Life, measured in summers, in moments of laughter, in breezes that fill the lungs and skin and hair, and leave you with memories of something beyond sight, touch, hearing, life fills your eyes and seeps into your bones and the days are full. Life, measured in scraps of poetry found in old, long-forgotten corners, in magazine pictures, glossy and over-edited and full of a longing for something that doesn’t quite exist, in the many smells of paper, of the powdery, reincarnated souls of numerous trees, life gets into your blood and lends your skin a glow that’s more than natural. Life steals, it takes of your heart like a poison, and before you can grasp it, you are addicted, and you need it, and you cannot ever be without it, and you will fight and struggle and kill to keep just a tiny drop, too little to taste or even see, just to know you have it still. It doesn’t register that you don’t have it anymore, if ever you did; life cannot be had; it has you.
Life is a lot like love, in that regard. You meet a person, and the next day you see them and you smile, and later, you are talking, laughing, and then before you know it you look forward to seeing them, and the image of their eyes—so unlike anyone else’s— settles, like dust, in the recesses of your memory, the places the wall of protection, the brush of indifference, cannot touch. And when the day comes when you will not see them again, and when you can never look forward to seeing them again, you reach hungrily, painfully, desperately for that brush of indifference to protect you, to make it so that their laughter, their voice, their way of talking and the things they say does not matter to you. But there are things that cannot be forgotten, and love does not care for your pain. Love does not need your consent to take root in your mind, in your heart, and is a force greater than anything, even than the ever-consuming need that is life.
Life flourishes in the most unlikely of places; in high places of rocky crags, where the winds tear anything loose away and the clouds freeze if they venture too close, there are small things growing, in the cracks and the crevasses. In the desert, where the sand is all and end and start and all, and heat rules the day without mercy, and cold rules the night without give, life survives.
And where there is life, there is love, and both are the most necessary thing, the one thing that makes you human, or more than human, or less, and neither are kind, and what can you do but give in?
About Me
- Patience
- I spent several years wandering through the figurative wilderness of life alone, sometimes literally. I called it "Rambling Lunacy" and told myself I was something other than human, something that belonged Outside. I believed in God; I was not so sure God believed in me.
And then I fell in love. And then I moved 3000 miles across the country. And then, through some strange and nebulous process which remains obliquely mysterious, I got adopted by the Episcopal church in the little college-town I'd drifted to. And now things don't look quite so bleak.
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