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Field notes: an ocean of fault lines

1. Everything is golden.

2. And I’m running, an running late, through the work carpark barefoot thinking about last night, sitting under the kitchen table with a boy

3. And how I was dressed as a woman who said, “The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”
because I think I want my life to look something like that.

4. On the walk home there was a girl who fell of her bike and had a head injury. I held her hand and her head, and said small silent prayers till the ambulance came
and it was the most useful I’ve felt in a long time.

5. A homeless man pulled out a small foil package to give the injured girl his thermal blanket.
I know I want my life to look like that.

6. ‘Give it away.’ It’s been three nights since I’ve slept in my own bed, and the girl who gives up half of hers made me a chain of stars and talked about holding things with unclenched fists.

7. I’ve been thinking something about how sometimes we aren’t sure how useful our love is, but I think we were made to love wildly and boldly, without exception, or understanding. Without knowing if it will ever change anything broken,
we are made to love for the sake of love
because if nothing else it changes us.

8. Love is the only thing that causes surrender

9. I feel surrendered in a time and place where I least can make sense of it

10. And how last night a nice boy wrapped his scarf around me and I have started to wonder if nothing is a mistake and everything is intricately woven into a universe of unseen colour that speaks the truth, and unfolds moment by moment to lead us home in spite of all our fault lines.

“I’m afraid I’m going to turn out bad.”

Stand in front of me and tell me all the worst things about you 
And tell me how they matter
And I’ll tell you that your wrong

Bear with me.

I haven’t been able to. Sleep
And when I have, I’m seeing the things I avoid when I’m awake

And I’ve been thinking about home, and the places I feel inside of me, and how I carried people there too and how I don’t know how to make sense of that.

I don’t understand how things can look so different from where we now sit.

I’ve been wondering if there are some things we will never understand,
If we can change our history,
If mistakes are mistakes.
Or just takes on the road to the last cut.

I’ve been wondering if my questions sound sincere.

I wanted to know what I meant to you, as though it somehow changed what I mean in general.
We have forgotten that who we are can not be grasped by another,
and it certainly is not made by one.

We have made ourselves small for small things and our hearts are still beating out of time.

I’ve been wondering if we will ever learn to listen.

A man who doesn’t know me told me I don’t talk much, a boy who does, but only a little, told me everything I say goes at least five seconds too long,
the boy that doesn’t answer questions told me he doesn’t mind.
He snaps his fingers when he sees the heavy look on my face and it makes it all go away. I’ve never known that safety, it feels like being known, and so I listen to him.

I’ve been giving God chances, asking him to prove me wrong, or the small part somewhere in my heart, right. I’ve been dropping old habits and waiting on inklings, that things are not how they are meant to be, but the lines drawn feel temporary.

I don’t think God works with ultimatums.
I think gods waiting for me to prove him right.
Because he had a good plan and I think he knows I know. But there are things I don’t know, that ill never see when holding on.

And so I will go, not knowing where,
and I’ll sleep in peace because home is the journey
and ill hope to see none of us missing one day,
because we aren’t running late, we just aren’t there yet.

31.12.12

Write,
Write holy and unwordable things
Wholly unwordable things,
Write as if you will die tomorrow, as if you died today and found your heart alive.
As if your words will be remembered and heard. Write from a heart that is broken and in love and whole.
Write as if you know you are still beautiful.

Write like you will wait forever,
for something you may never find
And it will still feel more real than settling for what you would be unwilling to wait for.
Write the mountains, the love of your brothers, and the beautiful ones that hold your heart. Write the stars.

Letters from the old world.

He said some people don’t want to come home.

But i’ve been asking what happens,
if we just don’t know how.

I remember saying to you that I thought we were filled with more holes than other people
because we were going to need to live aware of our dependence on God,to be brave enough for big plans.

You said you thought it was true.

In words that crossed the sea she said she knows she should believe something like that, but it just doesn’t feel relevant. And I know that, because at some point we all started wondering if we aren’t welcome home.

The years have changed us, and the holes are getting bigger, and our hands seem weaker, and the questions stretch further, and we’ve had ocean between us for over 800 days and separately we’ve been sinking.

But I’ve been stuck on the songs that save.

There are hearts I want to avoid, in my head I’m running scared.
There are those I want to sink all my fingers into, to try and share some kind of safety when the questions can’t be answered.
They are usually possessed by the same people.

Some people share the same space, sometimes there are seas of space between us,
it doesn’t change that some people share the same heart.

I want to run away and punch things.

I want to run away
and punch things
and stop feeling like such a child,
and never have to grow up. or stop caring far too much and not be so scared of everything always.

I want to be smoking behind the buildings at church with you a year and seven months ago, and laugh at trouble and believe it doesn’t matter and I want to never have picked up a cigarette.

I want to cry and heave and drag out everything sad from the last 874 days and set it on fire, and watch it burn

then run into the ocean, fully clothed, shed my skin amongst the waves
And when they crash over my head feel a clean break from every bad thing I’ve ever done.

When I walk home, alone, I want to leave my mountains of nostalgia in the sea.

Things they didn’t tell us . Part I

There are things they didn’t tell us,
things they didn’t know
and maybe they didn’t know them to be true
but we know.

There are things you can not sink your fingers into no matter how tight you hold.

And apologies are like swallowing dirt
Because the breadth of the thought of how far they should extend is weighing you down

I thought we would be there by now.

So I wore your shirt for twenty three days hoping I’d always remember what you smelled like,
and waking four days in to the scent of forgetting, I held on like it would change something.
But I can’t change something

I wish your hands were quieter.

Wish the sound of our crying was loud enough to be honest,
and that honest was more than an excuse now,

Like the sound of our laughter before it came without the creases in the corners of our eyes…

“You ask for too much,”
“You’ve told me too much”

I think sometimes our vulnerability reminds people of their own weakness
And I think sometimes they hate us for it.

I think sometimes my vulnerability reminds you of your own
weakness
And I think sometimes you hate me for it.

“I don’t want to be like everyone else,”
I am telling you,
And I thought you were an answer to that
as though it were ever a question.

You weren’t like everyone else.

Whatever the antonym of safety is, that’s what good bye feels like.
And apologies,
i’ve got mountains of them.
But there are things you didn’t tell me

You didn’t tell me I wasn’t like everybody else
You didn’t tell me we would never be smarter than our innocence.

The same heart (if you understand, you understand.)

1.
There was a man on tv, from the other side of the world; rambling incomprehensible poetry of gratitude because people had stood up and thanked him for the universe he had dragged out of himself, from the holes they couldn’t see beneath his shirt.

I don’t remember his name,
or what his film was about.
But his words were not right,
his sentences unspaced, unfinished.

And I said “I like him”
At the same moment someone else said “oh…say something that makes sense!”

2.
My brother once said, “if they understood they’d understand.”
I think it was the simplest and most complicated thing I’d ever heard. It sounded like an answer.

3.
‘Some people share the same space, and others share the same heart.’

My heart was arrested by words on a page about a hundred things, they reached right past every dismissive wall, back to words about connection “there’s no good answer, it’s like magnets…”

4.
We move back and forth, forcefully, an immovable tide,
we can not escape it, we can not go with it.
We are the moon, anchored in an ocean of sky, drawing in as many as we violently repel, without reason or control.
We are bound, against our will, and only by it.

5.
Surrender.
It is bittersweet.

6.
Disappointment, it’s just bitter.

7.
We are magnets drawn together against understanding,
we are the hands compelled to push the opposing sides of magnets together
in futility.
We are magnets flipping back against the hands and holding tightly together on opposing sides.

8.
I am still waiting for things to make sense.
My brother also once said that saying people don’t understand is the easiest excuse. I’m tired of excuses.