“love is the most powerful magic, so the cure must be extreme. love makes us sick, haunts our dreams, destroys our days. love has killed more than any disease.”
the cure is a gift.
January 24th, 2012ponder this.
January 23rd, 2012“you know, i do believe in magic. i was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians.
most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by the silver filaments of chance and circumstance. but i knew it all along.
see, this is my opinion – we all start out knowing magic. we are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. we are born able to sing to birds and read clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand.
but then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. we get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. we get put on the straight and narrow, and told to be responsible. told to act our age.
and you know why we were told that? because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth. and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.
after you go so far away from it, you can’t really get it back. you can have seconds of it. just seconds of knowing and remembering.
when people get weepy at movies, its because in that dark theater, the golden pool of magic is touched. just briefly. then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up. and they’re left feeling a little heart-sad and not knowing why.
when a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust, turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and you wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are.
for the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. that’s what i believe.”
i can’t sleep.
January 23rd, 2012i think a lot these days. i write a lot. i meditate a lot. i listen a lot. i hear a lot.
my mind is swimming with so many things, unspoken, untethered, incomplete, heavy and meaningful. like a bright and swirling mist around your head, where you can just glimpse the other side through the snakes of light.
and through them all is something i can’t quite figure out. it’s uncomfortable and unsettling. vague shapes in the darkness behind everything on top.
something is about to happen.
once upon a sparkly august afternoon
January 21st, 2012once, in late august, when the weather was still nice – warm and breezy – a girl was walking to a coffee shop, several blocks from where she had parked her car.
she was walking to a coffee shop she had never been to, to meet a boy she had never met before. as she was texting him that she was about a block away – she thought about how she knew what his first name was, but that she didn’t know his last name.
later, she would ask him what his last name was.
and he would say; “why, so you can put it in your phone?”
and she’d say; “yes – that’s exactly why.”
he would laugh, and she would ask him why he was laughing?
and he would tell her; “because i’m like that too.”
then he’d tell her his last name, and she’d program it into her phone.
and then they’d walk to a bench, and sit by a fountain. where they would make small talk, during which she would inadvertently fall in love with the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles, and how he waves his right hand when he’s talking about something that excites him.
and this was just the beginning.
an old man sits, collecting stamps, in a room all filled with chinese lamps.
January 21st, 2012i like this, this kind of early in the morning, still dark and quiet part of the day. when it’s still, and it’s just me, and there’s no one talking, it’s perfect. when it’s still gray outside, and just enough of that gray light streams in through the blinds to make it feel like an old attic full of treasure in here. a time of day where i feel like sneaking through the house on tippy toes is the only appropriate action.
it feels sort of like an inbetween place. inbetween night and day, soft and soothing. it feels magical and it calls to me.
i like this. and often times i will just sit quietly and wait until the mysterious feeling that comes with it has passed, the light shines brighter through the blinds, and the undeniable day has arrived.
if only, she says.
January 12th, 2012will you eat dinner with me again tonight?
if you stop being a brat right now.
the movie we started watching yesterday isn’t over yet. we could finish watching it.
okay. do you like when we eat dinner together?
yes. then we watch movies together. if only andrew was here. then i would feel better and i would never be bratty again.
i’m sorry, girl.
*heaves a sigh, crosses her arms, and stares out the window sadly*
when i was 19, i got my food handler’s card there.
January 12th, 2012when i was a little kid, i rode the bus to school every day. and every day on the way to school, right before we turned the corner onto the block where the school was, we would pass a certain row of houses.
nestled between two big, grand, dark, old victorian style buildings, there was a stark white building. set far back from the street, square as square could be, and kind of squat. in small silver lettering, the words MENTAL HEALTH were displayed over a dark alcove wherein lay the double doors to the entrance.
every day as we came upon that corner, kids would press their faces to the windows and stare at that building. the MENTAL HEALTH building. others still would watch out of the corners of their eyes as the bus drove past, pretending they weren’t looking at all.
we all believed it was a mental hospital. where they, whoever they were, locked away all the crazy people. what lie beyond those dark double doors, inside those stark white walls? what kind of people were in there? what had they done? they couldn’t be safe if they had to be locked away in such a boring building. would color make them crazier?
(i laughed the day i found it it was never really a mental hospital.)
Protected: letters to a ghost: 002
January 10th, 2012Protected: letters to a ghost: 001
January 9th, 2012because we were kids, and spiders were the enemy.
January 6th, 2012when i was growing up, we lived in my papa’s house. after he died, my grandparents cleaned it up and my family moved in. it was a good house, a lot like the one i live in now. it had an awesome back yard and a little tool shed that i could see from my bedroom window. i took it over as my own, to be a clubhouse. i was always so excited about it because it had real windows. i’d go out there and sweep the dust and windex my window panes for hours sometimes, trying to make it cozy.
there were no lights in the shed, so my friends and i would take candles out there for light. set them up, all around, on the exposed framework, climb onto the tool bench, and sometimes dump the wax on spiders that we found, and burn them with matches. they would flame and sparkle and pop like tiny fireworks.
we’d watch the show and giggle, then look for more spiders to sacrifice.