Moonlight Conversations

Flowing water.

2012-01-24T00:15:00.000-08:00

"You're leaving so soon?" she asked, the hint of worry noticeable in her quivering voice as she put the dishes down on the sink. He had his coat on; yes, he was leaving. He said nothing as he closed the heavy, mahogany door behind him.

She stood at the sink like a statue, her hands poised beneath running water that was cold enough to lend her fingers a frigid alabaster whiteness. Her fingers were still, but her shoulders were shaking slightly. The clack of the porcelain glasses as they rolled in the soapy sink’s bottom echoed throughout the empty apartment, hear the running of the water as it poured through her fingers and overflowed the cups that she tried to concentrate on cleaning. The water ran, and ran, and ran.

“Won’t he come back?,” she thought, but she already knew the answer.

Worn hands, rotten tomatoes.

2011-07-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it does not make sense,
not quite—how the bananas molded
before they had even seemed ripe,
how the tomato slipped from my fingers,
bruised and beaten it had become in my
ever-retrieving fingers.

Nonsensical, perhaps—but what of you?
Things were felt by me within the spaces
between fingers, as they held me or as they
lifted spoons and forks to chapped lips.
Things were felt but not remembered,
not quite.

My palms are worn out, worn like
rotten tomatoes.

Tears in the batter.

2011-06-08T20:48:00.000-07:00

As I hold your hand in mine,
I do not tell you that your hand feels,
of all things, like tissue paper,
the type my grandmother used to wrap
gifts I did not like, but always appreciated,
when I was young and still growing.

I also do not tell you about how
stark the blue of your veins is
against the paleness of your skin;
how they appear raised, like uncharted
lakes, above the skin near your wrist,
some black rivulets, perhaps, beneath.

Nor do I mention the way her hands felt,
delicate and light, though not paper-thin—
not capable of giving me the impression that I
might tear them, might drip blood upon white blouses,
might cause subtle pain like what a
child, a boy unaware of his own strength, might cause.

Instead, I tell you about the woman next to whom
I lived, years and months and minutes in the past.
I speak of her black, stringy hair. The tears that stood,
as though always ready, to fall quietly. She once
spoke to me as we opened our doors, groceries, perhaps,
in our arms. “I have lost things,” she had told me.

I tell you about the man that left,
that took things that she had needed, had
built a life upon. I tell you about how she baked,
how she cried into the batter. “I made a batch of my
own tears,” she had said, with a certain triumph.
“I ate it myself.”

Letters and a dead wife

2011-05-24T16:54:00.001-07:00

“She writes me letters, but when we talk we don’t speak,” he says, and something loosens in my chest. I remember that town we drove through by accident, when we took the wrong exit from the highway, and had asked an old man for directions back to I-95. “Straight,” he said. “Just move on forward down the road,” he’d said, but there was so much more he wasn’t saying. We started to drive away, and saw he was waiting for a bus, and offered to give him a ride. We joked about it later—he could have been crazy, you said, but he was only lonely, I insisted—I was one to know. He mumbled in the car, words barely audible over the hum of the air conditioner (I had begged you to turn it off). He spoke of letters, I remember, letters and a dead wife, stamps he forgot to adhere and envelopes crinkled from so many return trips back to his own mailbox. He taught me you don’t need to hear a voice to be spoken to, that you don’t need to talk to speak.

At a diner in the corner of the city.

2011-05-04T00:51:00.000-07:00

It's late, or perhaps early, but still we sit here—the skin of our arms across a table to which our skin sticks unpleasantly, and I feel the eyes of the beautiful waitress upon the back of your head. “I know a place,” you had said, and here we are, deep within the bowels of a city I can’t stand, plates of food before us that grow cold. I never liked eggs, anyway.

Can you hear it? You are speaking about your friend’s engagement as my legs shake, my knees knocking violently like two fumbling bones too large for my limbs. They seem to crash together, booming, louder than the china plates that we heard crashing within the kitchen the moment we’d sat down. It was a bad omen, I shouldn’t have come.

Would you have done the same? You finally ask me, and I don’t know, I say. But God, I know. I would have ran from a man like that, much the way I should be running now, from you. I should be weeping in the dingy bathroom (I can’t help it, you see) rather than eating a cold omelet that brings only uncomfortable nausea to what has long been a dull ache.

Perhaps I'm wrong.

2011-04-29T20:55:00.001-07:00

"Hello, how are you?" friends ask in a cheerful mood, "Hello, I'm great. How about you?" I respond with every ounce of strength that I have left, with the mask that hasn't yet worn out.

They're satisfied with my reply and go on to chatter about their day and graduation and other things that are insignificant to me at this point in my life.

Days that start bad and end worst. Mornings of loneliness and that empty feeling I can't seem to shake off. Tea that turns cold way too fast and love that is gone way before I want it to. That's what my life has turned to.

Today started with an argument, that I still don't know if it was resolved or not, and after managing to sleep for a little less than an hour, I found myself wide awake with a piercing pain in my chest, as if someone was stepping on my heart and I couldn't breathe. My lips were dark red and my mouth tasted of metal. Sometime during my turbulent sleep I hit myself and tore my lip.

I walked towards to the mirror and stared with disgust at the image that was looking back at me. Eyes swollen from crying, a look of a child who's lost in a crowd full of strangers, my lip swollen and bloodied that even makeup couldn't hide the wound, and for a moment, I could swear I saw my soul, empty and barren by all the torturous thoughts that played merry-go-round in my head; devoid of emotion-- completely destroyed.

And I have no motivation anymore. My spare time is spent laying in my bedroom, where the noise from the TV wafts silently from the living room, a room I do not spend much time in -I lay on my sheets that smell of my own sweat, the summer humidity having come all too early. It would not have been so bad, but I can not fall asleep unless under covers, unless the rawness of my skin is hidden from the filtered light from the street. Sometimes, however, I sit upon the couch with only the square of blue light shining subtly in the quite darkness. The Home Shopping Network, maybe—anything to offer a voice in the darkness. 1am, 2am, 4am.

And then there's the bathroom with the water that scalds my skin until I'm red and burning, panting in the heat until the pipes give way to an ice shower that hurts so much more. Lather, rinse, repeat, but sometimes I forget.

Perhaps this might change soon, but as for now it seems to eat at me and soon I will be nothing.

Letter to Tranquility

2011-04-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

I can hardly schedule an appointment with you.
Busy tones, dial tones, bitter tones.
Eye of the storm, you with your mocking smirk, I implore that you reveal your face.
Stop hiding behind the elegant fury of this perpetual hurricane!

Granted, it is perfectly understandable why you taunt us for our apoplectic tendencies,
our problematic enthusiasm for continued sadness.
Our human imperfections amuse you. What’s more,
I find it most difficult to express how much I need you, but I do.
I seek you always so that I might relish in your comforting fragility, so rationed and so forbidden.

And I have questions.
To where do the seagulls flee when I spill bourbon over the counter,
apprehensive over being apprehensive?
At what moment does a person turn into a bedeviled wretch of the universe?
Are the throes of my gradual decay reversible? Can anybody rewind the tape, stop the clock,
correct what’s been done?
My inquires are always unanswered by everyone else on this planet; I think you’re my last resort.
So please.
Come down from your abstract fortress, let me bask in your transience, let me figure you out.
This is my last attempt at correspondence.
If I don’t receive an answer from you,
well — I suppose Melancholy’s a good friend, too.

April hasn't been kind.

2011-04-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

It was late afternoon as I walked past the state house, the insecurity of a tourist within every step I took. I live here, of course, but when the sun shines in my eyes and my feet feel heavy, it is quite easy to forget.

On the lawn a man lies with his head upon a rolled up jacket. Around him men and women sit on picnic blankets while children roll down the bright green hill. Their laughter is loud and boisterous, but it does not reach the lonesome man. God, Spring is lonely, I thought.

It is this constant recurring loneliness that often guides the pen I hold. Its printed words are what make me suffer and the pain this causes often strips me of my soothing sleep. Vicious circle. All the words seem to drown in a vast ocean of black ink. The velvety blackness engulfs page after page with meaningless nothingness, despite my mind overspilling with ideas, my heart bursting with inappropriate emotions. I see myself steering straight into a meltdown…

The fondness pouring from their stranger faces, the gleam in your faithful eyes, it all used to be Everywhere. Especially in my dreams. I desperately seek it There now but I cannot find it Anywhere. I spend night after night running through endless, dark corridors leading Nowhere. The faint echo of my footsteps then rings in my ears, promising timeless loneliness. This shapeless anxiousness impoverishes my heart, which was once filled with nothing but affection. The hungry parasite drains it to the bottom without mercy. This Past of mine used to speak for itself but has turned silent, out of dread. And Present has been deafened by force. My heart can no longer speak freely to me. It is incapable of speaking easily to you. I want to offer you so much more than I can afford.

I would swim out of the womb of the black ocean where I am, to capture you, if only I could. But I’d drown with the paralysing burden tied to my spirit. I’d sink, I’d never stop sinking, cursed to remain voiceless, immobile, till Time and Space would separate, forget themselves - entirely. It is this invisible and visible distance, meant to keep our fragile world safe, that harms us the most. Ancient wounds, which were meant to be forgotten, have been ripped open again, and I'm finding it hard to close them once more. But I will, darling, I will.

And lately, the distance, it lets the fear hail down on me. It poisons body and spirit, heart and soul... but it hasn't yet, nor ever will, kill my love for you. Just be patient with me, my love. Please be patient...

Memories that are not yet memories.

2011-04-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

Do you remember the smell of Mother’s perfume in the bedroom,
subtle, yet there all the same? Yes, and then
we opened her medicine cabinet and touched her private
things, the kohl pencils with which we lined our eyes, the
stark red with which we bloodied our lips.
*
Yes, she wrote me a letter some days ago, or
perhaps it was months (I have so little use for
the passing of time). She said so very much,
without saying much at all, and I do not believe I
had the strength to read it through to the end.
*
Remember how she held our heads gently caressed
our hair as we cried on her lap. How she never really
knew what to say, but said exactly what we needed to hear
at the same time?
*
Oh, I remember those days.
I remember Mother.

You see,

2011-04-04T14:58:00.000-07:00

I already feel that you are leaving, becoming lighter, somehow—a small hole in the tire that lost air softly as we drove down that long desert road. You once wrote to me often, the starched linen of cheap hotels against your limbs as you signed your name with “always,” and never mentioned that you meant “until.” In her hands perhaps you are special, but she does not kneel before you while her fingers shake. What am I to do? I still have the memories and the hope of a never coming "forever"...

They had the Merlot.

2011-04-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

Early evening, and the neighbors and
their violin music are gone, perhaps to
the corner bistro. I imagine them with
large menus across their silk laps.
The Merlot smells exquisite dear,
she says, but tonight he has not
the taste for it.

And me, the kitchen counter pushed
against my hipbones, painful, I eat
bowls of canned soup and drain bottles
of dark coca cola, sodium and sugar
intoxicating my blood in a quiet way.
I hear the neighbor’s car drive up,
unsteadily; they had the Merlot.

The last vengeance of winter.

2011-03-24T15:29:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it is not meant to snow in March, but yesterday it did just that. The flakes that fell were the feathery type that rest delicately upon long dark hair until they melt, until the too-warm air steeps the strands in moisture. The last vengeance of winter, I heard somebody say, but it was already spring.

As I walked, I felt the flakes upon my eyelashes, cold and heavy, as I looked upwards. Only a few nights ago had revealed to me the largest moon, bright as the eye of the beloved, but that night had obscured both moon and star. Such nights are quite lonesome.

I had taken a walk, when the snow had become no more than a lukewarm drizzle, and each yellowed streetlight recalled you to me. You had walked upon these same sidewalks with me, perhaps only once, and yet I felt your footsteps echo to the melody of your voice with each of my own small footfalls upon the damp pavement.

“Come back.”
“Come back.”
“Come back.”

It is the melody they sigh, the words that are wrung like tears from the cracks in the sidewalk.

I would have showed you the brightest moon, I thought, I would have created it for you myself if the sky would not have let it shine. I would have carried to you handfuls of this late-March snow, a frozen bouquet of the early days of spring. But you are far away, perhaps already into May and the aroma of sweet tulips, flowers picked for and given to fairer girls of this golden season who are too sweet and warm for the touch of bitter snow.

I put on my best smile.

2011-03-22T15:39:00.000-07:00

She burst into my room just as I was about to drift into a much needed sleep.

It had been a rather long day, full of unnecessary drama and excessive stress. Everyone seemed more agitated than usual and I wasn't in the mood to deal with their thinly veiled emotions. It had also been raining all day, the incessant kind that pours down in a steady sheet and makes it rather difficult to see clearly through the windows, even when you press your nose to the cool glass. Throughout the day all I wanted was to arrive home, to my bed of dark, inviting sheets and my dimly lit room. I couldn't wait to open the door and let the smell of gardenias envelop me and brush away with their petals all the stress and loneliness of my day.

Arriving home, finally after hours of headaches, exhaustion and inexplicable sadness, I found my home not quite too different from the outside world I tried to escape. My desires of a peaceful rest and soft lighting were soon ravaged by her wails of desperation.

Her face was haggard and strange about the eyes."I can't take it anymore," she said softly, and as she laid her head softly on my lap I felt the humidity of her tears against my bare skin. She said something more, but I had not been listening intently so much as straining to remember what I was supposed to say.

"It'll be okay, Mother," I whispered while stroking her damp hair, "he'll call soon, you'll see." And even though I was tired and my eyes showed a pain that I decided to withhold, I put on my best comforting smile to see it reflected on her face.

Peacock Feather

2011-03-14T20:51:00.001-07:00

I remember sitting on the bus, the early setting sun of late autumn darkening the light through the windows. My knees had brushed against the girl in the seat nearest me, a dark haired stranger whose hair clip glinted softly as I watched her stare out of the dirty window.

She was silent in the way that I know well, so that I heard clearly the laughter of the girls who sat in front of us. With their golden hair and rose colored cheeks, they seemed to bloom in happiness that dripped off of their shoulders like melted honey. Their words were the type that come easily as breath, each syllable exhaled through a smile more than actually spoken, and I longed to know what it felt like to have such air fill my lungs. Bags surrounded their feet, not the plastic kind that come from the market, but the rigidly upstanding ones that are embellished with the cursive letters of this store or that. From one of these there stood the feather of a peacock, strangely beautiful against the ripped denim knees upon which it leaned.

I remembered the woman who once sold me a peacock feather. “It will do good things for you,” she had said, and I had believed her. She was a beautiful Indian woman, possibly thirty years older than myself while three heads shorter, and her skin was smooth and lovely as dark honey. She had trailed behind my every step as I walked through her store, telling me stories about each item I allowed my fingers to brush. “My brother used to make bracelets like these by hand,” she told me, moving her sleeve to show me a collection of intricately beaded strands of yarn against the blue web of her veined arm. “Those are beautiful,” I had told her, because they were. She had gone on in this way, telling me about flutes and wind chimes and such beautiful silk that I longed to drape it around my shoulders, to feel it against my bare skin. It was, however, the peacock feather that I had bought.

“It will bring you good fortune,” she had said, and I nodded and thanked her as she placed my change into the center of my palm. We had smiled at one another, a smile with which I promised I would always keep the feather in my home, would always remember the stories she had told, a kind stranger who knew of beauty that one can craft for oneself. A beauty that is more than cheekbones of rose, more than harmonious laughter, more than silent conversations with lonely bus windows in fading light.

I missed you even before you left.

2011-03-12T10:22:00.000-08:00

You didn't realize that when I said "I missed you," I didn't mean you, but this side of you.

No, I didn't miss you, not the physical you. I talked to you nearly everyday. In the morning before I went to school and at night when I came home exhausted from work. But I missed the side of you with which I had fallen in love with. The one who would always remind me of his love and tell me I was beautiful even when I didn't feel like it. The one who would wait for me to get home and ask me about my day. The one that had been gone for quite some time.

"We haven’t spoken in so long, I can barely remember your voice," I whispered to myself hoping that you would hear but knowing that you wouldn't. We talked yesterday,of course, but that's not what I meant. You didn't hear me but still caressed my soul with sweet words of love; I didn't mind that you didn't listen. Everything felt right.

Because this past days, past months, you have not bothered to hide the tone of indifference in your voice when I ask you something or when I want to share a tale with you. The rain would fall hard against the asphalt as the topics of conversation I attempted laid bare, flattened and rejected, among the distance between us. We stayed nearly silent, and I felt very much like crying.

But I kept silent. All of the love I had for you that you seemed to not want me to show while wanting me always to assure you of my love, I kept silent. And when we spoke, I missed you.

“Good morning,” you would say each morning, without any sign of wanting to say something more.

“Please,” was the word I had chosen, the only word my shaken heart had allowed me to say.

I looked ever so fervently for self doubt, for apology, for hope. For love. I saw nothing.

You would leave each time without my being able to tell you that I loved you and that I could not say it as you left, only because it hurt so much to see you going that I could not breathe. And I had missed you for months, I had missed you even before you left.

My heart seemed to melt away with my inability to give words to all that I had expressed to your ghostly form hours before. And I sat there thinking that you had gone. You wouldn't remember the rain. You would not remember my love.

Or maybe it hadn’t rained at all?

And today, after having poured the milk to my liking into my cup of tea, again assuring myself I will not spill it, I make a point of letting small things pass. And at night I will still tell you that I love you, not only to you, but to your ghost. To the one you used to be and is slowly coming back. To the one I thought I had lost.

She remembers.

2011-03-10T21:15:00.000-08:00

The afternoon wanes away with the ringing of her telephone, and she answers to her mother’s voice. “Are you coming down with something?” “No.” “Have you been crying?” “Not today.” Her mind is far away.

She has been thinking of the now distant years she had spent begging her mother to braid her long hair into shining serpents around her head, like laurel wreaths, despite the shoulder length and barrette adorned hair of classmates. In the early evening, the question of what to make for dinner has all too often loomed over her kitchen with the wrath of gods, prompting numerous bowls of cereal and nearly sour milk. Nightly, she’s been remembering the old woman who lived next door to her childhood home, the one who always invited her over for cookies on Friday afternoons, the one who died quietly while she was away at school, the one whose Christmas cards stopped coming. There is the unwritten paper she has to complete, the stray paragraphs that unveil themselves as she shampoos her hair but fail to fall eloquently to the word processing document she returns to. In the early hours of the mornings, she is reminded repeatedly of that saying “one day, three autumns,” and mouths short whispers to the sun, that one day Spring might return. There is that lecture on existentialism she attended last week, the professor’s words ringing true and terrifying in her small ears.

And of course, there are the phone calls from her mother, in which she remembers, in which she always seems to have a cold.

Orphaned shoes.

2011-03-07T21:18:00.002-08:00

We left with the rising sun—but it was not yet shining. The rain came down in a foggy mist that made it difficult to read the license plates of cars in the distance, that wet the windshield subtly and quietly. It was a morning meant only for laying in bed as the drops fell over the paned window above one’s head. But we had a destination, a place to go.

We noticed a stray shoe on the side of the highway and spoke about from where it could have come. We never mentioned the very real possibility of car accidents, of people thrown from seats to lay sprawled and bloody along the side of the road as curious but unconcerned faces drove past. What paramedic would ever take heed of a scattered shoe?

Rather, I mentioned a road trip I once took with my family as a young girl, a sweltering back seat in the dense humidity of late august. There had been a car we drove past with a mess of sandaled legs extended from the back mirror. You laughed as you mentioned what you supposed they had been doing, but I insisted that a sandal could have so easily flown from the window, could have so easily become forever lost.

We continued on as the land along the pavement seemed increasingly barren, desolate. The grass was still dead from snow that had only just begun to melt and the sparse vegetation made me think of no man’s lands, of soldiers crying with broken limbs.

But then there they were, I could see them, a family of deer so beautiful that I turned my face to the glass and pointed, quite furiously, as if I had intended to break through the window and touch their fur. Look, I said, and you did. You then turned away, your eyes on the road, because I was thinking of satyrs, of men with hooves to hold my pale arms in the brush, and I can not say as much.

—

We came back with the setting of the sun, pre dusk, and still the fog lies upon the pavement like a morbid blanket. The light had been slowly fading, but still I could see, and so I noticed him, I noticed the death that was life.

The death is a dead deer, a large and beautiful stag that is now a sad tangle of limbs with a severed neck thrown back to stare forever at the cement barrier dividing the two lanes. He is a sad sight, is he, and I am crying, because he left behind a mate and fawns to whom he will never return. If dogs do not go to Heaven, can deer?

I feel the deer as an absence in my chest, as a pain that seals my throat while it pours in water from my eyes. I am crying, crying, because this morning I saw him, this morning he was alive. You pulled over at the nearest truck stop, and we sat, but still I cried, for there was nothing I could do.

In the end, we decided to make an offering, and so a worn leather boot and battered ballet flat lie in homage to the deer upon the lonesome side of the highway. Perhaps this is one of the ways that shoes become orphaned, lost relics so easily forgotten about along the endless highways of paved land.

Accused.

2011-03-03T17:16:00.000-08:00

The sister of my late sire required several false pennyroyals and just a sliver of the bark of the midnight tree. Remain hidden, but hasten, she’d advised. I was only a girl of one-and-ten, small in both stature and worldly craft. I could slip easily through the thick trees of the forest, my little feet disturbed nothing more than the dry leaves on the ground. The moon was full and high so I retreated further and further into the darkness, swallowed by my own cloak, my breaths unfurling in the cold air like smoke. In the deepest of the very deepest of my heart I knew I was being careful for nothing but I heard those screams. The horror as I remained awake on the night before the last, my body trembling as I stared unblinkingly at the window. I did not understand why they were screaming, nor did I ever understand why Alice needed the fluxweed.

Lulled by the secure blanket of the night, I started singing in undertone— just misshapen notes, nothing fancier than the low hooting of the owls. That was when I felt the ground shook underneath my feet. So I pressed myself against the tree trunk, hiding from riders and horses as they were galloping past, heading to where I came from; their armours blinking in the spilling moonlight. My heart fluttered, then plummeted to the ground. At that very moment, I began to understand the screaming I heard the night before. I ran, ran, ran into the dark, slipping through trees, my cloak billowing heavily behind. I saw the well first, then the chimney, then Alice. Alice being dragged out of the cottage, struggling, screaming. I am alone, alone! There was nobody else save myself! Unhand me, you cur, unhand— One of the guards slapped her hard, and I could not prevent my gasp from escaping. But none of them heard, for the horses were snorting from exertions and the riders were talking among themselves, drowning my insignificant escaped gasp.

Witch, I heard the captain accuse. Finally … finally I understood. I swore Alice’s grey eyes found me somehow in the dark, and her lips moved. But I heard her just the same.

The year was 1600. No one knew about the girl who finally disappeared into the dark on the same night the last witch of the village was captured and later, thrown into the murky lake and drowned.

A hidden goodbye in Hello.

2011-02-28T21:06:00.000-08:00

"Hello", you say and somehow it doesn't feel much like a greeting but more like a hidden
goodbye. You are different these days, I can feel it and I fear it. "Hello", I say with as much enthusiasm as I can without appearing fake.

You, of course, know me and on occasions you can tell how I feel and ask me about it. You know my way of saying things, the way some words are laced with scratches, with worry. Yes I just feel a bit sick that's all, but it is not. I am sad, you see.

But you do not see. Rather, you smile and say that you hope I feel better, and proceed to talk coldly about mundane things such as sleeping badly or a game that you can't seem to finish.

I miss you when we do not talk, but I miss you more when we do. The nostalgia runs over me as I reminisce on how you used to be. As I remember how you always seemed to be happy to talk to me. Now you seem bored and impatient.

When I sit alone with midnight witches, you do not know, are no longer aware, of this my sleeping sadness. I am shaking, hands forming words to answer your own, but how does one answer?

I could easily let this go, for maybe you're just having a hard time that has lasted a couple of months, I could leave you pressed away between volumes to which I do not often return. Instead, I read your words as my lips quiver and I place you upon the nightstand, the dark mahogany one on the side of the bed, so that I may sleep with your ghost.

The voices of happy girls outside reach me in my warm room, yet I am cold and thinking of my grandmother's afternoon phone call. Take care,be careful… her voice carrying words that I may have needed to hear ten years ago, a child, but not today. For my skin has grown cold, of numb limbs, of long nights. I have not, for many years, felt that these advices were on time.

And last night, I witnessed a particular warmth as my eyes focused and comfortably came to rest upon a midnight kiss. Her skin was pale with cold, but his lips moved slowly over hers, carefully, seeming to envelop her features in a beauty that can only be had in love. My eyes grew watery with watching them, the witnessing of their private love as I sat lonely and separate as a stranger upon a worn couch. I knew, just as one tired feels the passage of minutes into hours, that this kiss had moved the couple outside of time. They were no longer in a plaza full of people as the clock struck twelve. Rather, they were alone, wholly alone with one another. And I began crying because it was beautiful, because my heart misses, because my heart yearns.

Summer for the lonesome heart.

2011-02-28T00:58:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who often calls to ask me how I am doing, and my answer is always quite the same; I am fine, of course, and our words run idly from our mouths, eventually settling into contrived comments about the weather. It seems that both of our recent days have been marked by footprints left in dry soil, wet socks enclosing chilled toes, and skin cracked red and raw from the cold. “Oh, it’s terrible,” she says, “How I long for the summer.”

Yes, I always say, how nice that would be. I agree with her until my skin finishes thawing, until the barren tree branches grow bountiful once more, until the grass is blanketed in emerald. Yes, that would be lovely, I say, but I do not mean it.

I find myself unable to explain to her, to her sunbathed soul and golden skin, that the summer is something I fear, something I mourn. I cannot find words enough to articulate the comfort early nightfall and bitter cold brings to a lonesome heart, how the winter moon seems to keep watch over me as I sit awake and think, how I am always thinking. I am safe within my winter skin, the knuckles that grow rough and the lips that sometimes bleed in the bitterness. The coming of spring, the harsh onset of summer—it is like stripping myself bare as those parts of myself in which I can hide are slowly melted. Knuckle by knuckle, the sun burns my naked flesh, and there is no longer a safe place in which I can hold the memories I carry, the possessions of this lonesome heart.

Tears and you.

2011-02-24T09:53:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I look at my face in the mirror while I am crying. I do this not out of any type of vanity or strange introversion, but rather as an all too personal exploration of the distorted shape my face becomes when it is given over to weeping. Perhaps I’ve always been an ugly crier; never have my eyes become fountains, never have tears fallen delicately in soft rivulets. Rather, my face grows wet and blotchy upon which my hair falls and sticks like a second skin. And my eyes, usually an impenetrable brown, grow so alarmingly red that it is difficult for me to recall the person I had been maybe a few hours, a few minutes, a few moments before.

As I meet my own gaze within the unforgiving glass, I often find myself wondering whether any one could ever find any inconsequential trace of beauty within this dull image. I long for fingertips to wipe away my tears and my mind wanders to you, as it often does, with the deepest clarity I can imagine despite my blurred vision.

If I were being honest with myself, however, I would admit that the tears you have so far witnessed were likely those that you yourself had caused, that those tears had hurt me. But is not always easy to be honest with oneself, especially when you are stilled loved so completely; even after knowing you can find another girl’s tears to wipe from damp eyelashes with your calloused thumb.

A ceiling, a canvas.

2011-02-20T16:35:00.001-08:00

As a girl I slept with a nightlight long after I had outgrown the monsters resting underneath my bed and hidden within my closet. I grew to understand that the creaking and moaning that befell the dark house was the old wood, the tired-out bones of a well worn home seeking rest, a symphony which meant me no harm. And yet, I could not sleep without the soft yellow glow shining upon the ceiling. The ceiling was never even; it had been covered with overlapping layers of thick plaster that, though they had always bothered my mother, I absolutely loved. As I lay back upon my pillows, I did not close my eyes before allowing them to wander along the nooks and crannies of the off-white expanse above. Illuminated in soft yellow light, I made out pictures and faces, reveling in my own personal clouded sky. I had a few favorite images that I could always discern in the same corners; a man and woman embracing with lips that nearly touched, a weeping willow with branches that touched as tears to the ground, or simply a hand reaching for something unknown. I could not sleep without the light, could not sleep without the blank canvas of possible images before my eyes. I have grown, and no longer sleep under that expansive ceiling by the light of a glowing lamp. And yet I remember, I miss these images, and still find myself searching for the story written upon the ceiling of each new bedroom in which I rest my eyes. After all, how else will I ever know whether those beloved lips ever met, what that tree so lovingly kept in cool shade, or for what that solitary hand had once so fervently reached?

Lonely, but alright.

2011-02-19T16:48:00.000-08:00

Now that you have asked, I will tell you that I am alright.

I will not mention that I’ve been having problems with the hot water in my apartment, that my limbs have quite possibly gone numb to the cold water that has poured over and washed them for the past few weeks. I will not tell you that I broke my favorite lamp last month, the one I had found at one tag sale or another. I talked to you the day I bought it, but you may have been too drunk to remember. A lamp as beautiful as some ancient artifact surrounded by bubble wrap.

I will not, of course, mention the trivial things that have marked my days. You will not learn about how I've started to order pasta from the nearby Italian restaurant, sometimes more than once a week. I won't tell you about how I sit in front of my computer and just stare at the screen, hoping you would be there to talk to me. Also, I won’t mention the types of dreams I’ve been having, the things I used to mention to you over early morning tea, mostly because you're too busy lately and I don't think you'd be interested. Also, I will not tell you about the evening I opened a can of tomato soup only to spill it across my sweater, the one that I always tried to keep like new because it had been so expensive. I won't tell you that at that moment I threw the can and sat down to cry for a bit and not necessarily over the sweater.

A few weeks ago a young couple and their six year old daughter moved in across the street, but I will not mention them. I will not tell you that their daughter’s name is Annie and she is freckled and so wholly beautiful that it makes me want to cry. Sometimes when I see her walking up with her parents’ mail I sneak her things. Lollipops, cookies, chocolate kisses, and always a smile. I’m sure her parents have told her not to take candy from strangers, but I find that I can not help wanting her to like me. If I could explain, I would tell you that she makes me ache so completely for something pure and beautiful in my life that I can feel the emptiness grow until I can feel it as a solid heaviness, brick like, within my chest.

I won't tell you that each morning the cold breeze embraces me and reminds me of how truly lonely I am. I won't tell you that amid that loneliness, I sit next to my window to watch the cars go by as tears roll down my cheeks. I won't tell you that the hollow sound of the clock ticking makes my bones ache with sadness. I won't tell you how much I miss you; how much I need you.

I do not know of the right words to explain something like this, to craft what it is I truly feel, so I will tell you that I am alright. Lonely, bereft and barren, but alright.

Chocolate Oil

2011-02-19T16:34:00.000-08:00

It was late evening, and your bones were still shivering with lingering cold long after you had removed your jacket and settled into the warmth of your small kitchen. I’ve always been a summer child, you said, one not meant for so much cold. Of course, I answered, and sat upon an uncomfortable stool. I watched as you opened the refrigerator and slowly removed a small white box, handling it so carefully that one would have thought the cardboard was paper-thin.

You placed a large dish in front of me and proceeded to remove what turned out to be chocolate cake with a complicated combination of forks and knives. You mumbled about the difficulty, and I silently wished you would simply wrap your figures around the cake and laugh with me as you licked the excess frosting off of your fingers. But you continued with your forks and knives, and soon the dessert was there on the plate, garishly dark against the bright white porcelain. One piece of cake, two forks, and never once did you stray from your side of the plate to accidentally brush your fork with my own.

We ate away slowly from the respective sides you had established, the chocolate layers forming a wall between us until it wavered, shook, and collapsed across the dish in a mess of brown. You didn’t hear a thing, but for me the sound was hollow and empty, like a gunshot heard late at night with the knowledge that there is so little you can do.

You put your fork down, and so did I, knowing that the fallen mess of frosting across the plate has become a type of no man’s land, a border you dared not breach. And yet you reached across to hold my shoulders, to move your lips against mine in a way that became so completely rhythmic that I thought not of music but of machinery, of gears and black oil. Your tongue tasted not of oil but of chocolate, and I thought not of your embrace, but of forks and knives—how you could hold my shoulders and kiss me, yet would not brush your fork against mine as we shared a piece of cake.

Rusty Combs, Strangers in a Bus

2011-02-17T16:32:00.001-08:00

It is one of those mornings where she’s left the house without brushing her hair, and she’s forced to work through the dark tangles with the rusty metal comb she’s found somewhere in the bowels of her purse. She can not explain why it has grown so rusty, but still it works to loosen snarled strands, to keep her anxious fingers occupied. All this while the bus stops and starts, anything but smoothly, tearing over pavement with earsplitting squeals.

“Do not stare,” says the mother speaking to the child sitting on the seat closest hers, innocently knocking knees at each stop. The mother does not think that she can hear, but she does, so she turns to the child and smiles sadly.

“What’s wrong?” asks the child, his voice young and soft, like a flute or birdsong, that resonates through her as music.

“Yes, no, nothing at all,” she says, but her words are thinking of that night, of;

“But I will not be alright.” “But I cannot—” “How am I supposed to…” “You’ll be alright.” “I think I can I think I can I think I can’t—”

The mother’s eyes meet hers, a not so subtle warning as she drapes her thin arm with it’s properly buttoned suit sleeve around the boy’s shoulders, whispering, “We do not talk to strangers, we do not talk to strange women on the bus…”

Having heard every word, she stands, though the bus is still moving and still blocks away from her stop.

“Please, I can’t— I have to..”

The driver opens the doors at the next corner, letting in strange air as her flat soles descend the stairs, quietly.

“Have a nice da—” but she is lost in the crowd, before she can hear, and the bus is silent, he will not miss her.

Yet in the back, the mother has loosened her arm from around the boy, and he says, “Mother?”

“Yes?”

“The beautiful lady, she left her comb behind.”

Like the swell of a tide

2011-02-10T20:20:00.000-08:00

The color of the sky was reminiscent of a deep ocean and dipped into blackness like the swell of a tide, yet still in possession of enough stars to light the path before her, she who believed in moonlit passion yet walked alone. Straining her eyes to find graceful footing before her, the moon itself seemed to illuminate her loneliness; her hair dark as soil plaited simply against skin tanned, her chiffon dress of ivory lace blowing freely around her hidden softness. It was not cold, yet she held her elbows in each of her palms, glad yet disappointed to feel the two fleshes, one callused and the other smooth, rub against one another with the familiarity of lovers, as it was no uncommon thing for her to hug her own silhouette.

It was not long before she sat, not long before she felt the dampness of evening sand upon her thighs and legs through the thin fabric which adorned her, not long before she recollected a story or possibly a passing tale of bodies and bones that melted into the sand and became the stuff of children’s castles. Did they know, she wondered, that the sand they scoop to mold towers and fortresses may hold the relics of the forgotten, the eternally lonely? And what about the numerous times as a child, when the beach did not yet pain her, that she saw so many children bury themselves voluntarily within the damp depths of sand to smile eagerly for a mother looking on through the eye of a camera. Did they smile despite dwelling within the graves of the dead whose bodies washed upon the shore?

She unclasped her hands then, tentatively bringing a piano-long finger down to the grit of broken rock and broken dreams, pushing one tendril of flesh deeper into the cold and uncomfortable wetness. “It will be alright, you’ll see,” he’d said, her memory recalling the benevolence of his tone and the beauty of his speech. But it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t be. She closed her eyes and thrust her finger deeper, slowly submerging her entire hand. Close enough was she to the shore that she felt the ocean, felt its terrifying heaviness, its blackness, its threat. Her hand came away from the sand dripping, regretful, eager even still for some hope of an answer.

Island of Sweet Music

2011-02-05T09:31:00.001-08:00

She’s always been one to shy away from the evening news, saying that the reporters told much more than what her heart could handle, describing sadnesses with untouched faces of porcelain skin.

She learns later, of course. Her friends will mention that terrible murder, only three towns over, how the neighbors hadn’t heard the screams (which they can not believe). She’ll see the headlines of newspapers and magazines, imposing words set in deep black font which stare at her apologetically as she empties her cart of groceries upon a cold conveyor belt, as her eyes grow pained.

And war, how could anyone, especially her, escape the war?

But then, she learns, there are nights quite unheard of. She is flipping through the evening channels when she sees it—not war, not murder, but a piano. It is old, almost tired, and upon a sandbar. It is lonely, this instrument, and her mind is filled with sirens, with flowing hair, with voices as pure as Heaven calling men to destruction almost sweeter than life.

Perhaps a girl had sat there, she thinks, her fingers treading over the worn ivory keys as if caressing the fingers of a lover, making music for both everyone and no one, for the sea itself. Perhaps this girl swam ashore, heavy lidded and tired, to sleep upon the sand and wake into a world eager, too eager, to solve this secret.

She changes the channel, then, for she cannot bear to have the truth revealed, to see the nearly mythical possibilities in which she has placed so much faith be disproved, undermined with strict reason and fact.

She can not watch, because if ever there was a thing she should escape, it is this—the secret of her, the unnamed girl and the island she made of sweet music.

As a spider's endlessly weaved silk.

2011-01-29T10:18:00.000-08:00

What do you do when you are uncertain of your feelings? When you stretch your weak arms in the middle of the night and you can feel a familiar presence in the dark but the shape does not truly satisfy your craving soul (for really, you are not sure you crave at all)? What do you do?

Each day i have been waking up at 5:55 am, with tangled hair and weak limbs, unable to move, unable to conjure persistent thoughts about the realization that it is but yet another day—another day in a feeble existence. Oh, how terribly ill-mannered and inconsiderable it is for one to demise their existence to that of weakness and lack of tangibility. Such is, however, the consequence of the human condition. We are nothing but pieces of stardust as frail as a spider's endlessly weaved silk, with as much meaning as we allow ourselves to encompass. Like she who places such sweet and constant effort in her complex trap systems we put into our lives, and like she who must create her labyrinths as a means of surviving the worlds apathetic tremors, we too create our own complex stories (be they fact or fiction) in order to survive.

And yet, and yet, my nihilism may be very well the all encompassing end of me, I fear, one of these days. But yet there is a tender (something, someone) that keeps me going. For why demise when with a keen eye and a curious head each nook and cranny evokes an emotional investment, a desire to understand, to consume, to simply be; and in such a muddle of thought at 6:55 am each day I rise. Alive and filled with longing.

Those quiet moments

2011-01-25T21:20:00.000-08:00

As I live practically alone, I often have more that enough quiet to complete reading and homework and paper writing (and other such school related things) in my room. However, this past Sunday and Saturday night, I chose to walk to the library.

As I walked through the chill January air, I realized I don’t take walks far as often as I’d like. The night was chill, but by no means cold, and I felt quite content to follow the dimly lit pathways wrapped in one of my favorite sweaters. I am always telling myself that I really should take more walks, but it seems more often than not that the ever-pressing stress of assignments and obligations keep me locked inside my room. However, this opportunity to feel the night air wrapping around my solitary form made me increasingly eager to make a pointed effort to include nightly walks much more often in the future.

As I entered the library, the quiet lull and slightly yellowed lighting were somewhat comforting. On weeknights, the library is often overcrowded and sometimes loud, but on the nights when most people are out enjoying themselves elsewhere, a sense of quiet peace falls over the lines of books already offering comfort.

I went to the back of the library, even more empty than the front, and wandered around until I found a back corner surrounded by windows and sat down at a table. Here, surrounded by planes of glass which separated me from the black night, it was easy to pretend I was elsewhere. The distant lights from the few passing cars became more abundant in my mind’s eye, and I was no longer on my local library but within a great city where thousands of faces rushed about eagerly in the November night. Of these various faces, one came inside to share my table, words were spoken between us and muted conversation grew comfortably.

But of course, I was sitting alone.

It is so easy, especially for me me, to fall into day dreams and considerations of a hopes that will likely never come to fruition. And yet I persist in such fancies, I persist in thoroughly engrossing myself within such hopes. Perhaps it is because within these quiet moments, taking solitary night walks and sitting against panes of glass in a lonely library, the reveries can make me smile in spite of myself.

Perhaps it is merely that some part of me deeply believes in the hope that seems to shake in my heart, knowing that if I let it crumble and dissolve I will fall along with it. And so, within these quiet moments, my hopes continue.

Hands and Stones

2011-01-25T21:11:00.003-08:00

Perhaps it can be best described as a shop of magical curiosities, but such a description would not do justice to the atmosphere.

Rather, I must describe the softly dim lighting, the alluring scent of incense that met one’s nose in welcome. The soft creak of the wooden floorboards as you stepped inside, the numerous wooden shelves of a deeper stain that rose confidently from the ground. The walls of herbs, labeled with intricate names that capture one’s attention. The tables of jewelery, of stone pendulums, of tarot cards. And also, when one looks to the back corner, the small desk where the shop owner sits comfortably with a smile that welcomes any inquiry or question you may find yourself wishing to ask. I have been here before, often browsing among these curious items, overwhelmingly interested with so many things that call to mind a time long past.

I see a handwritten sign that advertises palm and tarot readings. I look to my own hands, to the tables of tarot cards, to the shop owner who is doubtlessly the reader, and wonder what would be read there. Would I believe it?

I have always been deeply curious in such things, but there is part of me that feels quite hesitant to welcome such an interpretation of my future. Perhaps it is that I fear what may be told to me, that the happiness I dream of may be predicted to be something forever out of my reach. And yet, it would be infinitely comforting to hear the woman’s words promising me a world in which I can smile as she holds my hand softly within her delicate fingers.

My mind continues to wander as I ponder over a table of jewelery set with bright stones among glimmering metals. As my fingers trail along a display of bracelets my eyes finally linger upon one stone of jet black, and I am prompted to lift it, to try it on. It looks beautiful in a way that only black stones can be—the perception that the stone holds some story, some deeply hidden tale, within the opaque depths.

And so I walk towards the woman and pay for the bracelet, watching as the hands that could have interpreted my palms place the piece of jewelery into a small box that is placed in front of me.

“Wear it well,” she says. And I thank her, unsure of whether I can accomplish such a thing while deeply curious of the story that is hidden behind her own opaque eyes, eyes dark as the stone that will soon adorn my wrist.

Beyond the written words

2011-01-25T21:08:00.001-08:00

She was always searching for stories beyond the written words within the books she kept lovingly upon wooden shelves. Always used, accumulated through library book sales and thrift shops and gifts from distant family members who cared or knew nothing about her but that she would enjoy poring over some novel they had already tired of long ago. She took comfort in the yellowed and dog eared pages, the passages underlined by a foreign hand, the broken spines—it was sometimes almost too much to bear. She attempted endlessly to understand why some past reader had marked page 67, but not 64, which was her favorite. Why another had been moved to underline the passages that brought tears to her eyes, while leaving untouched the ones that made her smile? And yet another, how could they have been able to analyze the diction of the paragraph, when no other words could have better described the sorrow which was so painfully apparent? She often wished to understand their personal stories, these past readers, wondering why they had chosen the book, or whether they had preferred to read it in the afternoon or in the small hours of the morning when the rest of the world was asleep. Also, had they been happy while reading, or had the author’s words been a balm for a heart so broken that no other voice could have reached them? To her, these were rational and important considerations, for she could have sworn that so many of her beloved books possessed pages adorned with the dried tears of one of these readers. For these strangers, she often herself wept, spilling her own tears in painful consideration of just what word had touched them, just what memories had been so seamlessly and so strongly evoked. But she loved inscriptions best, the notes some stranger’s own hand had written within title pages for unknown eyes that were beloved to them. “For my dearest Mina,” one such inscription had begun in an elegant masculine hand that had been immortalized for centuries, “I have not the words to say it myself, but know always that in my heart you will be forever beloved.” Her eyes had watered at this, thinking of the Mina that must now be long dead, hoping that the book she now held had once been enclosed within Mina’s own beloved arms. She must believe, because it is these wordless stories for which she lives.

Then she didn't come back

2011-01-25T21:03:00.001-08:00

He’s made a habit of looking out the window, watching as the nameless faceless hurry by along the cracked sidewalk as he slowly drinks his morning coffee. They are always bundled in wool, it seems, tightly wrapped in scarves and hats in a ceaseless effort to avoid the bitter city wind. He can not discern one from another, even such distinctions as male and female become difficult when one is watching from so many floors above. And then one day, he sees her. First on a Wednesday, she is wearing only a white sweater and loose auburn hair, strikingly different from the mass of black coats which surround her. And again on Friday, and then Saturday, she is wearing not a coat but a sweater, always walking under his window just as he lifts his mug to savor the last steaming drops of warm brown liquid. Some days she holds her elbows as though carrying a burden, and others she simply tightly hugs her sides as if to prevent shivering, as if wishing some man’s arm could enclose her under his shoulder. He’s seen her in jeans, in boots of a dark leather, and even a few times she has worn a woolen skirt and dark tights that made her look timeless. But always the white sweater, always the loose hair. He often worried about the finely knit garment, which was likely more ivory than white, fearing that it could not possibly keep her warm enough as she strolled to her unknown destination below his scrutinizing gaze. But this he could work around, telling himself that she must be wearing numerous layers underneath, that she was enfolded in a special warmth that the strangers around her could not achieve, even with their scarves and hats and mittens. It was her hair that captivated him, her hair that kept his eyes watching her gait long after she had long passed out of the frame of his window. It was a wonderful color, some natural blend of red and brown such as he had never seen, blanketing her shoulders and falling in soft waves down the middle of her back. He imagined touching this hair, feeling its so apparent softness between his fingers as he sought to separate the unique feel of each individual strand. Each morning, he imagined falling into step with her upon the sidewalk, touching the soft knitting of her elbow and bringing her to face him, smiling as her face would somehow recognize the man who had watched her for so many mornings. He never could so closely see her face, for one morning he did not see her walking below him, nor did he for months afterward. He waited, day after day and cup of coffee after endless cup of coffee. And then finally he closed the curtain, for the loneliness was too much to bear.

It was the closeness

2011-01-25T20:59:00.001-08:00

It was not the stiffness of her sitting position or the draft upon her bare legs that was making her feel uncomfortable. Rather, it was the closeness, the forced intimacy of the room. She heard the laughter of children from the family sitting at a large corner table and caught revealing phrases and words from the loving couple nearby. She heard the smiles in their voices, the abundant security in their love. They felt too close, too near—as if every word she could say out loud would be overheard and picked apart by these happy strangers; as if their blatant happiness and quietly melodic laughter were solely meant to painfully illustrate her quiet misery

Certain burden that comes with great feeling.

2011-01-24T16:14:00.001-08:00

There is a certain burden that comes with great feeling, an emptiness. They are simple things which provoke it; the strewn petals of a flower crushed by an undiscerning foot, the drops of rain that grow too heavy and seep through to your skin, the accent of the man whose phone conversations, though rare, make you feel at home, the smell of the wind, the insect carcasses in window frames that have been long painted shut. Perhaps it is merely the eyes of a stranger who happened to meet your own on a crowded city street. It is an inconsequential day; sunny, with frantically dispersed clouds, and you are walking to class, wearing boots scuffed from too many winters. And then there is the moment of your gaze meeting his, and the day is monumentally changed because it no longer belongs to you, but to each of you together; to all that you’ll never know of him besides the deep brown of his irises. Or perhaps you are walking home from the convenience store just after nightfall. With a jug of cold milk in hand, you look upwards and begin to swirl idly on the outside pavement as your eyes struggle to take in the great expanse of sky all at once. You can not name the color, but it is beautiful, and the moon is brighter than you have ever known. It feels lovely, this moonlight, and you hold out your arm as if the glow is that of an artist’s paint, a masterpiece upon your skin which you dare not smudge, and you feel everything upon you. Your heart and mind are bursting with the sublimity of the moment, the moon that is painting you ivory, and you ache to share this moment, to grasp the hand of the one you love. But you cannot. The moonlight then seems to suppress you, to weigh heavily upon limbs now frail, and you walk home, burdened. You are empty, barren, weighed down only by the dripping beams of the ivory moon and the jug of milk, now grown warm, held uncomfortably in your hands.

And yet— I still watch, still gaze, still learn

2011-01-23T21:15:00.001-08:00

I’ve been drinking strange teas, burning my throat as I sip the steeped leaves, the dark liquid, without waiting for the steam to disperse. I enjoy it, somehow, the painful warmth which seems to burrow in my core while simultaneously cooling my fingers and toes. I enjoy it as proof, that I am here, that my fingers are frail and tired but they are, they are clasped vise-like about the body of a porcelain mug

But still, I continue to wonder, and have been listening to strange music in languages I cannot understand; Portuguese, Icelandic, Hindi. I sometimes am unsure of when one word ends, when sentences are formed, and rather simply hear a demurred loveliness pass over me. The notes seem to blend, to melt into my ear as wax from a candlestick, to create an assurance.

I remain lonely, however, and have been gazing into the faces of strangers. Making eye contact with passersby, penetrating the expressions of those with whom I share an elevator ride, the barista with the crooked smile—all of these methods I have employed to watch, to watch incessantly, the faces that do not know my own.

In this way I have been noticing—have been learning about these faces, about their details.

There is a man who lives a few doors down, and I watch the back of his head as he unlocks his door, struggling as he tries to balance a bulging bag of groceries upon his knee. His hair is graying though he is young, and I have made it a point to watch his expressions, to know that he too is tired.

Also, there is that girl with the crooked smile. Her hair is thick and of the deepest chocolate, almost black, and I have looked closer to see that her smile is not crooked, not in any way that can be considered any type of a flaw. As her hair accentuates the strength of her jaw, the upward stretching of her lips, I realize that she will not be lonely. A man will, assuredly, enter for a coffee and fall in love with her smile as he orders a drink he wishes could instead be a conversation with her.

There is a man, around 20 I would guess, I sometimes see in the bus station who wears a ring with a strange stone to which I can apply no name. I wonder where he could have gotten it, for how many years it has cradled the skin, growing somewhat wrinkled, about his right ring finger. I can not ask him, but I imagine that it was given to him by a woman, perhaps one whom he can't be with at the moment, but that he loves all the more. I imagine he waits for the bus just like he waits to see her; as he waits for the day he enters her softly lit rooms where he will make love to her with the fervency of a young man.

But none of these strangers, it seems, know what is to listen to foreign music with strange tea burning in your throat. None seem to know, to understand, what it is to doubt that you are. And yet—I still watch, still gaze, still learn. I notice.

Existentialism

2011-01-23T21:03:00.000-08:00

"Existentialism is a relatively broad movement, like empiricism or rationalism, that has a rich and wide-ranging history, so much so that people debate what is and is not existential. But here’s a brief history of the roots:

Sartre coined the phrase “existence precedes essence”, which has since been a rallying cry for existentialists. That is, there is no essential quality to being a human that we all share. There is no ‘essence of humanity’ we just are: from there you have to make yourself.

Existentialism is concerned with what it means to be, and it’s fiercely individualized. The central theme running through the whole movement is that there is no ‘universal’ human experience. It started out with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who don’t and do believe in God respectively, and who are equally vehement about the question.

So Kierkegaard takes this individuality to mean that we each have to relate to God on a personal level, that there is no universal set of rules or principles for salvation - we have to work it out with “fear and trembling”-which comes straight from Phillipians 2:12 and was the name of one of his major theological treatises. Nietzsche, on the other hand, thought that the Übermensch would forge his own way with brazen disregard for any imposed morality, any code that tried to tell him how to live; he made his own life because he was the only one living it.

Camus rejected any attempt to make meaning and he thought the Übermensch was a ridiculous project. Nietzsche thought we should breed an Übermensch, Camus was like, “Bro, what a waste of time, why even bother? SPOILER ALERT: The Übermensch is going to die too. And then his life will be as meaningless as everyone else’s.”

Since then, existentialists both theistic and atheistic have tried to figure out how to best represent our individuality. But this, first and foremost, is the requirement for existentialism—a rejection of any sort of universal definition of man beyond his need to make himself."

Think for yourself! Opinions, Suicide, Love, and Religion.

2011-01-06T23:04:00.000-08:00

I’m glad some of you find something in my blog of value for your personal journey. Just don’t believe everything I say. Or anybody else for that matter. Gautama Buddha said:

”Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

Makes sense to me.

One has to work his own vision. But not opinions either. Opinions are useless. I like that saying that goes “opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one” And I like to add “and all of them are full of shit, the best you can do with an opinion, even your own, is to wipe your ass with it”. They’re just positions, and always relative. Today people defend very eagerly the right to voice their own opinion… and yes, I agree, we must be able and free to differ. I differ with the majority of things that are taken for granted today… Galileo differed with most people of his time that thought the Earth was the center of the world, and his defense of heliocentrism caused him to face charges of heresy. But his claim was based on scientific observation (and it’s fascinating to think what was science back in 1600), it wasn’t just “in my opinion, I think the Earth revolves around the Sun, guys”, and that’s the kind of thinking many people defend when they claim they’re “entitled to an opinion”. So many arguments are settled with “oh well, we just have different opinions”, and that’s really.. useless, and absurd. Certainly, life is very complex and many things are relative, but we can’t stretch it so far as to make of everything a matter of opinion. I’m not telling this because things like religions and views about life are prone to become a matter of ‘opinion’.

Most people beliefs are the result of their experiences, something very logical, but I point at the importance of keeping in mind that we all have different lives and different stories and so every story leads to a different conclusion. So besides your own experience you have to look at the whole spectrum of human experiences and take it into account.

For example, I’ve defended suicide. Well, because I’ve been suicidal most of my life and I have attempted it and I understand what goes through the mind of someone who tries to put an end to existence. I’m really angered by “anti-suicide” people.. and ideas like “it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem” how do you know it’s a temporary problem? I could say that happiness is temporary too, so why should we be forced to live? In my case, my own pattern of thinking , my own self, make the very experience of life very intense… sometimes unbearable. People that haven’t experienced this are quick to say you’re a coward and that “it’s an easy way out” and that only shows their ignorance and that they don’t take the time to think twice and look beyond what is their own experience. They are sating that people like Virginia Woolf, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Cobain and Adolf Hitler were just cowards, when they don’t have half the balls these people had… not to mention the things they achieved in their lives and the impact they made in the human universe. It’s really stupid to call suicide something “easy”. It’s not, I’m living proof of that. If you’re gonna emit an opinion about something as delicate as suicide, you have to think deeply about it. Not just hold blindly to the biologically and socially enforced idea that “life is sacred and worth living”, because you think one has to be optimist and live at all cost. Why? Why do we have to suffer? They call us “selfish”, and miss the fact of their own selfishness in demanding of a person to live no matter how much they might be suffering, just because in their opinion, you don’t have the right to get out of a life you didn’t ask in the first place.

But as a suicide, I still agree some people commit suicide over stupid reasons.. because they broke up with their lovers for example. I know, breaking up may be devastating, but putting the weight of your whole life in the company of someone else is not the most intelligent, healthy or reasonable thing to do. That’s not even love, you’re just using the other person as some kind of drug to feel good. Love has been very idealized.. to an unhealthy extent. I don’t think most people are loving when they think they’re in love. But I digress. What I mean is that in spite of not sharing these preconceptions about suicide because I have my own experience about it, I can still place myself in the place of those people who don’t have this experience. I can understand that to them is something taboo and all the misconceptions they have about it. I’ve even saved some people from suicide. Ironically, one person I saved was by telling them to do it. This person would confess me afterward that he was doing it only so I’d feel guilty for the rest of my life. Since I didn’t seem affected by it, he was disarmed and saw no point in doing it. I just think suicides deserve some more understanding and empathy. It’s not about opinions, it’s about understanding between human beings and respect for the pain of others, beyond our personal experiences.

That’s what took me to abandon religion in the first place. I couldn’t become a priestess when there were so many other religions out there that I didn’t know and even gods that were just mythology. Most people choice of religion is just the one they were raised to believe in. It’s crazy that most people don’t stop and wonder about what are all the other gods then. It’s so automatic: my family is Catholic, so that’s what I’m gonna be and I’ll pass it to my kids. What if your family was Muslim? Then you would be a Muslim too. So in the end, your choice of God is not because you know the different gods out there and you’ve made a conscious choice, but just a matter of lottery, of what was the god the family you were born into worshiped. And the most ironic of all is that then people defend their religion like they really cared about their God. But can you believe some really cares about God if they don’t even care to know about other religions and make a choice but blindly accept the one is passed to them?

You know what is really absurd? How nobody would expect that our ancestors had an understanding of the menstrual period or the process of fecundation for example, but how so many people take for granted that they had a definitive and absolute comprehension of the Divine nature. “Yes! God talked to them! It’s in the Bible!” So what about Hun Hunahpu? He’s on the Popol Vuh! - It is obvious that what has moved people toward religion is not really an interest for God as much as a social phenomenon, rooted on human fear of death and the mysterious nature of the Universe. The western world has lived for centuries under the story of a messianic God… and it never occurred to them that God doesn’t need to be a messiah… that the whole “I have to sacrifice my son because my other children are sinners that don’t deserve forgiveness but oh well, my son (who, by the way, is the human manifestation of myself) is loving like that and he is willing to get killed just so they understand how much I love them” was just a crazy story of fiction… How did they buy it??? Because it was a coherent explanation of the Universe? Where’s the coherence in that? Was it because they pondered about the nature of the Divine and in their search for God they found this truth? No! It was fear. And politics. Do you know the power you hold when people think you’re the representative of God himself on Earth? You could burn people alive back in the days with that power. You could do whatever you wanted, even the most perverse things, and still look holy. And believe, they were done. The Third Reich has nothing on Christendom when it comes to atrocities. When people realize that Christianity has been a worse event in history than the holocaust, then you can say they’re opening their eyes.

So what’s really needed is a change in consciousness.. And only new generations can do it, because old belief are already too deep into old people, it’s a part of them, they can’t understand a different thing. It’s like an old computer that wouldn’t accept a new operative system. What is important and necessary now is to become aware of what happened and what has been happening and what is happening, and put under examination the paradigms we’ve lived under till now. We need to reevaluate things and rediscover the human in us.

Thanks again for the appreciation. I hope you continue to find valuable material in the blog in 2011 and the years to come.

Why has mankind become prey of their myths?

2011-01-06T22:45:00.000-08:00

I don’t believe in ‘debates’, because most people have made their minds and don’t really process what you’re telling, they just react. In the end you get frustrated at the blindness, stubbornness and automatism of people, and they walk away thinking there are too many wackos out there, not realizing they’re one more of them. Things tend to fall in the useless field of opinions. “We’ll have to agree to disagree”.. it’s like a never-ending tennis game with none of the players scoring.

Writing is a bit different, though. Maybe because there’s no confrontation, no competition. Not even a voice, but words alone. Of course, there’s always the chance people result as close-minded as readers as debaters, but writing has another good point, that what you write can be read for several people… hundreds, thousands,it doesn’t matter… maybe just 20, but it’s always more than one, and so there’s more chance that the ‘discussion’ gives any fruit.

Today I will write a bit about religion and spirituality. My concept and opinion on this matter.

What is astonishing to me and bothers me is how people can be so gullible to believe in something because it’s in a book, not only believe it, but believe it’s the word of God himself. Just because some people said so, thousands of years ago in a desert. Yet they wouldn’t even think to take seriously the Yowa of the Cherokees.

Furthermore, I can’t get how people conceptions of God are still about a “He”, a father or some kind of “energy” you can talk to in your mind and he will magically answer with events in your life; or punish you for not obeying his law (that he had magically inscripted on stones). From a psychiatric point of view, we’re living in a world of schizophrenics if you think about it. I don’t go as far as to call myself an atheist, though. I think both believers and atheists have over simplified the very nature of God. I think the divine nature cannot be grasped by the human being… at least at his current stage. But what I see of spiritual in man and divine in reality is the experience of man and reality itself. Nebulae are more mysterious to me that any angel. The Sun itself, our planet. The very plants and animals that live with us here. Our day to day events. Life itself is more magical and strange than any creation myth. Think about it, that from our semen and our ovums we can make another human being, with feelings, sensations, thoughts. Think about Beethoven’s music! and think it all began with cum in a vagina, maybe flowers and love letters, but you get the idea. The human mind! The human reality! Internet!… all of that happening in a little, microscopic, invisible corner of the Universe, with a bunch of matter and antimatter and atoms and protons and quarks and hadrons…and while there are millions of different living beings living with us, they’re all blind to something we can see (and I’m sure the converse is also true)… and we are born and we have a consciousness open to this world… that we have no idea yet what it’s exactly… I think that’s a quite spiritual, mystical, experience, more than any myth any religion has invented to interpret it.

Actually, there’s something in those myths that makes sense to me. The Garden of Eden for example. Of course, I don’t believe in talking snakes and the world made in 6 days and a woman made of a rib. But from a metaphorical point of view, it shows much more understanding of the human condition than the current perspectives.

For example, the Epicurean paradox, which is a favorite of mine. But I find several flaws in it. One, discarding the possibility that God can be evil. Another, it assumes God again in human terms, “Is he willing to prevent evil?”. And over all things, it assumes evil is real. If we think about it, evil is but a consequence of the human mind, and I mean that in several ways. Let’s go back to Eden: There it was, a prehuman creature, living on earth with all kind of other creatures, on a very different Earth. It was just another animal more. But something happened.. his nervous system developed to an extent that slowly gave him access to a whole new level of reality. The forbidden fruit! Now he looked at himself like he never had before, “felt ashamed of his nakedness”, he gained something: meaning. And when he had meaning, he realized some things meant ugly things, painful things. He must be very afraid, there he was, in that crazy and wild world, with its days and its nights, its Sun, Moon and stars (that were just “things” “up there”) with its births and its deaths… he didn’t possess any of the concepts we’re almost born with today. And he started to realize that he could cause a lot of pain he wouldn’t like for himself… he experienced guilt for the first time… and lo and behold, with this newly gained knowledge, he found himself out of the perfect harmony he had lived when he was just another animal. He lost paradise. And here we are, still expelled from paradise, and the Earth has become a place not very much unlike that final frame in the “Garden of Earthly Delights”. Now, do I think “God himself” ‘dictated’ these things to someone that wrote it thousands of years ago? No, not at least like people understand it. But I think every book has been ‘dictated’ by a higher force in a way, in the sense of the human intellect and the human essence that is present in any literary work on how fantastic that is inside the big frame of things. Of how those words formed on a brain, synapse after synapse, at one point in spacetime, one after another, inside the skull of a thinking animal in a round rock filled with water, floating in some unknown galaxy. What I can see in this myth, I repeat, is a better comprehension of our reality, in times far remote, which makes you wonder at which point did men became so stupid and fell prey to their own myths.

And then again, the myth of the Tower of Babel makes sense. Because, what is happening in this human world but millions of heads, each speaking its own language, unable to understand each other? Confused victims of their own creations. Many of these stories have their meaning, but instead we have used them to enslave ourselves, creating division between man and man, and between man and God. It’s ironic, and very arrogant on part of humans: we know there’s a lot about the Universe we’re yet to discover and understand, yet we expect, with our ephemeral life-span, to have complete understanding of God, even more, we take for granted that the people who lived thousands of years before us who couldn’t understand even electricity, had full understanding and knowledge of the divine nature. I have to hear in the very 21st century things like “Yahweh! His name is Yahweh!”, as it was written down on God’s birth certificate or something. The worse is that they most likely don’t know -or care- where that names come from and who was that Yahweh for the Canaanite and Hebrew people from the Iron Age times, for example.

That’s why I insist so much in the importance of culture and of a change in every human being. Politicians, religions and industries are not going to tell us the truth, it’s obvious by now, I don’t understand why people keep on buying their bullshit. If we keep waiting for messiahs, for panaceas, for others to do what only us can do, the world will keep going down, worse and worse, in every possible sense. We’ll continue to be fooled and manipulated from the left, the right, for the Church or Calvin Klein. And we’ll keep blaming the wrong people, killing the planet and destroying our spirits.

Are you really unique?

2011-01-03T16:59:00.001-08:00

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that humanity has no hope left. We go through life killing every ounce of joy in each human being that crosses our path, and stripping children of their dreams. We brutally murder the happiness of anyone who is having a luckier day than we. We close our minds to thoughts that differ to those which we grew up with. We judge anything that is slightly unique, and then blatantly put the blame on the masses; put the blame on anyone else, but us. Blame the media for giving you the idea of what's normal and acceptable in society. Blame religion for all those years and years and years of drilling your brain with rules of what we can and can't do. Because who wants to be known as the guy, as the girl, who can't accept change? As the person who is staying behind? No one. So we drag everyone else down with us. We bring down anyone who is succeeding in life, and ultimately, we all get stuck at the bottom.

I wait for the day, when someone decides to succeed and become someone happy in this life, regardless of anyone's opinion at all. Someone who won't mind being fat or dorky or having his or her own sense of style. But someone who wouldn't mind truly. Not like the obese people that live today, who say they don't care, but deep down, all they want is to be beautiful to the eyes of society. No, someone who truly and honestly does not give a damn about what others think is beautiful. Maybe that person already exists, and maybe he or she is a happy individual, but what about the rest of us? How come we don't know this person? How come we can't think like he or she does? Advertising companies, photoshop, Image consultants; all these are constantly blamed for this. Yet, if you think about it, it's not really their fault. Is ours. It's our fault for being so weak minded and letting ourselves believe that we are not beautiful. It's our fault for refusing to stand up for ourselves and let us be looked down at.

One day, there will be absolutely no uniqueness left. You think you're unique now? Look at what you're wearing, and I can assure you, that at least other 100 people are wearing the exact same outfit. Why? Because it looks cool, or because it was on sale, or because they all try to be cover magazine beautiful and that's what the model was wearing. If you're a hipster, an emo, a scene kid, a prep, a goth, a metalhead, an artsy, you're still not unique. You have labeled yourself, and that is far from unique. You might think your sense of fashion is unique, but really think about it, and you will see it is not. Maybe you dress the way you do because you saw the "pretty" girl in school wear that or that hot model in a picture or magazine, and you want to look like her because you feel and believe you're ugly. Wearing those clothes immediately make you feel "pretty". Don't they? Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe, you try to dress the worst you can and the most different that you can so you can prove that society and the media haven't messed with you. To prove how original you are. Yet, most of you that dress that way, surround yourselves with other people who think alike. Dress alike. Where has your uniqueness gone?

I suppose what I'm saying is, no one is unique now, and no one will be unique ever. That's just how we are. We are simply copies of the next guy, and the guy behind us is about to follow our footsteps. There's no hope for a better tomorrow, a tomorrow of unity yet originality. That will never happen. What we should really focus on, is today. Embrace the fact that our looks may not be unique, but our thoughts could be. Think outside the box and break free from the chains that the world hs made you carry.

Just Live.

2010-12-30T01:24:00.001-08:00

Living inside the system gets heavy if you can’t engage in meaningful activities, if you can’t be, or dream to be, something more than a walking piece of flesh. We have created a second level reality inside reality: our day to day world, and another one, the Internet. Few people realize that the “real world” is as virtual as the world wide web, and as contingent as ‘real reality’ -whatever that is- seems to be.

When I was younger,one of the things that deeply affected my life, was to see how roles determined people’s thoughts instead of it being the opposite. Obviously, if everybody is playing their role there can’t be understanding between humans. We are mostly the result of our experiences. And since we all have different lives, we have different views, it’s really simple. Our mistake is making generalizations about life. “Life is beautiful” and “life is shit” are both as true as lies. There are things in life that are common to every human, but there are many, many things that are not. Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night. We can’t just judge at people for hating or loving life without seeing that it is as simple as they really may have reasons to love it or hate it. As for me, I think it’s not secret by now that me and life have a love-hate relationship. But my point, and what I’ve always tried to keep in mind, is that in order to understand each other and ourselves we must look beyond our personal experiences. That doesn’t mean to disregard them, not at all, but to also take into account that would we ever had different experiences we would feel and think different, and we’d be taking for truth a different thing.

I think that only through own experience we can really understand something. If you have never gone swimming, you won’t know what swimming feels like. That’s why my answer to that has been to keep an open mind and not to attach myself to any ideology, to any belief or even any subculture. Sometimes I find myself being another person… feeling different, thinking different. I just look at it, always keeping in mind the big picture. I allow myself to change, to evolve, to mutate. Also, I always act as the devil’s advocate of the things I’m against. For example, in spite of my animosity towards religion, I won’t hold anything against an 80 year old lady that lights a candle to a saint. I even appreciate some candor and beauty in that. I won’t ask her to go atheist or agnostic or anything, either. If she wants to believe in a Heaven, that’s a beautiful thought for her to have.

Life doesn’t need to be this race to get to the top. Life can be about anything, which is actually dangerous considering what pernicious creatures humans are. But people have grown to believe that many things are necessary for us to live happy. New shoes, new clothes, and the perfect body… we don’t. We don’t. We have all those things… and we still aren't happy. We’re just trapped in the giant machinery we’ve put in motion, that’s all.

We don’t need a political revolution. Or social, or economic. No, the revolution we need is the personal awakening of each human being. Because we’re asleep to the world.

Haggard: Tales of Ithiria Review by Andres

2010-12-29T21:16:00.001-08:00

Haggard is a German Orchestral Death Metal band started in 1991 by Asis Nasieri, Composer, Vocalist, Guitar player, and song writter of the band; along with many other members, which are often changing due to conceptual/location/style of their albums. They started as a Progressive Death Metal band, but then blossomed into one of the best Orchestral Metal bands in history; known by millions all over the world.

Tales of Ithiria is the most Celtic, progressive album of the band so far. Ithiria is a Medieval imaginary land full of chaos and war, a land of enchanting beauty and sorrow. What makes this album one of the best of the band is not just the ideal of a fictional world which is told by the songs within the album, but also the construction of this album. It is well composed and mastered, a piece of art that everyone must have.

The first song, The Origin, tells the beginning of the story. A settling introduction,almost like a Tolkien story, an epic battle between evil and good, the way it gets intense every second that passes into it… Amazing.

Tales of Ithiria: One epic intro. A mixture of flute, violin, viola, violonchelo, cello, piano/keyboard, medieval percusion, and harp, among with Asis’ epic vocals make the first 3 minutes of this song a journey into the life of a warrior. After the music starts to kick off, the drum beats and the guitars are epic, making it sound like a folk metal band. Perhaps, something that a band like Wolfchant or Folkearth would do. Mix that with the soprano vocals and you get such an amazing mid part. After this little burst of energy, a very peaceful recital follows, almost like an Opera. You can imagine an epic scene of a young man training and fighting for his people, along with that, the almost invisible guitar solo (because it is part of the background) a 8 minutes sonata; worth every single second.

From Deep Within: a speech which tells a story about a murder, following the last song, and so the story goes on.

Upon fallen Autumn Leaves: A classic medieval theme. sounds like a video game. Piano, flute, and then a soprano kicks in with a tenor to back her. Singing in a chaotic way, a Latin, German, and English song that tells the story of a fallen warrior, that after loosing a battle awaits for his death by the hands of the enemy, an existentialist song if one may say.

Des Konigs Hallen: A song that reminds you of a castle’s Funeral, where the body is being brought it after a fight.

La Terra Santa: An epic battle between good an evil, a battle between a kingdom and a terrorizing dragon. It’s a fast pased song, more than in tempo but for the lenght of lyrics, it si still one of the best songs in this album, a very epic song.

Vor Dem Sturme is the calm before the storm, the begining of the end, one may say.

The Sleeping Child: Perhaps the best song in this album, the upbeat resembles the galloping of thousands of warriors, going to their destiny. This is the most progressive, agressive and attractive song for lovers of bands like Therion and Turisas.

Hijo de la Luna: I didn’t like much the change between such an upbeat song to a classic 80s song by Mecano, with a more folky sound to it, it is perhaps the best cover you will ever see of this song anywhere, but the change is too wide, perhaps they should of made a small intro into Hijo de la Luna, but still is one oustanding song of this album.

On These Endless Fields: the classic medieval battle, a story walk throught with a beautiful ending.

The Hidden Sign: The ending of the album, this song is the best if you prefer the seer album, but, it doesn’t meet up to the expectation of the album, althought it is a good ending, it wasn’t my cup of tea, I am not saying that the song is bad, it just didn’t feel part of the album.

This album is a must for any Haggard lover, it is just a beautiful Celtic Opera, I give it 5 stars out of 6.

She Knows Sadness Very Well.

2010-12-29T17:01:00.001-08:00

She walks through the city without a destination in mind. Simply walks for the sake of walking. People pass by her a little too close, she thinks. She looks into their faces, studies each crease and each scar quickly as they pass by. Each person is a mystery, a secret that hides behind the the mask of the everyday life. What stories lie behind that look, what memories behind those eyes? She wonders if her own eyes reflect her story.

“When people look at me, when they look into my eyes, can they see the pain? Or are they fooled by the smile that I wear? Can they see the agony that facing a new day brings to me? Can they notice my loneliness, my fears?”

She sits in a bench in the middle of the park. Children run past her. They smile and laugh and squeal. So filled with happiness and free of guilt. She tries to remember the last time she felt that way, but all that comes to her mind is death and despair. She stares at the children hoping that some of their joy and carelessness gets transferred to her. Hoping that her smile turned from fake to genuine.

She pushes a strand of her chocolate hair behind her ears, softly exhales, and uses every ounce of strength in her body to stand up and walk home. Home. What a silly idea to call that place home, she thinks. To her understanding, home is a place where one can be happy and feel safe. A place to spend time with loved ones or alone but in peace. Instead, that place seemed like a jail cell. There was no one waiting upon her arrival, no one to smile at her for a well-cooked meal, and no one to prepare her one for that matter. Her apartment was an empty, cold room. The only purpose it served was to have a place to sleep at night.

Almost a New Year

2010-12-29T00:52:00.000-08:00

I sit on my bed, the warmth of my clothes bothers me and I have a headache, thinking about my life. How fast have the years gone by! How soon have I had to grow up. Yesterday, I sat on the floor having a tea party with my dolls, today, I pay the bills and fix my car. Where have I been all this time, that I hadn't realized my life was passing by? In what thought have I been so consumed that I neglected to notice that things around me were changing? What have I missed along the way? In 2 days, it will be a new year. New opportunities and new beginnings. All I can think about is, what did I do with all the past years? Moments wasted and things left unseen. How worrying that thought results!

Yet, I do have one thing that consoles me through my despair: The realization of how truly fortunate I am to have Andres.

He's a sweetheart and actually pays attention to me. It's safe to say that he knows me more than I know myself. He surprised me today with how much about me he knows. I must admit, I was a bit weirded out at first, but then I started to think and decided that there is no reason for me to feel that way. We have always connected since day one, and I have always felt very at ease to tell him stuff about me. That's something I don't do with anyone else. I can't just open up to anyone, and I realized that I have been doing so with him without even noticing. I suppose I just feel comfortable enough with him. I feel I can trust him with anything, even if he has betrayed my trust a couple of times. He has been slowly gaining back my trust, maybe someday I will trust him 100% like I used to. Yet, he is still the only person I trust the most in my life. Isn't that crazy?

I don't know why my apartment feels so hot. The heater's off and it's cold outside... could it be that it's just me feeling hot? That in the middle of this lonely night, I ache for his touch and that rises the heat in me?

I stood up to get some cold water, dropping pieces of clothing along the way. Shirt on the floor, pants on the floor, then panties and bra. Oh the freedom of being au naturel! Yet, this heat persists. I start to sweat and my hand makes it way down my thigh-- If only there were more hands to follow! His hands. I don't like this loneliness! I lay down on bed again, and the image of him is my only companion as my fingers enter the warm zone between my thighs..

A New Year

2010-12-27T11:24:00.001-08:00

This goes to the nights when I dealt with more drama than I wanted to. To the night I found out he had been lying to me all along. To the nights that I drank too much and made mistakes that no one forgets for months and months. This is to that one night that I decided to hang out with that guy, because I was feeling used and alone. To the nights I would’ve rather stayed home, watching movies but instead got dressed up in clothes that weren’t as comfortable as sweatpants, went to that party I didn’t really want to be at. To those nights when I would come home, after smiling all day and laughing with my friends, and lay down in bed and cry until I fell asleep. This goes to the nights when I would sit on the edge of my bed staring at the bottle of pills holding a bottle of liquor in my hand.

To that night when I found out he was going out with that little girl, and I was so angry and hurt that I punched the wall and broke my hand. This goes to all those nights when all I wanted to do was lock myself in my room and sleep and not think about anything else. This is for those nights that I felt there was really nothing left for me on this world. For all those nights when I would think about running away forever and starting a completely new life. To that night that I stood on top of that building looking down and almost jumped. This is to try to get rid of all the pain that I carry with me. This is to mark a new start, for all those nights that I intend to put behind me. This is for a new year, for a new start. Better nights, better life.

Speaking of Love

2010-11-15T18:35:00.000-08:00

I can not sleep, it usually takes me time. The lamplight illuminates my room, and in the silence of the night, the outside noises seem amplified. A bike, for example, now seems like a machine breaking the silence. Tonight it’s not cold at all, and I’m wearing a pale pink nightgown, my hair falls freely on my shoulders; my tea’s turned cold. I put on my headphones, and listen to the beautiful tunes of melancholy and despair. Some romantic songs, too. I won’t lie. In fact, tonight is mostly romantic songs. Beautiful, deep words, and how they reflect certain of our realities!
It’s funny how love works. Sometimes it starts without a reason. It comes to us when we’re least expecting it. But one thing is sure, it comes when you’re ready for it. It comes exactly at the right time. There are times when we think we received it at the wrong time, or that love has abandoned us, yet, we must always remember that there is a time for everything. Even to love.
Other times, we try to force it, only to have someone break the monotony of daily routines. Simply for the sake of making you move away from so many thoughts … and then what? Then you realize that you’re not only with a certain person for that reason, and you don’t regret it. The thought of it starts getting stronger, overpowering inside you, you just can help it and you just can not be alone anymore. You’ve fallen in love.
We think about that certain person so much and all throughout the day. They invade every corner of our minds and make it their homes. Then you find yourself talking about that person incessantly. “He’s so sweet, so cute, so full of care,” would be my case. “I truly believe we were made for one another. It’s one of those things you can just feel.” It is after you have said such words or had such thoughts, that you realize that you just can’t not think of that person or of love. Then, you do not know what to do about it, and at the same time you do know that you do not want to do anything in the world that would make that person suffer. Then, my friend, you realize you’re completely and undeniably in love.
Now I come back to my current reality… and I find that the warmth of my nightgown almost bothers me, or maybe I just can not stand anything tonight. Even typing this is bothering me; I caress my thighs that are left uncovered. How I wish there were more stroking hands—His hands. I feel too lonely tonight! All I can do is talk about love… but only to not feel so alone.

Un Poema a mi Madre

2010-11-14T08:46:00.001-08:00

Esta noche se siente mas pesada que las anteriores.
El frio es mas notable y la noche mas obscura.
O sera que mi corazon pesa y mi mente se queja,
al pensar en lo que has pasado por mi?

Desde que era nina, fuiste tu la que me miraba, la que me apoyaba.
Mis suenos me ayudaste a obtener tu,
y se que los que vienen tambien.
Cuando necesitaba con quien hablar,
fue tu oido el que escucho mis incesantes lamentos.
Fue tu voz, la que no dudo en dar consejos.

Cada lagrima que derrame, ha sido tu mano quien la seca,
y cada logro que tendre,
seran tus ojos quienes vean.

Quiero disculparme hoy,
por no haber sido como tu hubieras querido que fuera.
Por esas decepciones que te he dado,
y por ese estres que por mi culpa se a sumado
dentro de ti.

Disculpame, por que tu no dudas en darme tu tiempo para escuchar,
mientras que yo nunca tengo tiempo para ti.
Disculpame, por las palabras hirientes,
que en momentos de colera,
sin pensar te he dicho.

Yo se lo que has sufrido por mi,
para que salga adelante.
Y se que a veces me comporto como una ingrata.
Pero quiero que sepas, que si te lo agradezco.
Por ti soy quien soy, y por ti sere mas.

Tambien se que te sientes sola,
y yo no estoy para escucharte.
Solo para insultarte.
Pero, nunca lo hago con fines de maldad, lo prometo.
Perdoname, yo se que mereces respeto.

Y que te agradezco lo que has hecho por mi.
Lo que has hecho de mi.

Te agradezco esos caprichos que me has cumplido,
y las cosas que me has negado,
por que me has formado en lo que soy.
Por que me has dado sabiduria,
por que me has dado ambicion,
por que me has ensenado lo que es la compasion.

Te agradezco tu risa,
aunque a veces parece que me eriza,
por que llena mis dias vacios,
de alegria y amor.

Sobre todo, te agradezco tu comprension.
Cuando todos los demas no me entienden,
Cuando te dicen que haces mal en tu forma de ser hacia mi,
tu sigues firme, apoyandome.
Ayudandome.
Gracias.

No podria imaginarme una vida sin ti, Madre.
Es por eso mi frialdad al hablar de tus enfermedades.
No puedo imaginar que tu algun dia no estaras,
y prefiero negarlo.

Pero yo entiendo la realidad,
y entiendo que para mi eres muy importante.
y te necesito.
Por mas independiente que parezca.
Por mas grande que quiera ser,
te necesito.

Madre, hoy solo recuerda,
que si manana se me olvida,
y vuelvo a mi rutina,
y en mi mundo me miro consumida,
toma esta carta y lee.
Y recuerda que,
Yo te amo, Madre mia.

Perennial Lady of Wisdom

2010-11-12T00:14:00.000-08:00

A cool breeze blew in, making Lilith’s skin crawl as she looked up and saw three winged men fly towards her. “Our names are Senoi, Sansenoi and Sammangelof,” they said, “The Holy one commands thee to return to Eden and serve Adam or you will be forever damned and daily one hundred of your children will die.” Lilith stared at them. She pondered the idea of return, but there was no force strong enough to make her believe she should. Finally, she said, “I look at the fire that burns in the horizon and I only pray that it consumes me, immolates me. I don’t believe I have done wrong, I don’t believe I am evil. If evil means to stand up for oneself, then yes, I am evil. Yet, I have done no real harm. My hate is growing, though, and so is my courage to never submit. I should do what I was created to do. Weakening and punishing little children, infants and babes. I do have power over them from the day they are born until they reach eight days if they are boys, and twenty days if they are girls.”

At listening to this speech, the three angels wished to drown her by force. “I’m not afraid of dying,” she said in a calmed and hushed tone, “What I am afraid is that no one will ever have the capacity to think for themselves. So I will make you a deal. I swear, in the name of your living God, that whenever I come into a room and see the names or images of you three, upon an amulet in the room where there is an infant, I will not harm it.” The three seraphs considered this and decided to let her live. Lilith observed them as they flew away and couldn’t help to feel a sensation of overwhelming victory run through her. It was never in her plans to harm little children, it wasn’t either what she wanted to live for. She had set a task upon herself that she would make every woman in future generations be strong and independent. She would teach them her wisdom and guide them through the fear they might have of letting go. Lilith was so wrapped around this idea of a world of equality, that she hardly noticed the sky darkening around her. Night was setting in, and the eerie silence was shattered by her scream of joy, the string of peacefulness ravaged by the glorious cacophony of her voice. The white waves surged forward and curled like serpents around her, inviting her to its oceanic depths, while she drifted into peaceful slumber.

Seasons came and left, and throughout the years Lilith persevered. Women became stronger and more independent with each passing year. One day, after much hard work and success, Lilith returned to her beach. Autumn trees were a great shade of reds and browns and yellows that day. The birds were frolicking in the air, free as life itself. Lilith felt the breeze embrace her and said, “There is still a long way to go, and a lot to be done, but I have trust in my children.” Then,she unfolded her wings and soared into the skies once again.

~Alejandra Araiza

I wish...

2010-11-12T00:00:00.000-08:00

I wish I could be like the first ray of sun to kiss your cheek each morning,

to be with you each night and show you paradise.

I wish I was like water that glides on your skin,

and feel your body tingle in my hands.

I wish I could be the serenity of your tomorrow,

or a breeze to caress you and kiss your lips upon the arrival of a new day.

I would be your joy in the dark days to give you a smile,

and illuminate your sweet face.

I wish I could be like many things that have the honor to touch you each day,

but mostly wish to be able to be with you everyday.
~Alejandra Araiza

Ophelia by Lisa Klein

2010-11-11T23:08:00.000-08:00

I read this book just last week, and I must say, I found it quite interesting. I liked how Klein gives us a further look of what could have been Ophelia's real story in Shakespeare's "Hamlet". This book portrays Ophelia as a strong, smart woman, rather than a weak girl who kills herself for lack of love. Klein also simplifies the story to a more user-friendly version for today's readers.

Yet, the reader must have first read the original "Hamlet" to be able to fully understand this novel. Due to the fact that it does mention situations seen in Shakespeare's original version, but it doesn't explain them. We have to remember that this is Ophelia's version of the play. Therefore, there is a lot she didn't see, and won't be able to explain it. I recommend reading "Hamlet" first if you want to get the full effect of reading this version.

(Excerpt):

Prologue

St Emilion, France
November 1601

My lady:

I pray this letter finds you in a place of safety. I write in brief, for few words are best when they can bring only pain.

The royal court of Denmark is in ruins. The final fruits of evil have spilled their deadly seeds. At last, King Claudius is dead, justly served his own poison. Hamlet slew him with a sword envenomed by the king himself. Queen Gertrude lies cold, poisoned by a cup the king intended for Hamlet. It was the sight of his dying mother that spurred Hamlet's revenge at last.

But the greatest grief is this: your brother, Laertes, and Prince Hamlet have slain each other with poisoned swords. I have failed in the task you set me. Now Fortinbras of Norway rules in our conquered land.

Forgive Hamlet, I beg you. With his dying words he charged me to clear his wounded name. Believe me, before the lust for revenge seized his mind, he loved you deeply.

Also forgive, but do not forget.

Your faithful friend and seeker,

Horatio

The letter leaves me stunned, dazed with fresh pain so that I cannot even nse from my bed.

I dream of Elsinore Castle, a vast stone labyrinth. At its centre, the great banquet hall, warmed by leaping fires, where courtiers passed like lifeblood through a heart, where King Hamlet and Queen Gertrude reigned, the mind and soul that held the whole body together. Now all fire and all flesh are but cold ashes.

I dream of my beloved, the witty, dark-haired Prince Hamlet, before he was taken from me by madness and death.

In my mind's eye the green orchards of Elsinore appear, ripe with sweet pears and apples that bent the branches and offered themselves to our hands. The garden where we first kissed, fragrant then with sharp rosemary and soothing lavender, now lies blasted and all withered.

Through my dream gurgles the fateful brook where I swam as a child and where the willow boughs skimmed the water's surface. There I met my watery end and began life anew.

I see myself and Hamlet on the mist-shrouded battlements, where an unseen ghost witnessed our embracing, then turned Hamlet's mind from love to vengeance. I see the fearsome face of Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, who murdered his father and married his mother, my dear queen Gertrude, whom he poisoned.

Alas, my Hamlet is dead! And with him all of Elsinore ruined, like Eden after man's fall.

I, Ophelia, played a part in this tragedy. I served the queen. I sought to steer the prince's course. I discovered dangerous secrets and fell foul of the tyrant Claudius. But how did it come to this end, the death of all my world? Guilt consumes me, that I should live while all are lost. That I could not divert the fated course.

I cannot rest while this history remains untold. There is no peace for me while this pain presses upon my soul. Though I have lived .only sixteen years, I have known a lifetime of sorrow. Like the pale moon, I wane, weary of seeing the world's grief, and I wax again, burdened with life. But like the sun, I will dispel the darkness about me and cast a light upon the truth. So I take up my pen and write.

Here is my story.

Part One

Elsinore, Denmark
1585-1601

Chapter One

I have always been a motherless girl. The lady Frowendel died giving birth to me, depriving also my brother, Laertes, and my father, Polomus, of her care. I had not so much as a scrap of lace or a remembered scent of her. Nothing. Yet by the miniature framed portrait my father earned, I saw that I was the living image of my mother.

I was often sad, thinking I had caused her to die and therefore my father could not love me. I tried not to vex or trouble him further, but he never gave me the attention I desired. Nor did he dote on Laertes, his only son. He cast his gaze everywhere but on our faces, for he was ambitious to be the king's most valued and secret informant.

We lived in the village of Elsmore in a fine house, timber-framed with mulhoned windows. Laertes and I played in the garden my mother had kept, the beds growing wild after her death. I often hid among tall rosemary bushes, and all day I would carry the pungent scent about me. On hot days we swam in Elsinore's river where it meandered through a nearby wood,and we captured frogs and salamanders on its grassy banks. When we were hungry we stole apples and plums from the marketplace and darted away like rabbits when the vendors shouted after us. At night we slept in a loft beneath the eaves, where on cold nights the smoke from the kitchen fires rose and hovered beneath the rafters, warming us.

On the first floor of our house was a shop where ladies and gentlemen of the court sent their servants to buy feathers, ribbons and lace. My father disdained shopkeepers as unworthy and low, but he consorted with them and aimed favour with the customers, hoping to overhear court gossip. Then, wearing a doublet and hose in high fashion, he would hasten down the broad way to join the throng of men seeking positions in King Hamlet's court. Sometimes we would not see him for days and we worried that he had abandoned us, but he always returned. Then he would carry on excitedly about some opportunity certain to befall him, or he would be silent and moody. Laertes and I would peek through the broken panel of his chamber door and see him bent over a small pile of money and papers, shaking his head. We were certain that we would be ruined, and we wondered, lying awake in our loft, what would happen to us. Would we become like the orphan child we often saw in the village streets, begging for bread and eating scraps of meat like a wild animal?

My father's anxious office-seeking consumed our family's fortunes, the remains of my mother's dowry. But he did manage to hire a tutor for Laertes, a bookish, black-capped man.

"A girl should not be idle, for then the devil may do his work in you," my father said to me. "Therefore study with Laertes and take what benefit you may from it."

So from the time I could babble and my brother could reason, we spent hours in daily study. We read the Psalms and other verses from the Bible. I marvelled at the Book of John, with its terrible revelations of angels and beasts loosed at the end of time. I loved to read about Ancient Rome, and I was quicker than my brother to find the lessons in the fables of Aesop. Soon I could cipher as well as he. I also learned to bargain with Laertes, who disliked all study.

Sitra Ahra: Review

2010-10-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

Therion new album, released on the 17th of September 2010, had been one of those "I can't wait till it's out" albums for me. I had been awaiting this album release since the title was first announced on February of this year. Now that I finally have it in my hands, I can honestly say that I believe it to be one of Therion's best works yet.

For those of you unfamiliar to Therion, it is a Swedish symphonic metal band founded by Christofer Johnsson in 1987. Their name means "Beast" and it comes from the greek word therion (θηρίον). This appears in the Christian Book of Revelation. However, their name is really a homage to Celtic Frost's album "To Mega Therion". In their songs, they use choirs and classical musicians, not only as additions to but also as integral parts of the composition. Therion was the first metal band with fully live orchestra.

Therion takes its themes from different mythologies and is based on concepts that range from occultism, magic and ancient traditions and writings. Thomas Karlsson wrote the majority of Therion's lyrics. He is head and founder of the magical order Dragon Rouge, of which Johnsson is a member.

I must say I believe the best song in this album is Land of Canaan. I even lack the words to give a good, accurate review for it. Its a ten minute mini opera that throws everything at the listener. It has that spookycore intro, then it enters into classic euro progressive metal, then harmonica and acoustic guitars, and which then morphs into battle metal territory with some great flute playing thrown in! Then here comes that epic male choir. After that we get some accordian and soprano female vocals. Afterwards, yet another tempo change with harpsicord leading to traditional eastern european folk.
A melancholy breakdown then blends into a mid tempo drum rhythm with violins and cello's and another male chorus, then a happy upbeat almost pop bit with some humming vocals blended with more opera.
Needless to say, this is one of the best and most captivating songs I've heard in a while!

'After The Inquisition/Children Of The Stone' brings us to a calm and gentle finale.
The beautiful acoustic guitars lead into a pink Floyd/Moody Blues relaxing mood.
The choir sounds almost childlike, creating this mood of relaxation. One would want to listen to it while you lying on the bed, dreaming, discovering, taking your time in life.

Now, in terms of musicianship, structure, production and emotion this is perhaps the best album you will hear this year. This album is more than just music, it is a concept, it is a compilation of images and words in perfect harmony. It is a piece of art and works as a whole, a voyage to the past.

The Final Frontier: Review

2010-09-02T22:28:00.000-07:00

Iron Maiden has always been one of my favorite bands of all time. Every single album released by them has been a masterpiece to my ears and I had never been dissapointed in them... until now.

I (finally) heard their latest album, The Final Frontier, and thought of it as completely bizarre, and not in a good way. I'm not saying I am against change or progress in every artist's career, but this wasn't progress, this was trying too hard! This sounds like an album that was put together over a couple of weeks with the guys never collaborating at the same time. I felt like a young girl watching her hero die. I really hope this won't be their last album, I want Maiden to go out with a Bang! and not a Pfft!

Now, Let's go song by song:

1. Satellite-The Final Frontier- I find this track endlessly long. Unecessarily long. It starts off creating this mood as if preparing you for something awesome to come, but then goes on and on for 4:35 minutes. 4:35 minutes of rubbish! A little more than half the song (which runs 8:40 minutes) wasted on something completely useless. Oh and get this, they have to come to a complete stop for the actual song to begin! Why? Because there was no way to make it flow into the song. Seriously guys, if the intro does not flow with the song, do not use that! Fix it so it can go into the song, or better yet, omit it completely.

2. El Dorado- This one is decent, compared to the rest of the songs. The lyrics aren't too bad, but if only Bruce could reach those high notes that I loved so much! In my opinion, this is a song that can be salvaged from this album.

3. Mother of Mercy- This song sounds to me like a b-side from Matter of Life and Death. Seriously, another song about how war sucks and disillusionment? Spare me!

4. Coming Home- This track relates to Bruce’s recent interest in aviation, which personally, I could care less about and bores me. But as Maiden ballads go, this is worthy of a 6 in a scale of 1 to 10.

5. The Alchemist- Mhmmm this song makes me think of The Magician (Accident of Birth). Shortest song of this album, overall Ok, just Ok.

6. Isle of Avalon- Now, this song that I liked from this album. It starts off with a spooky sounding bass and guitar riff loaded with effect while Bruce whispers the first verse. Then, the song changes into a sort of proggressive rock sounding passages. Overall, I liked this song. I would rate it an 8. My only issue with this song is the fact that Bruce's voice is drowned out by the rest of the band.

7. Starblind- This song is a mess. It's a gangbang of shattering instrumental suicide. After minute 4:05, it sounds as if each member was just playing what they pleased. It's atrocious.

8. The Talisman- It starts off too boring. It does not make me want to keep listening. Then, when I start to think this song had the potential to be a kick ass song, Bruce screams his lungs out in a really annoying tone. It is very sad to notice Bruce's voice can’t reach the high notes anymore and therefore sometimes the singing sounds “forced”.

9. The Man Who Would Be King- If this song was at least twenty five percent shorter, it would be a hundred percent better, in my opinion. I like this song, I'm not going to lie, but I feel it would be a lot better if it was shorter.

10. When the Wild Wind Blows- Another song I feel would have been a lot, a lot better if it was shorter. Also, as he does in every album since Dance of the Death, this is the one track Steve Harris's uses to tell us why society is decaying. Spite of the length, this is an overall good song, and the guitar solos were amazing.

Even though this album starts out as tedious, I've realized it gets better with each listen. It's like a fine wine, you have to get accustomed to the taste to really appreciate it. See, really the thing with this album is the long, long songs. Epic songs (just like literature) have to be constantly changing throughout. Sadly, Maiden didn't do that with these. They were just the same thing over and over again.

Although, this album dissapointed me, I have to give it to Maiden for not giving in to please others like Metallica is doing. They're consistent on what they do and that's admirable taking in consideration the times we live in. Final Frontier was an Ok album, but let's be realistic for a minute here: We haven't been Iron Maiden fans throughout the years simply because their music is "Ok". So step it up in the next album, guys.

Trobar de Morte: Quick Review

2010-08-31T13:30:00.000-07:00

I was recently introduced to this band by my boyfriend-who is a complete music geek- and I wanted to share it with the few other people who may have not heard of this band yet:

See, when he first told me of this band, I was a little hesitant to listen to it. The cover art and song titles had me stuck in this belief that this band was simply another Nightwish style band. Just another overproduced and underpowered metal band. I received a surprise, when I noticed that this band was more about powerful folk music than glossy gothy rubbish.

Lady Morte brings bells, flutes and tambourines, while Arianne backs her in vocals and percussion. There is also Armand on bass and drums, and Lenna on guitar. Trobar de Morte also has a couple of guest musicians such as Jose Luis Frias and Fernando Cascales. Frias with his whistles and duddlesacks, Cascales on violin. The diversity in this acoustic instruments adds an effect that would be sadly lacked if TdM was heavily based on the usual instruments, such as electric guitar and keyboards, that most gothy bands use.

This band has become an instant favorite. Also, I definitely recommend this band to fans of Ataraxia or Artesia.