from audreyhepburncomplex
1. I’m at Coffee & Chocolate in the freezing icebox of this room, open almost 20 feet up roofward, the top six feet or so painted brick red and the rest a smooth blond-coffee brown.
2. I came here in a dress that Katie Gray sent from New York in a huge cardboard box that weighed 31 pounds. She and Emily cleaned out their closet and now I have these small shirts and shirt-dresses and little thin cotton dresses and sweaters that are hardly worn at all … it’s like … incredible, and reminds me of the years I was Not Buying Clothes, how great a gift a shirt was, a dress, a pair of gloves. I love that girl, that KG, and miss her today. She is fabulous. I love her.
3. I’m not sure if this dress is too thin. It’s perfect for summer, rose with tiny brown and grey dots, not fitted at all, and it feels like wearing a sheet or a handkerchief or a whisper. I was wondering whether it was decent, and then remembered Michigan by the Red House Painters and walked out the door. Today, I’m wearing what I want to wear. This is about my soul.
4. I’m seeing two girls walking down the road holding hands and wishing I was walking down the road with someone holding hands.
5. I mean, after I’ve got some things accomplished. Today I’ve already: watered the garden; made a lemon icebox pie; asked God fervently for a lot of grace for this long day stretching into the mist of the future & anxiety; listened to a bit of the new Mars Hill audio journal; and made the v. v. correct clothing choice of this thin cotton dress. I mean! Yeah!
6. Making lists like this sometimes feels necessary, as if I didn’t know how to organize my thoughts and needed this superficial grid to make me feel the comfort of a little structure. But God is bringing real structure back to me, I think, and I guess I need to call Britta, who offered to do some healing prayer with me.
7. The idea that God would ask me to remember pain & feel it & forgive is terrifying … but the pull of that connectedness is overwhelming all my resistance. I know that I’m disconnected in dramatic ways from memories and pain in my past, pieces disparate and sharp like shards of glass that I’ve forgotten and tried to disown, and if I want to be a whole person I need these lines drawn, dots connected, I need the ropes and nerves and ligaments to find each other and grow back together. I can only talk about it in physiological terms, because there’s still so much I have to learn about emotional healing … and because I watched my own body heal, in a way, from trauma. I see that happen. And if that can happen in a body, it surely must must right? happen in the spirit. Including mine.
8. Now they’re playing I Will Follow … ! … I used to listen to these songs, I used to remind myself of eternity via U2’s music and hearing this song is like another window opening. It’s almost unbelievable to watch how God is changing my life, how God has never left and never stopped with His perfect and precise thoughts over me.
what if God knew what He was doing, me not doing a hundred things I thought I would be doing, doing a hundred things a didn’t think I would do? anyway the day is leaving the foyer, it’s walking down the hall, turning the lights off on its way. I want to be somewhere else, like in this picture I found on one of those Tumblr blogs, of a girl who is extraordinary like I want to be, of a field of desire. I watched Big Fish and remembered eternity in the last scenes, when the old father is carried through a crowd of everyone he ever loved, everyone who ever loved him, and is coming to know that everything he did mattered, every word he said and gesture of his eyes or hand in a conversation.
Calvin (of Bill Watterson) said once that he didn’t know which would be more terrifying, to find out that everything mattered, or that nothing did. the thought that there’s a possibility that nothing matters terrifies me, but the thought that all the things I lost or left or couldn’t defend are waiting somewhere … it’s the thought of space, an expansion that includes, it pulls the lungs down with the force of something greater than gravity and draws the air in. and it’s only when I’m stuck in rooms with no windows that I realize the windows are in my mind, that I can remember eternity without that help. I need something beautiful, today. I need to someway catch the day, walk with the day down the hall and turn off the lights myself.
there is a speed that is only imaginary; life is not running away from me if I start the evening with it and keep it close to me, on purpose. life is not something you wanted, or the printed page of all your conflicting desires … it’s encased in your body, and you bring it where you are. I will bring my life with me where I go now and it will assume my colors, not the other way round, and this is something God is saying. just to say.
I’m sitting in a creaky black office chair in the foyer of Tracy Jackson Smith’s office, finding myself in black clothes and unusually smooth hair, stretching the tape across the walls of my heart to see how much space this has brought. I have not brought a hundred things here, I can only stilly sit, answer the phone when it rings, check my email. This means I can think and I am, thinking about all the lines I’ve let cross and crisscross, trying to follow one through the knot to untangle.
1) I will leave the office in an hour and a half to buy
some floss and let Cooper out.
2) I will work today alone on my new journal and on
a grant proposal.
3) I will rediscover the prayers I wrote that I used
to say for matins, vespers, and compline.
The phone here in the office keeps track of all the calls received, even if they’re answered mid-ring, and I don’t know how to clear it. It says “36 NEW CALLS.” My hand says “COOPER” and “GET FLOSS.” Can we all stop shouting for a minute, can I stop shouting and feeling so strongly about everything? The answer is yes, and I can feel a strand pulling looser as I decide this, I decide to build structure into my days which includes:
4) When I get home I’m cleaning my room and
sweeping the house, taking the recycling.
5) When I get home I’m going to find somewhere to
sit still and think … I’m so behind on thinking.
6) When I get home I’m going to find myself and ask
myself where I’ve been and where I’m headed.
I developed two rolls of film, rolls that are months & months old and came out grainy and bad. This is pretty disheartening, and makes me want to throw the other three rolls away. There can’t be anything extremely worth saving, there. I wish I had new shoes so I could throw away a couple of pairs that are becoming largely holes. I have new pants, though, and I love them. I have a new novel to read (new to me), a new title for myself (significant other), and new understanding of my limits and need for boundaries.
7) I have to be still every morning this week, every
night before sleep.
8 ) I have to start a new journal and tell it how I am,
on purpose, so I will know.
9) I have to take care of myself, rebuild fences where
the old fences have gotten lost, or where I unhinged
them myself.
Soon I will be leaving the 21st floor of the First Tennessee building and will be walking. Standing up alone and being independent and deciding what to do next. Something is extremely crazy about being too involved and I need a few moments to hear myself speak, some small voice that I’ve not been catching because there’s been a lot of wind and music. I wish I was older and had more years of experience on me. What is the point of being 23. This is ridiculous and I’m tired of knowing nothing and being wrong. Well, I needed to say that because when I re-read it I almost cried, but now I will say something else: The point of being 23 is that I have to be 23 before I can be 39. I have to know nothing before I can know something, and none of this is ridiculous.
10) I should celebrate something…
11) I should find something beautiful and say it’s
beautiful.
12) I should find again how I’m searched & known,
find that beautiful, find myself beautiful.
There’s a lot to be said and learned and unlearned about forgiveness, how it doesn’t necessarily mean reconciliation but necessarily means some sort of recovery of equilibrium. in oneself. I need to learn what it means and how to do it. I think Jesus may have some things to say about it, things to do about it. I’m ready for it I think. you look around and relationships are splintering beyond any control, you hear the tough fibers cracking like gunshots in the still air and watch the building you built leaning and falling into the ground with the calmness of a dream … I don’t know whether it’s as final as all that, I don’t know that what feels like a tree dying is just one larger lower branch shearing down the trunk as it goes, I don’t know that what’s diseased should be kept alive at all costs. you feel you need to start over, sometimes, from where you are now.
Last night as Marshall, Natalie, Matt and I were leaving the Mexican restaurant in Maryville, a little white-haired old lady with white capris and a floweredy shirt was leaving and fell on her hands and knees on the grass. She’d obviously been drinking too much and laughed it off as she kind of weaved toward the parking lot by herself, and it didn’t hit me until I noticed Matt and Natalie watching her intently that she was walking toward a van with keys in her hand … we walked out together toward her and Matt came up to her just as she was getting ready to close her car door and asked her if she was alright, if she needed someone to drive her home. Embarrassed as hell, laughing, patting her hair, “it’s these shoes” and “oh I’ll be fine!” as she smiled and waved, closed her door and drove away. I have brave friends, and I hope she was alright and just embarrassed enough not to do it again,but you don’t know. you don’t know how it ends, when someone says “no, thank you” and closes the door. you don’t know what happens after.
November is my birthmonth, June is the current month, and all these notes are flying around in the air like the sun filling all the air in the world, today, even the small pieces of cubic inches square in shadow, underneath leaves. Natalie gave me the black swimsuit she got in the mail yesterday that didn’t fit and has gone out of the house with Mrs. Dalloway and a towel, bound for some piece of water and some piece of sun. I am bound for some piece of forest, or some clearing in the forest where I’ll meet the known and the unknown, I know this because I’ve been reading Wendell Berry poetry and sitting up late on the back porch and talking about things no one knows anything about except yourself, after you weigh everything a hundred thousand times and decide to go ahead. because you thought weighing it would give you an idea of its safety or sureness, and weighing it over and over would show you the flaws, if there were any. and because after you step out somewhere, you know where you are only because you are there.
I have questions, a hundred thousand questions that I can’t think of, but I know they’re there, there in the same box I kept the answers to those other questions. I can look out the window, now, and see a lifting of my own heart out there and that’s something unusual and everyone’s going to the beach and I’m waiting to hear, waiting to hear, waiting to hear. bidden or not, God is present in the doorways of my mind and seems to be as gentle as I cannot imagine with me. I never wanted to be alone, even when I was a kid I wanted my sisters sleeping with me in our room and I have lived a long time alone with a preoccupation with both the silence of my life when I wasn’t talking and the voice of God in the silence of my life. I want to do things like learn, to run, to sprint, to play piano, guitar, to not be afraid anymore, to be brought to some place with a forgotten garden and to bring it to remembrance with pruning shears and turning over soil and the kiss of my hands on everything that needs the kiss of my hands.
Progress!
it’s changing something in me, to see my garden growing outside the kitchen window. or I’m changing, enough to see the garden growing outside the kitchen window. it’s strange to have become a person who’s kind of afraid to talk to her own blog. but I will say here that I bought a “Shiner Family Reunion” at Food City last night, and I would do it again. also that God is saying psalm 139 in my ear. also that Marshall is a good one, and I’m making art, and my back porch is a place where God is and a place where God is is a place I love to be. and also, you know how my antigen count was 238.5 back in the day? well, I got the results back from the lab today and my six-month CA-125 is 7.9. just so we can all know. and be amazed, and feel like today is another day that God thought we should live in.
