But it's my theme, really.

Emily's Theme
by Charles Simic

My dear trees, I no longer recognize you
In that wintry light.
You brought me a reminder I can do without:
The world is old, it was always old,
There's nothing new in it this afternoon.
The garden could've been a padlocked window
Of a pawnshop I was studying
With every item in it dust-covered.

Each one of my thoughts was being ghostwritten
By anonymous authors. Each time they hit
A cobwebbed typewriter key, I shudder.
Luckily, dark came quickly today.
Soon the neighbors were burning leaves,
And perhaps a few other things too.
Later, I saw the children run around the fire,
Their faces demonic in its flames.

--------------------------------

Feeling strange & undefinable. Nothing seems important anymore & that scares me. I'm not depressed, or at least it doesn't feel like I am; but strains of November echo back & my dreams feel like they never belonged to me. I don't know what to do now that my hopes, my passions stare at me with the eyes of a stranger. So I devour the printed word & pretend that this ache is negligible & will go away even if I do nothing to try & alleviate it.

I don't know what else to do.

Also, I wasn't going to tell you all this now, but I keep putting it off, though I did wish to get it off my chest, so... The problem between my mother & I that I mentioned a couple of posts ago was this: she found out about my self-harm of last winter. There are no words to describe how it felt to make her so sad & guilty. Because, of course, she blamed herself to a greater extent than she should have. I always knew she would, should she (God forbid) ever discover this secret; still, there was little I could say to assuage her sorrow.

Things are all right now. A little different, but good. Admittedly, I do still feel a little on edge at times...

Of course, this might have come as a surprise to everyone, since I never made more than a couple, vague allusions to my cutting. I want to make it clear I'm not that girl anymore. I haven't been for a while; I had moved on, which is why it was so painful to have all those memories dredged up.
Thank you all for always caring. I don't know where I'd be without my dear blogging friends.

I felt calm today while sitting in church. I am daring to hope that soon my dreams will be mine again, cherished & familiar; they will come back, wagging their tails behind them... :)

{Photo is by Linda McCartney.}

sleep patterns

I was staring out the window listening to this song:



Wind holding leaves, then letting them fall; the song weaving a haze around me.
It's easy to pretend that all this, that I am merely a dream-figment.




Then, the vacuum cleaner whined to life in the other room.

(I could cry, I really could.)

Dear You

(A post via Heather.)

Dear You,
It always make me sad to think of our friendship which was cut off so suddenly. You were gone before I even knew you were going.
It was all out of your control, though. Which makes me feel better and at the same time worse.
I miss you; do you remember me?
I'm sure you do though this all happened two (or was it three?) years ago. It frustrates me that I can google your name and come up with your prestigious family tree, but have no way of contacting you. Probably ever again.
That's the beauty and sorrow of online friendships: they're like signaling with a lantern across a dark abyss and receiving a reply glimmering back at you. Then one day you signal in vain, the only reply is a continued darkness.
Maybe I'm just living in the past but kindred spirits are not a dime a dozen, you know. I miss our messages back and forth, our jokes, our intangible bonding.
Dare I wish for the impossible? I will! I hope our paths cross again someday.
(If I ever make it to France, don't be surprised if I come knocking on your door.)

Much love from your friend,
Me


Now to pass it on - Jade, Kim, Shopgirl, and Ever, I ask you to write a letter to whoever about whatever. It must begin with "Dear you" and you can only use pronouns.
(And any other reader who would like to do this... do it, please! I know I always say that, but gosh... I always feel like I'm probably missing the person who really wanted to do it. Just let me be content in my paranoia, thank you! :P)


Funnily enough, a few days before this tag was passed on to me, I found an unfinished "Dear You" letter I had written a few months earlier. It got lost in a pile of papers (a typical fate!), so I finished it and decided I might as well post it now, along with the other letter.


Dear You,
Whenever I write, I always feel the need to address myself to you.
You, you! It's so ambiguous. You could be male or female. You could be my mother, you could be the dog next door.
Sometimes I'm not even sure who you are. You are my lover, you are my enemy. You are a sonnet, you are prose. You are sufficient; you will never be enough.
But you know... you always know. I can tell you those things I always wanted. Whoever you are, I need you. Because, in writing to you, I feel a little less lonely: you're reading along.
Thank you.

Ever and Ever,
Me


{Painting is 'Woman Writing at a Table' by Thomas Pollock Anshutz.}

his absent presence

It is my regrettable habit to come here and remember.
Every morning before mother wakes up, wanting my company and her breakfast, I come to this field that lies a short distance from the house I fear I'll live in forever. There is nothing outstanding-looking about this field. One needs to have past memories to see the extraordinariness of such an ordinary place. The field's plethora of clover holds no lucky four-leafs that anyone has ever found, but rather memories in soothing, green abundance. The sharpest eye on earth couldn't spot the two entwined souls that once lay in the clover; they're only a remembrance now.
Even the lone tree in the upper right corner of the field holds no man-made scars, outward crude initials on its bark; the backs that together leaned against its trunk left no imprint.
There are birds, ever present, though not always noticed. Sometimes I hear echoes of past conversations as if the birds were parrots and mynas instead of robins and wrens.
"Many don't come back." I hear him say.
He said it so many times and my mind repeated it back. Sometimes I think it was just a lesson I memorized to mindlessly drone in reply to those who asked what my knowledge amounted to. Yet at the same time, I did know it and feel it and taste it. It felt like a punch, tasted like blood in my mouth.
Still, it did not prepare me for this outcome. I expected black or white... not this disconcerting grey.

Every time I go to see him echoes from the field follow.
"I will love you forever."
I look into his eyes and search for that forever in their blue blankness. Nothing is there.
"It is okay to move on when... if I am gone." His voice in my mind says.
I look down at his pale hand I grasp. "Why didn't we ever define the word 'gone'?" I ask, though he never notices or responds. "Your body is here, but your mind has folded into itself as if it never existed. If I should lay my head upon your chest your heartbeat would pound underneath my searching ear. Does your heart still function in ways besides its task of pumping blood?
I prepared myself to love you without an arm or a leg; I don’t know what to do with someone who has lost everything except their outward appendages. I was ready to love whatever havoc guns and army life would wreak on you. Without second thought, I would have stayed by your side always, stopped the nights from tearing you apart with unseen claws.
You were mine, that was enough. Now I don't know who you belong to. You're lost in a land they tell me you will never return from."
Whether I cry these things aloud or just think them makes no difference; he doesn't hear either way.


Somehow my remembering of the past and how we once were always turns into an inventory of my present. I must go in soon and get mother her breakfast. My skirt is damp from the dew-stained clover. Mother will look at my soggy skirts disapprovingly, as she does every day. Perhaps she knows the field is where I keep my memories and each morning I sit among them as they roam around me. She thinks I need to move on, she and her friends plot together and introduce me to men deemed suitable who are all wrong. (They aren't him.)
She doesn't understand. For now I must, I must keep coming here. But I feel... and am more than reluctant to admit that there may come a time when I won't come anymore; I will have moved on and will want to forget. Though I admit this, it still frightens me; I don't want to become someone who wants to forget.
I almost get up to leave, but I decide to surrender. I lie down in the clover and stare into the blank sky. I shut my eyes and let the memories close in on me. Mother's breakfast will have to wait.


(This story was inspired by a character in the Maisie Dobbs mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear. A character "...whose terrible injuries in the Great War had rendered him incapacitated in body and mind." [from the third book in the series "Pardonable Lies".])

{Painting is 'Girl in Field' by Eric Hu.}

firefly wishes.

Remember how easy it was to catch fireflies when we were young? Carefree, we'd chase them on summer nights, our eager reach never failing to capture those luminous orbs twixt cupped hands.

Now I am old and their elusive glow always flits just beyond my reach...

I think fireflies are the unfulfilled wishes of children who have grown up.

{Just don't let me forget what it was like to be a child chasing fireflies. I feel more foolish now that I am more knowledgeable.}

I remember how we would put those fireflies in our mason jars and innocently think we could keep them forever.
{We are children; we are immortal. The night will last forever. Each wish will come true.}

But morning came and our firefly dreams vanished. If we had tried to keep them we would have seen their glow turn to darkness. It is better, I suppose, to remember how beautiful they were. When we were children and we were immortal.

{Pictures found here and here.}