I could hardly stand leaving that river. I left easily in a hot car, climbing back through the hills, dodging deer and iffy parts of the road. The thing I love about rivers is that I always feel clean coming out of one. Even amongst the river bugs and moss. I came out and the 90 plus weather dried you instantly but your skin, despite the sunscreen, was river fresh-river strong. We waded out, it never got more then waist deep, just deep enough to swim against the current. The fish nibbled at our ankles and we gritted our teeth and bore the freezing parts searching for the warmer currents. I realize now I need to be near water, within easy driving distance of a body of water, something that moves and changes, but is always constant. I look at the pictures of us in the shade smiling enjoying the blanket of sunny air moving through the valley. I notice in my eyes the rivers reflection, painted across the glass iris. James’s eyes are brown just as they have always been. Like the woods solid around him, just a tinge of light penetrating from the canopy. In this terrarium James is the land and I am the water. Or something like that.

Read more...

Now, with things such as facebook and myspace one can be nosey. Back even just a few years ago, if you stopped talking to a person, it likely meant you had no idea what they had become. Now it’s on the Internet for everyone to see. I look at these pictures, people I used to play with as a kid, partying, drunk different hair cuts- me included. I don’t know if it makes me lazier, or more interested in getting in contact with these people once again. Sometimes I am jealous, sometimes I'm frightened. Mostly I feel old. I skipped, or rather, was never going to have a wild collegiate life. But it doesn’t bother me that much, plus you never know really what’s down the road.

As people get older I can see why the word meaning might grow into a flower, or brick for that matter. You keep wondering what your meaning is. When you’re young no one thinks they are going to have to actually work, the world revolves around a child in their perception. Then you learn that there’s other people suffering or reaching some level of enlightenment and one wonders where they stand in all that mess. What the hell is one supposed to be doing? Meaning is a tough word. It’s great if you can find it, bad when it’s the used the wrong way and scary when you can’t find it at all.

As for me, and anyone my age who is freaking out about their meaning in life, I don’t really think we can honestly. Twenty, you’re only twenty, I remind myself. I say, you just came out of your teenage years where things were really fucked up, and you’ve really only just begun to live. I think sometimes it just happens, we can’t necessarily go looking for it. And worrying about it certainly doesn’t help the situation. You can’t go around expecting the world to change with the snap of your fingers; you have to work at it. Everything comes with work. I hate that most-that there’s no magic spells to cure cancer, no magic seeds to regrow forests in a day, no way to really know where you are going to end up. Right now, learning to live is probably the most important thing. Gaining tools of some kind to do so.

However I still spend a lot of nights in bed talking to myself, what am I doing here? What am I going to be doing? What’s the difference between the bed and me? Who is this person laying next to me, and why do I wan them to be there next to me? I guess this is why faith is so attractive, especially to people who are getting older. They want to know they fit, and they are wanted, that they were meant to be put on this earth, that they have meaning.

Read more...

I don’t want my mind to bother. I hadn’t listened to music in a while, and I do now. Suddenly it makes me move, makes my eyes soft and I wish for everything to beautiful. The things my mind sees as dark, to go away. My passion trodden on. Yet my anxiety declined to a blissful breeze. One’s you feel up your skirt, behind your ears. Which one do I choose?

God the sun was deep in me today. I could only stand it for an hour, before my wintry acclimated skin could no longer take it. I was reading, forcing my body to get used to summer again.

I want to be able to touch the map on my wall and go there instantly.

The high desert at sunset, the seaside hot and salty, the woods after summer rain; those places are me, what I am made of. Cracked concrete, need.

Read more...

I feel like I am looking at myself the way I might look at a history book. It’s just the big events, important to someone and no one at the same time. And you never really know how they happened, it just did, and now here we are in the perils of our time. Loosing touch with what we used to be everyday and moving towards cold metal. I wish I could know what it was, and is, to be so intimately connected with the earth that you can sense a storm hours away and tell where the path is in the woods. But those days will never be, and they are disappearing for those who know those things. They will be gone soon, ground into powder and swallowed up by the oozing cancer.

I think for me, I submerge things, weigh them down into a pool, where eventually they pile up and I can see them surface slowly. Then things get dark, the light flickers and I grow irritable, frustrated and I want to distance myself from the things that matter most. One day I get pushed over the edge, and I have to stare at these things floating around what a seemingly pristine pool. All I can remember from those times, is rushing into the water tossing and churning up a whirlpool of these things. Ultimately I want the objects to be the way I want them to be, because I feel like only then will things be perfect. When finally they settle to the bottom again, I am numbed, walking around blinded, even more distant. But now I am wading everyday into that pool to push them down-wanting the pond to swirl around naturally without intervention, just acceptance. I just want to let things be, because why should they change? Yet deep down in my belly I know that there is unrest, there is this thorn trying to tell me something but I wont listen. I wonder sometimes, if the pool is a place I have created over this past year-for it will be a year soon, in order to keep myself in a safe place. No worries about love, place.

I’ve been playing WoW. Although I know it’s such an awful disease that I vowed never to catch, because it is the seed of the things that I try to drown in my pool and the cancerous metal that is swallowing up the human being, I still go back to it. It’s mindlessness, like watching TV, letting it do the thinking for me. Not only that but the attention I get from the Guildie’s draws me in. I feel childish, like a middle school girl shaving her legs for the new boy at school-the one rumored to have a crush on you. I like “boy company” frankly.

In an effort to counteract the numbness of my swirling pool and the numbness of WoW, I have been drawing and I recently picked up a book. Books were my first lovers. They pleasured me, gave me strength and hope, taught me how to live. But they are gone now, replaced by flesh and dripping wet metal, twirling down into the bottom off the pool.

Read more...