Lines, Diffused

I love the smell of mediocre hotels. The chlorine and second-hand smoke seeping from the carpet; cleaning solvent and cheap coffee. It’s limbo, it’s suspension. It’s nowhere-home. It makes you like a turtle: you are forced to be your own home.
I wonder if turtles get tired though, having to carry their shelter everywhere so predators can’t get at their soft underbellies; their long, fragile throats. Though I know it is ridiculous, it seems to me that they might also get claustrophobic, with that cumbersome defense mechanism always surrounding them. It keeps them safe, though, and I suppose that’s all that matters.

When you shake it down, isn’t that all that matters to anyone? Seeking protection from something. Even the daredevils, the show-offs, the adrenaline junkies—all those who appear to be looking for danger. Even they have something that drives them, something beyond desire. Whether they are conscious of it or not, they’re afraid of what it might be like if the fulfillment of that desire remained absent. Those far from their shell are running from a life trapped inside; those closed up between the walls have run from exposure to the wide world. I know—I’ve been both places.

No matter what you pursue, you must admit you’re fleeing the opposite.

Sometimes they feel like the same thing to me—the pursuit and its opposing force—or so nearly the same that I am running toward and away from both of them simultaneously. It’s hard not to lose myself in all the floating; all the in-between. Often it seems that someone extracted my brain and wrapped it in cotton before stuffing it back down into my skull. It’s hard to focus, to make decisions, to form coherent thought, to remember.

I crave clarity; a bright image, a sharp thought. I give myself headaches sometimes, because I unconsciously clench my jaw as I attempt to decipher the wrinkles in my brain. But my thoughts come like static shocks from a hot, heavy blanket just out of the dryer. My mind feels thick and overheated, while little random thoughts shoot off, there and gone again before I can identify them and they keep going from all directions until I can hardly tell the practical from the naïve.

I crave a moment like the crack of a gun: startling, indisputable and confident of some result. I want to slam into the destination along with the bullet discharged—the sure, hard-edged bullet that sparkles in the sun, so bright you’d hardly mind dying by it if it meant that that glittering shard could become part of you. Like it would shine out from inside you, and by it’s glory you too would become glorious.

But instead I feel spread out, like milk spilled on the living room floor. Just a thin layer soaking into the carpet, existing in a big, inconvenient space yet barely existing at all. And no longer full of the potential it once had to be useful; to nourish someone’s bones, to help make someone—anyone—a little stronger.

I feel as if I once had a shape, some detailed definition, and maybe I still vaguely resemble it but it’s bled out of and into itself, like ink on wet paper.

I feel like a series of lines, diffused.

When I don’t know what else to do-—directionless and dazed-—I go out by the pond, even now in this heat that pounds pounds pounds my head and sticks my clothes to me with sweat; even fogs my glasses. Still, I go, and on the way there are wildflowers. I pick them—-because I can’t seem to be able to simply leave beauty alone; I must capture it, be in it, do something with it—-and lay them beside me as I sit on the bank. I am thinking about God, I think, and His grace versus my unworthiness; the constant battle in my heart to come joyously into His presence when I know I don’t deserve to be there. It is a classic debate for me; ironically my pride will not let me shed the shame. I try for the millionth time to rearrange my thoughts or soul or heart or whatever needs to be reordered, and I slowly toss the flowers, one by one, into the pond. Most of them are the white and purple clover blooms, but some are dainty sprays of tiny yellow blossoms and occasionally one or two of those limp, lovely flowers—blue and white—that I find crawling across the ground sometimes. They land lightly on the water, seeming to both glide on and stick to the surface at the same time. Brief, swift little ripples thrum out from each sprig as it alights softly on the water. They’ve all gone voyaging now, and as the wind blows them slowly towards the opposite bank I expected them to look like a fleet of little petal-boats. But instead they seem more like a group of living creatures clustered close to one another for protection; floral herds gone to mingle with the cattails.

It isn’t quite elegant, the sight of this colored foliage-circle floating over the water. If they were all the same color-—white, maybe-—or if they made a different shape, perhaps then they could lend a graceful air to my common backyard pond. But something about their bright span of colors and varying shapes, all arranged in what is really more of an oval, they seem more ‘playful’ than ‘elegant’; more whimsical than beautiful.
But in the playful whimsy there is indeed beauty, just not the same kind as is usually labeled with the term. Then sun has begun set and the water beneath the blossoms is orange, pink and gold; it is all very surreal and it makes this feeling well up inside me; a feeling that if I were to call my dog and run away into the woods we could find Narnia, or someplace where the snow isn’t cold. The feeling—and the sight that gives me the feeling—is so overpowering, like magic is about to happen. I am mesmerized, just watching colors sailing over more colors, blue pushing orange out of its way, the orange turning from pink to red to yellow; green reflections from stems and leaves.

I wish I had my camera, or paints and a canvass, and I want to run inside and get them but I don’t want to stop watching. I feel vaguely panicked, knowing that these moments will end without me having captured them, but I make myself relax; let myself be drawn in. Right here, right now; nowhere else, and it’s ok that this won’t be preserved; that I didn’t get the perfect photograph.
Sometimes it needs to be enough just that it happened, just that it was.

In those moments, it doesn’t seem to matter that I am spread out and shapeless. I’m neither pursuing nor fleeing; I’m taken out of myself.

Thank God for that, because “I” can become an exhausting word.


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