life via living

I've pulled over in the barren fairgrounds parking lot to write this down. If the thought had been any more urgent I may have resigned to write in flames, soaring toward the ditch in a lunge for a pen. Anyway, I was driving and thinking and this stale idea floats past. "Love evolves." I'd always say that. And it was true -- why else could we look back on our pasts, all our former loves, and dismiss them with the simple charge of naivety? If we grow, so must our love.

Then I got cynical -- but I never stopped saying it: love evolves. Only then I had stopped believing it existed and only kept spewing the line because it made it more excusable that I hurt a lot of feelings in impulsive acts of faux-passion. Those were born of a stagnant life, I think, and a desperation to escape it. It worked for a while but eventually I admitted the invalidity of that sad excuse, too. But even then in the face of ultimate defeat -- when I decided that love existed and I'd outgrown it, or that I'd had my share and wasted it -- I never stopped professing "love evolves". I always found a way to prove its truth , even though that truth existed in a constant state of flux.

Then I stopped to consider connotation. Maybe love evolved because the way we use and understand words is always changing, increasing in elaboration albeit maybe suffering a decrescendo in affect. The more I thought about words, in particular "love", that mysterious object of human fixation, the more I felt like a fly trapped in a web.  The spider holding me wasn't a predator -- no, I had no fear -- but he couldn't see or hear me, and the more he lived as normally and the more I struggled, the further I became trapped. With each new day, dew drops glistened on the web like treasure, but always evaporated as I was left to bake in the midday sun, longingly gazing at that distant, floating gem. It was always changing and always beyond my insect capacity. Love. So I escaped the only way I could. I detached myself from that ineffable fixation like an exoskeleton and flew off from the web to become lost in the vastness of Earth's atmosphere.

blog post circa january 2009

I have absolutely no sense of direction. I’ve driven Jenny home so many times, but somehow when I get to Pennsylvania, I always turn right, which is the wrong way, unless I’m going straight back to my mom’s, which I never am. So anyway, I realized I was going the wrong way, but I didn’t feel like turning around yet. So I drove a few miles, and stopped in the parking lot of my old church. From the time I was in seventh grade and old enough to go, until less than a year ago, I spent every wednesday night there, with my friend John and my little brother, and sometimes, Carlene. Youth group. But it was my social life.

Every week, whether it was warm or cold or raining or just uncomfortable, John and I would go outside the church and sit on the edge of the parking lot, because there was this very large, very steep hill that, eventually, turned into soccer fields that turned into a playground that turned into yards. The space that was the hill and the ground at the bottom of it was a huge expanse before it became any of those things. We’d sit on the hill and talk. My hair was long past my waist, and the wind would mess it up beyond fixing, but I’d stay outside. In the summer, we’d roll down the hill and climb up and roll down it again and again until we made ourselves sick, laughing and unable to walk. In the summer, we rolled onto thistles. In the winter, we didn’t roll. In the spring, we climbed back up muddy and wet. And in the fall, there were dandelions. There were so many dandelions, you couldn’t even see the grass, over that huge expanse, no grass at all. You’d take one step onto that hill or the field, and thousands of tiny seeds would cloud up around you and blow away to make more dandelions, as if there was room for any more. So we’d roll down the hill and the dandelion seeds would cling to my tangled up hair, and the bill of his hat, and to our eyelashes, and to our clothes, and they’d fill our mouths and noses because we’d been laughing and we couldn’t breathe. Eventually, at some point every year, they spray all the dandelions with whatever the chemical is that kills them. And after that, the hill is bare and even the grass looks ugly. And then it starts snowing, more and more. And in the winter, we’d go skiing and sledding and we’d be covered in snow instead of seeds. And in the summer, we’d sneak off to flora pool and drink iced blended coffee, and four days later we’d be on the hill again. I never could get enough of that place. John was my best friend. I loved him. My mom, though, she didn’t want me to even speak to him, and she had very little faith in him. I especially miss him, covered in dandelions. We’d roll down the hill facing each other holding hands and laughing when we lost our grip halfway down. Our faces were close together and close to the ground, and like I said, filled with dandelion seeds. All those dandelions, reproducing because of us. You know how people say that dandelions are for making wishes? Blow off all the seeds. We wasted every single one of those wishes. Hundreds at a time, just because of gravity. But what happened when those seeds landed again? There were even more dandelions than before.

Assignment: Short story of 8-10 pages.

Classmates: Eight long pages about their mild car accidents while driving to a campsite to go fishing.

Me: Seventeen pages of eloquent drama, in which a girl is disowned by her parents, addicted to coffee, gives up her baby, goes nuts in the hospital, freezes to death, and realizes that accepting peace and love transcends human experience.

Me: My teacher will kill me.