The words first seeped out, then fleetly flew around pouring under doors and dancing, chanting in my sleep, no it's not true, you misunderstood. Trying to collect the black paint and pour it back in the bottle before it dried. All I did was stain my hands. I'll never be happy again, not like that. You should have let me split my love, there was enough to go around. Music like razors searing the flesh of my wrist, my heart. "If that's how you're gonna leave, straight out from underneath, then we'll see who's sorry now." Hi, I'm eighteen, haunted and beautiful. How far can I push you? So close I was dizzy, a few more days... running up the back stairs and the door to my heart swings open, his face holy with elation. "Awww, girl..." and what a beautiful mess, what a beautiful mess I'm in. Stayed out so late that spring came early one morning. Do you have to leave? You may go away, but I'll have both arms around you and leave my empty cicada body behind. This is now, this is you, this is all I've ever wanted if I can keep my heart from drowning in my own badness. You're so far away, so much higher than me in the better tree. Watch me break myself for you; library books tumbling down, chasing toddlers on a dreary playground. I write you restrained, straining for an ehco of love, my sweetness stilled by your mandates. Every book the box doesn't bear me a letter I feel my soul stillborn, still burning for you. Other boy on the tiger-print lovesack reverently touches my fingers--"Juliet"--but I recoil, terrified to betray you. I spin them all the shadows of my sorrow until they are desperate to save me. Chain, chain, chain, if there is hurt and loss it will be on my terms only. I love you like the stars above, I'll love you til I die, that will be ours, okay? Tell me it's not real, it feels too real, you want details by the mouthful but I only give you words salted with hopelessness. I am so surrounded by soldiers, but so lonely. I save every song for you in a treasure trunk I'm keeping for tomorow. SPRING AT LAST! I want to disappear from the righteous burdens, want to disappear under blankets. Just a sweet taste, and I put it down in a minute and everything will be as before. Pacify the concerns with splashes of truth. And there's a place for us. There is no place for YOU! Leave me alone leave me alone leave me alone because you might convince me. Sweet child in my arms, what will become of us? You're like a star telling me I am a stranger, broken heart in a broken game, we all fall down. 3 quarters, 3 wishes and a compelling memory. Dread and blue fringe on the letter, are you ever coming home again? Through the bright you are found again but maybe I am lost now. I am crying in the back room, the songs don't fit after all so who do we all belong to? How did you know?! The sky and the earth have been ripped away and all is ash, all the former glory charred and vanished. He can't erase me, I've been there in the corners waiting all along. Who could love him sweeter than I? I have lost my blue light, and I am so sorry! You're the hero in all my memories now, and I am the dove to your morning. To your mourning. I am impossibly cruel. I am both barbaric and mortally wounded. I lost my soul with the tag and where is the light now? How do I find my way home? Blind creatures find each other in the dark and with dismay in the morning see how hideous they have made themselves. This wasn't who I was supposed to be. I can't abide these waste places.
So please Lord, I want you to take it all away. Let me leave behind ancient sorrows and carve the lies I've been taught by the foolish and the foul out of my heart. Pass Thy hands over my weeping sores. Let me be free of the heartbreaks that cracked open so long ago. Help me release the weight of my memories. I want to walk out into the sun, into the bright of a clean day. Take this and place it in the sepulchre where the worst of us lies, where the corruption we resist and slough off can be entombed. Forgive the horror of my selfishness. Take all this from me and let me live a new life. I want this, I want this, I trust You. I want a new set of good intentions like an unused box of paint. The old picture is muddy, I'm starting over on a clean page.
3 comments:
Rachel,this is incredible. You are a writer, did you know you were a writer? because you are. Wow, i'm speechless.
Rachel, I love when you write most anything! As I always say, you were born to be creative and to write! I love the imagery you use...I especially like the chain part and how you say "forgive the horror of my selfishness" because it's the part I most relate to. You are beautiful, and your writing matches your persona!
-JJS
Have you ever dreamed you were in love with someone? And felt that intimacy and closeness slip away when you woke up? Alarming. I had this vision that came one day fully realized and unbidden, something that I still see sometimes when I think of love, or of myself being truly in love. I don't understand it or where it came from or if it just means I'm crazy. Actually, I'm sure it means I'm crazy, but I don't care. I like it. I see a dry, faded landscape like yellowed, cracking parchment spread out in front of me. I'm on the porch of an old, wooden house, with gray planks under my feet. Posts come from the floor and support a roof overhead. There is a slight breeze and I'm facing away from the front door. A dirt path leads away from the house into the gently rolling hills beyond. The wood creaks diffidently as I step forward and there is someone with me. I see her profile, and a sudden gust of wind whips loose strands of her hair around her face. She turns her head to look at me and she smiles, and in that smile I see her consuming desire to exist with me, to share everything, that not one part of who I am is lost on her, and I feel nothing less in return. I feel butterflies in my stomach, and I look at her as if I'm seeing her for the first time. Most times, as now, I don't actually recognize her. I once reached out to a blossom that folded at my infringement, wilting in a wintry chill of my world that I had never felt, that I didn't even know was there. There sprang the walls of a fortress forever impregnable to someone like me. It was painful to be told I wasn't good enough, but what really hurt was realizing that someone who for a moment I had recognized on that porch as the wind blew wanted nothing to do with my vision. That was bitterly disappointing.
Someone told me once that they had become hopeless, that they had lost faith in their chance at the kind of happiness we all desire. For all they'd seen and felt, it seemed an impossibility. But I see impossibilities every day. You, Rachel, are an impossibility. That you would become who you are from the moment the fundamental pieces of you were first forged in the heart of a star now long dead is, in terms we comprehend, impossible. But you are real. That our paths would eventually cross on some distant world far in the future of those moments, that through events set in motion billions and billions of years before, that had to line up perfectly, all impossibilities. If even one thing went differently somewhere on that long road I may never have known anything about you, how fragile that connection was, and how easily it broke. But somehow, mocking the impossible, we once briefly occupied a joint time and place. I may never fully understand what it was that made me care about everything you had to say or everything you felt, but it is wonderful to know that I am capable of that. You would think allowing somebody to love you would be easy, but it isn't. I've found it is immensely difficult, a burden you or they are not prepared to bear. Everyone wants something, and there is always a price. I said that the star you're made of is dead, but it isn't. It's you. You wish for a new life, it's yours. We only ever save ourselves, first. And no matter what you might say, I believe you are entitled to your own vision and your own happiness. I really hope you find it.
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