People Collection

He had sad eyes; the edges turning watery and crimson as emotion scraped at his voice. I stored up his face and the brief part of his story that greedily ate up my time. His mess splashed onto my empty day, smearing my memory with this moment captured forever in my subconscious.

Life has always been about collections for me. As a child I watched what my older sisters collected to know how to pattern my own hordes of treasure. They had to have known what was valuable; they were older. So I gathered the usual: stamps, coins, marbles and added a few of my own: rocks, bugs and pine cones. We moved when I when I was nine and my mother made me downsize. I've been emptying my pockets ever since.

Several years ago I began to collect people, or parts of people through the random parts that they slough off of themselves. They pack better than rocks. I never know why they choose me. I wonder if its random or if someone whispered my secret- that I would collect their memories and preserve them. Usually through the course of the conversation they stop in bewilderment, wondering why they are talking to me. Sometimes they look at me accusingly, questioning how I invaded this private memory.

Norman, or the one with the sad eyes, was so uncertain when I met him. He was wavering between worlds of decisions, weights of pain straining down on his tired shoulders. He lived in moderate poverty while his eldest son ignored his need and paid off other men's mortgages- in cash. He dwelt on suicidal notions as his youngest son bordered on sociopath, absently recalling the story of an idiot that blew off his face but couldn't even finish the job. He was always a selfish child. Norman shared that he too sometimes thought of suicide. His son has told him to make sure he aims right.

I think that the part of Norman that was my favorite to collect was his love. I remember his face as he remembered “a bit of a girl” that he went with in his thirties. He “should have married that girl”, he'd thought that ever since. Regret, a tantalizing emotion, sweet as they remember what they've loved, and bitter as they realize that it is no longer there. I feel as if I'm peering in a wound as they live through it all again, all in the speed of a breath.

Norman told me how he'd poured all he had into his boys. He was their punching bag as he taught them to box, their teacher as he taught them to carve out usefulness with their hands. He gave them what he could, allowed them their stubborn mistakes, watching them occasionally coming back to the answer he'd invested in them. He always wanted them to surpass him in every way. His eyes had teared again as he wondered what had gone wrong, and then proud resolve would try to return as he told me that if nothing else he had taught them to defend their women. Whether they won or not was not important, just that they stood up. He told me he guessed that's what it was all about. Even if for him there was no longer a woman and the one that had been worth the fight had left forty years ago.

While we talked he would forget what I had showed him five minutes earlier, yet the past seventy years were as clear as if he'd just lived them. He said he was just old and confused. I think the past just pushed out the trivial present.

He shook as his back grew tired, the cane unable to give him strength. He would sit his punished body into a chair, the pack of cigarettes bulging in his t-shirt pocket. Now he punished his mind and heart and none of the pain could save him. I can't save him either, but I will store away his pain.

Great Expectations? Or Greater Disappointments?

Expectations are a frightening companion to the events of life. Without them, experience is more like an intake of breath in a musty attic, leaving your life void of enough oxygen to make the action worthwhile. With them, it is like playing a bad game show of guessing what's behind door number three. The odds of it being a sports car is unlikely and you're not sure if the thrill of the chance is worth the disappointment of it being a quilted tea cozy. A gamble of the dice.

There's a pool of thought that without the pain of life, the sweetness would not be as delicious. It is hard to agree when you are in the midst of an unknown amount of distasteful. The theory to have loved and lost as a positive moment in your life has likely made you want to shun every optimist you've encountered, or worse. And knowing that your expectations could send you there even more violently is sometimes hard to deal with.

Dreams are often synonymous with expectations. The world is filled with slogans of how you should dare to dream, follow your heart, listen to the greater calling on your life. But what if that Dream ends up being a sports car in your head, and a tea cozy in reality? Where are your limitations, and when does reality and a mature perspective come into play?

Today a discussion developed in my kitchen over breakfast about how it is easier to hear God say no than it is to hear Him say yes. But often we wait, paralyzed by our fear of failed expectations, to hear that very quiet, often non-existent affirmative that our actions are lining up with the bigger picture.

Yet how terrifying is that first step? You haven't even lifted the second foot and you are earnestly listening for God to scream the cease and desist command. As if He didn't know that that first step was coming prior to your muscles engaging. At times that step is as far as you'll go, but there is a purpose in that one step. Even if it feels like wasted time and effort as a door slams in your face.

I have often lived in fear of having too lofty of expectations. And when it seemed like my dreams were some terrible prank, nothing but a light show, I have given up. However, I am beginning to see that sometimes those dreams are like the conjunctions in a sentence, bridging the gap from one thought that I have towards another that is on its way to realization. At times God will use my idea, my dream, to connect me to the bigger picture that I have been fearing that I'm missing. It is the waterway in which He directs my seemingly aimless ship.

Is it all just rubbish?

Painfully the walls are being torn down, new perimeters are being put into place. Previously I wrote of a time and a place that was years ago, but was strong enough to mark my life. The bricks and mortar from this time are crumbling and life has condemned them too dangerous to be inhabited any longer, but still at times I chain myself to them, hoping that the wrecking ball will not remove them all. I scramble from one pile of trash to the next, picking up a brick here or there, stuffing them into the bag I carry with me. And these moments in time are becoming too heavy to carry, the sharp angles digging into my back and tearing through the canvas of their container.

Now that I've salvaged some of these experiences, I try to recycle them into the new walls and foundations that uphold my life. The chipped corners and edges caked with old cement refuse to line up with the new supplies that are making up this project. Do I continue to try to meld the old and new?

This obvious metaphor has a not so obvious lesson that I believe we all have to learn over and over again. What do we dispose of as we go into the new phases of our lives? What do we keep? The people? The memories? The lessons? What is baggage and what is useful to the new life that is forever stretching out in front of us?

At times we are all children trapped in adults bodies that just can't seem to get big because it is just too hard. Growing up to me is like being in a small box, surrounded by a huge world, trying to claw your way out while being pulled through the trap door and being shoved back inside all at the same time.

Experience is the death of innocence but the birth of life. So often I'm being birthed and dying faster than I'm breathing. These days keep rolling and there is no sign of slowing, the clock is ticking and it is only going forward.

Bits and Pieces

You told me to write, and here I am, the sun is still black and everyone is asleep but I wake up needing to expose myself in straight even rows of black letters, so orderly, my thoughts contrasts with the cleanliness of this page. I wasn't sure what would happen. Its been over a month since I've attempted artistic suicide. I should have known it would be you that would come out. That is what scares me most of all. It is unnatural to love this way. What is this frightening destiny that we are supposed to live out that love will not die over hundreds of miles and years of pain? Oh, its too late. I think I've taken a step onto that pirate's plank, but I remember too much...

I remember you sitting in the corner of my apartment, so bitter against the past you still carried, raging against things you've done, embracing the pain that you felt you deserved. I remember your knuckles white as you gripped the steering wheel, the night getting later as you internally screamed. You just knew you couldn't trust me with that story, that glimpse of your horror. Surely no one would still love you...

I remember crying over those lost faces, pleading the world to care. No matter how loudly I screamed, nothing seemed to change but the overwhelming sense of failure.

I remember the dizzying reality of living life so full I thought I would break. We did break and here we are again; another step onto the plank.

There are forces that are stronger than two people. Destiny, whoever you believe decides it, is pulling and pushing, guiding and directing until a couple of souls can begin to feel inside out. I'm afraid to write this story down, you may recognize yourself in it, and I'm not sure if the thin threads keeping us together will withstand the pressure of that realization.

I wonder what is the plan of God. He gave us the choices and the mind to choose, but then that destiny slaps us around as we deal with the fallout of what we've decided.

You keep coming back to me, but the situation is impossible. Do you lay awake thinking of the past or do you daydream about the future? I can vividly describe the past, his face, your face, their faces, our tears, but the future is so foggy. Perhaps its because a decision is waiting on the sidelines, waiting to be sent into the game and change what this will all look like.

Why is the next chapter of my book glued shut? Will it stay like that until we come to that decision together, to move forward into the crazy plan He's molded for us? Where along the way did we get lost in the day to day and become okay with being plain? Perhaps if I tattooed my purpose on my skin like God chiseled the Law into stone I would stay true to it.

Sacrifice is the key, but who will send their pawn out to be slain first? Protect the King, but at what cost of our dignity? At what cost of our dreams? At what cost of fear and money and practicality? Passion, dedication, overwhelming commitment to one another, to the others around us, God and the people He has called us to: this is what we would sacrifice for.

I'm going to write quickly, faster than I would speak, before I lose my courage to lay it out for everyone to see. I've kept that screen in front of me for too long. I've acted like I don't need anyone or anything, especially not what we had before. Its more than being in each other's company, its who we're meant to be.