An end for now...

I am terrified.

Not because of my PhD exams last spring, or all the reading I did, or presenting at more conferences, or even getting published. Not because my friends are drifting away, or because I'll probably be jobless and homeless next year. I'm not even all that afraid of being in India, of having traveled to a foreign country without anyone to help me out. On my own, at least I know all my own weaknesses and strengths. I'm not even afraid of getting hurt or dying here, just of the complications that would arise.

I'm not even scared because of the increasingly crappy economy. Or the poverty that is rising. Or of all the people who are so disillusioned by the ridiculousness of our political establishment that they would rather cut out both their eyes and be blind, electing fools to roles of power. Or of the lies we tell ourselves, that the oil in the Gulf just went away, that the world is not slowing dying because we ask too much of it, that the ice caps melting is not big deal, that the trash we put in a plastic bag is not going to get thrown back in our faces, etc.

I can kinda handle all that; after all, I've had time.

-

I'm terrified that I will never know another moment where the world just wraps around itself, and becomes small, and becomes meaningful, and I am all right. I am okay. Because there are people who love me and we are going to be okay. We are going to be okay.

I'm not so good at feeling that. But my dad makes me feel that way, just by being hisself, running off into a waterfall when I'm scared of slipping on stones. My sister in Portland does it when she takes me off to someplace we've never been, road-tripping our way through a day. My mom makes me feel that with a warm hug and a bizarre recipe for brownies combining things I would never put together. My friends make me feel that way when they do something thoughtful, so simple.

My aunt and uncle made me feel that when they would save me from petrifyingly dull or awkward conversation at gatherings. And, more than anybody, Sebastion would make me feel that way just with a glance, with his nose nuzzled up against my leg, with a whine, his head rubbed up against me, a game of fetch.

I could wake up from the worst nightmare in high school, in the summers of college, and I'd wake up, confused, and he would be there, his nose sniffing my hand, asking me 'what? did you hear a racoon?' And dreams of zombies and school and other monsters would just fade away into a morning fog that any starlight could easily cut through, much less one so close to Earth as the sun.

But even though I'm scared of losing those moments, I can't stop that from happening.

No matter how much I want them to.

Stop.

A random poem for a blue, stormy day...

A flourish of memory for the gracefully departed

Sitting on the couch in a house
That is home to me.
The night rushes in, scarecrow storms and cricket divas.

And the smell of death that’s mixed with soil. Earth.
The paints and lines all blend in the memory, but then,
There. I swear I felt more alive than
I ever felt before. Sebastion the dog, whining
On the couch, waiting for his friend to go to bed.
To open the door that means the way for sleep is clear.
To let the night in, finally. To rest.

Sitting on a chair in a house
That is now home to me.
The night swirls around, but does not enter. Her storm songs
Stay silent, the charioteers that lead the way have fallen dead.

Cold. The Earth feels wrong when the roots don’t reach far beneath.
The pathways confuse. Even the moment of fingers rushing over a keyboard,
The scent of worn down grooves, the pattern of days
Only remind of something lost. Left-over thoughts and memories.
I cannot feel the ones that have passed, the dog, the friends who wandered
Away. Rivers rush over fate and love, revealing only the cold, black stone
Of something’s heart. A planet speeds through space, reveling in chaos.
But living things only grasp ever-tighter
To hold onto the world that rushes, that falls, that rises. To keep the shutters closed.
To keep the night out.

Sitting and thinking only perpetuates breathing. Being.
This is not home to me, but I am tired.
And my hand falls from the knob, from the latch, allowing the galaxy a glance
Into the chests full of photographs and keepsake moments, into my memory,
into the missing piece of you.

I need something to breathe

It is that awkward pause between spring and summer where the weather could do just about anything. Humid. Rain. Dry. Sun. Wind. Mold. People. Any combination and it just feels like that same strange season.

Like the world is maybe deciding what she'll be today.

"Friend is a four letter word" - Cake

I have been losing friends my entire life.

Morbid much? But still, I remember grade school being a series of lost friendships, failure upon failure to get anyone to actually hang out with me on a regular basis. Each attempt seemed all the more futile: Brent went to a different school, Marc moved away, Mike got cool, etc. High school shifted into high gear the many disappointments as friends became lame, got involved with creepy people, or just realized they were assholes all along.

Or, worse yet, became convinced friendship was the best route to the bed.

Which led to college, land of confused relationships, where things got better and things got worse. And I began to see the pattern all too clearly that friendship was doomed in our American culture. Moving onto graduate school and various workplaces, I have watched my friends become more and more isolated, gaining emotional malfunctions and a deep-seated need for things in the place of human interaction.

Hugs. Movie nights. Making food together or going for walks and talking.

Granted, not everyone. Me and many others have managed to keep building connections anew, mainly by keeping taking classes. WHich has its own disadvantages...

I hate this pattern. I have gotten trapped in it myself. And various studies have been published in recent years documenting its destructive power. As people lose friends, they become more dependant on their spouses and families for support, leading to greater stress on those roles, making it more difficult to stay a good lover or blood-relative. We rely too much on the bonds that are more difficult to be broken, straining and breaking them, all in the name of what?

Greater mobility. The ability to get up and run away from our lives. Only to follow ourselves, like the main characters of so many french new wave films, our problems chasing us in a way that our loved ones cannot.

To keep the job. To rise up a rung. To go to school because there is nowhere else to go. And our traditions die out. Even while we depend on our families and loved ones, we get farther and farther away from them, finding new friends, trying to create new communities instead of sustaining the old ones. And new friends continue to move farther away as we follow larger patterns: money, positions, cultural capital.

Move to the city to find yourself only to realize you were there all along and now you're too far in debt to run back home.

Too far along to even remember your name. That person who watched the sun set and gasped at the wonder of something so massive appearing so simple.

And the stories we tell don't help. TV and movies all tell us to go to the city, to start over, to leave those loser friends who care about us behind, to BECOME. By purchasing, by gaining the right capital, the right titles, the right this or that. CONSUME to find what's valuable. But we cannot buy friends. And once our families leave us, once our spouses drop our dead weight, we will each be alone, staring at computer screens, reaching out to the lonely ones just like us, who we once knew, who we once cared about.

Do we even care about them in that desperation?

So many stories tell us that we don't need friends. They always fade away in the rom coms to make way for the COUPLE to kiss in the sunset. They die at the hands of the monster to make way for the protagonists to win, the couple to again, embrace. They die in superhero movies, in thrillers, in all sorts of films, they move away, they act as wingmen, but they rarely ever get their dues. How many times to movies or books focus on a friendship, a companionship that is not romantic or based on moving closer to someone related by blood or marraige? Not often enough. Considering how important our friends are. Considering the power of a mate in the Australian sense (Oh, Flight of the Conchords!).

I don't know where I'm going with this. I meant to incorporate a ton of articles I've found, movies and books and stories I've read. But I'm so busy lately, drifting from the person i'd like to be. I feel friendships straining.

And then I remember.

(Love does not come hand in hand with despair; friendships are not meant to end so easily. They should not fragment like crystal, delicate with value. The bonds we build are mountain fortresses, ready to weather the harshest elements.)

I remember those moments where it all falls into place. The years melt away and all the bullshit and fuckall doesn't mean anything. Because we're hanging out. Because we've got time. We had time then and we'll have it again.

And when we do, maybe we'll talk about this. But I hope not. I hope we're too busy doing the important shit to think too concretely about abstraction. And I hope I get the time to put something together with more heft than this, with references and examples and videos. But i'm too busy trying to keep all my dishes spinning, all the planets of my person in the right orbit where they will not crash hastily into one another. At least for now.

Fetch

When I was in high school, I used to call my sister; this was after she'd gone to college. I would go to the payphone at the end of the hall, next to the boys' locker room so not actually safe, and call her up. She never actually answered. I do not think she was in her room all that often.

So I would sing songs to her answering machine.

It was probably the weirdest thing I've ever done to my one sister (the other I have obviously done much weirder things--i mean, come on, mL?). Maybe not; I did used to throw dirt at her hair because she'd get so fussy about it. Anyway, point is I would sing this song to her.

"Come
Come away
Come away from
That height..."

Or something like that (it's an Ani Di song). And it was less for her benefit than my own, yet I think we both needed it back then. So anyway, I would sing it and then apologize or something and hang up and go to class and pretend to like my friends because I just didn't know anyone all that awesome. Or more likely, I just have much higher standards now.

But lately, I keep hearing that song in my head. I think that maybe I need it now. Like a story my parents might have told me once, or ml retelling Narnia as feminist critique (really, she did, but without as much kung fu as one would expect). Or the sound of birds in the summertime mating in the lowland by my parents' house. An overwhelming ringing in my ears that somehow feels like looking at rain falling into puddles on a gray, singsong day.

Or looking into my dog's eyes and not feeling anything but that there is a stick outside and I need to throw it so he can fetch it.