Returning...

I was raised in a structure that included the timespan of Old Testament to Christ to the returning of Christ and the Rapture. All tidy and structured and very linear. But how easy would it be for us to have mistaken our savior when he returned to us. Could he not have come or perhaps never really left? What the disciples called the Holy Spirit could have been Christ returning not two days after he left them right? After all, we can't really say that there is any difference between Christ or the Holy Ghost, assuming Christ was God (not the safest, but it's my argument dammit). When Jesus said he would return one day, maybe his followers were not acute enough to recognize spirit and fire as the flesh and blood they had walked with. These thousands of years (and how many millinia to come) have been the rapture. We are currently being taken into God, but we didn't notice and remain oblivious to the paradise around us.

Tis the Season

I checked my e-mail before going to work and found one from a friend telling me that a young woman at her husband's work had been raped and murdered last night. Chased down by one of the client's at Peter's work and stabbed to death. All day, fleeting visions of a nameless and faceless woman lying in her blood, a shadow of a man making a trail of this blood back to his apartment there at the halfway house. I did not know her or him but it is enough to know the story and have the small connection of my friends in this terror's wake. Peter works with people even more violent than the man that did this and he is working there at this very moment. So the woman without a face lying in the snow becomes a man with Peter's face and eyes glazing over. Mary screaming in the background. Then the scene shifts entirely, Tom drives away to class and it is twisted metal and him trapped in a burning wreckage, face disfigured and empty. It is children unborn taken away from my care and help and spitted on some piece of the world's cruelty. And, of course, it is myself.

We are all afraid of death, and there is certain reason for it to my eyes. I have only seen death once: an eighty year old man, heart disease, had lived a long and relatively happy life...and it was still horrifying. It seemed wrong and unfair and it fed my nightmares for some months after that. There is nothing to be known about it except the mutilations given to us as evidence. It is the only evidence that is plain and the rest is left to philosophy and religion.

Trojan horse...

We've been married almost three years now, and still keep each other awake talking into the night. About our day, philosophy, theology, psychology, and any other ology we can think of. The conversations I enjoy the most though are the ones that we try to catch each other up on our different pasts. I love imagining him as the knobby-kneed pre-adolescent he tells me about, smarting off to the bullies and invariably getting knocked around. By the kids. By his dad. And I love introducing him to the neurotic, long-haired little girl I was and imagine our two remembered selves meeting and becoming friends.

I began one of my stories not imagining it to be anything terribly important. Or, I should be honest and say that I couldn't imagine anything to be more important; it was my story of course. But relative to that grand delusion it did not seem particularly monumental. I was telling him about me being ten and at summer camp with my best friend of the time, Courtney. My years kept at home had already started to show as I found myself in complete bewilderment at the general hormonal upheaval rampant in that place. Courtney was quickly snatched up by some scraggly kid, but, not only was I not snatched, I had no idea how to get snatched. There was even the obligatory end-of-camp banquet, but I watched baffled as every guy I could imagine interest for was paired naturally with every girl I could acknowledge as cute. Where did that put me, I began to think with growing unease. What if no one even asked me? Even the unpaired remnants would be better than being the only person deemed unaskable. To my relief, a prematurely pot-bellied hick from the backwoods finally asked me the night before the banquet. He asked from a distance of about twenty feet; had never talked to me before that moment. In fact, he didn't talk to me after that moment either. As he ignored me over the meal in favor of his friends and talk about hunting and cowtipping, I saw the realization grow that I did not have whatever it was these people were looking for. I was either ugly, or stupid, or too weird to be around. Or something.

That night, being the last night of camp, there was a huge water balloon fight. Now this was something I knew how to do. The water wars we had had on my block growing up were legendary, complete with mercenary bazooka launchers and subversions and betrayals. I remember running into the frey with the first real excitement I had had all week. And I saw Courtney and her boyfriend, so I went launching towards them with my little bombs, laughing with loud bursts. I was going for Courtney, so I did not notice her boyfriend flanking me with his own bombs in hand. I did not notice until I felt the burst on my face and then a raging burning blinding my eyes. Rubbing them, I felt the soapy mess covering my whole face and realized that this boy had filled his balloons with shampoo and that he had found me and he had aimed at my eyes.

I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, washing my eyes out with sinkwater and tears. And as I was telling this long time ago story to Tom, I felt a tightness in my throat and the moistness growing in my eyes.

"So what could you expect except to be either ignored or hurt by boys?"

And quite simply, there it was. How could I have not realized how significant and fundamental that one event became as I entered adolescence. I had so few experiences to draw generalizations from in my homeschooled seclusion, so each one was given unmerited weight in my mind. I avoided and mistrusted males for very long with the split assumptions that there was nothing attractive about me and, even if there was, there was nothing to be gained except pain and embarrassment from such a relationship. Friends would betray you for a guy and defend their boyfriends no matter how unjust. This small story suddenly synthesized one of the major issues I have struggled with even into adulthood, and yet remained relatively unexamined and small for so long. A whispering giant in my developing self.

Trajectory

Every time I run into an old friend (which has been happening disturbingly often in the artificial realm of myspace), I have an existential crisis. I imagine myself through their judgement and see myself as a too young for her age, confused, doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up kind of girl. I see someone who hasn't figured out even how to manage her hair or settle into some sort of style of clothing. Someone who's house is as messy as her room was when she was eight. It is a hard thing seeing through these people's eyes. Especially considering the view I get examining them after all these years. For the most part, I am finding that the path has remained straight for these pals of old. What they imagined themselves to be when they were young is precisely what they have become. They went straight to college, never changing major (especially not changing it three or four times), and became proper professionals upon graduation. They married when they found the person that they knew they would meet and they will continue on to children and houses and everything that is necessary for the good life.

And I have no response for them. If I were to try to justify myself and my decisions, it would by definition be laughable because most of my decisions are indefensible. The one decision I have been sure of has linked me to another wanderer and therefore also has no creedance for these surefooted friends of mine. I also had no idea who he would be until I met him and the quickness and sureness of my decision with him would only point to recklessness as far as most people are concerned. But it must be said: we don't happen to be most people. There is something very peculiar and uncomfortable about Tom and I, and I don't think even the boxes of society would bring order to our dishelvement. I also could never explain that this is just how I would have it and that I hope to have the courage to continue my life with such recklessness. That I hope to feel this frightening expansiveness when looking towards not only the future but also the past. To be constantly re-examining what I have known and letting it fundamentally influence what I would like to know and be.

No, I don't know what I want to be (which means I don't know what profession I would like to have) but my own trajectory has been straight in its own undefinable way: I want only to learn to love and to be loved. According to this criteria, I have been wildly successful thus far (well, on my good days anyway, but let's not be picky). Marrying Tom is probably the most obvious. Living with someone I am so wild about but that can drive me as crazy as I drive him, and letting the chaos form itself into the many faces of beauty and wonder. Terrifying, and sometimes I remember with fondness the perfect safety of my onetime dream of just being a nun. But day by day we crawl inside each other's skin and let the awkwardness of shared lives blend with the joy of knowing love and being love to one another.

Even this job I now hold, this job that I hate, even this is teaching me something about love. Loving people that irritate my sensibilities more than they have ever been irritated. People that share nothing but time and space with me, but whom I am given the opportunity to learn to care for. This I have not been so successful with yet, but a few have moved from the hated status to the tolerated and from the tolerated to the liked. The very fact that they are so different from myself has allowed me to watch them in pure curiosity, wondering how they have been formed and what motivates them. A few have proved my preconceptions of the evilness of this insitution, seeking only power and recognition and abusing that power once it's in their hands. But most seem to be trapped by one thing or another. One is putting in his twenty so that he can afford to go back to his ranch in Utah and be with the animals and space that he loves. His longterm separation from this identity and dream makes him behave bitterly and spitefully, but just imagining him on wide open plains with a hat shading his eyes from the blaze of sun and too green grass...There are the mothers working to support their babies, doing everything for their children, yet hatefully separated from raising them essentially by the work they are required to do in this profession. Deployments being the extreme of a job that is taxing even without that hardship. There is also a man that seems only to want to sell tires and see his wife get her doctorate instead of waiting around for him duty station after duty station. With very few exceptions, I have discovered that everybody has a secret identity that fuels their work and their bitterness. Making my own bitterness somehow easier to deal with (again on my good days).

It is the only path I can see clearly, although not in detail. There is no way to define love except by forcing yourself to remain in each moment and wait for her to show herself. And she always does, it's just a matter of wanting to look and wanting to find. Which is the hard part, because she always demands another piece of yourself as if the supply was infinite. So I either hope that she is right or that I will have the courage to look forward to the end of myself in her pursuit.

Bygones

In my sophomore year of college, I worked a night job watching the front desk in my dorm. It was what all the cool kids were doing my freshman year, and I very much wanted to be cool. This came at such cost as working eleven until six in the morning and then trying to stay awake during Ancient History at eight-thirty. Then again, there was Ross. We had become friends the semester before as he tried to counsel me out of the fairly damaging relationship I was in at the time. We would discuss the evils of this boyfriend over shotglasses of coke and cold pizza and then I would blithely return to the boyfriend and ignore Ross until the next venting situation. It was quite possibly the healthiest friendship I had during college.

Counter to all reason, we took up the habit of staying up with each other on both of our shifts (even though previously mentioned boyfriend was very much ex-boyfriend and not cause for fervent conversation). At first, we bantered in our sophomoric prime, passing the night hours with tritisms and witty reparte. But we had history and...we were both single. Ross, I remember, had been single for quite some time. I had accused him over the summer as we e-mailed back and forth of him trying to begin something with me. And how dare he, me so freshly out of my first traumatic dating relationship? How could he possibly think I was ready?? Then I started giving him back massages during our shifts. The delights of him shivering and shimmying under my fingers as I feathered his neck and creeped my probing around his sensitive ribs. We brought gifts of caffeine and reading material to each other and the conversation became slightly more serious while remaining awkwardly distant. Occasionally I tried to force him to put a name to the laying on each other's laps and taking long walks even after the interminable night hours. Whenever I approached the topic, however, he became taciturn and would cut me off for hours or days. Still, the walks became more frequent and the cuddling in far away parks in the predawn of our lives that semester. And the friction of forced emotional distance chafed more and more.

We had made plans for him to visit my home over New Year's, but when we left school for break, we barely even had a comfort level for civil conversation. But he came anyway, and we went to the Grand Canyon with my brother and a couple friends. New Year's Eve, the tension reached a climax as we talked alone in the tent. He said he wanted his body closer to me and could not figure out why, and I stifled the urge to raise up and slap his stupid red face. Was I such a bad person to be attracted to? Had I been so utterly tainted by the clutching paws of my previous boyfriend that Ross could not justify touching the same flesh? Then we were back at school, and the relationship was entirely over. I had quit the deskjob, having developed mono from the extreme lack of sleep, and I did not share his shift with him anymore. Two months later, we had dinner together over which he told me he had decided to marry a girl the year below us. I smiled and choked down my food, and we made plans to meet again for another horrid farce of friendliness.

We only continued these wretched social events that spring, and I did not see him again regularly until I shared an apartment with his fiancee in one of the most ill-advised and ill-fated twists of irony I have experienced to this day. The friends of mine from freshman year, whom I had been hoping to live with since meeting them, knew her and wanted her as our necessary fourth. Pride could not allow me to admit the vileness of this idea, and so I smiled Christianly and said, "of course!" All I will say about that year in passing is that the horror of it put two of us in the hospital (and not the sew-you-up-make-you-better ward either) and a third one of us that probably should have been admitted as well. Ross was a mere pimple on the cancerous growth of that year. And that is what I am left with. A friendship of impotency and vagueries that leaves me even now in bafflement. So little said yet hinted at and expressed in every way except words. Ended so violently yet never even properly begun.