Experiment (required)

When you can count on more than 5 fingers the number of people you have loved and lost, the world begins to look more tilted than 23 degrees.

New posts arrive at a snail’s pace because creativity is like slime. A big mess that no one understands but its producer. Necessary for growth. Necessary to move forward. People will touch it and say it’s gross. What are you doing? This is disgusting. No one else touch it, they will say. But some, some, will let you (the snail) crawl up their arm, trail of green slime and all, and that select few will tell you that it’s beautiful and you should keep going and you shouldn’t stop even if some rambunctious boys try to sprinkle salt on you to make you disintegrate. Keep going, keep going, no matter the time.

Today I’ve had a big, emotional family event. I’ve left the gathering place (hospital waiting room) for home but now find myself sitting alone in a Starbucks watching my coffee cool and form a thin layer of congealed sugar and creamer on the top.

Today I’ve had a big, emotional family event and I feel like I’ve eaten too much and can’t throw it back up. Can’t digest it down. It’s just stuck inside me and I don’t think anything will fully wash it away.

Today I’ve had a big, emotional family event and I can’t help but replay the last few months again and again in my head. They all look the same. Entering and exiting through the same automatic doors. Into sterilized conditions and hallways of fluorescent lights, hallways lined with rooms full of sick people and healthy people sitting next to them, wanting them to heal, but waiting for them to die. Into hours and days of muted life and coffee self-served in Styrofoam cups. The days, the hours, blended together and there’s a million other things I could have been doing, but nothing as important as holding my grandfather’s wrinkled hand.

Today I’ve had a big, emotional family event and I know it happened because it’s happened. But I don’t think I will ever be able to grasp that it’s OVER. It’s a battle lost to greater forces and it’s OVER but I don’t believe it. I know it’s true, but its reality is slippery and only after visits to his empty house will I begin to internalize this.  My memories, so solid and loving, are stubborn against forces like these that cause shadows to darken my every worldly perception.

It’s over.

It’s over.

He’s dead.

You’re a child.

Upchuck isn’t fun to say but VOM is. Blunder, eh, squirm, YES, lumpy, NO. But some words require accompanying animation. Sometimes it’s voluntary but sometimes it just happens and it’s organic and beautiful.

The clouds cover darkness and

connect delicately like lace,

they move when we can’t see them and

have transformed but we can’t always tell.

The clouds breathe like lungs free from worry

because they are so high

and just have to move as they wish, beautiful

interpretive dance around the bright moonlight.

I’m writing because I have to and it doesn’t feel good,

refreshing,

electric,

or meaningful.

I don’t feel any motivation to wrap my words around your mind.

I am simply putting them on this page.

Are you still reading? because I’m typing with my eyes closed.

I write when I feel alive, at least that’s when the best writing zaps from my brain to my fingers, my fingers to my pen, my pen to my paper, my paper to your paper, your paper to your brain, back out your mouth to tell your friends what you have just read.

Will you tell them about this? This brief encounter? Was it wonderful?

Right now my brain is moving as slow as molasses in an igloo, or a 4th grader walking to detention, or anybody driving a Buick. These similes are terrible. Why are you still reading? My brain is moving slow and connections are weak, and watch out here’s another bad simile- my thoughts are mostly untied like the shoes of any given 1st grader who has graduated from velcro.

I like to write when I feel the most alive because a great poet told me to write when I feel alive. So for now, tonight, I will stop.

And you can thank me later.

Karli lies in her bed listening to the birds converse in energetic chatter. She tries to keep her eyes glued shut because she knows it’s too early for them to be open, but she can’t help it! She’d already opened them once and saw the early morning light begin to illuminate the white curtains. She’s peeked outside and saw the still mist suspended in awakening sun rays and now she can’t fall back asleep.

The minutes seem like days and the waiting is unbearable. FINALLY she hears her mother’s muffled footsteps shuffle down the hall. Her door swings open and

“HELLO SUNSHINE! Do you know what today is?”

Karli pretends to be just waking up and rub her eyes. She feigns not knowing,

“YOUR BIRTHDAY!!!!!!” Karli’s mom begins to sing and sing and sing and celebrate the birth of life that helped her reinvent a life she almost lost.

Karli smiles and laughs as her mother tickles her sides just where she knows she can’t resist. Her laugh dances through the sleepy morning air and her mom keeps tickling her so she can keep listening to the laughter and she wishes there were some way to bottle doses of it for when she’s feeling sad.

Karli’s squirms and runs down the hall to the bathroom where she brushes her toothless smile. Her eyes are excited “I AM AWESOME!” she announces to her reflection. She dances and shakes her booty, pees with the door wide open and runs downstairs for breakfast without washing her hands.

Her favorite blueberry pancakes, honey and fruit loops sprinkled on top are waiting at the table.

There are cards and presents stacked neatly on a card table, but her mom says she has to wait until after school to open them.

Her older brother gave her a hug and her dad called her before the school bus came.

She gets to wear a new outfit. Leggings and a long shirt with a tutu-like attachment. Purple, Karli’s favorite color. And her mom does her hair in a long braid.

“Do you know what’s missing from this beautiful birthday head?”

Karli shakes her head and her mothers goes to her room and comes back with a beautiful purple flower headband that has glitter lining every petal. Karli hugs her mom so tight and can’t stop smiling because she knows she looks awesome now that she’s seven.

“Perfect!” Her mom says and kisses her hair and says that she wants to borrow the headband tomorrow.

The school bus comes and she gets on. Karli loves her birthday because everyone has to pay attention to her because it’s her birthday. But she bounces down the aisle to an empty seat near the middle of the bus and not a soul looks up to say hello.

Friends are sitting with friends. Friends are already opening lunchboxes and sharing snacks. Friends are laughing and getting yelled at by the bus driver for playing with the windows, bouncing on the seats and unnecessarily screaming.

“What’s on your head?” A voice from behind Karli asks.

Karli touches the flower on her head and smiles.

“It’s my new headband, my mom gave it to me, it’s my birthday!”

“Oh. It’s weird. It looks weird. Why do you have a flower on your head?”

Karli looks at this boy, this little boy with toast crumbs around his mouth, and wants to spit on him for insulting a beautiful thing that her mother gave her and wants to borrow.

“Hey, look at this flower head. Isn’t it weird?” he asks his friend, “yeah so weird! Flower head!”

Karli sits there without a friend sitting near to help her fend off these spidery boys who have just appeared and ruined her day.

“You’re ugly!” she sputters, not knowing what else to say.

“Flower head!” They chant.

“Stop!” she says.

“Oh stop!! Stop what? You started it.”

“Started what? Flower head! Can I try it on? Let me try it on.”

“No,” Karli says and turns around. Crosses her arms.

“FLower head flower head!” They chant and laugh because one boy is laughing so the other is laughing too.

“I’m gonna punch you in the face,” Karli says because her brother says it to her and her dad says it to him and it always gets the other person to shut up.

“OOOOOOOOOOh!!!!!!! I’m telling! We’re telling!!! Bus driver, bus driver! She’s going to punch us!!!” The timing is impeccable as the bus pulls into the bus circle and Karli is escorted from her lonely seat to a chair in a line of chairs in the office that she knows is reserved for the trouble makers. She starts to cry because she’s seven and today she can’t control what comes out of her mouth. She tells the office secretary she wants her mom. And she’s told to sit down because when you’re seven you’re supposed to be all grown up.

The character is you and you are looking into the sky at the moon and the stars and the sky is clear, the air is crisp, and these are the most amazing breaths.

When you tear your eyes slowly away from the universe above, you can see your trajectory in front of you. This tree against which you sit, the most comfortable tree you will ever find, can only be your backrest for so long. The clock ticks loudly in your right ear and though you cherish these moments you’ve managed to freeze, you can only forget to remember your obligations for so long. That thing, that person, those things that you must do inevitably break their way into your solace.

You flick your flashlight on and off, on and off, on and off. Then you stop and think of all the life you just disturbed, awakened, disgruntled.

Breath, breath,

tick, tick, tick, seconds approaching a minute, an hour, a defined moment that you want to discard, that you want to just let be, that you want to just have without any label attached to it. Everything is just that, a thing, and you want to just be without someone holding a magnifying glass to imperfection, shortcomings. Tired of being compared, reminded of what you’re not instead of celebrated for what you are. These thoughts swim innocently in your head until they slowly set on fire, and bloom into vicious dragons that find you and tightly wrap their fiery tails around your neck. You panic and know you will never be able to escape.

Flailing, flailing,

tick, tick, tick, the clock keeps track of your every move. Between certain numbers you must do certain things. Predisposed moments and routines that are tiring because there is no spontaneity. No time to lose yourself in the words of another.

You are rigid, robotic, stacked dice with pictures to tell you the direction of your story.

How infuriating to be too tired to decide, to detach, to stay here scraping sticks against the ground all the night long. How infuriating to have the option but to not really have to option to sit here all night with the earth breathing below you and your breath be the loudest thing you can hear above the rustling of the insects, the sighs of the squirrels.

You are the character and you are miserably aware of how distracted you are from the quiet hum of the planet.

A different perspective has one eye and can only find so many distractions to stop from looking straight at his impending death.