LIGHT ALONG THE OCEAN FLOOR

Photo

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:04:56 -0400

It’s not faith, if we’re just desperate to believe. And it can’t be love, if the catalyst is need....

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:45:53 -0400

It’s not faith,
if we’re just desperate to believe.
And it can’t be love,
if the catalyst is need.

And where am I supposed to be
when nothing is around me…
when nothing seems to breed.

And what about the promise…
the peace that comes from knowledge
or the power of some entity?

I’ve only ever seen it leave
with the heat.

And after all this time
my greatest deficiency
is sleep.

I contemplated leaving the beach for the day to do some sight-seeing on my own. Our time together...

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:07:40 -0400

I contemplated leaving the beach for the day to do some sight-seeing on my own. Our time together was floundering and any hope that we previously had of salvaging the relationship, departed into the sea upon arrival.

It was clear to both of us … it had been clear, for a while. We were much too young when we found each other and, by the time we grew up, we were much too angry to forgive each other. We had been reduced to strangers or, at the very most, acquaintances who occasionally slept close to each other after a night of drinks. It was a very lonely love. But, it was a hard one to let go of.

The curtains were still closed when I awoke, but the room smelled of cheap coffee, and I could hear the tiny knocking of cleaning ladies, up and down the hall. I wanted to go back to bed. The room was so dark and still sleepy. Layers of thick fabric hung from the windows, blocking any shreds or strands of unwanted light. There was a whole day to be had outside my window, but I was afraid of what it would be like.

I hadn’t seen him all morning. I waded around the room for an hour after I woke up, thinking he had just gone for a walk around the hotel. It wasn’t until I became stewy and decided to go on without him, that I saw the note he had left:

“Taking the day to myself.”

He kept it short. It was his way of letting me know that he was still sore from my comment the night before. I had, admittedly, made a bad joke during dinner. The hotel made a mistake when booking our room, and we ended up with two twin beds, rather than one king. We had been laughing at the whole ordeal during dessert until I mentioned (I’m almost certain as a joke) that the staff was making more realistic decisions for our relationship than we were. He didn’t think it was funny.

The rest of the evening was spent in silence. He wouldn’t hear anything I had to say and offered no aid to my efforts to repair the situation. He signed the check in silence. We rode the elevator in silence. We walked the long hall back to our room, in silence. I went to where my night-clothes were and carried them into the bathroom with me. I didn’t want to get undressed in front of him while things were so tense, so I changed with the door closed. By the time I had taken out my earrings and removed the makeup from my face, he had already pushed the beds apart and claimed the one furthest from me. We fell asleep with our backs to each other. In silence.

The moon was out, but we couldn’t see it behind those heavy curtains.

MY FATHER, THE CHARMER: PART I

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:56:29 -0400

After, literally, years of pursuing her and only ever getting “no” to his requests for a date, my dad climbed into the backseat of my mom’s car one day, and hid there until she got off of work. My mom finally finished for the day, walked out to her car, only to find this complete goofball in the back, and was told that he would not be getting out of the car until they “had a talk.”

After telling her to drive somewhere, they end up at a nearby lakeshore, where my dad proceeded to list off all of the reasons why my mother should let him take her out … “I’m great and I’m wonderful and I’m this and I’m that and you would be a fool not to date me” … you know, really sweet and humble things like that ;)

And, finally (for some mysterious reason), after who knows how many years of saying no, my mom finally said yes.

Good job, Dad. Way to persist! <3

Photo

Sat, 04 May 2013 16:00:43 -0400

Winter 2012

Thu, 02 May 2013 19:30:51 -0400

Winter 2012

Video

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:16:40 -0400

A FEAR OF HEIGHTS

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 02:28:00 -0400

One day, on top of a high cliff, I learned many things about being afraid.

The water was quiet and the cove was green and still. The voices of others crawled across the lake to our side of the island, but, by the time they reached our ears, had lost their shout. We only heard whispers and echoes of their celebrations— the sounds of joy, hushed, but no less infectious. It was a beautiful time to be up so high.

We were still out of breath from our swim against the current and our climb against the rocks. He was much more experienced than I was and knew the way. I felt safe, despite the danger. I followed his arms, still wet with lake water, as he pushed aside overgrown brush and branches for me to pass through. The cliff was near and I hadn’t done this before. I felt brave and the task seemed small, but, when the forest cleared and we reached the edge of the rock, I quickly lost my nerve.

It hadn’t looked so high when I was below it. Perhaps it was the shakiness of the climb or the uncertainty of the depth of the water below, but, all of a sudden, my fears had caught fire. I walked my toes to the edge, where the cliff met the air, and looked down. Everything in me raced and shook, claiming much of the strength I needed to stand. He stood a few feet off, watching me watch the height, but unable to see or know how scared I was. Unable to see or know how badly I wanted to climb back down and slip back into the safe water that I knew so well.

I began to ask him questions about the jump— about clearing the tree branches that weren’t far below, about if he had ever hit the bottom of the lake or if he had ever hurt himself. He answered them with a smile and sat down against the trunk of a tree that had grown through the ground.

“Are you not going first?” I asked him, nervous that he would say no.

“You don’t need me to, but I will if you want me to.”

We traded places and I watched every detail of his departure. It was so quick. By the time I saw the splash, I could no longer remember how he had placed his feet or how far he had to jump or if he had scratched his back against the branches. I had a couple of minutes to muster up my courage, while he made the climb again, but, I wasn’t able to. He came back around to me and took his place against the tree. I still wasn’t ready. I was still too scared.

He continued to jump and climb, over and over, for almost an hour. Each time, he would tell me to watch something different, so that when it was my turn, I would know what to do. And so I watched and I learned and I memorized the act of safely jumping from a high cliff. But the fear would not leave me. I could feel my shoulders burning from the sun on my back and I knew that he was tired from all his effort. I wanted so badly to jump … to show him that I could … to show myself that I could … but, instead, with a deflated spirit, I announced that I just couldn’t.

I expected that he would comfort me and tell me not to be embarrassed and that we would climb down and swim back to the other side. I would tell him that I’ll come back alone and conquer the jump myself, on a day when I have plenty of time to waste. I would thank him for trying so hard to encourage me and make me feel safe and, that, he really did do a great job. I thought that we would go home and that I would feel relief … and disappointment.

But we didn’t climb down the rock. Instead, he leaned back, against the tree trunk, and told me that he would wait all day. He knew that I could do it and he wasn’t going to leave, until I knew it. And so I stood at the edge for another half hour, shaking and sinking and shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I imagined all of the worst things that could happen and, at times, truly believed that they would. I practiced the jump, over and over and over again, in my head, until I eventually got scared that over-thinking it would cause me to hurt myself. And so I just waited. I waited for the bravery to come. I waited for all the fear to drain out of me … for my hands and legs to stop shaking. I waited for my heart to stop racing and I waited for a moment when I felt like I could jump safely.

But, I waited and never felt brave and I waited and I never felt safe. And then I just jumped.

And I was no longer afraid.

A LOSS OF MANY THINGS

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:11:00 -0400

I sat with a young mother in the afternoon. She was my young mother and I was her very young daughter. We played with sticks and flower-stems on the front porch steps and talked about the clouds and what they looked like. They were grey and heavy and it was going to rain soon. I saw one hanging over the highway. I told my mother that it looked like two hands clenched together … like hands that were scared. The blue in her eyes sharpened. She wouldn’t look away from me. Her eyes locked against my face, moving only in tiny flinches as she focused on the different features of its shape … the freckles across my nose … the pink in my cheekbones. There were tears in her eyes.

A man that was not my father, but had been spending many days and nights with my mother, was no longer. And the nice things that he had given her were now sitting in an old, cardboard box— the bouquet of flowers with deep purple petals, the necklace he had laid around her neck, and the letters he had written her, with very gentle hands. My mother said it was time to give them a grave. She explained that, sometimes, parts of people die… the good parts that you wanted to stay… and that the best thing to do is bury them, deep in the dirt.

Later in the night, long after my mother had fallen asleep, I slipped out of bed and into the hallway. The socks on my feet made my toes slip across the wooden floor. I moved slowly past the walls and was very careful not to make a sound. The porch lamp was still on outside and silver light leaked in through the window-blinds. The box still sat where my mother had left it, in an old chair that her father used to sleep in. The flaps were open and streams of light beamed against the white diamonds of her necklace. I looked down at my folded arms across my chest. Resting inside of them, was the weathered stuffed animal I had carried everywhere. He had been my greatest friend and held a very quiet love for me. But he was tired now, I told myself. And the blue of his skin was faded, now resembling the grey ashes of something burned. His color had been my favorite. But, like my mother had told me, sometimes the good parts of things die.

And so, with silver light across my face, I cried and said goodbye to one that I loved. I laid him in the bottom of the box, underneath the pages of my mother’s letters, so that he would not be cold. I left the box open and the porch light on— it would be dark in his grave, I knew, and I wanted him to have one last night in the light.

And then I left him. And I climbed back into my bed and slept alone for the first time. It was a very awful night.

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Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:38:07 -0400

We’ve grown into ugly things… like fused roots, confused, and unsure of what to breed....

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:47:00 -0400

We’ve grown into ugly things…
like fused roots,
confused,
and unsure of what to breed.

The water here is dirty,
but our mouths are dry
and thirsting.

We need new seeds
and a safe terrain.
The pressure of clean hands
against the grain.
The transfusion of veins.
A new landscape
and the courage to stay.

Let that old ground become a grave.
Let this new home be a place to pray.

We’ve got to rise to be resurrected.
Let the sun disinfect us.
Create new roots
and grow in a different direction.

Its time to leave the garden we were born into.

There was a morning, not very long ago, when she felt something that she couldn’t define. It...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 18:10:49 -0400

There was a morning, not very long ago, when she felt something that she couldn’t define. It was important and clanging, like the beat of cymbals across symphonic lines. Constant and reminding of the paths she had tried. And the trees were breaking in the garden. She imagined herself rising up over the white desk she sat behind, opposing winds battling, creating pockets of gravity … the ability to fly. Her hair tangled and whipped across her face, like the slapping of dry branches against the glass outside. There was movement in her mind— a kind of shuffling that seemed to indicate the uncertainty of time. But nothing spoke. No thoughts arose.

Just a feeling of trouble,
and the sting of needles from the broken pines.

The sea is certain.

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:11:03 -0400

The sea is certain.

CHEMISTRY

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:30:28 -0400

The development of a human is like the formation of different substances in a science lab. You have all of these different elements in front of you and, depending on how you combine them, will end up with a different reaction each time.

In life, these different elements are chalked up to an innumerable amount of circumstances. Childhood experiences, losses, hurts, betrayals, absences, deaths, abuse, etc. Those, coupled with an infinitely unpredictable pairing of personality traits, learned behaviors, coping methods, fears, strengths, abilities/inabilities, opportunities, misfortunes, etc …. make for the most complicated and unpredictable conclusion. The sensitivity of our development is so mind-blowing. It’s like a math equation that you keep adding on to. 2+2=4 … but, if you throw in another number or change the plus to a minus or add an element of multiplication, the entire answer changes. As humans, and especially as children, we really are just this ongoing math problem that continues to change in very specific ways, because of very specific experiences and inheritances that get added in along the way.

I so often used to look at the bad things that people did … stealing, murder, meanness, etc … and think to myself, “I would never do that.” And, echoed in that thought, was always this seed of judgement … “What is their problem?” It was so easy for me to think that, if I wouldn’t do it, they didn’t need to do it either. And, of course, this is sometimes, still, a reaction that I have to fight. But, ultimately, I just don’t think it’s as simple as we may assume.

If you have the ability to do something, it is because you have learned or inherited it. Your strong sense of self-control or discipline, your fearlessness in new situations and challenges, your self-motivation, your optimism, your integrity, your drive to continue trying new approaches, your patience, your this, your that and the other. While it would be nice to be able to take full credit for who we are today, the reality is that there were a lot of forces outside of our selves, that contributed to developing our self. You should, of course, take pride in who you are and celebrate the details that are yours, because, afterall, you lived the life that it took to gain them. But, its really important for us to realize that much of our development happened behind the scenes and without our permission or control.

As we get older, our ability to overcome certain habits, or change the things that we don’t like, is definitely possible. But, its not just a matter of mental ascension or discovery. Someone can know that they have an anger problem or that they are lazy or that they are addicted to something … and not necessarily have the tools to snap out of it. Its like knowing and experiencing the symptoms of some invisible disease … but having no idea what the disease is, how or why it got there or what the right treatment is.

We go through life focusing too much on our symptoms and not enough on the cause of them. This is a really tragic thing, for a lot of reasons. One, it keeps us from being able to effectively and thoroughly understand why we do the things we do, which prevents any real, lasting ability to change them. And two, our lack of understanding (or, acknowledgement) of the life and past that contributed to a person being the way that they are, really deadens our ability to have or offer any kind of empathy or forgiveness. Instead, we are quick to raise ourselves up above another, quick to discard them as weak or less … and, so very slow to truly understand the process, pain and life this person had to endure to get to where they are.

Understand me when I say, I’m not excusing bad behavior. In any way. I don’t think a troubled or unadjusted life is any reason to pardon any wrong. I fully support goodness and ideals and the upholding of right-doing. But, I also fully support a kind of discipline that is motivated in love. A good parent desires to discipline their kids, not out of frustration or confusion or power or anger … but out of love. They understand why a child does what they do … and they truly empathize. But, they also know what the right and best thing for that child is and, so desperately, wants that for them. The key to this, is empathy. It’s ok to be unyielding in our morals and upstanding in our commitments to what is right. But. When we lose empathy and understanding, and the mistakes or weaknesses of others become simply that … we, ourselves, have committed a great wrong.

Change takes work … the hardest kind of work, too, because it involves relearning “truths” that you have believed for so long and that you learned during the most trusting time of your life. To have to redefine (or discover for the first time) things like love and worth and ability and freedom and safety … is no small task. Those things lie at the very core of everything else that we do and live for. To change them, is to change everything … and that takes a lot of uncovering, a lot of hurting and a lot of healing … none of which, are easy.

Some of us grew up lonely, some of us grew up criticized, some of us grew up abandoned, some of us grew up unvalued … the list goes on and on …. but not one of us has manifested the same effects in the same exact way. We each have specific strengths and specific weaknesses … and those very strengths and weaknesses are what determined how we dealt with what we experienced in the past and, more often than not, how we will deal with what we experience in the future. You are not, solely, your own. And neither is any one else.

We have to learn to see people for what they would be, if they hadn’t had the bad experiences that they’ve had … and realize that that is truly who they are … they just never learned it. When you understand someone’s past fully, and are able to imagine who they would be with all of the shit removed … you are so much more able to forgive them for the wrongs they’ve done and empathize with the reasons they’ve done them.

Be thankful for the strengths that you have. Not everyone has them and you are lucky. And be forgiving of the weaknesses you possess … they came from the lie of an experience or life that you’ve led. And, in knowing all of this, realize that it’s the same for everyone else. Everyone has strengths that set them apart … and everyone has weaknesses that set them apart. They may look different, but they are all rooted in the same thing … the failures of people who were meant to love them perfectly … but didn’t. Or couldn’t.

http://varunyoothongdee.tumblr.com

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:48:49 -0400

http://varunyoothongdee.tumblr.com

THE UNAVOIDABLE

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:43:50 -0400

I am starting to realize how broken love is. Not love itself … but the idea and expectations we have of it. Not accurate ideas or expectations … but ones that we have been given by other people and experiences. The idea that love hurts you. The idea that it’s a difficulty you are better off without. The idea that it lies to you, betrays you and tricks you. The idea that it was never that crazy about you to begin with.

I grew up with my own ideas about love. Good ideas and bad ideas. I believed that love was breathtaking and romantic and sweet and that it whispered kind things, often. I also believed (though I didn’t know it at the time) that love was punishing, deceitful, careless, selfish, unreliable and uncommitted. I believed that love would do nice things for you … but that it counted how many nice things it did and held it against you when you didn’t do as many. I believed that love really liked me … but only when I was able to provide a service or fulfill a want that it had. I believed that love communicated … but that, if it was upset, it yelled and pushed and stormed away without caring how I was left to feel.

I believed these things for a long time and I wasn’t even aware of it. And the only reason I am now, is because I’m able to see how I let other people treat me …. and how I treated other people.

I am really lucky. I’ve spent the last few years resorting my ideas … or completely doing away with them … and have come to a place where I know what love looks like … and what it doesn’t look like (even if it claims to be). What I’ve realized though, is that all of the time I spent trying to avoid it or control it or live my life without it, I was actually only affirming the existing ideas I had of it. What I thought I was doing to protect myself, was actually only hurting me more … in the same ways I had been hurt before. My mindset about the whole thing, only ever attracted others with the same mindset. And so these toxic relationships continued to occur, I continued to get hurt, and I continued to believe that love was a thing that hurt.

And then … by luck or fate or coincidence … I ended up in some really healthy relationships.

My best friend and I came into our living situation as complete strangers, knowing next to nothing about one another. I came into the house still pretty wrought with soured beliefs about love… or maybe more accurately put, a complete ignorance to what it really was.

We quickly became close. We shared a lot of interests and realized that there were some really beautiful ways that we balanced each other out. And so we talked a lot. And before I knew it, this girl knew a lot of things about me … and I knew a lot of things about her. And as we continued to grow in our friendship and continued to delve deeper into sensitive subjects and vulnerable moments … there was a fear that began to rise up in me. I worried that the more she knew, the more she wouldn’t want to know. Or that, the closer we got the worse it would be if I ever let her down or disappointed her. And I definitely did … we both did … and it was terrifying.

Jess and I have been pretty close to hell and back. There was a day when I had completely resolved to move out of the house. I just had this overwhelming feeling of, “Get me out of here!” She knew too much about me, I trusted her too much and I had too much invested in this person … she had too much power and ability to really hurt me … and, at the time, we were both really hurting each other. Not because we didn’t love each other, but because we didn’t realize that we were safe in that love.

I can honestly say, I have never gone through a more difficult time in a relationship … and I have never been more indebted to one. I think every single day, in some way or another, of how unbelievably lucky I am to have this friend. Knowing each other has completely changed both of our lives. We chose to stick it out. In a time when any other friendship would have completely fallen apart, we still fought for ours. I don’t know that I will ever again see or experience a greater reward in life, than what I’ve received from the fight it took to know and love Jess … and to LET her know and love me.

She will be my best friend for the rest of my life. That may be one of the few things that I know, with full assurance. We have come to a place where we’ve been through so many difficult times and, not only survived them, but seriously come out grateful for them. At this point, there just isn’t anything that threatens us any more. We know shit will happen … we know we’ll still disappoint each other, hurt each other, and endure some genuinely hard times. … but we also know that we seriously love the shit out of each other and that, no matter what, that’s why we are doing what we’re doing. She is the safest person in my life, because I know that she will always choose to love me, when others wouldn’t.

To think about what my life would be like right now, had I not had those experiences with people who showed love well … scares me. I would have continued to believe that the bad ideas and examples I had had in my past, were accurate depictions of love. I would have continued living my life trying to fend for myself. And so many of us do. We rely on our own strengths to be what carry us through, we rely on thrills and change and distractions to keep us too busy to invest in a person or let them invest in us and we adopt a way of life centered around things, rather than people. We speak big words about living a free life with no attachments … or about conquering our needs by depriving ourselves of their solution … or about focusing on the “now” or the “positive” or the “whatever”. But in the end, none of that will fix us. The only way you can relearn something, is if you study the real thing.

If we’ve mastered a life of avoiding relationships, then it might be time to master a life of pursuing them. The avoidance of things is rooted in weakness, not in strength.

You can be cautious and still embrace relationships. We know, better than we think, when something is a good idea or not. Pay attention to how people treat you … to the little things … to the quiet moments. And if someone fails to love you the way that you deserve, forgive them and move on … reminding yourself that we’ve all been given wrong ideas of love, from the ones that were supposed to represent it well. Not everyone has relearned it … not everyone knows how to show it … or receive it. And unless they are willing to learn with you, you won’t be able to teach it.

But, when someone wants to love you the way that you deserve, you will know. And you will have to choose to let them.

These hands are frantic, along the hem of ribs and chest… against the heat of a body, at rest. The...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:44:00 -0400

These hands are frantic,
along the hem
of ribs and chest…
against the heat
of a body, at rest.

The tragedy of waking,
and how it all seems to get
swallowed up…
the affection and the good…
the hands behind the pull.

So true, until the morning…
the waning strength of reverie.

The night has ways of seeming clean.

AN UNSAFE NEIGHBORHOOD

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:38:52 -0400

They stole the things that we gave freely,
the patterns of our sleeping,
the calm beneath our breathing…
the wounds that we were healing.

And every run of conversation
revealed a mess of complication,
the testing of equations,
discrepancies in confirmations
and the loss of deemed sensations.

This is not what we expected.
It is the revelation
of what we’ve dreaded.

A crumbling arc
beneath a promise that only bows to self.
A flailing mouth
that only serves the ground.
The gift of growth…
in letting go of what we’ve found.

Love will always sleep
with her doors unbound.

I dreamed that i went walking in the morning. Out in a field that I hadn’t seen before. I...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:55:00 -0400

I dreamed that i went walking in the morning. Out in a field that I hadn’t seen before. I found my father there. I ran to him and hugged him and cried and clung to his side as we walked. He picked a tall piece of grass and chewed and spit tiny pieces, like he used to do when he was here. We laughed and retold old stories and recounted as many moments as we could, in whatever time we had. In all of my dreams with him, we always knew that he could only stay for a very short time. And so we rushed to love and we rushed to laugh and we rushed to remember. And then, the rushing slowed. It was the middle of the morning, and the end of our time. He placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me toward him and looked at me with the kind of eyes only a father can have.

“Are you happy in your life, sweetheart?”

And I began to cry.

He was a selfish little thing. In ways that other selfish little things were not. He drained the...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:22:00 -0500

He was a selfish little thing. In ways that other selfish little things were not. He drained the ones he loved and, the ones he didn’t, he used up. But he was not a mean man, not intentionally … though the ways he treated and took from people often felt cold.

His mother was still young. Still beautiful and fair and smooth. Her face was soft and peach and her eyes held the ocean. She was one of those beauties who did not know what she carried. When the little thing was a child, his mother cried a lot. (She still does, though not as much.) She slept late into the afternoons. He would whimper and wilt outside her room and slide drawings under her door. They were always late to everything. His hair was crazy, until he was old enough to tame it himself. Their house stayed dark, though it was decorated beautifully. Expensive wood in the floors and expensive fabrics on the walls and expensive china in the cabinets and only a couple of things that weren’t expensive, but looked expensive. The house would have been very grand if his mother had let some light in.

His father was not a little thing. His father was a big and wild thing and smelled of whiskey and dirty clothes. He was loud and funny at times, but mostly just loud and mean. He spoke in spurts, never wanting to spend much time on any given thought and always interrupting the little thing’s stories, saying he had better things to do. His heart hurt. No one knew it, not even him … but it did. He had spent too much time piling dirt and ugly things on top, that he had forgotten what was beneath it all. He forgot about the time when his dad made him sit in the mud, in the middle of a storm, as punishment. And he forgot when his mother shipped him off to California to live with distant relatives while she and his father seduced themselves with the idea of a vacation, when really, they just drank and argued until she ended up with a cast on her pretty arm. He had forgotten all of the things that hurt and it became much easier to just be mean. And mean things create little things.

The little thing was very loved, later in life. He found and met others who weren’t big and wild and who loved what he drew and painted. They wrote him nice letters and did him sweet favors and gave and gave and gave, simply because they wanted him to have. And he often felt happy. But his heart hurt. Like his father’s. And it was hard for him to believe that anyone wanted to wake up early with him. And it was hard for him to think that anyone wanted to hear his stories. And it was hard for him to see that, like his mother’s old house, he really was decorated beautifully … he just needed to let some light in.

And, so, people came and went. Not because they left, but because he let them.

As he grew older and found more, and found himself wanting less, or at least, wanting less of things that didn’t matter, he began to think about what he had. And what he had lost. There was a great danger in him. One without a face or a name … a thief that cowered in the dark spots and stayed very quiet and very secret. In his thoughts and in his sleep … in conversations about family and tragedies or in the moments when he wanted to ask, “Do you love me?” The little thing was scared to have the very things he feared losing.

And so he kept his hands empty. Empty of any needs. Empty of a reliance upon any thing. They opened for small amounts of time, like a child’s hands at the top of a roller coaster ride, but, at the end of the day, or in the gray of the morning, or when something sharp cut them or upon first-notice of his heart really feeling … they would close again. Like the bursting retreat of a terrified animal, in the face of a threat. His hands would close and his eyes would close and his heart would close and he would wait until it was safe to come out again.

The little thing stayed small. He grabbed at what he could and he pushed others so that he wouldn’t fall. And the good that came in, was only held for short moments. He stole and broke and hurt what he felt he could not harness. And many people loved him regardless and wanted all of his ways. Many people came and wanted to stay. They wanted to teach him and trust him and wake up with him every day. But when the time came for important declarations, or the need of some comfort, or the support of another … he ran away with everything they had given. The thief alive and kicking. A beautiful mother, too sad to really be living. And a big and wild father, too torn up to be forgiven.

He was just a little thing … dressed in big clothing … experiencing the life and loss of growing.