Once Upon a Time,

The books in my life have been numerous and varied.

Days like these when I have important things to do and I will do anything to avoid them, I think about the books. The books that have come to me and then we have parted in teary goodbyes. Most of these books are piled in various places in my basement on the island. Some of them are on shelves, most of them are not. Some of them prefer the windowsill where they can soak up the sun and become yellowed with age. Some are in dark corners where they ponder their own existence.

The characters in these books have left their pages and found spots in my head. They became friends and I loved them. Characters do not leave you, they just fill you up. They make you a bigger person.

Its days like these when I start to feel the weight of all the characters. When I try to let myself out but they all seem to stand in my way.

Is it possible
for the world
to look this way
forever?

A year, and some other undetermined length of time ago when I was living in a different part of the world, I woke up early. I woke up in the dark and got dressed in the dark and then I got on a train to another place I had never gone.

I drank hot coffee that left a singed spot on my tongue. I drifted in and out of sleep while some walls flashed by my windows. I ate yogurt out of a ceramic bowl and drank more coffee until my hands refused to sit still in my lap. Then, the sun rose.

The sun rose and I pulled out my camera and recorded France flashing by. I hunched my shoulders and tried to hide from the eyes of my fellow passengers, humbly self-conscious of stealing these images.

This morning I watched these videos again. France flashed my on my computer screen. Life is funny.

The Key to My Success,

I realized, sometime last week or sometime in the middle of the night when most realizations come, that if anyone were to ask me, "How do I DO college" the advice I would give would not be what I would expect.

It would have nothing to do with study habits. It would have nothing to do with learning to live with someone. It would not apply to finding the library or sucking up to your professors. It would, in fact have nothing to do with anything exclusive to college.

It would be - find a way to get free coffee. Exploit that as often as possible.

I miss sunshine.

If I wanted to run away right now, I would run away someplace where it never stops being summer. I would run until I hit the ocean. I would lay down in the sand and roll myself until I resembled a chicken cutlet.

This is my idea of paradise. This is my idea of retreat.

Right now I am going to go upstairs and I am going to lay in the dark and play music that reminds me of summertime. I am going to keep my eyes closed long enough that I can forget where I am and hopefully believe completely for a few seconds that I am in my sun soaked paradise.

Then, I will exhale. I will open my eyes. I will hopefully have satiated this desire.

I'm a little bit worried.

This worry isn't like my always present worry. The worry that never leaves me. The worry that tells me each and every moment what could (and probably will) go wrong. That worry has a very specific flavor that I have had to recognize and understand isn't leaving.

This worry is something new. Its the more fleeting kind of worry specifically tied to an event or state of mind.

I'm worried because I have so much. When I look at my life I'm crippled by how thankful I am for everything I have. The repeated mantra of my prayers has been an unending stream of thanks. I'm worried because I feel like my life has reached a crossroads. The point right before the climax of the novel that says, "And then our heroine saw that she had all she ever wanted."

I'm worried because some part of me knows a narrator is saying in some dimension I cannot perceive, "Little did she know..."

Nerves,

There's a peculiar sort of feeling I get in my stomach when I'm nervous about something and I drink too much coffee. Usually, when I'm nervous or bothered my instinct is to drink coffee because caffeine will surely calm my nerves, right?

But, it happens. I'll wake up and my feet don't feel attached to the ground, and then I drink cup after cup until I feel like acid is swirling around in my stomach and the idea of swallowing food makes me want to retch.

Because of the way I handle stress, this feeling will actually trigger to me that something is wrong, and I'll try to figure out what it is that's bothering me. Sometimes I figure it out. Sometimes I don't.

This time, I can't figure out whats bothering me, but I'm five cups deep and something certainly is.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep;
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,

With Peace on earth, good will to men."

There's a pretty big part of me

that wants to clean out this whole thing are start over. Someone commented to me the other day that I only write about sad things. All of my stories have a dreary edge to them. Not a dark, gothic side to them. Just the themes they deal with: loneliness, abandonment, and fear tend to be inescapable.

I guess I didn't quite realize this. I think of myself in positive upbeat terms, and in fact project that kind of personality, in order to avoid the things that are bothering me. Which is probably why they come out in my creative outlets. My characters don't always make these things clear to me.

I'm not going to turn my back on any of it, but I am going to grab hold of a new happiness that I've achieved and try to wrestle with it a little bit. Let's see what happens.

The First Snow

My twenty first year
was the first time the snow felt stale.
It seemed too soon,
though it was late in the season
on the seventh of December.
It fell on my shoulder and
dusted my hair.
I felt the still burning flame of summer
flicker and die in my chest.
The external light of Christmas
is a comfort, but dull
in comparison.