Holey Night

If I know the truth...if I know it in profound, earth moving way...then why do I lose it? Why is it obscured at night? Like when the night sky is full of holes and the universe peaks through, how you can see everything so clearly for just a split second, and then it's gone, and you are just sitting in the dark. It's like that. I can feel the truth all around me and in me and through me...and then it's hidden. It hurts. Like slicing your finger open and not feeling it until you see the blood. It hurts like that. All that energy that I save for talking and being around people and the act that it takes to be the half-normal that everyone thinks I am is running so very low. I thought that it would get better when I understood, but I understand now, and I can feel the pain. I can feel it flow from everyone around me. I feel everything that they feel. Joy, pain, happiness, sadness, all of it, like a river is trying to rush me back in to the middle of itself again. I like the side. I like the cool quiet pools at the edge of the raging river, where I can dip my feet and feel the sun on my face, smell the earth. I yearn for the quiet.

Faith

So I have never really understood how it is that you can love something that you can't touch...people of faith amaze me. It is different for me I guess. There are things that I know for an absolute certainty, but not because I have "faith" in them. Faith to me implies a kind of moral hesitancy. Like, "It takes a lot for me to believe in this because it will be impossible to prove." Well if that's the case, than you can never be proven wrong, can you? Then that kind of makes you a coward, doesn't it? You will never have to show that you were right about anything that you said, because you can fall back on faith. It seems like a cop-out to me.
Honestly, I don't mean this to sound mean or spiteful; it's just that there are so many things that you can see and you can touch and that are proven to you every day. Faith in a god of any kind seems strange when godliness surrounds us. Beauty is in everything, and I do mean everything. There is even beauty in ugliness and hardness and wrath. We are so blind to so much that surrounds us because we are distracted by the immediacy of our lives. That damn stop light, the morning wait in line at the Starbucks (and how long is that guy gonna take anyways?), the bank balance...a million little things that make up our lives and none of them have even the slightest hint of reality in them.
What we are is so much more than that.

OK

I wrote this list when I was 20 or 21...how young was I? Ha Ha Ha!
"All I need...
Someone who will desire me
Someone who can touch my stuff and not piss me off
Someone who will read to me with passion and voice
Someone strong enough to argue with me without being intimidated or getting mad
Someone who can recite Shakespeare when appropriate
Someone who doesn't care that I'm crazy
Someone who is supportive of the creative me
Someone who can play/paint/laugh/love madly
Someone who wakes me up in the morning with a kiss
Someone who breathes sexy things in my ear when we're at a party
Someone who fixes my car and everything else."

How hysterical is that list! You know what's really hysterical, some of those things are completely true for me all the time in a way that resounds like a bell.

Late Night Poetry

So this is what happens when I can't sleep and I stay up way too late with no caffeine and no sex and no other possible outlet...
Night Sweats
Looking over my shoulder
With its silly, silly sharp teeth
How does a memory
Suddenly grow dentures?
Hideous formed with
Anxiety and riddled
With fears, new and old
It smells of my past
Like a sprinter, I bolt
In terror, but the
Little memory has a
Hold of me
And I fall and fall and
Fall
Topsy-turvy, end over
End
Then land
Face stark white -
Upright
In my bed.

So hard won
My tenous grip on freedom
Like an action hero with one
Finger on the cliff
I cling to the crumbling.

Found a letter from my old friend the other day. This letter is the subject of some other...private e-mails that I looked at (I got permission later).
"Melinda,
It is good to be loved. You too provide me an outlet for my innermost feelings. Thank you for being there through the few years that I have known you. Though we tried to be what we were never meant to be, I think things worked out for the better. You are perhaps my most compassionate friend who never ceases to sparks the compassion within me. Compassion is essential in my line of work.
Many times I have needed your guidance, but you were doing your own thing in your own world. Your remarks are forever in my head. Please keep in touch and don't forget me."

So then I ran across my old dream journal last night when I was, you know, not sleeping, and I had written down the following transcriptions from e-mails sent between my two best friends at the time.

"Melinda was not here to receive your message. I hope you don't mind that I read the e-mail. I am going to read it to her over the phone. I always knew that you talked to Melinda, but I didn't realize that you confided in her as much as I did. I don't know if you realize it, but Melinda has always been very important to me. I wonder how and why it is that she had gained both of our trusts so completely." E-mail sent to my old friend from my ex-friend (Paranoid much? Why did she gain our trusts? Um, why did you give them?)

And the story goes on...
"I appreciate you relaying my message to Melinda. She is a good friend as you probably already know. I don't know why she is and I really don't care. She is one of the things that I do not try to pick apart. I simply accept her." E-mail reply from my old friend to my ex-friend (Yup, I love my old friend no matter what too.)