9. Janice

Tags

100, affection, character profile, death, drugs, girl, http://ibecameashepherd.blogspot.com/, hundred, one hundred words, past, prompt, relationship, writing exercise

Janice, with her ponytail over her shoulder.
Janice, with her apple blossom cheeks, flushed when they smiled sweet.
Janice, arms draped around and around, limbs askew on him, on you.
Janice, with her long lashes touching, droopy-eyed, lost too long in her high.

Janice, always in a Mister’s lap.
Janice, wearing your baseball cap.
Janice’s arms lazy and limp around your neck.
Janice, climbing in that car, minutes before you left.

No nights, no days, no sleep to differentiate.
No tears for you, no coffin in the ground.
Just a daze, eyes all a glaze.
Years before you would awake.

On Literature

Tags

Barnes and Noble, books, downtown, free events, friendship, life, literary event, literature, memories, new york, New York City, November, NYC, past, subway, Umberto Eco, Union Square, urban

With my last wish, I’d turn the clock back just four hours today and wait outside Union Square’s Barnes and Noble with hipsters and literary buffs. I’d wait for Umberto Eco, who I wouldn’t recognize if I had a lunch date with him. Still, I’d wait.

I’m something of a literary buff, you see. Or I at least, I play one in real life. But Eco is one Irish author whose name I turn my head to out of nostalgia, not knowledge.

When we first started talking about books, it could have been dead end conversation. It should have, maybe, been dry analysis over red-marked high school essays. She was, after all, nearly five years my junior. I had almost finished college. She hadn’t started.

But she loved Umberto Eco. We used to drink coffee as if we liked it—I think maybe she did—and browse bookstores, where I still love to get lost. Eco was sometimes stacked in hardback beneath a dark-stain ladder. Name of the Rose or On Literature, a cover I liked for its book spine after book spine, all in browns.

I went to a café and independent bookstore in Soho this evening, trying to made good on a deal to myself to get out and see the literary spots in the city. There was a nonfiction reading nearby which I walked to but couldn’t find. Lots of work this week makes my body scream for rest anyway; came home without too much disappointment. And some writing lodged up to boot. Browsing my internet bookmarks, I saw that the Eco event had transpired in Union Square. He had discussed his new bestseller, The Prague Cemetery. I’d walked up to Union Square on my way home from the café. While Eco was happening. We were so close.

I’ve still never read an Eco book. Almost bought the one with the book spine cover once, but I was feeling cheap and put it back on the wrong shelf. But I had this friend once who would have gone to this discussion had she known. Had she been here. She wouldn’t mind about the lines and the crowds and the fandom that tries to drink away the energy from literary nerds of all ages and stages. Or maybe she would, but all of that fades away for the one unique note of brilliance she might be able to hear Eco utter above the buzz.

I think I’ll buy On Literature.

7. Bleached Coral

Tags

100 words, aging, Bonaire, character, city, coffee, coral reef, exercise, experience, fast, http://ibecameashepherd.blogspot.com/, island, life, ocean, one hundred words, pace, past, profile, slow, train, tropics, urban, writing prompt, youth

Thought I saw you on the train today as those tired eyes caught sight of mine. Saw beneath the shadow brim, shifting greys hiding a wrinkling face. I’ve seen you differently before, skin aglow, dancing with youth and light. I knew you a traveler, a good doer. As in motion, as a curious seeker. A morning waker coffee drinker.

You step carefully in new cloth flats around puddled sidewalks, rain waterfalling down subway grates. Measured and slow, left risk at the front door. Searching for rewind. Lifeless and aged, a bleached coral changed by this undercurrent of cold winter waters.

Bearing Burdens

Tags

burden, conversation, emotion, God, healing, love, marriage, pain, past, relationship, sharing, unity

I’ve carried my burdens.
Bore them for miles.
Hesitant, resilient to impart my trials.
To share too deeply,
With anyone, really.

It’s not trust, I don’t think fear
Not instability or feeling irresolute.
It’s the way I know it weighs down,
And how I’ll be to blame.
The way it will weigh love
Make your love for me swing low
With my trials, my shame.

When I give my sh*t to God,
He doesn’t flinch, move, budge an inch.
His heart hurts with my hurts,
But he heals as I wound, clots while I bleed,
Mends as I rip stiches with my breaths, gasp and heave.
I pile my sh*t on you, and you ache, anger, bleed.
It’s with me and for me, which should stop my re-shame.
It doesn’t, I throb, wishing my mess back into my own depth.
Wondering if keeping to myself
Would’ve just been best.

These breaths we take together.
Our steps, some pained, are measured.
This is what it is to share.
To come out from my corner, alone,
To say I promise, I’m weak, I’m yours.
For you to promise, I’ll stay.
Yours is ours.

No longer.

Tags

broken, city, communication, community, conversation, friends, hate, judgment, life, past, relationship, wrong

I used to check up–
Where were you checking in?

Dinner, downtown.
Goblets of the wrong size.
Red wine.

A little bit of highway–
Daylight savings time.

I said no for reasons I can’t describe;
I didn’t lie.
You have no right.

Relationships cannot be maintained by mail.

Tags

chance, change, coffee, communication, effort, envelope, friendship, hockey, letters, life, love, mail, past, speculation, talking, travel, writing

I cannot win you over or back by affixing the self-adhesive stamp.
I will not turn time to hallways and hand-written notes, wide rule notebook paper
With bi-fold cards, sentiment on scrapbook paper, newspaper cutouts, gift cards

If we cannot have a cup of coffee,
Sit hours in uncomfortable chairs to tell stories,
I cannot know that you like the foam extra dry, that you don’t even like coffee
Peppermint tea with soy milk and honey

If I cannot be in the folding stadium seat beside you
On the ice, behind the boards or in the balcony, beer in a plastic cup
Swimming in the sleeves of my right wing who was on the Maple Leafs—
Now the Flyers

I cannot send myself to you
I cannot cross state lines
I am liquid and perishable
I am hazardous and otherwise fragile
I have crossed state lines, I have sent myself to you
I have bore this bridge
Unbroken this chasm, if only now, by mail.
And—

There is the possibility that this cannot be maintained by mail.

Always Home

Tags

Chicago, driving, friendship, Gina, grandma, high school, home, life, memory, Michigan, Mom, Nonna, parents, past, streets, suburbs, travel

I don’t live here now. I don’t suppose I’ll raise my family here. Though it would be nice to watch my girls, with baskets on their bikes, ride down to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for cookies and milk, wearing summer skin just like I did when I was a kid. Even still, driving down these roads still feels like coming home.

Taking the back roads, the way our Moms always used to go, past the library and the convenient store. Past the corners where we stole, smoked, swore. Past Nonna’s apartment, where she’s lived for years, had trouble recently to just get up the stairs. Not even my Nonna, but yours. You, my high school best friend. No where but here, our memories, every one, still fresh, dear to me, clear in my rear view mirror.

Three Sleeps

Tags

anticipating, counting, epic, family, friends, friendship, home, life, love, Maxston, past, self-esteem, sleeps, travel, waiting, Walker, weekend, Whitney

Back when Whitney and I were friends, her family would rejoice in my cross-state visits. They were a close-knit bunch and the kinship buoyed my self-esteem (a side effect which wouldn’t be currently unwelcome). Her little cousin Maxston was just a tyke, maybe four, maybe six, then. He took to me in a way my memory covets now that it’s been years since. He’d see me across the church when I met them all there and he’d come running, wrap his arms around my neck–a hug with little arms, the kind that made you feel like family when words and things paled in comparison.  Empty against little squeezy arms like these. I digress.

Maxston, in his six-year-old simplicity, couldn’t rightly handle upcoming excitement. He couldn’t count the days on his hand, couldn’t methodically cross off Mondays and Tuesdays on a calendar before bed, nothing was enough. The days waned too slowly when he had to wait. Patience is an adult game. He couldn’t sit in front of the television without legs shaking, without a burst, a sprint to Mom in the kitchen, asking When? When? when something better was creeping closer with every tick of the clock.

So Maxston starting counting things in six-year-old sleeps. If Whitney was coming home in three days, he would have to go to sleep three times before he could wake up and see her. So, three sleeps. That was easy to understand. I can close my eyes one more time and then the thing I’ve been waiting for will be here before the next time I close my eyes. That’s so soon!

I understand the logic because I, at twenty-five, am resorting to it.

Is it the drag that these current patterns are pulling me through, the weight of responsibility that I want to come out from under, the itch to press fast forward and search for apartments in a new city too soon? The future beckons in all kinds of shapes and colors this Spring and counting in sleeps is the only way to keep things grounded.  And so, too old, I count in sleeps to stay sane.

One more sleep until the only city that’s ever been home.
Two more sleeps until my high school best friend, if I can be so archaic with the term, until a gal I’ll  take any day as my sister, though she’s not, until long-distance gets a break, praise God.
Three sleeps until a day that needs to last forever.

Face to Face

Tags

anger, forgiveness, grace, hate, imagination, imagine, lines, man, memory, past, poetry

If I met him on the street
If we stopped face to face

Would I shake his hand like old friends,
Smile and nod like nothing happened?
With my words, could I give grace?

Would anger burn inside of me
Hatred leak out of my pores?
Would I punch him in the face
For how he ruined my yesterdays?

If No Hope

Tags

Africa, Congo, faith, family, future, Grand Rapids, healing, hope, hopeless, life, love, memory, past, rape, redemption, repair, violence, woman

If the Congolese woman cooking rice, crouching down, her dress furling curls of dust into the humid sky loses hope—

If when her khanga splits in two and they thrust an assault rifle where only her husband had ever nestled in—

If the whines, the whimpers, the hiccups, spring blossoms of hatred brighter than the patterns hugging her thighs cry—

If the cries escaping from her pursed, parched lips will never sing notes of forgiveness—

If her baby boy, frozen in fear, his toes in the mud outside the hut, holding an army jacket, colonial of the third rank, the man with his rifle inside mama, can’t forget—

Then hope, too, once was lost in the grid of Commerce, Bartlett and Division where the prostitutes stand and the Catholic schools, fatefully or ironically, cluster on the corner—

Then the deck of cards, slick with alcohol corners, which slipped from my fingers before choosing the suit, before the staircase, after the sofa—

Then the scavenger hunt, clothes on the floor, every third stair, the carpet, callous, knees meeting each step, is missing a clue, missing a map, missing a girl—

Then the jeans that are torn, ride the bus with no pants, will always be frayed, never sewn, never patched, no hope of beginning again.