can hear jazz as I walk in. I look up and there she is. The person he has loved and whom he vows never to part with in memory. She’s reserved in his heart. She gives me a smile and her name hits me like a sunrise.

We find our seats in the crowded shoppe, I with great difficulty (needless to say). B.B isn’t in my boots anymore.  I tend to spill on myself next to always. This moment will be no exception. And she’ll see it, no doubt. It’s hard to miss a klutz. “Isn’t it hot in here? It’s hot in here, Sarah. Hot. Are you hot?” – I am barely audible. My hands tremble and I flip open my poetry to some anonymous page. I’ve apparently forgotten how to read. I have a kindergarten class to teach in the morning; we’re learning how to read.  So suitable. Sarah interrupts my incompetancy and asks me what kind of tea I would like to drink. I stare at the chalkboard of choices. “Yeah, tea, I’ll have tea…any kind, yeah”. I forgot about tea, too. But it’s out there!

Sarah leaves me to place an order for our tea. I’m bothered; I’m behind in my studying for Poetry and I know I won’t be able to concentrate, either. I just want to go back outside.  What I want is interrupted by my own personal commentary in my head; “I can’t believe you almost asked ‘the smile’ how she was doing. She doesn’t even want to know you. Does she even know who you are in the first place? Yeah, of course. People creep… I creep all the time. Who doesn’t creep? I creep. You’re a ridiculous person, you know that?”

I neglected my personal commentary and gave up on Poetry altogether starting with a thud in closing the damn book of ‘Poetry’. It blew a napkin towards me and I tried to catch it. I missed. “It’s fine”. I tend to say this when I’m in dire need of a change in situation. I’m also fluent in sarcasm.  Humiliated, if not only for my clumsy ways, I was distracted by ’The Smile’s’ laugh. It was actually real nice.  I watched her for a minute as I waited. ‘The Smile’ was diligent, personable and down-right pleasant.  Need I say at this point that I assumed she wasn’t before, having only known her historical alias.  Watching her for a minute, I rationed that I was “star struck”. My mom and I thought we saw Dennis Quaid in Hawaii once.  This was even worse. Imagine that- Dennis Quaid. Yeah, it was actually heavier than that and this “smile” doesn’t act; not even a nominee. 

Though she has no “star” status, I knew her in pictures well and I had grown accustomed to hearing about this particular person. Like some sort of celebrity I was in awe of the reality that she existed beyond photo paper and telephone wire; “wait, you’re real?”

She WAS real! Very. It finally happened. Maybe she knew enough about me to know that there would be a day I’d slip into her shoppe to write.  Maybe I was giving the whole scenario too much thought. But I am a woman, and I know women. I don’t doubt it, really. This ‘Smile’ and I don’t know one another exclusively but I am, or was, indirectly, or perhaps directly, apart of one the most difficult experiences she has come to live through thus far in her life. Having been told that this person resented me (without knowing me), then, or now, the battles lines were clearly drawn.

But she smiled at me today and the axis on my world went wonky. Genuine or not, she had smiled at me and I realized while waiting for my tea to steep that it wasn’t an easy thing for her to do. Watching her work, I liked her immediately and I tried a different perspective; an objective one, if such an objective can exist with people.

I misjudged someone I didn’t even know. I had reckoned this much by the time that tea was cool enough to drink. How does that happen, the misjudgement, I mean? How does it happen? I felt her watch me as I thought and looked into my big blue cup. We had more than inevitable tension in common and I felt a release, for the first time. I liked her necklace and the way she said “how’s it going?” to approaching coffee-goers. “She’s lovely” I thought. I told Sarah, too.  I took a break in thought (as if) and went to the ladies room. I checked myself out. It’s true. Whatever. I don’t regret anything about myself but she inspired me, this person, perhaps out of self consciousness, to look into the mirror.  When I am under the influence of a sharp bottle of wine I tell myself that I am “under the influence” while looking into the mirror. It’s a quirk. Some people find it funny ( probably on account that they do the same (ie. “I’m so drunk right now”). I didn’t have wine in my tea cup but I felt drunk enough. Breathing in deeply and my hands propping me up by the sink I looked at my  reflection and said, for the love of god, “you’re so drunk right now”.  Reality did it to me.  I was intoxicated by reality and consumed by what I didn’t know and thought I did (like most drunks). I caught  sight of the chalkboard opposite the mirror. These damn chalkboards were everywhere.  I felt like going Jackson Pollock on them. There were quotes written on this chalkboard, probably written and decorated by the people who worked in the shoppe.  Two of them were:

“Let your heart live” and “Don’t cry because it’s over, rejoice that it happened”.

This person, The Smile, could have written these and I’d know why. I was enlightened by her smile and the quotes conveyed in front of me,  regardless if the smile was false and the quotes written by some milk boy with freakishly nice printing and overwhelming sentimentality.  Enlightenment, nonetheless. I took my seat after my “break” and reckoned why he had fallen in love with her. It was life all over again. It was meaningful and I understood and respected this meaning.  I admired her and I admired him. I admired her for smiling at me and I admired him for knowing that she would.  I shouldn’t have assumed otherwise but I had and reckoned that I was wrong.

Despite where my story goes, the one she knows of, I am so grateful to that smile and always will be. I’ll finish my tea and be done; face the leaves and the chime of the streets knowing the people that walk them have stories of their own that come and go. The streets are full of heartbreak and cupids. I’ll walk them knowing this much.  We pace as the people we are destined to be.  For however long she decides to recite the week’s “daily specials” I hope while gazing out that shoppe window someone catches her eye and that Autumn no longer leaves fog inside the glass of her summer heart.  I hope, however ironic, perhaps humorous, that she will consider me to be her so-called “daily special”. She reminds me, perhaps unintentionally,  that we are threatening to ourselves when we stray from who we truly are on account of feelings or events that are overwhelming in their reality; jealousy for one.  Life will go on. You can either appreciate something or someone or be consumed by the inverse of appreciation. It cannot be forced, either.  You learn nothing without genuine compassion. If you cannot adapt to understanding or inherit it from experience, you cannot grow as a person. You cannot be enriched.

“Maybe I’ll just write about it”

…

“What?”

Sarah says “you’re growing”.

And that’s today’s special. Shift happens.

Hudson River

I had heard it before but I never knew it ’til then; one overcast day with chance of showers, the lyrics unexpectedly crept. It was one of those awkward days where your mind is continuously jogged by the infamous “to do” list and you like it so because you’re not sure what you’d with yourself without it.  It was one of those days. In a song I heard “love is facing all your fears” and I understood without having heard the lyrics prior or the lyrics following this apparent “punch line”.  It was as if I had been tuning a radio and gave up on reception until the news broke through; what I needed to know, and just in time. Love is facing all your fears.

My life has been blessed by another, one whom I never anticipated to meet. I first spoke to him the week I left for New York City, a state of mind for me at that time, the same week as cupid’s; February 14th.  He was a friend, then and we entertained one another with descriptions of our lives. This was the “getting to know one another”, though I felt, strangely, like we already did.

My second night in NY, I had exhausted myself by the city’s seductions.  My feet worn and my heart warm, I spent the remainder of my evening describing to him, through writing, how New York City looked from the sky when we had landed the evening prior. I felt he just had to know what it looked like and what it felt like to arrive in that city; it was so very enchanting. I didn’t even know his favorite color then, but I spent the remainder of my evening finding the words to describe:

“As we flew over New York I saw the blue tip of the Empire State. I thought we were going to scrape it. It was just phenomenal. Lights galore. The city, from the sky, looked like the sky itself, inverted with the ground. Embedded and pinned with gold against velvet blue. As we drew closer we found the stars to be buildings and the velvet the blue. It’s so vast. I think you’d love it here.  City lights is all I see.”

Like the back of some postcard, I had hoped he’d take my words and put them in some “forget-me-not” box. After I had sent this “postcard” I went to sleep in the city that doesn’t know how to and awoke early the next day to walk Hudson River.  There along that river I found my intrigue. The wood of the boardwalks lining the river were dry and seasoned. We had walked along the boards compelled and drawn to the water; wearing our jeans and sneakers, we snapped candid photos.  When my friends and I weren’t laughing at our inability to take a good photograph, we were off in our own directions, flirting with our scenery and its company. Two by two I was intrigued. Couples just lined the boardwalk; talking to one another, walking dogs together, laughing and taking photographs together (like my friends and I had been earlier),  and loving one another. In a metropolis these secrets existed. In a city of 18 million people,  I reckoned that all you need is one, sometimes.  Being there felt like hearing Aretha Franklin’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”.  It was suspending in that I realized the privilege of having a love to call your own or that which makes a love. I thought of  how “we entertained one another with descriptions of our lives” and I wanted to place a long distance call. But I never did.  At the same time that I realized what a privilege it is to be in love or have someone to love and love you in return, I realized that I was afraid. How do you ever know that what you think or what you feel dwells in another? How do you know that someone can see what you see? Even words don’t suffice; like promises, love can be broken. It can only be as good as your word, but even so, time can only prove your word.  I think that’s why most people  want to be married, sometimes; it’s a promise that can’t be broken, or really shouldn’t be. You have someone’s word that they will love you ’til the end of your time. What could be more comforting, I’d like to know. But I was afraid that along that Hudson River and miles South, this person, this new compliment to my life, (and the one whose favorite color I didn’t even know), wasn’t thinking of me; it was silly, how could he? But everyday I was in New York City I came home to my place on Broadway to find a message in my inbox. I was grateful and afraid. What goes up must come down?  Maybe we’d just be (and remain)  the kind of friends that would write letters to one another throughout our entire lives and we’d reunite on the day of his wedding or mine and tell people we were “old friends”. If it ever amounted to that, I’d be satisfied, I had reasoned.  We are both the kind of people that have ambitions and things we’d like to do alone. I could receive his letters of happiness and he could receive mine, like he was now.  Maybe.

**

It’s nearing October now and I don’t spend much time writing in my curtains, anymore, at least not like I had last Fall.  I haven’t written a letter since he was in Serbia.  But I’m still afraid, because I don’t write letters to him anymore.  We’ve overcome letters and stamps. I fear that because in any situation, in any relationship, you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be out. You spend your time the way your heart tells you to. And what if your heart doesn’t believe in the same things his does? What if his heart can’t see tire swings and autumn leaves or the vines in Bordeaux or dinners that erupt in laughter and ongoing narratives? What if your heart anticipates? Anything short of anticipation is a true disappointment and bruise.

If you are afraid or fearful of the death of a love or the disappointment of a love, and love is in fact facing all your fears, love, then, is confronting itself and the possibility that it can leave you. If you’re afraid of love leaving you but you love anyway, then it’s true; love is facing all your fears.  True love is loving someone regardless of the situation, or the potential outcome in hypthosis; loving regardless of less than desired outcomes (which our fears often consist of). Love, as I had discovered throughout my life and along the Hudson River, can be precious and rare. Once you have it, do not fear losing it, because by doing so you’re neglecting it, or certain aspects of it. By fearing disappointments in love you are paying heed to what could spoil it or the love you may find in the future.  So write letters, and and talk about skylines, and say “I miss you” and appreciate the people around you who expose their “vulnerability” in intertwined hands and leashes on the boardwalk. Love makes you vulnerable, sure, but should it matter?  Love makes you stonger; you’re only vulnerable to yourself without it.  Wherever you go, even in thought, there is the ghost of  a love; past or present and never does it reduce you; it makes you. Don’t fear ‘you’.

Patience

” No, mom. We will get your dentures on Tuesday”.

I heard this about four times within fifteen minutes as I sat outside of Sunterra’s ‘Second Cup’.  I couldn’t progress past the 23rd page of a Nicholas Sparks novel. The reality in front of me was something Sparks himself would or could write in the autumn colors of the Northern Carolina sun. 

I didn’t look up from my book, though I listened and  heard the voice of an old woman. I could hear her picking at a paper bag. I heard another woman, her daughter, suggesting she stop picking at the bag and try her frozen smoothie: “Careful, mom, if you drink it too fast it will give you a headache”. I heard her mom slurp and say, almost on time, that she couldn’t drink it too fast or her head would hurt.  I initially found this funny, though once she was told three or four times that she had to be careful while drinking her frozen smoothie, I caught on to the reality that this person had no short term memory. She was forgetting things, though trivial, and I was certain that other not-so-trivial things had already progressed to be irretrievable.  I have never seen patience like I did that day. Never. The aged woman asked about her dentures probably six or seven times and to which her daughter would say: “We’re going to pick them up from the dentist on Tuesday, okay mom?” She said this with such grace and patience and optimism. Not a trace of impatience or bother.  Like she was saying it for the first time, every time. 

 ”Oh, okay” her mother would say.  She continued to shred the paper bag in her lap or pick at a flower on the balcony of the cafe as I could see in my periphery. At random her daughter would ask her what year she was born: “Hey mom, what year were you born?”

I can’t recall this woman’s birthday but she answered this easily and with spontaniety, like it was a ridiculous question. I’m sure it inspired hope. Even if it was something so simple as a birthday. It meant she wasn’t lost, just yet, I felt, anyhow.  In reluctant conversation the older woman asked if they (she and her daughter) could visit Gina on the way home. “No, mom, Gina is in B.C, remember?”  her daughter would answer. She said this in various ways probably half a dozen times. “Oh, right, so she’s home now?” her mom asked one last time.  “No, mom, she’s not home”.

I thought, then, of a fragment from Corinthians 13:4:  ”love is patient, love is kind…”. When I did look up from my book, the one I hadn’t read much of, I met the eyes of the daughter.  I tried for a smile and she lent me one easily. I think she noticed I never turned a page of my book.  If I had seen this woman anywhere else I wouldn’t judge her, though I’d suspect she just returned from a cruise. She had the disposition of the Becel woman in the commerical from the 90s, the “young at heart” commercial.   She probably had been on a sailboat, her shampood pooch, too. And she may or may not have been on a cruise recently, but it was then that I found that things are much more complicated than we suspect. We don’t know how people love. We don’t know their story. We really don’t know where they’ve been or what has happened to them in their lifetime or that which has brought them to our visual sense. I wondered what that mother had done, as a young woman, that earned her the (rare) patience of her daughter.  Personally, I remember as a little girl falling off my bike and having a pebble stuck in my arm. When I walked home with a bent bike and my arm bleeding my mom took me in and propped me up by the laundry room sink. She washed it and in her frenzy said “what if you chipped your bone?”. I told her that I hadn’t even though I was crying. I knew it was a pebble. She washed me up and removed it (by accident) and bandaged me up.   I remember that very well. Just as I remember her curling my hair for a wedding or driving me to choir or giving me (burnt) toast with forgotten cheese for lunch on days she hardly had time to make herself something to eat. She still leaves me a card on my bed every Valentines Day. And she has ever since I could read or knew how to spell my middle name.

I know for giving me life and teaching it to me, I would try, with patience, to tell her over a dozen times that we would pick up her dentures on Tuesday or visit Gina when she returns from vacation. I think sometimes we forget, almost entirely, about patience and why it’s important, and why people deserve to be treated with it.

I think if that aged, older woman could have seen, before her daughter was even born, that moment I witnessed outside the cafe, she would cry out of the very realization of love. Love is patient, love is kind. And love, inevitably, takes time to prove.

Love is being patient enough and kind enough to find new ways to show your child how eating broccoli is actually okay. It’s being patient with time to recognize that your child may not want to wear the clothes you buy them anymore. It’s being patient enough to encourage them to follow a dream, even if it’s not the one you dreamt for them. It is being kind enough to break it to them like it is. Love is having to repeat yourself, with patience. And you have an entire lifetime to be patient, to love, and to repeat yourself until you no longer can prove your unconditional love and gratitude to life and those who have revealed it to you.

I believe that we forget, sometimes, how precious the people in our lives are and how they deserve, completely, to be honored and treated with patience. These people in our lives don’t necessarily have to be our superiors but rather, those who inspire us to be superior( in a humble context of course.) Inspiration, like love, can take time to illustrate.  Time and patience. I am beyond thankful for these personifications, to my personal superiors; to my family- my mother, and friends. If you’re reading, thank you.

Pennies From Heaven

My new room is wine-red. The rest of the house is painted in pale, neutral colors. The dining room is a light purple and the “library” a honey yellow. With the exception of the library, my room is perhaps the most outgoing, in color. The last I ever sat at my type writer was in a much different room. In a different city, actually. It was a white room with pink stained carpet and bright green curtains that I seriously considered setting on fire the entire month of September, last year, freshman year. To me, that room, however outdated, was comfortable.  I hadn’t been there long, eight months like any other student living away from home. Now, “home”, I haven’t been here long, either, as our family has moved into a new one.

 I’ve noticed a strange trend with myself; I call any place to sleep “home”. Any place that offers surfaces I can rest books upon, a window ledge, room for a large vase of flowers, and a place for all my pictures to stand. Walking bare feet on hardwood, hearing the sound of the shower, and Frank Sinatra in the evening are familiar to me. Frank and I go way back to when I first discovered him when I was thirteen. He’s been with me since.  I have a postcard with a picture of  Marilyn Monroe on the front of it, and it is leaning against a vase of a dozen dried roses. My vintage Nancy Drews that I had collected and bought from a  book store beside ‘My Favorite Ice-Cream Shoppe’ as a girl, are all stacked on my mirrored night table by the window. It’s a lovely image. Especially with my “old-fashioned” phone resting on outdated vogues. I’m listening to “Pennies From Heaven” by Sinatra. I hope you’ve heard the tune. It was recorded in 1962. And it sounds exactly like 1962. I want you to think pearls, and I want you to think fur coats and scarves, and I want you to think of small dining tables with little lamps on them, Cadillac’s, shiny shoes, and old fashioned love. The subway steam kind-of-love. The “let me get the door for you” kind of love. Red lipstick love. And all those billboard signs and advertisements, the (now) vintage ones where the women in them always look stunned or about to fall asleep with their glossy lips and small hips. I want you to think red carpet at the movies. The “Yes, sir” and “yes, ma’am” right alongside the milkman and mashed potatoes and peas every night (I don’t think anyone ever ordered Chinese in the 60’s. Maybe The Beatles)

 This is “Pennies From Heaven” by Sinatra, 1962 and hearing it stream from my player makes this home, to me. It could be Christmas for all I know.

  When I was thirteen I saw Cadillac’s. As I did freshman year. And as I do now, a sweltering hot uncomfortable evening in July where I’m certain all the fireflies of the world have gathered to celebrate their 4^th of July just outside my window.  This evening couldn’t get any warmer.

I always feel honored to be among a persons things, to be in someone’s “home” or some part of it. A person is not defined by their things, surely, but there are “things”, images or objects, that often remind people of certain others or their so-called “home”. I was overjoyed to receive a postcard from a friend traveling the world who had sent a postcard with an image I’ve always loved; “The Singing Butler” by Jack Vettriano. The postcard reads:  “I found this in Edinburgh and had to send it to you. It’s one of those things I’m not sure I could send many other people on my list… you dig it?” It rests on my dresser drawer. Dig and dug.

 

I think it’s most peculiar how people grow to know one another. An image or the way certain words are said, or perhaps what is said, can remind us of someone else. The way something is arranged; be it in music or the way fine china is set. Anything, really. I think most have experienced at least a fraction of that fondness or familiarity in details that can often remind us of a particular someone. Sometimes we take pictures when this happens.

 The inevitable sentimental, to me, is the greatest. Incomparable, really, when you experience that moment of recognition. It’s a big “Hello Dolly” and feels like old New Orleans. Couldn’t get anymore smug.

 

I want to write about my grandmother’s sugar bowl. It is what has inspired me, after months of delay, to write. Grandma’s sugar bowl.

It’s not extraordinary. You could find one similar in a pawn shop. It’s not delicate enough to be found in an antique shop. I’d cry to find it on an abandoned table in a flee market. Even so, it’s just the sort of object that would have such a fate. A flee market fate.

It’s a thick glass. It looks frosted and it has two little handles on the side of it. The lid is never on it. The rim of it, like the handles, have gold trimming, now faded.  It always looks clean and it is kept in the mirrored armoire by the table we all used to gather ‘round. It’s more of a sugar cup than a bowl, really. As a little girl I’d always lick my index finger and put it in the sugar “bowl”. I didn’t think anyone would notice. I don’t think anyone did, really. How unfortunate for those of you who are reading this and know the sugar bowl. Tragic, really!

As a girl I’d steal sugar from it until I had my fix of sugar and cavities. I eventually grew out of this habit and it became an object almost always on the table after dinners when it was time for coffee. In my teen years it always sat in my reach and I’d scratch at the handles as I’d talk nervously. I was a nervous teenager. I would tell my grandmother what had happened at school and it was upsetting to both her and I. The highlight of school for me, during junior high, was grandma’s house. I knew she’d be waiting for me on the steps outside. If it was nice outside we’d sit and talk. If it wasn’t, we’d go inside and she’d make coffee. Put out the sugar bowl and stick a spoon in it “Okay, bella”

 

  When I went to visit my grandmother one night, last December, she had made us cookies and coffee. Naturally, the bowl was there. She had teased me that evening. “Why aren’t you on a date?”  I remember stirring the sugar with a tea spoon. “I don’t know”. I talked and she listened. The sugar bowl, too.  I left her house late that evening. Snowflakes came down to meet me.

 

Should it ever break, the sugar bowl that is, I’d take it as a very bad sign. I’m not trying to sell this sugar bowl to you, nor am I trying to sell you anything, but it really is so much more than a sugar bowl!

I sat alone at her kitchen table one evening after work. Dazed and exhausted from the work day I just sat there holding my head, no thoughts, at ease, and I noticed the bowl for the first time. It was so old. It hadn’t changed. No part of it broken. The sugar still as sweet as ever. I invested my thoughts into this sugar bowl. Where it had been. Where I had been. It was only an object yet it comforted me in a way no book has or anything of intentional sentimental value. It was and is a reminder that nothing could be sweeter. All those times of taking from it, from “how” to “why”, is remarkable. I often work myself into a knot when I consider the fate of the sugar bowl. I don’t care for possessions though this one I do. Wherever it will sit sweet, I will call home. It tells me everything is okay even when it feels like everything is not. It tells me that things change and the reality of love does not. It can’t talk but it can say “I miss you”. It knows the state of mind I am in. It won’t change, it can’t. It’s never been near empty.

If you ever look at photographs of old chateaux’s in France, not the excessively big ones but the so-called “home”, you’ll notice the interior of them have not been remodeled. Everything from walls to wine are ancient. Having Provence in mind, let me say my comfort in this life lies in my own châteaux. Photographs and that which grows sweeter in time, like wine.

 

 I’ll always see the sugar bowl in memory being pushed towards me by my grandmother’s hands: “take some”.  It is comfort and life all over again. Sugar in my châteaux.

 

Respice Finem

The irreplaceable.

I have not written in what has surely been weeks and I wonder, now, of all things, about the irreplaceable. The irreplaceable has occupied my mind for weeks. Perhaps this is the reason why I have not attempted to write my thoughts or describe them, (even if only to myself) that is, I have de-scribed on account of feeling rather incompetent in describing.

I have yet to write about New York. I wonder if I ever can or will. I also wonder if such paramount experiences will eventually overrule my ability to write about them. Maybe this is how we lose ourselves. We succumb to the every day or doubt what we can do with the every day. So you saw something beautiful today. So you felt something that anchored your heart deep inside of you. So you heard something you didn’t understand.  So you forget. And, if you’re anything like me, that is, you do not receive amnesia well, you spend minutes at a time blankly staring out a window or sitting on the edge of your bed staring at a wall with no pictures, just shadows.  Minutes at a time. And quite simply, it’s just the exhaust of the everyday, the overwhelmed exhaust.  Trying to remember it all after having set it free.

Have you ever watched something slip through your hands, despite the way you reassuringly cupped them? Like sand or water? It doesn’t matter just how much you want to hold it all, the sand finds a way to grind itself through the cracks between your fingers, and the water, seeps through like water on a weak tin roof. There’s nothing you can do about it.  I do not want my life to drip away or form pyramids at my feet. And it is, perhaps in writing, that such happiness can pool and form castles. You must never let it go, and you must never trust that you will not. It can happen. Do not trust that you will always remember. What you remember is engraved on account of its significance. You may remember the details of significance, sure, but I doubt you always will. You could fall ill, and like every other life form on this earth, you will pass and that significance that you once cherished, even for a moment, however fleeting, will pass just as well unless you struggle to write it down or perhaps capture it in a photograph.  That significance is irreplaceable. Life is irreplaceable.

I believe I truly felt that “life is irreplaceable” while walking through a marble hall in a church in New York.  That day, while walking the marble corridor, tears fell. I never felt more overwhelmed yet sure of what I was to behold or was beholding. The marble corridor was made of marble boxes (like bricks) that held the ashes of the deceased. And on each marble brick was a name, birth date, and day of expiration. A corridor of names. I couldn’t fathom how long the hall of the universal deceased would be.  Still, a corridor of names.

I felt as though I should have read each one out loud. I had a difficult time simply walking a marble hall without regard for the names that lingered in it.  I came across one marble brick that had a woman’s name on it. I can’t recall her name now. She had died in her late twenties and someone had taped a pressed flower to it. And beside the pressed flower was a note that said “ no one could ever substitute you”. It was written in black ink in a curly fashion. It was beautifully written, so beautiful, that one could neglect the words. The words- I don’t think I had ever written, read, or heard someone say them before; “no one could ever substitute you”.  I didn’t know what to do with those words. They weren’t all too complicated, either. I just felt heavy and I couldn’t help but stare at my white sneakers against the rose-colored marble floor.

It was my own awkward moment with myself. I struggled with that moment as I remember having my arms folded, staring at my feet and trying to shuffle side to side. I struggled and immensely so. It was just a name, one among billions, and it was just a few words, strung together. It was just a pressed flower. It was just a corridor. I could have walked right through without having made a sound. And I could have pushed through the exit doors to meet the sun, all the same.

No, it was more than that. I felt my tears and released them on account of knowing and feeling that no one could substitute certain individuals in my own life.  Someone, like you and I, missed someone so terribly that they wrote to someone that is gone. Gone.  Irretrievable, irreplaceable. They had written those words down and had carried them so that they could give them to someone who couldn’t receive them. And I wondered about this person, this woman who had died. What had she done and who was she? Did she have brothers and sisters? Did she have a fiancé?  Did they live together? Did she make pancakes in the morning and serve them in bed to him? Did she have a favorite dress? Were the corners of her mirror occupied by photographs? Did these photographs distract her when she was putting on her make-up or pearls while getting ready in the morning or for a dinner date? If she had a fiancé, did she adjust his tie when they would accompany one another to a social gathering? What were her ambitions? Had she been to Africa? Did she ever want to go? Did she collect odd things? Sea shells? Mosaics? Colored glass? Was she the kind of woman that would always spill on herself? Did she drink wine? Had she ever been a bridesmaid? Was her father still alive?  I wondered about such things and I was overwhelmed by never knowing the answers, or perhaps whatever the answer to my contemplations could be. I realized that whatever the answer was to my contemplations, they were unique to her and thus, no one could ever substitute her. Maybe she could make pancakes. Maybe she couldn’t.  Whether she could or could not was apart of her and her life story, one, like every other, that is incomparable and irreplaceable. I thought, then, of those closest to me and how lonely I’d feel without them in my life. Without their details. 

I thought of my grandmother and how no one could brush bread crumbs off of the kitchen table as gently as she does. I thought of my father and how he washes dishes and folds the dish cloth when he’s finished. It’s very neat. I thought of my mother and how she draws stars or 3-D cubes when she’s talking on the phone with someone. I thought about my brother’s printing. How funny looking it is and how much I like it. I thought about my sister’s inability to make her bed symmetrically.  I thought about my best friend Sarah and how she’d organize the papers on her desk in math class in high school- so organized. I thought about my friend Allan and how he used to walk down the hallway at school, his football figure deep in every stride. I even thought about my former English teacher who had taught me for the last three years. How he’d glance at me through his glasses in a melancholy way. And how he had a little gold Oscar statue on his desk.  I thought about these people in my life and began to cry. Nothing and no one could ever compete with them or their memory.  I’d carry a pressed flower in my pocket and walk blocks between Hudson River and Amsterdam Avenue in a heartbeat.  There is no substitute.  I saw each and every face on a Polaroid. Each smiling at me. And I clipped them on the line in my mind and could walk the corridor.  The irreplaceable.  

I truly believe walking that hall had changed my life. It didn’t have to. It could have been another corridor. My friend Sarah who was with me understood as well. I don’t know if anyone else could have at that moment. I like to think, however, that destiny does exist, and more and more I do believe destiny is a reality.  Things are meant to catch our eye. Whether you behold it or not is entirely up to you. So I believe.  That is the beauty of belief, I suppose. It evolves and with every evolution, it becomes stronger. The debris and fragments of the past and present; the belief and validation you have earned in life thus far. It is yours and it is irreplaceable. It could only ever echo in eternity if you let it. Don’t let the poets cry themselves to sleep.  Perhaps this is a lecture directed towards… myself, and to you, of course.Write it. Sustain it, always.