“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”

~Neil Gaiman

The Grid

The streets in Rexburg are a grid, much like the streets in many other american cities. There are two center streets perpendicular and other streets that run parallel to those. 1st East, 2nd East, 3rd East and so on. Then west. Then North. Then South. Not all that exciting if you were to look at them from google maps satellite view. But if you look closer, you can see a lot more. They are rough, covered in gravel from the winter just passed. The oil from the tires of students' cars breaking too late and too often. The cars passing by every so often carrying families to Wal Mart or Sammy's. So many different people from so many places. College students, mothers, high-schoolers, children playing, a man walking his dog. I walk alone to class but never feel lonely.

Writing Prompt #5

Write about the streets in your city.

You Are My Sunshine

SIDE NOTE: I have been really struggling to write lately. Even with a prompt I just didn't know what to write. I decided I could either keep ignoring the prompts until something made me just have to write or I could force it. Sometimes you have to fake it til you feel it. So I picked a song, set a timer for 10 minutes and wrote. Nothing spectacular came out but I wrote. And for that I am happy.

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The other night dear as I lay sleeping, I dreamed I held you in my arms. When I awoke dear, I was mistaken, and I hung my head and cried.

Melancholy. Loneliness. Longing.

This song is so full of sadness it is almost overwhelming. A lover gone to another. A child no longer a child anymore. The death of one so dear. And yet I sing it to my little one as the sun disappears and her eyes droop. I love it, in all it’s gloom and loneliness.

When my grandma died I was still young. Only 14. I didn’t know her as well as I should have. But I could see the pain of real loss in my grandpa. His love had moved on and left him there. And oh how my heart broke for him. He loved her so.

You are my sunshine my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You’ll never know dear how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.

Devotion. Adoration. Dependence.

Growing up I declared I would be dependent on no man. Oh how things have changed. While I strongly value my education, my ability to think for myself, and, if need be, take care of myself, I savor my co-dependence with my husband. I need him and he needs me. I do not wish to go through life, doing everything myself. We work side by side, caring for a house that we chose together, raising the child(ren) we created together in love and longing. He brings balance to a life that was unbalanced before he entered it. I adore my Sunshine.

Prompt #4

Then you had to bring up reincarnation over a couple of beers the other night.

And now I’m serving time for mistakes made by another in another lifetime.

                                                            -“Galileo” by the Indigo Girls

I think back to just last weekend, when my sister asked, “Man, can you even imagine having to go back and do it again? Be a teenager again?! Have to grow up again??”

“No thanks!”

We laughed, but a childish terror peeked out from behind our laughing words. To do it again….

x             x             x

The tears I couldn’t stop while my sister, all worry and regret, stroked my hair. “I shouldn’t have told you. But I was so mad, and I wanted to make sure you knew, so he won’t be able to do it to you again.”

“Did he…really…say it? …Really?” Sobs broke my words.

“’Told you I could get any girl to think I liked her. Any girl.  I win.’ Just like that. And I could have slapped him. I should have.” And her voice was full of sorrow.

And I thought I would never stop crying.

x             x             x

A weary night. I knelt in meditation, listening and not listening to the answer to my heavy petition.

I took a deep breath and said to the heavens, “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m just too tired.”

And I knew it was wrong, but I was so tired. So heavy.

And I fell asleep to heaviness and dreamed of the friend I would let down, of her future that would fork and digress and never be so peaceful again. Because I was too tired and heavy to bear her peace and mine. And I awoke unyielding and full of shame.

x             x             x

A startling hammer in my chest, sitting next to him. A pounding that was new, that had never been there before, in all of our hours of talking and sewing and driving and movies. A pounding that increased as I listened to the words behind his words.

“So you’re leaving for sure? And you know I’m leaving? That I won’t be here—here—in a year and a half? I’ll be on the east coast. I guess I just thought, I don’t know… Well, I guess I’ll be watching the foreign films alone from now on.”

And his look—a look that was uncertain of itself, of what even he wanted. A look that was half a goodbye, half an invitation. And I saw another road wind through the look—a road without my Chad and my Coren and my Risa and my Haakon, my fairy children as yet unknown to me. And I was afraid of a road without Chad, afraid to admit that this other road could be just as beautiful, that either road was a good choice. A beautiful choice.

And I opened the jeep door. Because I could not face the choice.

x             x             x

An egg, half dyed blue, trembling on the spoon in my hand. I saw her—ashen skin, mouth slightly open—and I didn’t see her. She wasn’t there anymore.

But a body was. And my dad, holding the hand on that body, stroking it, kissing it, weeping saltwater rivers. Brothers and sisters everywhere in the room—literally everywhere—the vast numbers of us, first watching, then understanding, then ducking heads into shoulders, into pillows, into hands.

And I felt it—the heave from the swell of the wave, the rush forward, the break, the break, the break… Oh, a break that wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t ever, ever stop! One wave and another and another, so fast upon each other that there was not even time for breathing. Just the waves, just the saltwater. And in the blur of my vision a father holding a hand on a body. Just a body. But no mother anymore.

x             x             x

And the mark of the handprint on his face. That angry red that I see every time I close my eyes. And I think, That handprint alone sentences me back to a mosquito’s life for a thousand days. A thousand lifetimes as a bloodsucking pest, to be cursed and hated and crushed endlessly. That one hand print. A thousand lifetimes to pay.

x             x             x

 “No,” I whisper. Then “NO,” loud and firm this time, so that Shiva hears me, wherever he lies with Parvati in the cosmos, in their endless practice of the kama sutra. So that he hears the finality in my voice. So that he knows that when I am laid to rest full five fathoms down, I will not answer the call of the universe.

Not again.

I will yawn and stretch, look up at him and tsk-tsk, “Now, my cosmic dancer, you know better. So if you please.”

And I will turn and curl back into my own immortal beloved, close my eyes, and sleep. 

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”

—Enid Bagnold

#4: The Glow / Boys Around Here

"Can you tell me your happiest memory?" he asked. And I pondered, and I thought, and I considered, and there was nothing.

But there was your face, head on my lap, my lap on your couch, ankles on the coffee table, glow from the credits of a film on the television screen. And your eyes, as transparent as the sea, looking up at me, a small space between your lips, and the glow as I told you that yes, I was yours.

You were mine.

And the space between your lips stretched into a smile. Years later and I can still see it, a look of awe, a look that I have yet to see on another's face. And I smiled too, and laughed, and turned away, shy.

-----

"Boys Around Here" by Fences:

These mighty eyes, they look at me with no intention. They hit me twice, at first glance, and then a second time.

She said to me, "that sh*t you say can really hurt me. I wrote this note, I'll read it once. I feel like giving up."

The boys around here don't respect a thing, respect a thing at all.

The boys around here don't respect me, don't respect me at all.

It's been a while since the night that I first met you. I still got dusty shoes, fear of love, fear of losing you.

I'll be alright if I can just stay in tonight. I don't want to talk. Just let me drink, tomorrow we'll give up.

advice needed

I have been working on this little essay off and on again for the past few weeks. I am feeling a little better about it now but still wondering if it needs a little help. Part of me just wants to post it on my personal blog and be done with it but here I have this wonderful group of writers who can help me make it better.

                          ~Alicia

Being pregnant is not my favorite state of being. The constant, seemingly eternal, and sometimes paralyzing nausea. The restless, painful  nights. Being physically unable when I so want (and need) to be able. And the fear of the impending future of giving birth. It can often feel so overwhelming and debilitating.

But through the struggle, I feel a divine sense of honor. Breathtaking and bewildering honor. To give my body over to God to let him form and create a body for one of his adored children. And not just any child, chosen haphazardly, but one specifically chosen to have this tiny forming body and to be a part of our particular family. To have Billy as her father and me as her mother.

Whether there is quiet or chaos all around me I feel the movements of a body so small. I feel serene and wondrous in the connection. I try to share some of those moments with Billy, willing him to feel the quick movements of our child, but I know he cannot really know. The fluid and rolling motion of little feet and little legs are mine alone to savor in all its resplendent vastness.

When I give myself space and time to think about what is really happening, all that is challenging and magnificent and scary all at once, I am overwhelmed with the brilliance and responsibility of my role as woman, mother, guardian, and teacher. And I celebrate that role.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” 

Ernest Hemingway

Oil and Water

Mid- April 2003

In the desert, you hunger for rain.  It waters your soul.  The clouds are dark, lumbering giants that grumble with deep voices about their heavy load.  They give off a sort of twilight as they mix with the sunshine, like oil and water.  Altruistic crystal drops begin falling from the sky.   I hold my breath in awe at the sight, at the battle of light and dark in the heavens.  

When I was a little girl, I used to pray every day for sunshine.  If the day was gray, I would be too.  I didn't realize that rainy days weren't a personal slight.  It took me years to learn to love the rain.  But now, as I stand outside, letting the raindrops kiss my skin, I feel there is nothing more beautiful than a rainstorm. I breath it in.  I feel the beaded blades of grass under my bare feet as I twirl and watch my world spin.   I know now that darkness gives everything its value.  I am familiar with its bitterness bleeding across my tongue.  I am familiar with the dichotomy of my soul.

But for now, I live only in this moment.  There is no horizon, behind or in front of me, only the steel sky twisting above.  It is the first day of my freedom, after my first taste of college.  I have swam when I was afraid I might sink, and I feel intrepid.  The world is mine, reflected in a raindrop. 

Writing Prompt #4

Transcribe the lyrics of a song you enjoy. Why do you like it? What lines especially please you? What formal devices do you find? Similes? Metaphors? Alliteration? Why do you relate to it?

This prompt was taken from Writing Poems by Robert Wallace and Michelle Boisseau.

Remember that you can respond in any way that you want: essay, poem, short story, etc.

22 March 2013

All my branches extend into ashes

the remnants of what were, what was

and in my bones, my wrinkles, breathing

there springs a river of everlasting life

flowing from my bones, my breast

and one who keeps swimming--

it was you all along.

(a response to the prompt "are you even the main character in your own story?" 

that a friend presented me with last month)