Duplicate #32527962745813041724

And what different am I from the others who have written about the leaves jingling like bells? And why is that so wrong? because of this force pushing us into what we ought to be? a damned species made to die, and to fear it throughout our lives, of listening to the leaves and sight-seeing in Nashville, and then passing on that dying life to other little humans?

Then what makes a species, Eve? And what is so wrong about being the same when you have the ability- and choice- to  be happy, though it feels as if you don't? Then you searched and searched at the different, yet similar faces, and looked hopelessly into your hands, and then you saw it- your fingerprint- different from them all, unique and authentic. Then Kitty read your palm, her breath smelling like sour cinnamon. And you looked at the sunset, dark blue and orange, and you said to the sky, "For me?"

Rest

My roommate heads to the bathroom and the bright, setting sun beams on the bundle of clothes she's about to pack. A Chinese translation of Sophie's World is on her desk, an English translation on mine. Coincidence. The threads of her black wool sweater flicker under the air condition.

Everything is still, as if every job in the world is done. The world claps its hands, says "okay", and puts its hands on its waists, looking around at its completion. Nana Sinam's curtain is pulled over the edge of my bed and the sun shines through as if it is her soul. I can hear Jesus saying, "It is finished."

I could see flecks of dust conjoining and I remember hoping to have a part of me linger after death. And maybe bits of my skin and nails will flicker in the air, and the sunlight will expose the dust like a ghost at night. It will be like cutting up pieces of paper and calling it confetti, cutting our long hair and calling it donation. But it feels more like burning a rose and calling it ashes.

We will put one foot in the water and the other on the pebbles, one in Virginia and the other in Maryland. And we'll be like gods, in multiple places within the same second. And we'll finally be those objects, the ambiguous rock and the lunch box, the pearl, and the crunchy leaf. We'll finally know how it feels to be a carpet. We'll remain like a strand of hair dangling on your shirt, annoying your arm.

I tell him to tell me things, that the snow sleeps calmly up north, that there are miraculous oddities with certain animals. I sleep with the phone in my warm hand and await the feeling of Christmas morning in September.

September in 2012

I always liked looking at things rather than living them. I remember when I was a child, I thought there was some royalty to stairs, that dresses would dangle and brush against each step, slowly and teasingly. When we finally moved into a two-story home, I went up each stair carefully with my elephant slippers, but I was forcing out a feeling that did not exist, trying to feel what walking-up-and-down-stairs must feel like. I want to take pictures of the homes I see on the brown line and the stairs that lead to the balconies. But I don't want to walk on them. I want to glide past each building and see snippets of lives through windows all in mere seconds. I don't want to be at a party on the roof; I want to see it, to see all the different lives that are in one life, one planet, a person with a million problems handing a bouquet of flowers to another person with a million problems. I want to stand on a ladder and paint my apartment light blue and red and to watch the sunset and the cross out in the distance and hear the "eeeeeeee" in the wheels passing by behind me, blowing my hair. My shirt lifts, too, and they can see my belly button.

Bird outside the kitchen

The birds come to our bird house every day. Specks of seeds bounce against the window and sound like thick hornets crashing into glass. If I could be an animal, I'd be a finch. My mother brings the hot pita bread she has heated over the flame and places it over a paper towel. We dip the pieces into Lebanese yogurt and smile as we eat, watching the birds come and go, some fighting to make room on the bird house.

I tell her how it never gets old to watch them eat, always so frantic, looking up, down, through the window. She smiles silently and then looks down with a bigger smile, dipping her bread.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing," she says. "It's just sometimes I think that my dad sends these birds to check up on me.....and make sure everything is okay. I like to think that he comes in this form to see me."

The Garden

She was quiet and thoughtful. She took out a shovel and uprooted each heavy plant while pushing the shovel down with her flip flops. The sandals bent and dented into the shape of her sole and I told her to wear safer shoes. She was silent and shook her head with a smile.

After scooping and pulling and sometimes being hindered by rocks underground, she managed to uproot the heavy plant. I saw hundreds of roots being revealed in a dirty white and they tore and stretched like an old ship tilting and breaking, sinking slowly and heavily in the water. There are roots to everything even when things become bland and desensitizing, a habit we ritually do. There are roots in me.

She tells me she wants to plant the small bulb I manage to pluck out so that she'll remember me. And I just imagine being dead by next spring, blooming as a reminder to my family.

The bulbs look like onions. Once you slice and kill the fruit, you can throw its remains back into the soil and it'll resurrect. Keep the spark alive. Pass the baton. We are living because of what is now dead.

My body weakens when I encounter cigarettes. When I recover and smell the cigarette smoke of others, my body will know to defend itself; it is now stronger. And when I let someone hurt me, I begin to learn that I deserve better. I am now stronger. My body learns its lesson and so do I.

But life is not metaphor. We will not resurrect. We will merely be compost, a fertilizer. "Hey, it's your turn now," we'll say to the unborn. And we'll pass the baton to them.

It's raining

As I watch the different colors of the sky each day and how the water can be still, but in different ways, I feel God.
It rains in different places, and it rains in my backyard as my grandmother calls from the city and witnesses a dry and cloudy day. But there will be a time for sun and a time for her to hear the rain. God will give without grudge and reveal himself in a parting of a veil, in a bird outside your window, in the rumble of city buses on a fragile concrete ground. And though the good ones don't call out, Jesus, or Babi, he is there. He has always been there.

We will resurrect; I feel it. Like flowers we are, like the raging yet still waters we are, like the flickering leaves that bloom and fall we are. And as I stare into the earth, I see God, so happy, and so lovely, smiling widely like my dad with his eyes squinted shut and teeth glowing in the sun.

Waltz to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

We are all insane, and the only thing keeping us sane is our insanity.

Brother, if I feel these pangs of life so rootedly, so do you. If my mind swerves into madness, so does yours.

It amazes me that out of the same person, the same body, the same mind, I have become different persons. Just like spinning a round fish bowl and witnessing the stability of the water and plants- not moving, though the world, the walls, the glass is spinning. And when the earth spins on axis, when the rock at the park (and the seagull on that rock) remain stagnant when the sun rises, the water trickles and the clouds pull like threads of yarn and the leaves flicker. The world remains the same like stone, noticable like a mother, but changing like the whirlpool in her womb.

Out of my heart comes out an aching rod of panic. And out that same heart, that same planet, that same earth, comes drenching happiness. It stretches like these legs and arms, one half sustained to the gravel, the other suspended in the sky. The muscles stretch like rubber, first a tight ball of dough and then a thinly twirled flat bread, yanked and stretched all over.

When in panic and when my eyes feel tense, unable to stare at people calmly, I go away to myself and take bits of my so-called insanity and talk to myself.

"Tell me what you are excited for in the near future, Steph?"

I then answer without thought, without shame or hesitation or embarrassment, speaking quietly like a vulnerable patient.

"I am excited to feel his warm muscular arm around mine as we walk through the door and to rest my head on the lump under his pillow."

Then I am happy and relieved for a bit, forgetting about my mind. Then, I am in control.

Sometimes I wish that someone can come from beneath the shadows and scream and scare me until I'm screaming, too, both of us screaming, one louder than the other. Then I'll put my hand to my heart, breathe heavily, and then, then we'll both laugh, barely able to speak, pointing a joking finger at our childlike fears.

Sometimes you need the Boogieman to reveal the mystery and pop up and say, "Alright! I really do exist!"

You shake and quiver coldly like a hungry dog, as if you are craving the shadowy monster. Once you see the face of your monster, of the thing in your mind that you call "thought," you will laugh and lay bare your chest and say, "Do your best destroy me" (as Ray Lamontagne sings). It is just a shade of gray, you'll say. A neuron, not even an atom to the eye. And all these years will flash and flicker like a shadow of a dancing tree on the hardwood floor, and you'll realize that the leaves weren't blowing fiercely in the wind and that the darkness of the shadow was a contorted mirror, and the lump beneath your bed was only a bundle of colorful laundry.

Paul told me to embrace everything that comes my way, even these panic attacks. As he was telling me this, I was shaking from fear at hearing the "p" in panic.

How? I thought, could I embrace something that feels so unhealthy and deeply horrific. Though it is a demon and a hard seed, a plant that keeps failing and tilting, it is something I am now trying to embrace and love.

An old lover sees a beauty and a strength in me that I cannot and have never seen. And though I cannot see it, I know it is there. That strength is a shadow, and (oddly) as I wrote "there," the sunlight cleanly flapped through the blinds and onto the word "there."

"Here Comes the Sun" sounded beautiful early today. It's alright. I never knew these words as I've known them today. I felt my bones recovering, and when I went to bed last night, my skull felt like glowing skin and my breathing and my muscles were moist and light.

Right now, I see my strength as a darkness: not sure if I am void of one or if it is shadowed like the monsters inside me.