Frenzied Free-write

Start time 6:05 pm. Song: Trouble With Dreams by Eels. Mood: Anxious

A dusty, desolate road stretches out its long spine before me, daring me to trace it's vertebrae. I put one foot in front of the other, walking the line that forbids me pass. My steps are slow and unsteady. The sun is unkind today. It sears my skin with stripes that draw blood. I walk as if I am bound, and my hands are not free to catch me when I fall. 

I gather my courage and look ahead at the road swallowed by the horizon to the point I've been trying to reach in vain. I don't know when I'll reach it, but I look on anyway. I implore the sun and make him mine. I even ask for a little water from his stores, the ones he keeps up there. 

Instead, he sends me a well, promising and cool. He bids me drink deeply, store some up for the journey before me. He loosens my feet and tacks wings to my shoulder-blades. They are small but sufficient. Their names are "doubt not" and "fear not".  

End time: 6:14 pm. Song: Climbing to the Moon [Jon Brion Remix] by Eels Mood: Still anxious. 

Caution

"Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow."

"This might hurt a little, but it's necessary. It would hurt a whole lot more later if we didn't do this now."

"Can't you just do it quick, like a band-aid?"

"You know that never works, it just stings afterwards."

"So you're going to do it slowly?"

"It may be the only way."

"Then it will just hurt in increments."

"Good."

I pull away.

"Whoa, whoa. We are not putting a band-aid over this and calling it good. You are going to hate life later. I can't pick up those pieces. You have to be smart about this."

"I will be."

"You're not being smart now."

"Because I'm confused."

"..."

"You're making your point. Nothing has happened yet. The likelihood of this going any further is pretty low."

"Not from where I'm sitting, and I have great night vision."

"Speaking of night,  I should go to bed."

"You should, but that doesn't mean you'll be getting off that easily."

"I know. What's the lesson for today? Just say it already."

"Caution."

This Is Just to Say

I have regrets

already for 

hurting us both

before anything has 

begun.

Forgive me.

It pierces my 

soul to 

pierce yours.

Assuming

"This is a little strange."

"What is?"

"This art imitating life imitating art imitating life imitating art..."

"I get it."

"I'm not sure how I feel about this."

"You should just start writing the life you want and maybe it will happen the way you want."

"Hmm, maybe; but I don't know if what I want is really what's best for me."

"Look at you."

"I wouldn't mind if it happened though."

"You'd better watch yourself." 

"That's what you're for."

"So what, are you just assuming I'm going to keep you straight?"

"Pretty much. Yeah." 

"Maybe you shouldn't assume so much."

Patience

"Archimedes? I'm calling you for real this time."

"Your timing is most inconvenient, I was about to go out for the night, since you commanded my attention last night."

"Please?"

He can't turn away from the despair in my pleading. 

"Okay. Qu'est-ce qui se passe?"

"Am I really that tired that I'm thinking in French?"

"Apparently, but it probably wouldn't be a good idea to hold this conversation in another language."

"I agree."

Sincere for once, he snuggles into his feathers and focuses his gaze on me, "You wish you'd never had that conversation, don't you?"

"It was helpful in the beginning, but then it started to take a bad turn. She just didn't understand."

"But you did learn something, didn't you? "

"Yes, I learned that I still have trust issues? He promised me and I didn't trust."

"That was even deeper than what I was going for. Good girl."

"I learned that I don't have to change, that I can be myself."

"You just wish you could be yourself with the right sort of people."

I can only sigh, and look away. 

"Enter trust and faith. You should try keeping them in your pocket, or wearing them on your wrist. Then we might be able to get over these conversations."

"I just wish..."

"You wish what?"

"I feel like there are two halves of myself, equally important but there isn't a person for both of them. It's one or the other. I have to give up one for the other."

"And you don't want to give up either?"

"No, but there is only one I would absolutely never give up, but I can't imagine He would ask me to give up the other half for one."

"He hasn't. Remember?"

"Yes. But I worry that if I give up one, I'll repeat history and hurt someone. I refuse to hurt someone the way I've watched others be hurt."

"You would rather be alone than hurt someone else?"

"Absolutely. I won't do that. I respect him too much."

"Who?"

For a second, I don't recognize that he'd asked me a question, "You know."

"No I don't."

"You just want to hear me say it."

"I'll spare you. This is what I'm hearing from you: You don't want to give up your other half and risk hurting someone else the way others you love have been hurt. Even if you do have a perfect option, you love and respect too much to put anyone at risk. You're scared of what might happen. So instead, you're going to spend the rest of your life wandering the world trying to find alternate methods of fulfilling your divine talent of caregiving. You'll never be complete if you keep two halves and you'll never be complete if you don't."

His hearing is so good, he heard the things I didn't even say. Still, I can only look away. 

He flies to my shoulder and gently grips my skin, "I'm going to add to the usual prescription."

"Which is?"

"Trust..."

"Oh yeah. What are we adding?"

"Patience."

Trusting

"Back again so soon?"

"I still maintain that you come to me, not the other way around."

"You just keep tellin' yourself that. Maybe one of these days it will come true."

"Did you just apostrophize a word?"

"No"

"Yes you did. You need to get out of the city, or at least spend your free time in better company. Let's not contribute to the degradation of the English language."

"It's dialect. It's why you just had to change the spelling of 'degradation' from 'degredation'." He suddenly beats his wings in frustration. "Don't change the subject. I'm here on business."

I groan. Being around Archimedes seems to elicit this sort of response. "Okay, what are discussing today."

"Your latest."

"My latest what? Meal? Adventure? Mistake?"

"Mistake? Is that what it is?"

"I didn't say that."

"So, tell me about this dream you had."

"Oh, my latest dream?"

"Or something like that."

"I don't get it."

"I want to you to tell me about your dream."

"No, I get that. I don't get my dream."

"Neither do I. Maybe you should ask Him about it."

"If you don't get it, why did you bring it up?"

"Do you really have to ask that after our last conversation?"

As much as these conversations make me want to poke my eyes out with pencils, they work. I get it, "You were just reminding me."

"You're getting good at this."

"Yeah, well..."

"Go on, you can say it." He puffs out his chest, tawny feathers disturbed.

"Say what?"

"If you don't know, then I'm not going to tell you."

"Well that's mature."

"What I mean is: If you don't know, you're not as good as I thought."

"You mean you wanted me to say what a great teacher you are?"

"There you go."

"You know you're just a figment of my imagination."

"Shhh... don't say it." 

"Just because I don't say it doesn't mean it isn't true."

He starts bobbing his head, getting a better grasp on his branch. 

"Getting restless," I ask.

"Fancy a stroll?"

"No." 

"You don't mince words do you?"

"Right to the point. You still haven't told me why you're here."

"You tell me."

I give him a stare somewhere between annoyed and intensely bored. This is getting old fast, I think.

"This time it's different."

"From the last time? How so?"

"I'm more the person I am when I'm with myself."

"The person you never show anyone?"

"Yep. It's not like I thought it would be."

"How did you think it would be?"

"Like certain dark things..."

"Ohhh...You're learning all sorts of new things aren't you?"

"It's like someone poured me full of stars and new galaxies being born."

"..."

"Oh my..."

"Do you realize what you just said?"

"Yes."

"Keep going."

"It's like one long sunrise, where the whole earth is waking up continually within me to a beautiful new day. It's soft and sweet and vulnerable. Have you ever been on the beach and found a starfish and poked it to watch it curl up?"

"I generally stay away from the beach."

"It's like that."

"That's a really awkward analogy, don't you think?"

"I didn't say this would inspire any sort of brilliancy on my part. That's what happens when you're filled with champagne."

He looks at me as if to say, Really?

"Ugh, not literally, you know that. What I mean is that I feel like someone filled me with fizzy water and pop-rocks and put springs on my feet and jumping beans in my stomach."

"You're disgusting." 

"Hey!!" 

"Where's your rhapsodizing?" 

I take a deep breath, "Let's start from the beginning."

"Good idea."

"It's like someone poured me full of brightly burning, luminescent stars that shoot off their silver shine; and that whole galaxies with their fiery, vivid hues are being born inside of me. It's like a Chinese New Year celebration of fireworks dancing and twirling in some haphazardly choreographed finale. It's like being set out on the ocean with nothing to carry you but the waves and not even caring. It's like clay that's been hard and brittle for so long becoming soft again, ready to be reshaped. It's like finding yourself on the edge of a parapet, ready to jump, trusting that someone will be at the bottom to catch you."

"Trusting, eh?"

"We'll leave that for another day."

Floating Intellect: Becket--the Internal Dialogue

People buzzed around him, bees with low zees for whispers; the chronic, monotonous noise swarmed his ear, with singular words breaking free of the white noise, a radio coming in and out of tune--he jumped away from these words with a mental gesture akin to a paranoid tick. He tried with increased effort to focus on his doodle, an ink-homage to Escher: simple, dark black lines arranged complexly, so that nothing ever seemed to begin or end, a labyrinth in lines. Someone laughed, but he swatted it away without raising an eyebrow. He looked up from his sketch momentarily: desks cherry, carpet blue, chalkboard slate. His nostrils flared once, detecting vestiges of a former chalk-cloud in the air, pomegranates--someone was wearing a little too much perfume today--the perpetual smell of new paint, even though this building hadn't been repainted in years. His curiosity was a fugacious flaneur, and he bowed his head once again over the masterpiece on the 8 1/2 x 11 canvas, pale veins pulsing underneath cuts of black. 

Before his stylus touched the illumination, a wildfire rushed in through the door--a drastically fantastic natural disaster so searing it made him sweat, streaked his face with dirt, and flushed his cheeks. The bees donned heavy fire-proof reflective clothing and moved in on her as she sat down one seat in front and one row to the left of him. She turned around in her seat while the bees poured water on her chocolate-brown curls until she steamed. 

"What did you think of the sonnets," she inquired of one of the bees. 

"What d'ya mean 'What did I think'? They're Shakespeare. I liked them."

"How magniloquent of you. I mean, what did you think of the ones she assigned?"

"Oh, they're all the same, aren't they? Genius."

She cocked an eyebrow, and he could see a fire still scorching vacation homes and national forests and park-service stations in her eyes. 

The pig-tailed girl turned to him, licking a popsicle, "Don't you agree, Becket?"

He heard his name as if underwater, but fire was flicking on her tongue. 

" But Sonnet 116? As if we hadn't read and heard it into nimiety thanks to Sense and Sensibility. If he's such a genius, why don't we ever hear about the all the other sonnets?"

"That one is my favorite!" 

He suddenly felt a heat wave as she turned towards him, freezing his spine into one long icicle. This time, the capsized ships remained motionless above the tempest; but her honeycomb lips twitched amusedly, swathed in nectar. The bees started buzzing again, but no one was speaking. 

Bemusedly, "Is it really, or have you just never read anything else?"

The girl twisted her pig-tails around her finger, "What about, um, the...the 'my mistress' eyes...'?"

"Sonnet 130. My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun? The one where he rhapsodizes about how unattractive his mistress is? All he's saying is 'You're ugly, but I love you anyway!'"

Suddenly, doves start flying from his mouth, "I think what he means is that she can't compare to any of those things--the sun, coral, and snow. She can't compare to angels or goddesses. He loves her when such comparisons fail, regardless that such comparisons fail because she is not beautiful. He loves her despite, even because of, her imperfections."

He feared the acerbic honey of her words, but the incisive dagger of her sarcasm stabbed his gut, "On whose side are you, Becket?"

In defense, he threw himself to the pavement and licked the dirt off her feet with an iron tongue, "If you're so familiar with Shakespeare then, which is your favorite?"

She flared with the new fan of oxygen, confidently, with shoulders to rival the Winged Nike, "Sonnet 65," she said with soft, milky words. 

He raised one eyebrow with shocking skill, a reflex he couldn't help suppressing.

"Ooo," the girl chewed on her popsicle stick, cheeks sticky-pink, "which one is that?"

Her back the arch of a waning moon, her eyes sparklers in the hands of children on the Fourth of July--small vivid sparks of joy and excitement--the fire now a glowing hearth around which he could have raised a family, soft and warm. Lips of cream, breath of cinnamon and nutmeg, chocolate words--she recited: 

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,

But sand mortality o'er-sways their power,

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out

Against the wreckful siege of battering days,

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

O fearful meditation! where, alack,

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O, none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

In her taffeta-and-silk gown, pearls in her hair, signet ring in hand, the velvety curtain descended on her bowed head. The crowd applauded, shouting for an encore, but she took no bows; she made no curtain-call. She turned around in her seat, dress and all. 

Yet the crowd wanted more, they wanted closure. "What does it mean," they inquired.

She doesn't give interviews, the night is late, and she wants to go home; but they love her, they cry. They want to know more. Make-up gone, hair devoid of pearls, now soft curls, she comes out in her robe, "It's about the ravages of time on love and life and how the author attempts to overcome mortality with his immortal writings. For this poet, disturbed by the deeds of Time, the written word was the only thing that could resist and even defeat time. " Then she closed her prayer book, rose from her knees, and left the cathedral with reverence.