one more shadow leans against the wall

All I need to do now is mat Hana's gift and frame it in the glass. I hope she likes it, it is my first attempt at cross stitch. I have to find her today or tomorrow.

I'm so tired. Twelve hours days are no good. But the money must be earned, the hours must be made, and everything will be okay one day. Just keep saying that. Tomorrow a potential buyer comes to look the office over. Someone dropped silver tinsel all over everything.

Melynda gave me a fabulous book yesterday, The Dragon and The Unicorn by A.A. Attanasio. Going to start this weekend. I got a lovely furry hat from Karen, so that now I can look like a Cossack girl. I gave them books, a French novel on sadism for Karen and Poison by Kathryn Harrison for Melynda.

My body aches, and I just want to drag myself home into the shower, sit there and daydream. Wish he was around to rub my neck, my back, hold me. I miss the contact between us. It feels so good to hold him, the warmth of his body, my cheek pressed to his chest over his heart.

"...in your room, time stands still or moves at your will, you let the morning come soon, will you leave me lying here...
your favorite darkness, your favorite half light, your favorite consciousness, your favorite slave...
in your room, where souls disappear, only you exist here, will you lead me to your armchair, or leave me lying here, your favorite innocence, your favorite lies, your favorite smile, your favorite slave...
I'm hanging on your words living on your breath feeling with your skin will I always be here....
in your room your burning eyes cause flames to arise will you let the fire die down soon or will I always be here, your favorite passion your favorite game your favorite mirror your favorite slave...
I'm hanging on your words living on your breath feeling with your skin will I always be here?..."

"Mortification of the flesh," he said to me as the elevator door closed.

(no subject)

This is why I haven't been updating here. But I don't know who you are or why you are reading this so how could I have told you?

So beautiful, so achingly lovely, the sky above me. This blue expanse, so wide, so bright and clear over my head. I can see it when I run outside in the morning, down the street so I can stare over the hills and the small canyon that named my middle school. God it's so beautiful.

As I said the other night, God is in the smallest things, in the juxtapostion of the lovely and the horrible. God is the fluid motion of hunting lions and the cries of that child carried through the ravaged Alabama town in the arms of a stranger. The incredible mathematical symmetry of the stars and the shapes of leaves. The air I breathe, the lungs in my body, the body I have, the mind, the heart, the hands....

This week has been something for me, something I don't quite know how to describe. I've been thinking a lot on my own. Not the kind of thinking that leaves me shaking in fear in the middle of the night. But this kind of thinking where I can feel something growing inside me.

Last night I dreamed a long chaotic dream. So many soldiers and police officers there. But there were fresh strawberries in the store! I felt them, so ripe and abundant. I ate one, the sweetness of fruit in my dream. Ahh I need to find some strawberries now.

"...I don't need much to keep me warm..."

He's gone, and I am alone here now.

It's almost Christmas.

I helped sort gifts from the giving tree this year, and it overwhelmed me. The need in out community, the poverty, the desperation, the sadness. All present in a city described as one of the best places to live in the whole damn country. Oh my god.

But what was even more shocking was how much people gave. Each child could ask for two things- one article of clothing and one gift (a watch, a toy, etc.). I sorted the gifts, looking at the tags. A girl asked for a shirt, a 14 year old girl. The person bought her an entire outfit. A boy asked for a toy car, a 7 year old boy. The person must have bought him fifty cars, another toy, and the batteries for it. On and on it went, these gifts that just kept arriving and piling up in the hallway. So many things for the homeless teens here, sweaters and blankets and shoes and socks, bags of little soaps and things. I sat on the floor in the midst of all this and cried under my breath.

Just keep reminding yourself, it is the beauty and the pain. That is the mystery. It has to be everything. One day you will understand everything. For now you have to keep trying, you have to keep trying....

Did I ever think I would grow up? No. Never. I never ever believed I would be this old. I tried to die once, and I very nearly did. The ambulance skidded on the ice and they jammed a tube into my throat to keep me breathing. My heart stopped. I was in a coma, out of control. Days and days of this.

I woke up. I am alive. I am still here.

blackberry girl

Dreamed a long dream that started out good. But I was woken up at 8am by a telemarketer, and again at 10am! Ack! I tried to fall back asleep but my dreams just got scary. So I got up and finished packing Hana's gift, then went running outside. Its been so perfect this week, 50-60F and brigth clear skies. Oh the joy of living in the South.

In my dream there were fresh strawberries in the grocery store, now I want them so much. Mmmmm fruit. Must go get fruit. Juicy berries.

The first memory I have of eating berries- I was visiting my great grandmother outside of Amarillo. She had a dish of incredibly ripe blackberries on the table. I was about 5 years old then I think. Grandma offered me sugar to put on them, but they tasted so good, so sweet and delicious that I didn't take any. The fruit fit in my little hands.

scars like silver light

"One day, maybe one day." She's singing in my head, and I'm watching things happen outside of me, like the world goes by on a screen... The movie of my life is finally getting a good soundtrack. The actors are getting better too. Someone still has to figure out where this story is going.

I know. Used to listen to my headphones all the times, hidden in my ears under my hair, under my shirt. The sound always in the background, so I could believe that none of it was real, that I was walking across a movie screen in Berlin, and the story was going to work out okay. Walking through that crowd, down the stairs and a voice was screaming in my head. All the pain for all the world to see if you had looked underneath the surface.

I knew how to lie, how to hide. It was so easy. But I broke the screen, one violent act that was still cinematic in its intensity and the dreamy slowness.

I am alive, alive, alive, so brutally alive. Years before I realized that I hadn't died that day.

I am alive. Still hard to say that to myself, this thing that everyone takes for granted. I look at my hands, breathe and feel the air on my skin. I am alive. I don't have the words in any of the three languages I know to describe that feeling. To know that I almost ceased to be, that the ambulance skidded on the ice, that I stopped breathing, that I laid a week in a coma and no one knew where I was.... and here I am now. with everything I have, this life.

There is so much inside me that finally feels like it's beginning to heal. Becoming silvery scars, the record of violence and survival. The wounds so deep I never thought they would heal are closing. I can forgive them, and even myself sometimes...

Sound crashes down like rain, my thoughts move backwards in time and for a moment I am sixteen years old again, scared and my hand shakes on the glass.... but I speak, out loud and the silence hangs back and I can see the look in those eyes.

Lately I can feel the process of change in me. Like I'm growing up, becoming that girl I never believed could exist. For the first time there is light in me, and I feel it radiate like a cry, light like fire like music shot through with sunshine and color the sound without end high over my head like the sky....