Dear Little Brother

This is just to say that:

when I'm talking to you on the phone and your voice cracks,

when we drove across country and you lost seven staring-contests 

in a row

when I visit every three months and you've got another inch on me,

when I can hear you in the background laughing

so hard you can't stop

when you could finally take my punches like a man

when I know, nothing fearing, faith never failing, that you'll do

the right thing

when I remember back to when I was twelve and you were eight 

when I have to remind myself it's seven years later

and you're only getting better...

I do, and did, and will look up to you. 

No matter how tall you get,

no matter how many years my junior 

you remain,

no matter how many girls you date,

or hearts you break,

no matter how often I'll give you advice because

that's what older siblings do,

no matter how immature you get...

I do, and did, and will look up to you:

I do, and did, and will always

love you. 

streaming semi-consciousness

The branches outside my window sit still for the first time in days, mocking with their contentment outside the tempest rising within. I ache with emotional exhaustion and a persistent crink in my neck. The darkness folds its curtains around me while I stare away my soul into a screen. I feel like fleeing through my window and across the masquerading mountains over cornfields and wide rivers to where winter has already come. I want to hide in a valley between overpowering rocks ascending towards heaven and the lake whose end can't be seen from the shore. I want to feel the sky unencumbered by the earthly trees that presently prevent my view. I want to feel the cold that apologizes for being so by jeweling my whole self and surroundings with crystals and creates a quiet security as it muffles the sounds of the world. 

I want to see stars. 

A moon who hasn't been replaced by stadium lights or crowded out by buildings. 

I want to see the splendor of the sun in it's descent, not just feel the gradual extinguishing of it's light. I want to see it pastel the clouds and set fire to the water, to see it retire to deep blue instead of abdicating, exiled by the dark. 

What I wouldn't give to see a cloud! What I wouldn't give to see it parade phantasmagorically across an azure stage so nonchalantly, so unassuming, passing it's silhouette over the unfortunate mortal. Oh if I could just lie on grass with the earth working for and supporting rather than working against me. If only the ground would calm itself long enough to let me lie on my back, for I cannot yet stand on my feet. I want to earth to hold me while I observe the heavens, not hurt me. 

Hide me while I wait for the apocalypse, won't you? If you can't bear me before heaven, at least bear me a little before hell. Sink me deep into your soil in one swift swallow. Plant me where the roots of trees may plant themselves, wrapping great fibers around my arms and legs, piercing through my side. If you keep me, I will keep you. Until together we will be burned in the great purging of our impurities by flagellanting blaze. 

If you will not keep me, I will wander until someone does. Here a stone or brook or borough, until somewhere will hide me forever. 

If, of course, that sky is beyond me. Those stars and moon and sun. Or else I am confusing darkness, outside the once-sought sky. In the end I see that somewhere I have breached the contract between the sky, the earth, and me. 

If it isn't bitter, it was never sweet

I 

could

erase

it 

all.

let it wash away

as rain 

f

a

l

l

s

and

let it fade to gray

Watch it become nothing

before  eyes.

my

This fake real life I 

REALIZE

too much

inside.

But

I won't hide.

For if I must, I'll take the 

pain

 to remind me now

 like a   sweet 

Refrain

 

of those things.

Once again.

Prepping for a paper

Step 1: Arrange study area in living room. Look at text on which I am supposed to be writing and type some garbage.  

Step 2: Talk to roommate. 

Step 3: Decide it is time for dinner. Make dinner. Eat dinner while typing some more garbage.

Step 4: Realize you have to get ready for an evening lecture. Get ready. 

Step 5: Go to lecture, which takes longer than the time alloted for it.

Step 6: Return from lecture and decide to make pumpkin spice bread. 

Step 7: Realize you have no nutmeg, so go downstairs, outside, to the other apartment complex, and rummage through your friend's spices before realizing she doesn't have any either.

Step 8: Go outside, to your apartment complex, upstairs and back to your own apartment. 

Step 9: Decide to turn the pumpkin spice bread into pumpkin spice muffins.

Step 10: Hold a makeshift Family Home Evening in which you are the sole family member. Have two songs just for kicks, a prayer, a scripture, and listen to two Conference talks. Do all this while arranging a canopy over your bed with the window curtain that is too short for the window. 

Step 11: Show everyone said canopy.

Step 12: Eat pumpkin spice muffin while watching a little television.

Step 13: Commit to writing your paper.

Step 14: Hear roommate come back and go to catch up on her stories. 

Step 15: Commit to writing paper. 

Step 16: After you eat another muffin.

Step 17: Get on YouTube and listen/watch Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl" to get pumped up for writing your paper.

Step 18: Repeat step 17.

Step 19: Work on outline for paper while listening to "Viva la Vida: Or Death and All His Friends" 

Step 20: Work on outline until "Viva la Vida" stops playing (because you've worked through the entire album) and mess around trying to find appropriate music on YouTube.

Step 21: Finally finish outline and decide that you need to get pumped up again.

Stept 22: Go through various music videos searching for the perfect pep song.

Step 23: Decide you need to get up and move to keep awake.

Step 24: Decide you need to get up and go to the bathroom in order to feel comfortable writing your paper.

Step 25: Decide you need to make peanut butter toast with orange juice in order to get the serotonin flowing to write your paper.

Step 26: Decide to watch something to help you wake up while you eat your peanut-butter toast. 

Step 27: Change your mind and listen to Demetri Martin jokes while writing this blog about how many steps it took before you actually started typing your paper. 

Step 28: Realize that you must drink your orange juice in order for you to be able to properly absorb your adderall when you take it at 8:30, four hours from now. 

Step 29: Realize that you should have started writing the paper BEFORE the adderall wore off, to reduce the number of steps. 

Step 30: Write paper.

*Some steps have been omitted in the interest of time. 

Wristcutter: A love story

It always begins and ends the same way: innocent intentions turned to pulchritudinous pain. Tortuous, sadistic pain. It is my addiction. I am addicted to the pain I inflict upon myself like a cutter is addicted to the blade against his skin, to the scarlet streaks that form across the flesh and to the puckered scars.

And I've given myself a lot of them: scars. But my blade of choice isn't made of metal.

It's made of emotion. 

 

Slash.

The shallow feelings that fill my bathetic sentiments with puffed air.

Slash.

Erratic, diametrical irrationality nascent from obsession.

Slash.

No sooner have the latest scars turned from pink to white than I streak them red, agitated again. 

Slash.Slash.Slash.

It feels so good: to hurt so much.

Before all those scars, now hidden behind sleeves of silence or verbally veiled according to my own semasiology. Before all this: a beautiful lamb without blemish, without scars. Now ravaged and torn by the wolves I costumed in sheep's clothing--no longer suitable for sacrifice.

SLASH.

Floating Intellect: Prescott

His slow approach from the far end of the library towards the great table at the center was slow and quiet. His steps were deliberate and calculated, moving with a steadiness of foot attributed to his strength and agility; his sculpted, sinewy muscles working simultaneously in an even stride, his self-awareness and control keen enough to contain the impact, weight and reverberations of his steps. His breaths drew long and deep and slow while his arms maintained an uncharacteristic stillness, intending to leave the air as undisturbed by his approach as he could manage. He could not see the object of his destination, correctly imagining his object veiled from view by stacks of books and papers and notebooks piled in dangerous but artfully-neat towers, each one undoubtedly and laboriously arranged according to some complex and overly-intellectualized system. The effect of the stout table dominated by the evidences of an in-depth research grew continuously imposing as he neared the object of his thoughts. Soon he was close enough to catch the first glimpses of his motive. Upon discovering her asleep amidst a wave of papers and books, he moved from around the back of the table to the corner to her left. He rested his left hand gently on the edge of the table, unconsciously desiring to feel the beat of the breath transmitted through the thick wood, but at the same time, not wanting to disturb her.

She looked like an angel lost on earth. Her face, turned away from him with her left cheek using her open Shakespeare anthology as a pillow, was almost entirely hidden by the voluminous cloud of dark chocolate-brown curls forming a nimbus around her oval face, a spray of stray curls-- appearing star-strewn underneath the glow of fluorescent lights--shaded her olive cheek and mingled with the shadows of her long, thick eyelashes. A few flighty curls shuddered whimsically to her even shallow breaths, like curtains fluttering about to the breeze at an open window. Her eyelashes skimmed her cheek under the subtle movements of a dream, estranging the shadows across her skin. In spite of the estrangement by the activity of her lashes, like that of earth from the sun as the result of shading branches, she appeared otherwise peaceful, her dream perhaps a recollection of her pre-earthly angelic experience. The only disturbance, the only evidence of earth, the only stain to the situation came from the pen she held to an open notebook, trapped mercilessly beneath her right hand as it violated the paper to which it was held with a suspiciously-strong grip, one that might only be attributed to the coherent, but heavy enough to witness to her slumbering state. It's ink, which had begun as an obedient line in the formation of a "t," had budded to a blot and blossomed to a three-centimeter-diametered bloom under the pressure, no doubt having sprung a leak from some joint in its plastic construction.

He moved at first to remove the paper of its burden, intending to free the pen of its struggle and thereby rescue the entire notebook from destruction and relieving the hand from excessive stress; but he only left his hand to hover over hers for a moment, examining with some contentment the still-life of his hand so close to hers. Conscientious that such a movement of her hand, or even an attempt to extract the pen from her grip, would surely wake her; he moved his hand with a thought to shoo the petal-soft curls from her face, but stayed his hand again upon feeling the warmth radiating from her unusually-pale cheek, the heat normally signified by a fire-pink glow laying hidden beneath her silken olive skin. An unsteadily-sharp and deep breath and a flicker of lashes punctured his reverie and yielded him from any contact. He wanted to detain her restoration to earth.

His observations, comprehensive as they were, comprised but a small moment-the passing of a few seconds, during which his attentions were accompanied by a fulness of thoughts and visions like this angel had brought him prematurely to the judgement bar at which trial she made the sum of all his experiences, the measure of his creation, the fulfillment of his purpose.

On Principle, Not Party

My conservative family's favorite pastime? Criticize Obama. 

I go by principle, not by party. Despite my socialist-slant to the left, I do not personally support Obama. And yet I find myself being constantly attacked by my radically conservative family. It's no help that my father subscribes to Ann Coulter's newsletter (which to me is the equivalent of reading satanically-stained apostate texts) or that my brother is borderline fascist. 

Yesterday, as if trying to convince me that Obama is Satan incarnate, despite my repeated affirmations that I DO NOT support him, my mother recounted a story of a recent heckling at an Obama rally. During Obama's speech, someone stood up and commented that the meeting had not begun with the Pledge of Allegiance. The person accusingly demanded to know why Obama had not begun his rally with the Pledge. Obama stopped his speech and asked the man to lead them in the Pledge, which he did, before continuing on. 

I knew my mother would twist this to an Obama-hates-America spiel. But as she told me the story, I couldn't help but get a picture in my mind of a similar incident. Every so often, someone in church forgets to start a meeting with a prayer and someone will stop the meeting and make everyone bow their heads before moving on. 

Ann Coulter may write books about Democrats who make health care and energy-alternatives their god in her book Godless, but as I listened to this story, I couldn't help but think: Republicans have made America their god, and the Pledge of Allegiance their prayer.