Come Back, My Love, For I Never Had You To Start

"Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes,
Nibble their toast and cool their tea with sighs,"

Oh the apathy of the people here,
And yet the tension is expressly clear.

"Or else forget the purpose of the night,
Forget their tea -- forget their apatite."

How far gone it seems are we,
from the past -- from ferocity.

-John Keats and Me

Elegy

"I do not know how elastic my spirit is."

Mr. Keats, I'm afraid you would be ashamed of this shrewdly blasphemous hipster land we call the modern day.

"There is a tenderness to the heart's affection you know nothing about."

Dear John, there is a tenderness it seems only your heart has captured; only your heart and one other. The only pair on earth that has captured the tenderness you speak of. For is not each person, each pair of people intensely unique? And yet no one is completely unique. And that is what allows us to love, but love uniquely for no love between any two people can be recreated by a different set of beings.

"You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun." -Billy Collins

There is much that you are, and that you are not, Mr. Keats. You are half of a whole, a puzzle piece, and Litany. But in this case, you are not the bread knife, but you are the plum orchard. You are eaten rosebuds and coughing blood. You are the keystone to someone's life, and when you are removed, the arch of her world disintegrates.

Mr. John Keats, you are the bright star, you are the elegy.

Word

90's boy bands
Christmas Music
The Happiness Project that was Procrastinated
unfinished books
unfinished goals
unnatural contentment... apathy
dissatisfaction
Lists..... Listslistslistslistslistslists
dissatisfaction
indifference
validation
no opinions. no opinions.
procrastinator
hard worker
epitome of average
flake Big corn flake
White Blue Yellow
Wrong order
Right order
look back look back
self elision
explanation
no explanation
chair pillow
Isadora Duncan?
no
modern dancer
don't like
caveman
North
I wish
feeling sluggish
beatnik
am I?
don't want
be
is
am
was
were
Freakin' Faulkner
word

The Melodramatic Missing of a Missionary (or Several Missionaries, if You Will)

Dear ...........

After you left, I left your memory.

I left it right there by the side of my metaphorical road of life, because everything in my life is metaphorical.

My life is funny, grand, smashing, TOO SICK, adventurous, awkward and all sorts of good things that you left me with and I decided to keep.

I decided many things since you left, which is rather surprising for me, because as you know, I'm rather indecisive.

Know I'm missing you, though, because when you left I had learned all sorts of good things, but I felt missing-ness, too.

I felt a secondhand joy that bites the nose, because gosh, you were just an amazing kid doing stunning things, but my heart was a little hole-punched after you left.

Hole-punched after the rambunctious shenanigans we shared, because that is what the young 'uns do and we were definitely young 'uns and we still are young 'uns, but you are there and I am here.

And I am undulating in my life right now and you know exactly where you are going today, tomorrow, next week, six months, a year from now.

A year and you won't even know yourself and you won't even know me and I won't know you and I won't know I.

I won't be me and you won't be you, at least not the you that I knew and liked.
I knew it would happen before you left, I knew that when you get back I will see you in a different way, like an image in a refracted mirror created by laser-point pens and you will see me as if through a blurry contact lense in a mixed bag of emotions.

Mixed bag of funniness, grandness, smashingness, TOO SICK-ness, adventurousness, and I can guarantee that there will be some awkwardness.

There will be the things you left me with, but new things as well because while you were gone I had to take some string and clay and fill in the hole-punches.

Fill in the missing bits until "y'all" got back and could fill them in again.

Fill them in in a different way, because some of the clay cemented in the hole that "y'all" left in me.

"Y'all" left, not "you all" or "all of you" because my Texan friend filled in some of those holes with big smiles and constant "y'all-ing".

          You see, I had to do something to survive, because I've undergone a bit of identity crisis while you are away and I would like to warn you that when you get back I will not be the same as when you left me. People are not like that. We are not like your old room, or the books on your bookshelf. We morph and it's psycho.

          That is why I left your memory. Because you would morph too, and it would be for the best, but it would be painful to look back when you come back and I don't know you.
My one hope is that we'll still be somewhat friends.
I hope we will, and I hope you hope so too.
If you do, I think it might be so.

Yours truly,

...............

An Interesting Paradox

It's supposed to snow tonight. Five A.M. is what the weatherman said. But I don't know if I believe him. "Trust not in the arm of flesh." Or that's the gist of it, anyway.
What I do know is what I felt that night; what I felt in my pocket.  We were walking back in the dark, and it was windy and piercingly chill. The leaves were blowing down the sidewalk just like they do in the scary movies. I was wearing brown boots that crunched the blowing leaves as we walked. I put my hands in my pocket and I felt something. A pebble? No, a marble. It was cold and hard, and my fingers were cold and stiff, but within the lining of my pocket I clenched my cold fingers around the cold marble and suddenly both began to warm. An interesting paradox, like our philosophical discussions. The cold meeting the cold made both warm. I think I may have discovered cold fusion.

Chlorophyll

It was September 19th. She remembered very clearly. She woke up and ran down three flights of stairs. When she walked out the door, the air sparked her. It was different, the oxygen as she stepped out into the world at that specific moment was different. She blinked and subconsciously she knew what it was. It was Autumn. She took a deeper breath and it became part of her. The seasons, it seemed, mimicked her life. She had Spring to create, Summer to enjoy, and Autumn.... Autumn will be a trek into the wilderness for her, the first steps that will become the wild softness of Winter. Autumn is when she embarks on life's most daring adventures. The world winds down, the leaves conclude their stories, but something inside of her wakes up.  It nuzzles its way up through the pile of auburn leaves in her soul and says, "You're ready, now." That is always how it has been for her. Since before she was born. Her spirit waited, and then when Autumn came, she came too.

Grandmother's Pearls

I've been searching, tearing apart the house for Grandmother's pearls.
I've been through all the knick-knacks, all the top drawers, and in the carved wooden box in the back of  Mom's closet. I can't seem to find them. I know they're somewhere. I've seen them. I know how precious they are. We wouldn't lose those.... Not intentionally. They are beautiful, and soft, and real. They're not a fake, five-dollar strand.
I just need something like that manifest in life. I've been searching, searching for something beautiful and real. Not photoshopped or cinematic. I just want something tangible, that shows that the things we want in life can happen, and they're not just pipe dreams and wisps of smoke and memory, like Grandmother's pearls.
We have them. I've seen them. They are soft and beautiful and real. I just don't know where to find them.

A response to myself; String and Clay 2

How can I know what I think, until I read what I write? I thought a lot of things in June that didn't prove true come August. August. What a beautiful month. It's the inbetween month with no holidays that is cut short by impending autumn. But it's still summer. August is like a game of perpetual emotional limbo. Not here. Not there. That's how I feel. I'm still under construction, but I've put a few bits of twine in and a little bit of mud. Now I'm out baking in the sun.  I know a few things now about myself that I didn't before, things that might interest you. I once thought I was too young, that day with the Roxberry banners. I know I'm not too young now. I'm not too old, either. I'm just me.  You seemed to have realized that and you're ok with it too. You've got these clear eyes. They're clear, but their color is murky. They're like Elton John, you see, because as he so wisely stated, I can't quite tell "if they're green, or they're blue." I thought about Elton John this morning. I thought about his music and lyrics. "Hold me close now, Tiny Dancer." I'd like you to take me and say that to me. I'd feel a little more complete if that happened, I think. The thing is, I told myself that couldn't happen until I was finished creating myself, or I'd feel emotionally compromised, like I let you affect who I was trying to become, which I'd always thought was going to be strictly between me and The Man Upstairs. I have one thing to say to that previous person, who thought she was above so much. Who you are is a mosaic of three parts. It's one part of how God  moulds you, another part of how you design yourself, and a third part of how other people paint themselves permanently into the canvas of your soul. So create yourself as best you can, but let others come in and paint right alongside you. You'll end up so beautiful if you do.

Take your life, and put it in a box. Now put that box in a bigger box, mail that box to yourself and what do you have? A package and too much time on your hands.  But seriously, pack up your life and you will realize you have too much of it. You will see that life is better when you are like Cormac McCarthy: a minimalist. All you need in life can fit in a shopping cart. Just one. And yet we fill shopping carts o'er and o'er again, because like Lay's potato chips, one was ne'er enough. So here's the plan. We take this summer, and we grab what we need from it, and leave what we don't. We leave our sadness, our shoes and worries on the front porch for the boy scouts to pick up and give to Goodwill. We take sunburns, skinned knees and change.... Lots of change. Nickles, dimes, quarters, but maybe not pennies. We'll leave those on the ground because we may need to come back and pick them up for luck later. We take different change, too. We take the-last-week-of-august change. We take that because we have to, but then we turn it into an adventure. You don't have to go far for adventure. 10 blocks = adventure. So grab your novels and vintage tea set and come over 10 blocks to my new backyard. You'll see when you get here.

Latitude and Longitude

There are a few ways to look at this. There are a lot of things I could say and excuses I could make, but the longitude and latitude of it is that I wasn't who you were expecting me to be, nor were you what I was expecting.  Expectations are a funny thing. I don't know why humans expect anything anymore because it rarely happens the way we expect. It's like we feel entitled to good things, or something. Are we? Because I'm a human, does that give me the right to expect that you would be a certain way and give me certain things to make me happy? It's not selfish, really, because I tried to give you what I hoped would make you feel pleasant, and so I expected (there's that word again) the same. Well it's not that you didn't meet expectations, it's just we weren't taking the same test. You see, you were in Albania and I'm over here in Ohio. They're the same level, but there is an unexpected dichotomy of an ocean to pass. Well, thank goodness for modern transportation. You fly out half-way, and I'll come meet you in the air. We'll jump out an land on our feet on an island in the middle of that ocean I didn't like and eat bananas. It might be paradise.

The Human Library Card

This summer is like a borrowed book. It's like the book you let me borrow, actually. I only have it for a brief time, I knew that from the outset.
I still took it though, knowing that I have to give it back eventually, that it can't be mine forever; not tangibly, anyway.
I can still take the letters off the page and churn them into my mind, so that what I can't hold in the physical, I can hold in my mind.... convert it into plasma, energy, synapsis, so that it lasts forever.
See, this book, "The World's Greatest Salesman".... It's inspiring, right? Well, you are inspiring too.
See? This summer is like a borrowed book.
See, this book, "The World's Greatest Salesman".... It's deep, right? Well, you are profound.
See? This summer is like a borrowed book.
See, when you gave me that book, you gave me a little part of yourself you didn't know about.
See, those underlined words you forgot were there was a little chink of yourself that I got to taste.
See? You are the book, and I borrowed you for a summer.
But don't worry. I will give you back in the fall.

I need friends. And I need hipster glasses. The two aren't wholly unrelated. I lost my glasses, so I need new hipster ones. I got three jobs so I lost a lot of time, but hopefully, that doesn't mean I lost friends. I know that doesn't mean I lost friends, because they come into my work and hand me back a bit of the time I lost. They brush the dust of the pavement off of it, because that is where I dropped it. They understandingly say, "Here. Here's some time. It's not new, but we know you are trying. We are going to make fun of you anyway, though. Because we know you will laugh, and we'll laugh too." Here's the catch. They don't say that out loud. I still hear it, though. That means we are friends.
They come into my work, wearing a baseball cap and a candy-circus dress.  They write notes on blank receipts and yellow sticky-notes. I'm covered in tape and laughing til I cry. I lost my glasses, and I lost a lot of time. My friends gave me back some time..... Maybe they can get me some new hipster glasses?

Yellow roses people

The world loves yellow roses. Because
They are pretty
They stand out, but they are still common; they aren't too surprising.
They are eye-catching
They smell nice... We can't forget that they smell nice.

So, the world loves the yellow roses people. Because
They are pretty
They stand out, but they still fit in; they aren't too surprising.
They are eye-catching
They smell nice.... We can't forget that they smell nice.

Sometimes what a girl needs is a pretty dress and a really great pair of shoes to go with it.

Branches

There is a tree; a tall oak tree. The branches twist and snake over and around each other as they reach outward. The roots run deep. This tree does not have leaves.
It has a sun, though.
And a moon.
And stars.
 Hanging from it's branches is the circus,
 a ferris wheel,
a friend
and a red front door.
There is a toppled suitcase, it's contents traipsing down through the branches of the tall oak tree. It's roots run deep. From the branches there hangs a lemon,
 a sailboat,
a pumpkin
and a bike.
There is music that hangs from the tree and there are balloons. There is also a girl in this tree. Maybe she is important, maybe she is not. You have to search to find her. Does that make her important? There are possibilities on the branches of the tall oak tree. You just need to pluck one off. There is life at the ends of the branches of this tree.

String and Clay

I work at the dry cleaners and that is where I met you, because you work there too. You weren't what I was expecting to fall in love with. You have a charm. You don't know you do. Well, you know you're charming but you are charming not in the way that you think you are charming. And it's not the 1950's-lettermans-jacket charming. It's your very own brand, like Tide, or PF Flyers. But those are my brands. Your brand is the brand where you tell me your plans, your problems, and you wear your imperfections on your sleeve. I wish I could do that. And you show me knew things that you know, and I don't. I love to learn though. I like to think about what you tell me. I especially remember the day where the store was slow, and we weren't busy.  It was just me and you and there were no Audreys and    Danielles or Carlys to get in the way. I liked it, but it was a bit scary for me, and maybe boring for you. But that's why it was scary for me. To be in the dry cleaners with just you and me, with not much to do, I don't want you to be bored of me. I want to be interesting. I want to be the maze that you want to discover. I want you to uncover my soul piece by piece until you uncover the entire painting. I want you to think it's beautiful. Like the Sistine Chapel.  They say we create ourselves. I want you to think I am a Michael Angelo with my own spirit. I think that's why I remember that thursday at the dry cleaners. It's because it was my first chance to show you a lesser-known part of me, and to see if you liked it. I choked though. So instead we cut out Roxberry banners from their flyers, and then we took those knives and cut up cardboard boxes. I built houses out of the pieces you had already sliced in thirds. You chuckled at me, and teased me a little. So I threw the pieces away. "Too young..." I muttered in my head regretfully, "too young." You never knew that, though. And you went on and told me about the world and what it needed and how you were going to change a bit of it.  Well, you changed me. I am now in a state of recreation, where what I was has eroded because you showed me a different walk of life, but I can't accept your walk of life either. Not now, anyway. So I am in a period of recreation where I am taking bits and pieces of clay and string and forming something that I am not sure what it is yet. God knows. But He's not telling me everything about it. He just gives me hints and lets me discover the rest. It's a restless game of riddles we play. Restless because he gives me straight answers and I confuse them myself and solve them again only to find that what God said in the first place was right all along. But I wanted the experience so I took the tiles an made a rubix cube and solved it again. I can't even solve a real rubix cube. Only metaphorical ones. I'm in the middle of one right now and you are one of the sides. I don't know which color yet, but it's still up for grabs, I guess. You told me your favorite color was deep purple. There's not that color on a rubix cube. You'll have to choose a different color or not be on there at all, I suppose. Maybe you are the tricky extra color, the joke square that someone put on so that I could never solve the rubix cube. Do I want to take it off, though? Do I mind if this puzzle gets solved? Maybe not. Maybe that's why I write in a notebook now, and why I kept the Roxberry banners we cut out.

Of small and large

I think I'm afraid. I'm afraid of being passionate. I'm afraid of being passionate because I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid of failure and ridicule from, I don't know who. My family. Maybe my friends maybe nobody. Maybe I'm afraid that nobody will scoff at me because that means nobody saw me try. That means that maybe nobody saw me succeed. If you succeed but no one was there to see it, did you really accomplish anything? Is it possible that I'm afraid of success? Or maybe I'm just afraid of change. Success in our society is often measured by how much change took place. Andrew Carnegie, for example would not have nearly the renown he does today if he had gone from rags to a peaceful middle-class home. His passion took him beyond that, in almost every way, good or bad. He gained so much, but he lost a lot too. Passion is what propels us forward, and evokes powerful changes. What humanity often forgets is what falls by the wayside in our powerful pursuits. There comes a point on everybody's life where they have to decide to pursue their biggest dream and fill their life with that, or whether they are going to follow a gentler road, and fill the void of a forgotten dream with the smaller graces of life. Perhaps one path is better than the other; who's to say? Maybe it doesn't really matter. What matters is what each of will choose for ourselves, and when we do, can we ever turn back? Is a discarded dream lost forever to only be taken out of the attic and dusted off every now and then? Or can it age like wine and become riper with aging? Events like passions and dreams are so independent of each other, yet so intertwined. You cannot generalize people's desires, yet as society we always try to. I cannot say much for the dreams and passions of the world. I can barely say anything about my own. I can say this, though. Whether you lead a life of one strong passion or many mild ones, do not let fear govern your choice.

Sarcasm and Silly people

Today I experienced a rather awkward moment. It was one of those iconic moments where you text someone in your contacts, and unbeknownst to you, said person has changed their number, and so you end up having a very ambiguous conversation with someone you don't know, trying to figure out whether you really have the wrong number, or if your REAL friend is just playing a ridiculous joke.
Well, I sent a text message to what I thought was my brother, with just some standard small talk, and I ended up having the following conversation. I've put in my thought process during this conversation in order to clearly make my point. *ahem*

Me: "Stacia Hardy says hi."
Mystery Not-My-Brother Man: "Who is that"

Me: "She was Chamber with you, right?"                    
MNMBM: "? Wrong number?"                                    (Well, I hope not because then that puts me in that stupid situation where I have figure out whether or not this is Drew, and then it's super lame if it is him, and super lame if it isn't. Especially since I've had his number in my phone for the past, well, eternity.)


Me: "Wait. This is Drew, right?"
MNMBM: "Goodbye stalker"                                 (goodbye stalker? ok either my brother inherited my Dad's warped sense of humor and it's only just now manifesting itself after a quarter of a century, or this dude can't give answers that make sense.)

Me: "Arrrgg! What is wrong with my life?"
MNMBM: "?"                                                          (yeah. That's how I feel right now, too. Just like one giant question mark. Help me out here, buddy. Are you my brother or not? Hey! maybe I should write a children's book about that and call it "Are you my brother?" Haha! Oh I crack myself up sometimes.)

Me: "This is my brother, right? Andrew Forbes?"
MNMBM: "Nope"                                                         (....... You couldn't have said that the first time?)

Me: "Well. This is awkward. Sorry about that."
MNMBM: "Is this hannah brown?"                                  (Seriously? Hannah Brown? Have you not been paying attention?)

Me: "Obviously not, since, well, my brother's last name is Forbes. Who is this?"
MNMBM: "No, its your mother, jk lol this is barack obama"      (Ok. A: Just tell me who you are and then we can both move on and sleep in peace. B: jk? lol? Really? Who uses those anymore? C: You honestly couldn't have come up with anyone better than my mom and the president? Sheesh. Some people's kids.)  *At this point I can feel my IQ physically dropping. In an attempt to maintain some sort of intelligence, I resort to sarcasm.*

Me: "Ha. Ha. You are cracking me up right now."
MNMBM: "Bcuz ima BAUSS"                                              (jk and lol were bad enough. bcuz. ima. bauss. I cannot believe this. Why am I even still talking to you?)      *My Braincells are now reaching critically low levels. Some sort of intelligence must be established in this conversation.*

Me: "Who is this really?"
MNMBM: "BARACK OBAMA"                                         ("You wanna stick with that lie or choose a different one" - Mr. Birrell and Ms. Woolsey.)


Me: "Ok. You're not the president. He would actually bother to spell the words 'because', 'I'm a' and 'boss' correctly. Nice try, though. If you're not going to tell me, I'll just go. Bye."  (Fairly rude, yes. I probably shouldn't have, but it had just the right combination of sarcasm and sass. I really couldn't help myself.)  *Brain levels of activity now begin to adjust back to normal.*

All in all, it was definitely one of my more sarcastic moments in life, and definitely not my noblest, but it was just one of those times where you're rolling your eyes and "SERIOUSLY??" is stamped across your brain in giant, bolded, size 294 sans-script font.  Anyway, it was rather satisfying to let my unbridled sarcasm dictate the converstation, but I'll try and reign it in next time. I guess I should go figure out Drew's real number now.