When I find the time to breathe between hypothetical syllables and a roommate saying, ‘I think you really do like being a little stressed’ (what did you think all the caffeine was for?), I find that simple stream of consciousness is getting the better of me.
Like that moment in movies when time slows down you’re just able to pick up the details before the explosion happens or the ring falls in the fire or that great, epic, heart-stopping kiss finally draws the film to a close. That’s where I find these thoughts. Like day-farers struck along the wayside, lost in the current of everything else that is beaming down my way (like Eastern currents or far off dreams not yet written on uneaten, uncooked grains of rice. They’re necessarily small, but no less intricate in detail.)
How many similes can you fit into one sentence?
This blog’s been running for four long years. Imagine that. Imagine thinking about moving. Taking all this time and effort and casting along the day-farer wayside where the rest of my thoughts seem to land at one point or another. (Like I’m proud of every one of them. Ha. That’ll be the day.) So maybe some deserve their fate. In some derisive sort of self-knowing self awareness or something, that is.
It’s like how Greg Laswell said the other night that he knows his music is depressing, but did we know it? He asked all this in a laughing matter that I liked, but didn’t understand. You wonder sometimes what’s hidden beneath or behind all those teeth. What we cover when we smile. But his deep timbre (pronounced tam-burr, not tim-burr—no trees falling in this phonetic) kept me company last night as I again went to pack all these ‘things’ into boxes and put them away for yet another year in a different hemisphere. Away from here… Oh! For the fear… Steer clear…
I’m sorry.
And there’s all this stuff, which I’ve been through a thousand times and still have most of. I can’t throw it away. All these pictures, all these images, all these hand-scrawled notes on whatever was closest at hand—Kelly? Where are you?—Kelly, I got you coke zero—Kelly, here’s a note to brighten your day… the list goes on and on. I wonder why I’m still keeping them, but then I don’t. They’re better than that outrageous shoe collection that’s blocked by the outrageous jean collection. (Where. Does. All. This. Stuff. Come. From?) You can’t take it with you. And I don’t mean when you die. They literally will not let you on a plane to China with more than ONE BAG. So get rid of some of the shoes, kid.
This is what happens when God asks you to simplify your life.
You want the notes worse than the shoes, in the end. The shoes have been with you through a lot (as has Greg Laswell), but both of them don’t know it. The people who wrote the notes do. The people in the pictures did, and most of them still remember. So you keep those too in order to remember their faces better when the moments get bad. When you’re alone across the world, thinking about that Polaroid of your grandparent’s fiftieth anniversary cake.
We all thought that cake was an architectural wonder of cake-dom. So pretty—with it’s marzipan flowers and fondant edges. ‘Who made this?’ we all asked. Some baker from this or that part of the Raleigh-Durham-Apex-Whatever. It was a marvel. A year’s passed and now my aunt could make that same cake in a couple of night’s concentrated work. She’s been slogging through culinary classes on a mission to palette-thrill and she’s winning.
That’s how much changes in a year. That’s how much you can learn. The things that seem marvelous become attainable and other things drift away. For whatever reason. I’m waxing philosophic again. Must be the impending doom of jeans and shoes.
In some ways, my bedroom’s turned into a living will. Between the clinging of my cell phone (Lauren’s, ‘Yes! I’ll take you CDs for a year!’) and the moving, shifting sounds of dragging around crates that someone else is going to have to carry up the stairs (Sorry!), I’m finding out who I thought I was all over again. I thought I was all these things in the boxes. I thought I could summed up by Tokyo Police Club’s ‘Bambi’ or even better ‘Boots of Disaster,’ which is about the best song title since Lord-Knows-When, but I can’t. There’s nothing in all of them about giving and giving and giving until there’s nothing left and you can’t paint lines on your eyes and black on your lashes just to intensify your looks as they pass from me to—who? (I know, whom—but it messes up the flow… So sue me.)
You can’t hide anymore.
I never wanted to be in a box (you can ask Kait Tancini all about that). But it seems all this time, I’ve
been trying to step inside of one or the other just to what—satisfy the urge to be clear-lined and clean-headed? To be able to say, ‘Well, if the shoe fits, then I’m wearing it!” (So much about shoes tonight. I have really got to get my priorities in order.) To encase myself in more and more of whateveritwasohmygoshIneedthis until I disappeared?
So, when God shows up at your door and asks you to simplify your life and get away from all these things that supposedly defined you [me]—what do you do? Do you contemplate the blue and green one last time, just to feel better that you contemplated something other than the task at hand? Or do you accept the fact that maybe he’s not going to stop until he gets all of you [me].
Here is my blatant transparency.
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