peering into windows…

My own eyes are too painful to look at these days. I tried staring in the mirror and all I saw were huge bags under them and messed up hair and sadness and wrinkles where there used to be light and happiness and uniimited smiles. But I’m wondering where…where the smiles were coming from. Where did they ever come from? From the time I was still a small child…where did the real smiles come from… where were the realest smiles I’ve ever known..

Not the ones that say I’m glad he’s holding me or thank God I look semi decent today or I guess I’ll smile because that’s what we’re supposed to do for cameras, even though my soul felt like it was in a million pieces and confused and the last thing it wanted was to be held inside a 4 x 6 so someone could look back on that moment and try to convince themselves they were actually alive..

I guess the problem with me was photographs. Staring into photographs I remember analyzing each and every one of them, dreaming up new paths to happiness by trimming this part or changing this and the only thing it makes me feel right now is remorse, all those years, all those thoughts I could pile up in my backyard and they would reach miles high and sometimes I wish they could just reach all the way to heaven so God could pick one more slam down I’d given myself and they’d all come toppling down like jenga blocks. Crashing to the ground and causing such a ruckus that people like me, women like me would really wake up and see there’s no freedom here there’s freedom in downward spirals or traps or silence or any of these things…there needs to be edges there needs to be release, and reasons why…and I look for them where there aren’t any, anymore…

Thinking my dreams need to be excavated from my past like I really ever had whole intentions from my life, not really understanding that I never really did, only passions that were passions for the wrong reasons, that I only thought they could serve me and that’s the tears and the choking feeling I get from the four boxes of the last four years I dealt with today. Sorting through photographs and notes and ticket stubs and all I felt were people and smiles knocking on my door trying to get through to me where I would quickly greet them and slam the door shut saying yes, no thank you but I’m lost and I don’t want to ask your for help, I don’t want to ask for help and I’d much rather sit here, alone, wondering, and scared…

The earliest I can remember it is kindergarten, sitting in the back playing math games on the computer because I was “accelerated” and accelereated and what? I don’t know but it only left me unable to relate to the other kids and the girls would play dolls and house and I wouldn’t like it and the boys didn’t want a girl so I sat there in the corner making necklaces out of macaroni and string and those necklaces were my savior in that moment and the only other thing I remember was the way he played our guitar and that was my real smile. That was my real smile, that’s where it was birthed and perhaps where it will be found again.

I remember smiling holding children, feeding them suckers, and drumming and dancing and singing, and learning songs, and swearing and dancing in the rain, and being in an airport being a nobody with my big backpack wondering if we all are truly going anywhere, knowing in my heart one slight truth: we were created in order to love and to be loved, thank you mother teresa, and today I realized te greatest tragedy is not to fulfill the latter of those two ideals for a heart fully alive. To be loved. Beloved. Beloved is what God calls each of his children and the best I can give God these days is I have no idea how long I’ve been gone here but I promise I’ll stay up all night with a magic marker and a piece of paper the size of Texas to draw maps and symbols of where you’ve led me against my willl and the places I’im supposed to go. I have no desire to live in circles or live at 1/8th of my soulpower when a life with you is more than 100 percent I take a quick second and pray for my friends who are mad to live knowing you are mad for me to live too, to escape the labyrinth of comfortable sadness and comfortable fear and comfortable worries that set me into a frenzy of comfortable living, with gray clouds and a chance of nothingness..that soon might not pass…

it makes me wonder about the silent smiles and how those first came about in my soul..being an innocent bystander and an innocent witness of love, being able to be an invisible eyes, so drawn to love I couldn’t even stand it, so in tune with beauty I felt if I ever left i’d truly die because our waking life on this planet is so short there’s no time for anything but…..and images of India come to mind and I’m so ready to drop it all and drop all my plans and worries and stress and anything I will go there and walk, and dream, and taste, and listen, and read and pray and collapse, and watch elephants and play with children and walk barefoot and dust and constantly thank god to be alive. It should be so simple.

It should be so simple. But something inside me is rubbing the wrong way how a little voice of perfection and obsession with the physical appearance can cause me to give up on my dreams in a mere a second and cause me to be so ungrateful for life that I simply can’t do it anymore because the will to survive is captured by a fleeting though that became all encompassing. Never to leave, never allowing me to see the true light.

And therein becomes the seed of all great stories. The girl against all odds, against her mind, running against love and the promise of the truest future anyone could imagine. Struggling and aching to break free from chains and grab others by the hand and run wildly into the sunlight. Not wanting to rule anything out and not wanting to fall victim to addiction of any kind, not wanting to take anyone down with her but truth, so hard she’d wrestle it to the ground, making promises and making do with the moment. Praying for more than getting through the night alive. Praying for getting through the day and life and love unscathed. Praying for courage to search for truth in the corners of her life…