A plague with a dangerous tongue

I think I would rather hear someone has died than the diagnosis that they are bound to. It's like slapping a big warning on someone's body that warns they're a disappearing act. I'd rather she just dies and be gone instead of watching all the health and happiness flea from her body and soul. It's not glorifying and even the strongest person cannot defeat this deadly plague that is the human condition.

My good friend invided a group of girls over for our usual wine themed "Ladies Night". It was the regular type of get-together that we have everytime; sharing laughs and stories. Only last night was interrupted by a heavy undertone. All night we could see there was discomfort in her body language and physical pain at certain times. Almost the ache of a heavy soul. She shared with us last night that she was diagnosed with esophageal cancer about three months ago and by her check up with her doctor earlier yesterday, it is evident that the illness has begun to spread. Like wildfire, this is a grotesque killer, only now it is personal and has pried its way into the very body of one of my greatest friends.

This friend, is a gorgeous and generous person in both body, intllect and passion. There is not one person more qualifying for me to carry on in the impression of. I have many friends that I consider to be good people and by Mother Earth, god or whatever superstition it is that we name our religion, I am blessed to have encountered. She is beyond a blessing in my life. It is a simple task for a friend to offer a ride or come by occasionally at her expense to console a friend druing a crisis; however, it is a completely more emotional connection to take in someone (as she has done with me and vice versa) and say virtually, that "Hey, I am not going to go away. I am going to be here when it's invonvenient for you - invonvenient for me too" I think in most ways she is my rock - that person that I can lean on no matter where I am or what the problem. I used to figure that she would be a girlfriend at my wedding day, proposing a toast. I figured she would be around forever, to help me shop for children's clothes and pick out a good school if ever that day came as she'd already gone through it with her children. Unfortunately, cancer is day after day replacing my wonderful friend and likewise, taking over my own body and mind, replacing it with sadness.

The weight of her physical pain is above me. The weight of that choked up feeling you get when you need to tell someone face to face something but can't - that she is going to have to deliver this statement not only to myself and our mutual friends, but to her children, her family, her lover. I cannot even imagine telling someone that you are going to die and there is nothing anyone can do. I have seen this disease take over the lives of friends and family memebers before, people who's lives were throuwn into mine by biology, work, or educational decisions. She is someone I searched for. I made it a point of getting to know her and love her as a friend and mentor and now she is going to die.

Instead of focusing on all of this and addressing the physical and finacial struggles that lie ahead of her, she just mobilized everything she has - her spirituality, emotions, intellect and the remnants of her physical strength. She said to me in an effort to keep my tears back once everyone else had left, "Mel, the world is sickened; it isn't just me. There is pollution of pollution threatened with AIDS, racfisms, homelessness, all kinds of pain and illnesss. Cancer is just one point. One art in my body and it's just an art that is bigger than my body can handle."

I cried the whole way home and took miles of backroads just for something to do - someplace to go. I couldn't figure out who to talk to because I can't make this any better. I suppose that's why this is here, lying in the depths of cyberspace, with no direction. I, too, lacking direction.

The way things really are

It used to be that I'd find a great guy and share an extraordinary friendship which over time became more emotional and eventually developed into an intimate relationship. My dating history is not by any means an extensive list of haves nor have-nots; however, a small list of painful memories and opportunities which introduced me to some marvelous individuals along the way.

When I met Lucas the circumstance were entirely different than they had been in the past. He and I both in a location, physically, we did not frequent and, emotionally, we could not by ourselves comprehend. It was an unusual evening and in retrospect, I am still very fortunate that our paths crossed.

Sometimes, I feel as though it shouldn't be this hard to keep our relationship alive. It shouldn't be this hard to smile, but I'm beginning to see that the mountains not only tower in physical height but in defeat, once again. My head is like a kite; my thoughts tied on a string dragging behind me in magnificent visibility. I guess on my end, I'm just too afraid to give up. I'd love to figure out what's wrong with me (although I wish modern medicine wouldn't direct toward perscription bottle solutions). I'd love also to believe that he'd never let me go. I want to believe that he'd fight till his dying day because I know I would. I've been searching the eyes of everyone I meet to find signs of him and an offering of reason as to why everything is suddenly feeling so uneasy. I'd fight whatever it is that's causing this trouble in mind if I could only realize where it all began. It's my life?

Picking up the telephone is perhaps the most selfish act I've had lately and now it's one of habit. I'm doing it in part because I am, quite honestly, curious as to what's happening in the receiving location. I'm also making calls because I need to feel the person on the other end. I've been in a cold state of mind lately - part of me ready to say my good-byes and a bigger part believing that I have no one to say good-bye to. I feel like this beautiful place I've been has been in a fog of surrealism leading me to believe there's been emotion and love where there hasn't. I'm in a position that's far beyond tears and the hope of a disappearing act in a crowd of faces I wouldn't recognize.

Blissfest and other hippie bullshit

So here I am in Northern Michigan, once again, and it's the weekend of the Bliss music and arts festival. I guess to a lot of my friends and colleagues this is a big deal. It's like Rothbury had a little baby in Good Hart, Michigan. I've gone before and I'm not sure that I'll go again. Besides, it's sort of dubbed a 'hippie' festival now and I think somehow the definition of being a hippie has changed drastically since its origin.

I guess the term hippie means basically a person who is opposed to many of the conventional standards and customs of society, especailly one who advocates extreme liberalism in sociopolitical attitudes and lifestyles. I get this. I feel like I fit pretty well into that all natural liberal attitude.

I think it can be defined in many ways - having long hair in the 1960's meant something very diffrent that in does now. Then, it was a statement against the war. As people were being drafted and sentenced to a likely death in Vietnam, it was more a trend, it isn't really a philosophy like John and Yoko made it out to be back in the counter-culture days. I guess in my mind the modern age of 'hippies' isn't much like its 60's ancestors. It's a soul and life philosophy above everything else. Choosing to support local business or music, over corporate ones. Buying organic, harvesting your own food, political activism, meditation - everything externally simple and internally rich. Instead of man v. nature, it's about the power of co-existing; hemp clothing, plant based diets, alternative medicine and so on. Seeking to live in harmony with the Earth and those around you without confrontation and conformation.

I hope that if people are going to cling to this sterotype of being a modern hippie; they do, in fact, understand the mentality that all those civil activists that started this movement lived and breathed for us to know it to this day. The biggest part, I'd say is becoming the change that one wishes to see in the world. In order to start a revolution, you've got to first be the revolutionary.

So, to those of you setting up your hammocks and hanging your tapestries this weekend, you won't see me. If Bliss really is about following your own personal 'bliss' it wouldn't be slapping a price tag on Mother Earth, music or art. At any rate, to those of you going; have fun, you dirty bare-footed hipsters.

Living

When all there is is just cigarette smoke and hope filling the room, what can you do? What can you do but to feel like you want to laugh and cry and scream and you feel like it should last forever. What can you do but to feel a little upset because you know it has to end sometime - it just has to.

Every good thing comes with that price. With that lump in the back of your throat (that lump that you get when you know the feeling you have is the absolute best kind of bad).

Walk to the park. Lay in the middle of the road. Listen to the sound of perfect - to those laughs, that you just know are real. You don't have to wonder, think twice, second guess those laughs. Climb a tree. Those moment when you go outside and huddle together or walk while embracing because even though it's warmer inside, it feels better this way. Nothing can compare to sugarhoney kisses and one last cigarette.

To picture lifeless trees, living skies, tombstones of babies that died in eighteen thirty-three, , concrete floors and beautiful people whom you have nothing but love for - capturing things that you don't think should be memories yet. No, not just yet.

I like to capture them like yesterdays clouds and make believe that nothing can stop me from making them stay forever. And I dance and sing to the soundtrack of my future nostalgia hoping to put it in my pocket and hang onto it like it's something tangible.

I think sometimes that maybe this feeling is the feeling of happiness, something that I've never held before, never really experienced. I figure it's like being in a tornado - not the eye, where everything is peaceful, no. Instead it's like swirling around feeling things I never knew I was capable of feeling. I am a million shades of crazy, one hundred layers of calm, a mile of chaotic beauty.

And there isn't anything a thing that can be done to stop this. To end it. I know that it doesn't matter if I never feel this way again. It doesn't matter because I've had it once. This isn't an ending at all. Remember? We're feeling; we're living.

Something to fill some space

There was a pilot who crashed, wrecked his plane (and lived). He said he'd never fly again. I guess that words don't mean a thing if you can throw some together with the hope that it turns out okay, and then let anyone read it to see what he or she will say. Sometimes I feel like that 'anyone' is my only friend. Anyone is everything, you know? Me, us, them, him, her, no one at all. I just write words to words and hope that someone might discover the diffrence betewen 'listening' and 'hearing'.

I kind of laugh at the way I lie awake and let darkness seep in through my open windows, gathering under my eyes and bruising them a dingy purple.

I don't really have an inability to sleep, it's not that. I guess I'm just tired of devoting myself to something only to have it turn into a vapor and dissipate into the atmosphere - miles away - leaving me with empty clentched fists and damp eyes. And I do this to myself all the time until I'm raw with ignorance and nauseous with rejection.

I think I upset a lot of people and I know that I upset myself. And maybe I don't want that.

As for today, I'll just stick to my grey skies. It's like that feeling I got the first time I was soaked with rain and didn't even bother getting dry and warm. Once you've had lightning and thunder shake the walls around you, you might as well expect more because it's coming.

Sometimes rainstorms are so beautiful it hurts but it's not as bad as the times when I hurt so badly that it's beautiful. That's how it's been, licking envelopes and only tasting glue, not something enjoyable. Not something memorable. But I love those memories anyway, of sending letteres the old-fashioned way; and sometimes, when it's wet and grey or I can't handle the weather, I pull out an envelope and seal it shut without a letter inside because I think I've run out of words and I've been relying on touch ever sense.

Purifying

I woke up today in a weird place, in time. A grey place where it wasn't dark anymore and it wasn't quite light - just grey and kind of cold.

Sometimes, I get really angry with myself for thinking so much about everything around me in such a negative way. I'm finally trying to get a better perspective about my life and a better handle on the things that shape it. I'm really trying to understand the whole concept of feeling human without skepticism anymore.

Yet, I'm living in a system that doesn't force people to risk anything. I'm breathing a life that is not in control, but won't lose control. I feel like I will never stop fighting, yet I don't fight. I think there's a beautiful thing about the Chinese Taoism teaching to embrace and endure, and I find it rather entertaining how the Western world optimistically believes that if you embrace, you will endure.

And what exactly was that moment of greyness this morning? I suppose just a tired sunset that I called a sunrise because I haven't a clue. Maybe I'm just a fatigued as the sun, anyway. I feel like it. I'm emaciated, detached, and I feel lately lacking in life. I have, over the last two months or so, discovered my desire for solitude, perhaps of habit, like a woman suffering leukemia, only mine is an illness of spirit.

This past weekend has been rainy, and I feel like everything is exactly the same on a rainy day, where I can rest outside for hours while it pours and pours on me. There's no comfort in water and no comfort in stars. There's no comfort in knowing that the sky will clear up to something beautiful - because there's no saying when.

I'm learning an awful lot about myself lately without the presence of other people. For example, I spend entirely too much time outside in my garden and I never actually do much in terms of horticulture. It's funny that way. I just think the whole time, and feel the rain which is steady and just enough to let me know I still feel something. I think about art and how foolish it really is to think that I can stop and capture something beautiful as it is while it naturally occurs. My eyes are cold and dull but there is truth in them. I think about everyone that I am not and how they're all alike yet different. How they're all addicted and insane and how I'm just the same, and different.

Perhaps it's time to do some purifying?

Us

She once said she never liked to be alone, and it's kind of funny the way she rarely is. She has this sort of magnetism that attracts people to her. She hates it.

I had a marvelous discussion the other day and I feel like I might be one person that understands loneliness better than a lot of other people do. I guess a girl can't quite understand that level of solitude until she's watching someone die. I'm battling the sky.

I feel sometimes like a tramp - like I use my own body for satisfaction and communitcation instead of harboring the suggested behaviours of health and well-being. But sexuality is more about the mind and body finding harmony that it is about the body and instant gratification.

There are days when I sit outside under the warmth of the sun holding my hands to my chest - holding my hands against the life I had. That part of me is now so far gone that I can only see it when it appears while I dream. I'm loyal and I'll remain this way until the day that I die, but after that, it's uncertain. Nobody knows what lies behind the day we die.

Sex is only a part of the quest to be beautiful. I miss that part of physically being with Lucas while we're on opposite sides of the country, but I know that in life and in love people are constantly promising but never really after a promise. Instead, searching for a guarantee that whatever it is that two people share won't ever slip away.

I feel sometimes like we're slipping.

The way I'd like it to go isn't always the way it ends up happening. I think sometimes that what we do is complicating our lives vicariously through blocking our emotions because they're ugly on the inside. We're bitter and irritate and we should probably sing songs while we sail through the sky instead. Besides I believe that I'll know what he means when he flies and also when he comes down. Maybe it should all just be simplified, instead of worrying about circumstance and anything else weighing us down.

I don't want to be together. I don't want to be apart.

I'm yours. You're mine. That's it.

She probably wouldn't hate being alone if she took the time to understand what it was really all about.

Poetry from the garden

Untitled.

What would it mean to she who passed
A single room with a lamp left on?
If two lovers wondered out into their garden
To live where twilight lives after dark
And sit among the leaves and flowers late to bloom
Where the wild rasberries grow
Like chords from the string
Only speaking of inconsequent things
Whe he writes, he'll think of her constantly
And she, understand what the writing means
All he may mark would be his own
Offset by what is hers alone.

Pieces

I'm getting lost today on the roads that lose me. Soemtimes I drive around trying to find reason becasue I struggle with choices. Trying to find someone or something that will take me seriously. I take a shit load of drugs, perscriptions that I am perscribed to depend on and drugs that I twist my mind into believing depend on me. We all need that feeling that we're needed. I can't imagine life any way diffrent.

The drives I've taken aren't helping me much, some days I'm not in any state to be behind the wheel, others, I'm too disgusted with the little pieces littering the highway to be disgusted with myself. I'm not in a very good place today.

I remember when I used to be the go-to girl for a hadful of friends. The best small group of people I could ever care to being associated with. In retrospect, all they did was care about me. Truly and I didn't care enough to notice it. Sure, everyone is after her own quest for self-acceptance and stability, but those friends cared what I thought, and I probably should have thanked them for that.

It's hard to sit here and say I should up and leave, just to get away from all this weight on my shoulders and all those pieces along the roadside, but those pieces are my own. Hopping on a bus and taking my changes out of here won't do much today. Perhaps another day; another dime.

So, I'm sitting here in a busted chair that's about as used and fed up as the body I'm in and still somehow comfortable. This, saying more than the soul I'm burying with alcohol. I had a cigarette and it's been a while. It's been a while and I'm thinking the only thing that's offered to take me seriously are the drugs I take when I can't relax.

There's no living life again.