I've been losing weight; not trying to but its happening anyway. I'm by no means too thin, but I don't recognize myself--my reflection, my body.


I feel sixteen again, and at that time I wasn't myself--removed, tormented--so I feel like I'm in someone else's skin with someone else's bones.


Hip bones that press against the waistband of my jeans when I bend, pinching a thinned layer of flesh between denim and bone.


Shadows beneath newly-defined cheekbones reveal a more solumn, weathered face in the mirror; one that seems to once again have lost the scraps of childlike innocence I've been fighting so hard to regain.


Even my scars look different, standing out, pale against skin slightly darkened by renewed density.


My clothes hang more loosely and I check my right hand a dozen times to make sure my ring hasn't fallen off, because sometimes when its cold I can feel it sliding back and forth between white knuckles.


It isn't bad yet, the shrinking; isn't worrysome besides being further evidence of the physical manifestation of stress.


But it is different and unexpected, causes tension and suspicion of past demons rearing their heads once more even though for my part I know I defeated them years ago.


But food is ash on my tongue sometimes, and I eat to quell the icy emptiness in my stomach though the thought of another bite makes me feel sick.


Occasionally my appetite will resurface and I can enjoy food again, but mostly I swallow for health's sake only and I miss the solace that chocolate once brought me.


Someone once told me that I was full of inspiration--that my eyes shone with it. I believed him then. And maybe it was true, but if it was, if my eyes did shine months ago, they don't anymore.


They're missing whatever it is they once had. As if my fire is dwindling with the rest of me.


Once upon a time, my eyes were alive. I look at pictures, from when I knew how to smile.


I've forgotten now. I have to do it consciously, carefully considering how my muscles move to make sure they aren't doing anything I don't want them to. I have to think about my eyes, about how the tightening of my face frames them.



I learned the necessities from seeing more recent pictures, ones from the past year or two. In most of them, before I learned how to smile, I look frightened. In others, I look dead--a cadavour whose mouth has been stretched before rigor mortus--a wide grin beneath two spots of blank where human eyes used to be.



I'm still learning this art, this paper-way of the smile. But in some pictures I've got it--I look spirited and alive like I was all the time, years ago.



I still look tentative in some though; awkward, unsure of what to do, head pushed down and forward like a submissive dog, folding in on myself to avoid touching others.



Because I just don't touch people. It just doesn't occur to me. A hug is fine--intentional and brief, to-the-point. But it isn't something I initiate, mostly because I just don't think to, but also because of the same awkwardness that ruins my smile.

Sometimes its my idea--a hug--with people I'm very close to like Valeri or Melissa or Abby, or my family. But even then, sometimes I just forget how to be in my own skin. My movements are stiff and puppet-like, because I just don't remember how.



Even growing up, I didn't touch people except to accept a hug that I didn't initaite. I didn't mind that, but holding hands or even a pat or a poke during animated conversation just felt invasive, like staring into someone's eyes too long. Like they're setting foot somewhere that is mine only.



It probably isn't really as dramatic as all that. I have always thought of personal space as a thing to be respected. My lack of physical contact has always been for other people just as much as for myself--touching someone without being asked just never seemed appropriate.



I never really thought about it in my early years. Until I was thirteen, it just didn't occur to me to hug or poke or take a hand. I was slightly taken aback when others would touch me, but I never really minded. I still don't. It seems something like drinking filtered water after years of drinking tap: it is strange and different and given the choice you would have picked what you're used to, but it doesn't really matter.



I don't know if its a bad thing that I've never really 'needed a hug'. Most people I know need physical contact, but I am perfectly fine sitting in seperate chairs while we talk, a brief handshake when we greet, foldout our own respective hands together for prayer.



The only occasion in which I've ever thought I would need physical contact is in a romantic context. If I was with someone and he didn't want to be touching me in someway nearly every moment we were together--holding my hand as we walk, feet intertwined under the table, cuddled close on the sofa--I'd feel as if he didn't really want me.



I suppose, in friendship and family, I do enjoy the bond that physical contact represents. But in all cases, platonic or romantic, my touch is purely responsive--never initiative. Platonically, because it is my general tendency to keep to myself. Romantically, because I am shy. Painfully, awkwardly, debilitatingly shy.



I have always been a private person of sorts. I kind of think of myself as a room with one of those doors that swings closed on its own. It isn't locked; you can come in if you like. But hardly ever does it stand open, actually inviting you in. I post these notes, yes. But I don't tag anyone. They are there for you to read if you want to get to know me, because I do want to be known, but only by people who really want to know. So you can open the door, but I won't ask you to do it. And there is a closet in this room of mine that is locked, that won't open even if you try.



There are a select few who have keys. But in the cieling of the closet, there is a door leading to an attic. Locked, and painted the same color as the walls--camoflaged. There isn't a key for that one. In the attic there are dusty corners that not even I will truly look at. I know what is in them. The vague knowledge of their contents haunts me as I crawl around, looking for something to turn into art or a prayer. But I will not define them, the things hidden there beneath cobwebs. Not even in my mind will I dress them in words, let them stand before me in the bright, undeniable garments of truth.



The Devil can have his way with those things, take temporary delight in the fact that there are things in me that are shameful. I know God will not let the infection spread, as miserable as it is to endure while I terry in this waiting room that is earth, waiting for His sanctifying amputation.



I've written before about a certain tree, one I would gaze at through the kitchen window every morning while I ate breakfast, beginning when I was thirteen.



It started that winter, that Red December that burned.



The smoldering embers tormented me, like laughing cigarettes snuffed out on the raw flesh of my heart. But mornings on the edge of the kitchen table were cool, chilly white tile and dawn-fog soothing the burns.



I was restless, and searching for courage within myself. Not for anything in particular; just to prove to myself that it was there.
So I thought I'd run away.

I had a pillowcase of stuff and I was walking away, out in the woods, but I knew I wasn't really going anywhere. I was going to, but not really. I told my friends that I was really going to do it if Dad hadn't found me and I thought I really would, but I wasn't.

There was the tree, a few acres away from my house. It was on a hill, so I could always see it, and once I packed a bag with some food and blankets and my stuffed tiger and a book or two, and I went to that tree. I spread a blanket out under it and I stayed there for a few days. No one looked for me there. It was too obvious, too close. I even sneaked into my own house sometimes when my family was gone, to get stuff or to watch TV.

The whole time, I was sitting at my kitchen table, waiting for my toast, looking through the window at the far-off tree. Every time I looked at the tree for six years, I went there and was brave, but not too brave; run away but not far. Sitting above white tile, eating toast and running away in my mind to my tree where no one would find me but they really would; where I'd sleep under the stars but really I'd get chased back inside by the ghosts that are out there, cause they really are out there.

And I'd be so brave but I'm not, so I spread the marshmallow fluff on my toast and pretend it was marmalade or butter or something else more mature; something my brother would put on his toast. I tried, but I didn't like the butter, cinnamon, and sugar that he used. Salty and wet and sweet and soggy and spicy and crunch.
So I was filled with me and my toast was covered in fluffy, insubstantial sweet; no room for refined flavor combinations.

But on those mornings, I could imagine myself to be something bigger, something braver than I was. I don't know why I fixated on that particular tree and that particular fantasy. I was full of adolescent angst and thoroughly maddened by drama. Absolutely nothing I did or said or thought in my thirteenth year of life can be logically explained.

And even though I realize the legitimacy of this early-teen insanity--I realized it a little even then--that tree has always represented some particular inexplicable melancholy that lies dormant, raising its groggy head only occasionally to remind me that pain is relative, and be kind to my past self because if it hurts it hurts, and it doesn't matter why.

It represents the courage I've always longed to have--the courage to just go; to make some big decision that is thoroughly my own because too often I use 'seeking wise counsel' as an excuse to make sure that, in the event that I make the wrong choice, the blame won't rest only on my shoulders.

The courage to take risks. Voluntarily. Sometimes, when I'm warm and at home in my green, familiar room, I think that if an opportunity for risk presented itself right now I'd take it. But those opportunities really only come when I'm unprepared, in some strange place surrounded by strange people I don't trust yet and so I back down.

I know, I know--if one was prepared and confident it would not really be a risk. But that's what I mean. I wish with all my heart I had the courage for real risk. The tree stands like Avalon in my mind, whispering that maybe next time I'll get it right. Maybe next time I'll be brave and run away from what is safe, what is solid--and what will ultimately get me nowhere.

Six years have passed since that tree's roots twisted themselves into my ventricles, and I have not even attempted transplanting. Why would I? Its part of me, memories whispering in the leaves and bark rough to match me, scar for scar.

I've loved it for a long time. For more than 2,190 days it's been mine. And I had never gone to visit it until a few weeks ago.

Something determined tugged, telling me that if I didn't go now--right now--I would never really do it. That I needed to stop saying 'someday' and start saying 'today'. And then keep my word.

I was tired, but I tried not to listen to the protests of my muscles and my dizzy head. Plugging my ears with headphones, I let Roy sing to me about robin's jars and cinnamon as I paced up and down the bank of Pony Creek like a panther, looking for a place to cross.

Finding none, I ducked my head and plowed through the dense brush that lines the edge of the woods like a moat of foliage. Cracksnap crunch and it tore my coat but I came out the other side before drowning in the loam.

The sun was bright like the crack of a gun and the shadows it cast were stark; black construction-paper cutouts that satisfied my perpetual craving for definition.

Bob's fence stood a ways ahead of me, and beyond it I could see a shallow section of the creek. I snagged every piece of clothing I wore on the barbed wire and my calves and forearms sustained dense thatches of tiny shallow cuts--from the wire or the thorny vines twisted around it, I'm not sure-- but soon I was on the other side.

I'd seen Bob's land hundreds of times. I've seen this very part, every time I walk into my front yard. But it felt very unfamiliar, this side of the fence, as if by stepping over it into a pasture where I'd never set foot I had passed through a portal and everything around me seemed open and wide--far away.

My insides felt spread out too, like I suddenly had more room to breathe; my heart more relaxed in its beating.

I don't usually smile when I'm alone. Usually in solitude I just feel it, an inside-smile. There are special alone-times when my face smiles too,though--like when Caspian's fallen asleep on my pillows or I'm curled in the corner of Spirit's stall with his curious nose snuffling my hair or when I feel Gypsy's glass-smooth coils wrap me in a reptilian embrace. I smile alone then. And when I feel free.

On that side of the fence, with more room inside me and all around, living out a six-year-old dream in weather so cold it woke every sleeping fiber of my being, I felt the fleeting freedom and I smiled.

As I walked I hoped vaguely that Bob wouldn't shoot at my distant figure in a fit of old-farmer's paranoia, but I was more concerned with how to cross the creek without drenching my feet in the icy flow. I had part of a tree branch and a few slimy rocks for assistance, but mostly it was up to my balance and God's grace.

Utilizing every resource to the full, I made my unsteady way to the opposite bank and began ascent--the bank was steep. By digging my toes into deep furrows carved by the cloven hooves of cattle, I made a stair case of the cow-trail and hopped the last foot to level ground.

I could see it, my tree, now below the horizon line, standing alone in the pasture with acres and acres of field between it and the woods. I smiled again as I closed the distance between us, feeling my heart swell and fill up some of the extra room with dramatic, sentimental indulgence. Hello, old friend.

It was exactly as I'd always imagined. No, better. The branches drooped low around the edges, many even touching the ground. But they met the trunk of the evergreen higher up--maybe to my waist--so the tree formed a kind of tepee: Its trunk the center pole, and the branches with their fregrant needles weaving themselves together at their ends to form a sheltered hollow inside.

The ground beneath the branches was less grassy than the rest of the pasture, with large, flat rocks dotting the tepee floor. The roots, instead of protruding all around the tree's base, reared up from the dirt in only a few places as if to form specific areas for sitting or curling up to sleep. As if God molded it for me, just to fulfill my fanciful 6-year daydream.

Hearing a footstep, my head snapped up and I turned to confront the intruder. And smiled again. The cattle had gathered and formed a half-circle around me. Their heads were low as they snuffled my scent in the air with their huge wet noses. They looked very interested in me, with their ears perked and dewy eyes bright, but ready to run at any second. All legs stiff and pushed forward, a muscle twitched here and there.

But their faces were full of niave sweetness--adult versions of the little orphaned calves I bottle-fed and raised for Bob. Oliver, Nairobi, and Kenya when I was fourteen; Seto and Dodger a year later. They left me with good memories, my calves did, chewing on my socks and dashing around the paddock; delighted confusion when first presented with fresh-baked molasses muffins, followed soon by excited calls the second I could be seen walking up the driveway with a batch.

I was caught between my tree and Bob's cattle; caught between memories of things wished for and memories of things missed.

Slowly, I raised my camera to capture the sight of these poor confused cows, but some movement or scent brought by the wind spooked them. I watched them scatter across the pasture, then ducked back inside my tree-hollow.

I had already taken several pictures of it, but the roots there below my tree called to me. I wanted to see what it would have felt like, if I had really run away and slept here when I was younger. I had to walk about stooped beneath the branches as I looked for a suitable place to nap.

Pulling my coat more tightly about my shoulders, I bunched my scarf up around my neck and circled my spot like a dog before finally curling up against the curve where a thick root and the trunk of the tree.

I closed my eyes. I don't remember what Roy was playing; I think it was something soft, something light. Maybe The Beatle's "I Will". Whatever it was, the music sent over me a fresh wave of space and openness, as if everything in me and outside of me was spread so far, so scattered, that I was both completely safe and totally free, all at the same time.

So once more I smiled in complete solitude, this time without even any animals to witness.
Since then, another such solitary smile has yet to break on my lips.