...but clouds got in my way

When you make a major life change, even if to an outsider it's not so major, you might start to drift. If you are me, you might spend October, November, December and the better part of January in a hole in your own head. You leave the lights off in the daytime. You look at prom pictures when you are trying unsuccessfully to fall asleep at night. During the day you can't bear to be awake in the same room as those same damned pictures, so you sleep through all of your classes. You spend hours listening to "our song" over and over again on a Tuesday, but on Wednesday you have a nervous breakdown if someone on the street is humming the tune (or one similar). You play sad songs for your lost loved ones but forget to think about the good times. You play dead.

And then, one day, you are alive again. No, you're not the happiest person on the planet, and you have no idea where your life is going, but for some reason, you've woken up in your own bed, and you are so glad to be there. You are glad for the heartache of that first boy, because that means you really loved him. You are glad for the pain and emptiness you feel losing your best friend, because that means she touched your soul and will always be with you. You are still pissed that you work all the time, but you are glad to maybe pay your bills. You start to do your laundry. You stop doing the dishes so often. You start turning the light on in the morning when you wake up. You start shaving your legs on a regular basis again. You start wearing perfume again. You think very seriously about painting your nails, and deem it impractical. You show up for class.

And you remember, most of all, what is important to you. Not being who you were in high school (awesome though she may have been), not having a relationship or being pretty, or even being all-the-way happy (yet). What is important is taking care of yourself and your friends. Being there for one another if at all possible. Getting up in the morning and living your life, and living it with people who you love and who love you, too. Even if you are fucking miserable, you are alive. And that becomes a positive once more. When your feet hurt from a nine hour shift and you haven't eaten in twelve hours, when your boss looks at you as if he's finally realized that you are mentally handicapped after all, when your friend goes through the same sadness you did for the same reason and you know you can't fix it, when you hear crazy sex going on in the dorm room above your head and you're trying to get to sleep (and then you recognize a voice, of all the embarrassing things), when your parents are more fucked up than you are and need you to help them solve problems that they are too young for, when you can't find your left work shoe and you've been late for ten minutes, when the subway train goes past you without stopping, when you find a note you never gave to someone who will never want to read it now, when your dead best friend's daughter is bullied and has no mother to turn to anymore so she turns to you, when you can't move from not knowing which direction to move in. That's just how you know you're alive, sometimes. And you know what? Life is beautiful. Terrible, and wonderful, and beautiful.

And I think that I might be a grownup.

So many things I might have done...

I wrote a poem. I didn't realize that, on my quest to match blog titles to the lyrics of "Both Sides Now", I came to the perfect one today. This poem is, in essence, about the things I might have done (but clouds got in my way). It tries to tell me "why" from my own perspective, a futile effort. Its not beautifully written or perfectly wonderful, or probably even half decent, but you know what, I am rather proud of getting my own point across to myself. Sometimes I'm a hard person to get a point across to, so if I get it, I figure its gettable.

Also, I'm taking this opportunity to mention that i have defined the human condition to my satisfaction. Probably an unsuitable definition to the rest of the world, but a peaceful one for me.

Human beings, for whatever reason, crave two things more than anything else. We wish to know WHY things are the way they are, and WHAT IF things were different? That is, we want to understand the reason we are here, and what things would be like if something in events that shaped the present had not happened the way it did.
However, WHY and WHAT IF are elements of the portion of our consciousness we perceive as "the past", which simply means that they no longer exist in our current mental frame but we are still aware that they may have once existed. Because they are no longer a part of our active perception, they are unchangeable, and any dissatisfaction with the world that we actively perceive may be thought about in terms of alterations to this “past” without actually having an actual effect on anything but our outlook on the present.

Anyway. Below, you will find a poem. Enjoy it, if you can. It is a first draft, and as such, I wrote it an hour ago and have only read it a very few times. That means that your opinion is as informed as mine, and would be much appreciated.

<3


I picked up a handful of dirt
(a bit of earth)
for you today.
I held it in my hand for a moment.
Jostled it, like a handful of coins.
Hefted it in my palm.
I could smell the ground
The outdoors
Like that second date, in the park
At the end of summer
(my favorite time)
In the woods, by a river
(my favorite place)
Bound, without touching, to your side.

I can see your face there, too,
In the dirt.
The brown of your eyes
(now don’t be offended…
…I prefer them to any other eyes, you know…
they’ve ruined me, so,
for other men).

It clings, a bit, to the lines in my hand
Settles in, more than adheres
Gradually filling in the empty places
And every move I make,
Though the move be to dislodge,
to leave the dirt as it was,
(to keep my hands clean)
It is the deeper settled.

Like a fog between the mountains
Where we spent our days
Or dust filling in spaces between pages
On a library shelf
It sifts, it sits, and becomes commonplace.
And suddenly, a clean hand seems
Unintentionally incorrect.
Could I wash this hand empty,
Now that it is made different by
is Defined by
is Touched by
This little bit of earth?

But I am young, irresponsible
And so set
On following the rules
On keeping to the code
On pleasing my grandmother
(with my clean hands and polished nails).
Can’t keep dirt in my hand when they all want me
To clutch wildly at diamonds.

I see so much life
In this fistful of dirt.
And a diamond is dead, compressed, cold.

I want to tell them
That you can't make things grow
In a fistful of diamonds.
And things that glitter
Also tarnish, with age.
If you show me a potato that grew from a gemstone
I’ll eat it, and my hat.

But they won’t abide dirty hands,
(unpopular choices)
or a simple life
(without artificial sparkle)
in the mountains.

So I ball my fist around my little bit of earth
Of life
(of you)
I close my eyes,
And whisper a prayer that something beautiful will grow from it.
And, unceremoniously
fling it into the air.