To the comments left in love

A strange thing has happened. New comments were left on this page of history I never visit anymore. Confessions, connections, professions of love. I am sorry I do not write anymore. I am sorry if I have left any of you hanging. Mostly, I just let days pass now, think every now again about writing, and give my heart to things and people that will never love me back. I ache like I have never ached before. I am destitute of faith or any sort of hope in a future even neighboring happiness. I've been running so long. I don't know how to stop. I am not faster than pain, there isn't a road she doesn't know or a bed in which she does not lay down with me. I stopped writing; she has spilled off the page. I stopped singing; she has filled the silences. I stopped loving; her victory is doubled.
To the one I gave the sunflower to ... I don't know who you are. I don't remember the hand that accepted that flower or the girl who looked outside herself to give it. I'm sorry. Please remind me.
To Lisa ... I am so sorry for your loss. I am sorry for the emptiness you feel. I feel it too. I hope to write you soon.
To my dear Marie... I love you very much, though my silence has not said it. Your love still reaches me. It still moves me.
I don't know what happens now. I don't have promises left that haven't been broken. Or dreams big enough to make resolves. But to the three who have reached out, know that tonight my heart looks something like it used to, my fingers find the keys easy like pianist finds scales, and my tears stream out for this goodness and mercy that I have turned blind eyes to these past years. For that I thank you. For that I would die a little more to myself and remember that living for the ones like you turns aching into alchemy.

the river

ben and i are leaving for san diego in a few short days. i cannot wait to drive across this country. my life is on pause for this and it's a hard thing to explain to people. they say you can't live someone else's dream. and i think that's true, but i think you can hold hands with it; just until it feels better about leaving everything its known up till now.

this trip is the hand on the back of the bike. it is the afternoon you trusted enough to pedal long after your sibling let go.

we spend the night before we leave looking at the full moon from the balcony deck of our parent's small apartment. we talk about excitement, about fear, and expectations. i am surprised to find that most of ben's concerns are about mom and dad.
"i'm afraid that, like, i'll come back and i'll feel the same, but mom and dad will have aged and ..."
he trails off and i know his thought.
"i still feel young and i want to do things and what if i come back and they're ... older?"
his ever-optimistic heart keeps him from saying "too old." i am enough of a cynic to add it in my head, but, thank God, am i still not hard enough to be unaffected by it. i assure him that he'll change and slow too, but it is little comfort to him. and i realize he is his mother: eternally thinking and genuinely feeling twenty-one and untouchable. she never admits when she's sick and if and when she finally does, she can't understand it. like when ben broke his collar bone and he couldn't accept the limits it placed on him. it was the first time i think either of us realized he was getting older and things might have to change. things like playing hard, playing rough, and tackling guys younger than him. his body is slowly, but surely failing him. and when you face the breakdown of a twenty-seven year old body, you certainly have to face the breakdown of fifty-five and fifty-seven year old bodies. the creeping mortality of the ones we love most begins to sink and settle like sands in the riverbad we are ever trying to stir with the rapids of youth. rivers, turn streams, turn dry beds. and it is so hard to branch and run when your source is ebbing.

take the picture now

so i drove across country with my brother. the word good comes to mind a lot when i think of how to describe it. i don't mean "that icecream was good." i mean God created the stars, and the sky, and the expanse of waters that covered the earth "good."
it's a misused word. and journeys like this one are often misinterpreted experiences. i feel like everyone who asks about the trip expects me to say it was life changing. but i keep thinking about something royce mentioned once: how experiences, or trips across country, or even overseas don't really change you, not for long, unless you have a foundation to stand on when you come home.
i don't think instant change is impossible, but i do think it's a rare and precious mercy from God. because most change is slow and hard, and is the culmination of a lot of experiences, a lot of traveled miles, and a lot of ordinary days. they creep in quietly until one day you just realize that you see things differently; that you do things differently; that you're not obsessed with changing anymore because you are changed.
i've ruined a lot of trips by expecting them to reveal a round earth where all before was flat. but i'm trying not to anymore. i'm trying not to guess the defining moments or how it ends. it just ruins the middle of this really good story. and i'm trying to let my travels be part of a foundation that builds a floor sturdy enough to stand on while all that has happened begins to move me.

bilingual grace

so it finally happened. the thing i have been expecting since i started waitressing nine months ago: i slipped and busted my ass. i wish there was a better way to say it, but i think when your butt meets the floor with the force mine did that you have to call it an ass. and i busted it.
i had just been cut for the night which, when you're working at Catch 54, feels like a new lease on life everytime. the bell rings downstairs so i decide to be a team player and run one more ticket. Phil, our chef, hands me a plate of calamari and rattles off a table and seat number with his usual sarcasm. i attempt to round the corner and head out when i get that old childhood feeling. the one i used to get as i was falling out of a tree; the silent, slow motion, mid-air mind blank. i am snapped back into real time first by my arm catching the corner of the sink, then by my ass slaming the tile, then by the burning in the foot that folded under me, then, finally, by the sight of little battered and fried tubes and tentacles scattered on the greasy floor. in the words of my brother i folded like a prize pony. i have time to blink before Phil's hands are under my arms and he is pulling me to my feet saying: "Stand up, stand up. Are you ok?"

i like to think i'm tough. but, really, i never mastered the "don't cry in front of boys" part of being a tomboy. especially if said boys are kind. my eyes start to fill with tears, my face pulses with the blood rushing to it, Ben, the either gay or pretentious waiter laughs, and i try to make a break for the door. but phil catches me, tells me i have tartar sauce on my forehead, and sends me to the employee bathroom. i tip toe past the line of guy cooks, and past the dish washers wishing, for once, the kitchen wasn't so quiet and no one would see me.
the mirror reflects a flushed, wide-eyed, crazy hair, sweaty mess of a girl who looks as if she were chased by bullies all the way home. self pity starts to sink in like the stains of the cocktail sauce as i grab a paper towel and begin to pathetically wipe off the the shame.
i hate my job. it is essentially staffed by people who care only about tips, or how much they rang, covers they had in a night, what wine they suckered someone into buying, or the fact that they work for matt haley. with the exeption of one or two, there is no friendship that exceeds indifference and a "what can you do for me?" half smile.
a pair of sneakers in the doorway catch my eye. i look up and see Eddy our Mexican dishwasher. He speaks no English. Our only exchange up to this moment is when he clicks his tongue and calls me "mama cita." He extends his arm and hands me a rag, then another and then puts pink soap on a third. i smile weakly, accept the offering, and keep my head bowed. blood and tears are pushing so hard on my face now that i feel it might shatter. and Eddy just stands there, and waits, and watches, and bends to wipe my leg where i can't reach.

i like to think i'm tough. but really, i can't get over grace. especially when said grace is sourced in a man who understands me without being able to even speak words i would recognize. the motions of embarrassment cross language barriers, the motions of grace exceed them, and i am shattered by a new feeling: warmth.
work is hard. embarrassment can be insult and injury. but warmth ... warmth is enough to cover the exhaustion, and the sting, and the ass busting of these things i know will pass.

memories i sometimes remember

i can hardly tell you how it feels to be home and breathe in this air and drive these roads with the three i love most in this world.
i rarely ever remember my childhood stories. Ben is always telling me stories i know are true because his mind remembers the slightest and smallest details from left field. i just smile like a little girl hearing knew adventures of old friends, only a little frustrated that they do not exist as actual events in my mind.
driving home tonight on back country roads that wind like the north anna river the smells of a million younger days braid their way into our car, through my hair, and deep into my heart that aches so much for home these days.
hay, honeysuckle, wet soil, gasoline on cement, moss, barns, my nanny's house, and dirt dusted rock all fill me while the sunshine fades into the purple sky whose only interruption is the cadence of a coming storm. its jaged lines of light tear through the expanse, momentarily showing snapshots of still lingering clouds, and in between these things my brother speaks the stories that tonight i can remember if only by their smells. and i can't tell you how it feels to breathe this air and drive these old roads with those i love most in this world.

the loss of a voice

"Thom Mannarino died."
i hear the shaky voice of a fellow student say over the phone.
"I wanted you to hear it from me and not through the grapevine ..." she continues to speak words though only the first three have any meaning and they mean so much. she goes on to explain that he died in a fire in Henderson where his parents live. after almost a year i learn in this conversation where he has been. so many questions are answered in his death, but so many more arise from the loss.
i was praying so hard that he would come back into my life. i believed he would. i really did. i had his number but i just couldn't call, suddenly nervous after years of boldness in his classes. and by the time i was ready it was disconnected.
this "too little, too late" is too much to bear.
time strikes me as something wholly different now that he is gone. days are somehow shorter, hours less signifcant, minutes mere sounds as small and ignorable as sands roving the shoreline.
i can't understand it.
and i don't know how to explain my loss of him. it is incomparable and therefore seems dismissable. as if our age difference, his lack of relation to me, our teacher student status renders him expendable. like how losing an uncle or a friend is not as bad as losing a father or sibling. but sometimes it is.
and as i lay here in delaware living out of my trunk passing sunrises and sunsets asleep or working i am overcome by how much dimmer the world seems without him in it. i don't want him to be gone. every word i pen speaks of him, and his advice, criticism, and encouragment. and i find, even moreso now that he is gone, that he is bolder and more permanant than the ink that stains these pages. he will outlast every well-honed phrase, every story, every punctuation, every voice i find within myself.
he is the voice inside my head. and no words are ever born within me without the echo of his.