Our Algebra

The world is a beautiful place, its lines and curves and corners; the shapes it makes. The way it presses into itself and then lifts away; the way we lose and gain and lose again. I know it’s beautiful and the Christmas tree is lovely but outside it’s cold and gray and the hot tea isn’t helping this time. A beer instead, maybe, but the calories…

There were things I thought would never change. I thought they were immovable facts of the universe, inevitable and constant like mathematical equations and their answers. In class we found out our mistakes mid-semester. Ultimately, you got an A and I got a B+ so really it turned out fine, jealous as I was. By the end we’d learned the process; the how’s and the why’s of it. But in the algebra of us, I guess we never really figured it out. We made our calculations to imitate the answer everyone else seemed to be getting, the one that must have been from the back of a book no one bothered to give us. We tried to solve for x but we didn’t know that first you have to add and subtract what’s in front; divide and multiply. It was in parenthesis and we thought that meant that it was secondary but really it was foundational. We didn’t know how to look so different and still equal each other; how to reconcile my lengthy numbers and steps and transitions with your bold, singular symbol. We tried over and over and over. At first it looked like it was working; the numbers were falling into place. We wrote things down. We showed our work. When things stopped making sense we went back to the place where we knew we had it right and started fresh again. But at some point I guess we thought we were right when we weren’t. I guess we blew past that first mistake, and the second and third, and by the time we finally realized how far off we were it was impossible to tell where exactly we went wrong. We floundered for a while, reworking equations we knew were inaccurate. Eventually we came to two different conclusions, each convinced of their inerrancy.

And for the first time I’m beginning to think that maybe I don’t equal X at all. At least, not anymore. I’m also beginning to think that maybe I should have realized that a long time ago. Over and over I reworked myself, to make our friendship make sense; to make you want it to make sense, too. You don’t, but at least I can say I tried.

Still I’ve saved every piece of paper, the scraps of us; notes and pictures and cards, wrappers from presents and candy bars. I’ve kept it all, just in case someday we find what we were missing. Just in case someday you want to try again.

But I'm not holding my breath anymore.

Revival

I’ve been needing the autumn; needing a break from the sun stabbing hot and bright into my eyes. I thought that’s what I needed, anyway. I felt that the heat had numbed me and that it was the sweat trickling down my back that subtly irritated my mood. But now I think maybe it’s just me. A few months ago I wrote that I thought I would be a saner person when summer arrived. I was wrong; I stayed the same as I was last winter, if not nestled even further down into the vaguely sour haze I had been hoping to escape. I got my hopes up for fall, too, but nothing’s happening so far. For some reason, every time the season changes I think that I will change too. As if a new view out my window would change my perspective; as if the change of weather would awaken some sense of life and motivation hibernating deep down inside me.

I’ve heard from a couple people now that I’m not who I used to be. I don’t know if they’re really right or not, though I know some things have changed. I’m more tired than I was, and not as easy on the eyes. I guess I don’t create as much as I used to, and I guess I’m a little more raw these days; sensitive. Like the fleshy, vulnerable body of a snail that recoils suddenly into itself at one little poke. And then only very slowly creeps back out of its shell.

I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong; what exactly is making it more difficult for me to do the things that I feel define me. I’m not sure what I need in order to get back to where I was. Who I was.

Maybe I need to shrink. Maybe I need to accept “where I am”. Maybe I need to get out of my head. Maybe I need more space, or natural light. Maybe I need to do more. Maybe I need to do less. Maybe I need balance, or supplements or essential oils or more fiber in my diet or less red meat. Everybody tells me something different.

Maybe what I need is a big white tent in the sun, folding chairs dodging cow patties set up on the flattened grass in front of the plywood stage and wobbling podium. Styrofoam plates slippery with the bottled barbecue sauce dripping out the backs white bread buns and smeared on the chubby cheeks of children dressed in their wrinkled Sunday best; potato salad sweating like the red-faced preacher with the New King James Bible in his hand. Maybe I need to put on a calico dress and an ill-fitting bra and join the fat ladies belting out Amazing Grace. Should I sway and clap (just ahead of the beat), or raise my hands toward the meeting of the tent poles? I should close my eyes, of course, and throw out an occasional contribution to the waves of scattered “Amens” that briefly swell after every utterance of Jesus’ name, Amen. Maybe then the faith will come trickling back in like water, with the hymns and pleas to the sinners to repent; with the lukewarm grape juice and broken water crackers and the offering plate overflowing with flapping paper bills weighted down in the middle by the only kind of change that can be produced in an instant; counted out to be worth something quantitative. The only kind of change I can muster. Maybe I need the charismatic congregation; the unquestioning belief that that fleeting feeling in my chest is the Holy Spirit who lives in my heart, wandering my arteries and making my ventricles a resting place. Maybe after the preacher asks everyone to fold up their chairs and stack them at the front, I need him to clasp my hand in both of his and say to me “God bless you” as the a cappella choir sings the most exuberant worship song in its repertoire and everyone mingles while they exit the tent, filled with new resolve and hope as if it will last; filled with passion and eager to spread the Good News.

Maybe I need to join them; maybe I need to get swept up.

Maybe I need a revival.

That’s really all I can think of, at this point.

But I’m still open to suggestions.

That One Time We Were in the Woods

You eclipsed the sun as I looked up,
A pattern of lace in the leaves behind you;
A halo of light slicing through
Between the ends of your hair.
Your eyes were brighter
Than the shadows on your face,
Like two silver-blue pools
Lit from underneath.
Were they reflecting ripples on my skin,
Like liquid waves of light
Shining up through water,
Quivering with every shift of your gaze?
I felt them moving over me,
Washing me in purity
Clearer than the sunshine
You blotted out before me.
I wish that I could scuba dive
In the oceans of your eyes,
And find that source of light.
I’d let it burn me, blind me;
For I know that you have shown me
All I ever need to see.

Gravity is a Bitch

When I was a young child, I thought that all consciousnesses started out the same. All just waiting together somewhere like so many tiny glowing balls, primitive and barely-flickering, and when a creature was born—a human, a lion, an ant, anything—God would pick up one of the consciousnesses and put it into the brain of the thing that was born. Then I thought that the brain of the thing shaped the consciousness into whatever awareness was appropriate for the creature. So we’d all end up different, because of our different brains; one human is smarter than another, and humans are smarter than dolphins, which are smarter than dogs, and so on; but we all started out the same and it was by chance that I ended up being myself. My consciousness, my experience of life, could have been that of someone in a third world country, or of the president, or my cat, or a dinosaur from millions of years ago. God just happened to pluck it up when one particular baby was born and that baby became me. And I always wondered what it would have been like, to be someone or something different. To have that completely different experience of thought and life.

These days I mostly wonder what it was like to be my old self. No weights, no shame, no limitations, no reason to be angry, no wanting to be small. Smaller than a germ, than an atom, a quark; smaller than the smallest thing and wanting to burrow down through the carpet and the foundation of the apartment building and down, down, down through the earth to its core. And maybe there, in the scorching burning hot lava center—the point of origin—the weight would stop. The weight, the pull; the pull that makes me feel so heavy, like I am magnetized not only to the ground but through it and I am only so lucky that the earth is strong enough to hold me. Otherwise I would be swallowed up; sucked down swiftly, silently into the darkness and with a whoosh of air, gone. I feel it pulling at my bones, but the earth hasn’t broken yet.

Some might call it gravity but its pull on me seems stronger, or maybe I am just less capable of resistance.

Some might call it gravity but does gravity work on the neurons in your brain, the chemicals that shoot back and forth; the sparks? Does it work sometimes more than others? Do its effects increase with age?

Some might call it gravity but I seem to hit the ground a bit harder than others of a similar mass and density. My footprints are deep, it is hard to step out of them; hard to move forward.

Some might call it gravity; well then gravity’s a bitch.

Or is there a metaphysical kind, and it’s that one which pulls my words right back down my throat and into my gut before I spit them out? Keeps the inspiration buried somewhere I can’t get to it? Does it draw smoky lids down over the eyes of my soul so I can no longer see what I need to thrive? So that I bumble about in a haze, grasping at vague shapes that spark something deep in my memory but never quite fit. Maybe that metaphysical gravity is what makes the memories drop; fall out from between the wrinkles in my brain and drift down to the bottom of my skull landing facedown, where I’ll never see them again.

I’m hoping for some sort of micro-evolution; some way for my body and brain to adapt. Like maybe I will flatten out, distribute my weight over a greater expanse so the pull isn’t so strong all in one place. Or maybe my muscles will get stronger, or maybe my bones will go hollow. Maybe I’ll grow gills and take to the water; after all, it’s the next best thing to flying. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m doomed to a slow, sputtering extinction of the will, ill-equipped for the competition of this world. Why not me, Darwin? Why can I not adapt?

Maybe I just don’t fight hard enough.

But gravity is strong.

.

False Positive

The young husband sat at the table and she watched him there, drinking his coffee with his coffee-brown hair and his eyes that she remembered were gray, though she hardly saw them anymore; lids covered them mostly as he gazed down at books and papers—news or research or essays to be graded. He certainly was young for a professor. But then, she was young too, for whatever she was. A twenty-year-old girl-woman-thing; a female thing who wrote and read and painted sometimes, and other times watched the young husband at his work, as she did now. What was she? Whatever it was, she supposed she was young for it. Twenty seemed young for most things, things that were not silly. Young for marriage, some thought. Don’t you want to finish your degree first? Why tie yourself down so young, they asked her. You will change; he will change. You will see. So far she had seen, a little. Her puzzle of a man; as she watched him he only seemed to grow more mysterious. He was to her a crossword in a dead language. She would fit all the pieces into the places she knew them to belong but still she did not understand. He will change, they said, and she watched, fascinated. She watched him shift like colored sands and was mesmerized, lonely as she was. Whoever he was now—however different from when they first met on the pier—whoever he was becoming, she loved him still, though she did wish that he would take her into his arms more often. You’ll change, they said. But she had not. Still no career, still no college graduation. The little pink plus sign, but no showing yet. And no telling either; no telling though it had been weeks.

The young husband took a sip of his coffee—black—and his brow was furrowed. Or maybe that was just his brow, though she thought she remembered it differently far off at the pier. When she spoke his brow furrowed further—or furrowed in the first place; she couldn’t tell anymore—and though she knew it was only with the weight of the world’s injustices she had taken to speaking less, and about lighter things. Things that would make him give a satisfied nod toward his paper or book, for that was as close to happy as she had seen him in a long while.

She wondered what he was reading about, and weren’t his eyes gray? Maybe there had been some blue once; or maybe it was the light.

She was tending his bacon and eggs in the skillet but he did not seem to notice when she slipped away to vomit as quietly as she could in the bathroom in the back of the little house. She returned just as the bacon was burning, but this also passed unnoticed under the young husband’s nose. His lips brushed past her cheek and the door closed behind him.
Where was his mind? It was like an insect to her; one like a mantis: so curious and strange but so very, very still. She wanted to get up close and study it but she was afraid of sudden movements. She was afraid to touch it; if she held it, would she crush it in her hand? Or would it bite her and draw blood? Safer maybe to pin it to a board, well-labeled in a box with moth balls in the corners. Safer maybe then but empty, and he still had in him some of the man she had met on the pier.

The pier.

The day they met she had soaked in the tub until her fingers and toes had wrinkled. She lay mostly submerged, patches of skin cold where they peeked out from water. The tops of her thighs, the soft swells of her stomach and breasts; they rose gently from the surface like so many smooth islands. She had used all the hot water; she knew she would have none left for rinsing off. She had known the risks and kept running the water anyway, fully aware of her tendency to overindulge in the present despite future consequences. At that moment she hadn’t cared; that moment was all there was to her, until the next one.

For she was like a breeze, maybe, or like a train station. So much bustling about within her but never the same things; always different ones in and out and gone to new places where they might be better suited. What stayed for any length of time did so still briefly, and restlessly.

She grew restless too, there in the tub, and soon her boots scraped the sidewalk strewn with crackling dead leaves and twigs. The sky was gray and her coat was new; stiff, with brass buttons. The cold wind bit at her scalp where her wet hair separated in tangled yellow clumps. When she reached the place where the sidewalk ended, she sat on the edge of the concrete above the landfill. This was the place they called “The Pier” in the small town of Louisburg Kansas, two miles south of the abandoned houses where the high school students with artistic aspirations liked to take tired photographs. Natural light, black and white; film and dark rooms, so young and yet they only liked old things.

She had been there and she had taken pictures, too, but to her the light did not come so naturally anymore. It had gone out of her and nothing developed within the roomy darkness of herself.

He sat next to her on the pier and offered her a joint. Though she had never smoked before, she took it, and they talked. They talked all year; they talked and they got married. They talked another year. They talked less. He had fascinated her, with his silence and his words. And she supposed she fascinated him too, otherwise why did he marry her? They didn’t really talk about that.

For all that they talked about, she supposed now that there was more that they didn’t. She never told him of her little brothers toddling in off the sand on Dolphin Island, the tops of their downy heads smelling of the cool salt breeze and she never told him of the red-net bag of oranges sold to her by a man on the street in Mexico and how her mother had scolded her for paying too much. The nicotine on her uncle’s breath and the hole where there was no father, around the edge of which she balanced every day. One foot in front of the other, swaying, round and round, trying so hard not to be swallowed up by the emptiness he left behind. Oh, the young husband knew there was no father, but of the hole he was not aware. He had known her thoughts and opinions once, she supposed, on the things that people say should matter, but he never knew what it was to be her.

She supposed she never knew what it was to be him, either. She had asked some things. She had asked what his mother was like when he was a child; was she strict or was she doting? His father; was he always so serious?

She knew that there must be things about the young husband that made him human. Pictures he drew with his eyes on the ceiling as a child perhaps, connecting the dots. The smell of his grandmother’s perfume; a chore he hated? Sometimes she felt that these things—these tiny, small things—were all she had to connect herself to reality and so she believed others must have them too, buried somewhere in their memory. But the young husband, his conversation drifted to philosophy always; to history and ethical theory and the power of myth. These things she did not understand and thus she assumed that they were more important than the things she did understand, the things she carried with her day and night.

Never a straight answer from him; never a statement of how he himself felt. And so now, when it came to it, she felt she did not know him. Surely it was because her mind was not as lofty as his that she did not know what to do with the little pink plus sign, but then, she was afraid to ask. What did she want? Did it matter? Was there a theoretical answer that trumped all? What would he want? Must she do it, because he knew more than she did? Because they were married? What mattered? Who mattered? Who was who to decide? Certainly not she for it still did not feel real to her. She felt nothing; it was nothing. She knew nothing; she knew no one. No one knew. And what would be expected of her anyway, this twenty-year-old girl-woman-thing from twenty untamed acres in a small town where no one who left was ever heard from again? The young husband had whisked her away in a daze and here she was, dazed still and in the kitchen with the bacon grease and if there ever was a plan, this was not it.

Where did things go wrong? What exit could she have taken?

The answer always was The Pier. The second their fingers had touched as he handed her the joint, his mantis-mind had her and she was taken in, too much a floating, unanchored soul to do anything else.

The Pier.

She would go back to The Pier and, after a stop or two on the way, she would pretend none of this had ever happened.
If he came for her, maybe it was fate.

If he didn’t, maybe that was fate too.
But for once in her life she was going to take action, for good or ill.

For once in her life…was that a butterfly…?

Light Pollution

There aren’t enough stars in the city; they don’t get down this far. We get the little light-crumbs leftover from the grand feast of the cosmos, the galaxies and the planets, and I am malnourished from lack of starlight.

I’m bloated with time, though. It builds up around me, stagnant and sluggish, and oh how I hate to wait. But then sometimes there’s not enough of it; how cruel that time does not stop for the ill and the mourning.

Winter has been too long now; too long I have been cooped up indoors and too long out of the sun. My body and my mind grow dull, soft and flabby and tired. Is it me, or just that I have been stuck in here for so long? I hope it’s the latter; I hope I will change with the weather. I’m trying to start before then; I’m trying to be worthy of spring by the time it arrives. I thought the new year would bring the resolve I needed. I was wrong. This is the new year and nothing has changed. It’s a strange limbo we’re in, between New Year’s and spring. Just cold; just all shut up and sometimes it’s gray outside but sometimes the sun shines too bright, bright white on the snow.

I think I will be a saner person when spring gets here. I need sunshine that is soft and warm on my skin, not the stark, hard-edged light that is a sunny day in winter. A sunny day that is cold is just an empty promise of the atmosphere.
I think I will have more energy, too, when the chill is out of my bones. I pray it leaves quickly.

Sometimes I pray silently, with words and sentences quiet and invisible to anyone but God. But then sometimes I pray viscerally. Sometimes I pray with a wordless, guttural cry and just trust that God knows what I meant even when I don’t.
Sometimes I don’t pray at all, and I hope He knows what I mean by that, too.

I mean that sometimes I feel too much to pray. Can feelings be prayers, if I remember God while I feel them? Do I need words? What is the language of the divine?

I mean that sometimes I am all out of words; they have all been said and I worry that they will lose their value with repetition.

I mean that sometimes it’s been a while and even though I miss it it’s hard to get back into the swing.

I mean that sometimes I am lazy; I mean that sometimes I am distracted.

But I also always mean that I am sorry.

Maybe if there was more starlight; maybe if there were more open spaces. Maybe if the weather was warmer; maybe if there were no florescent lights. Maybe if I stopped making excuses for myself; maybe if I stopped justifying.

Maybe I need an adventure to snap me out of lethargy, body and soul.

I need clarity that lasts; I need discipline. I need things that are beyond what I can find in myself, but it seems that I need to generate these things in order to find something anywhere else.

What do I need? I need a double shot of grace and another of motivation. I need a boost. I need more of the divine than the dusty rays that have been filtering in through my mental haze; more than the bit that now pierces through the light pollution of so many arbitrary beacons in my mind.

I need more than the crumbs of a cosmic feast.


.

Starlight

There aren’t enough stars in the city;
They don’t get down this far.
We get the little light-crumbs
Leftover from the grand feast of the cosmos,
The galaxies and the planets,
And I am malnourished from lack of starlight.