scatter like light

I was lying on the couch soaking in humidity and contemplating student loan interest rates.

My phone rested on my stomach and I stared out the window until I noticed the light on the opposite wall.

I grew up in a house where crystals were hung in the windows and rainbows played on the walls with flecks of light.

In the front hall opposite me a light danced on the wall. It rose and fell with tiny steady hops.

The phone on my stomach was deflecting late summer evening sun onto the wall following the steady rise and fall of my lungs and the pounding of my heart.

I watched the chaos of my two most important life functions never reaching syncopation.

I rarely ever notice my breath until I am out of it but I like to think my heart and I communicate well.

The light danced and I had a strange idea that if I could, when the long-off time presents itself, I would want to watch it stop this way. Scattered like light with rainbows until still.

a return to my senses

My favorite noise is the wind through the leaves of trees.

Its random and beautiful.

It sounds like the tide. Like the ocean can find me inland.

Its not perfect and consistent like the sea, neither am I.

On my porch I have seen a dozen people cross my block in the twilight to night on bicycles.

Three women rode past. Young and unknown to me. They stopped outside the house next to mine.

Dressed in hats and skirts with leggins, they carried their bikes up to their porch.

About twenty minutes later I heard singing from the their second floor apartment, the three of them belting out the words to The Magetic Zero's "Home."

And that's when it hit me.

I wanted to write. For the first time in months I wanted to write. I wanted to cry.

Now they are singing Cher.

In my head I hear Aly on the phone in the basement. In my heart I hear Meg singing Regina Spektor in the shower. I hear Amber laughing at a repeat of Friends. I hear the familiar footsteps of Jules above me.

And I am homesick.

Now the girls next door are singing Grease.

Two years ago I took the last diet pepsi out of the fridge and drove to DC.

There is little preventing me from doing that right now.

I think I might just do that and call it a night.

A call for Support.

Each day I look forward to the once in a lifetime opportunity to do good with the people I hold dear.

Please take a moment to learn about my family's efforts to bring hope to a small remote village in Guatemala.

785 Park

There is writing on the windows.

Ian's paperbacks are all over the dining room.

My law books are stacked around the couch.

I suppose someone should dust.

There are plenty of bananas, help yourself.

At any given time if you hear a crash, its just a bike falling over in the front hall.

Baby Dan upstairs sometimes cries and his parents fuss.

I double up yoga mats.

We do the dishes when we are out of spoons.

Ian's on the couch reading novels.

I'm in bed reading law reviews.

The kettle whistles for tea regularly.

There is a pile of running shoes by the door.

Its quiet, peaceful and next to a park.

Not bad for a place to call home.

milk and bananas

I wrote this last June. Its still pretty completely valid. As a student I often forget to eat all together. If it wasn't for running regularly I would be terrible about remembering to eat. Cooking with myself in mind has been a huge change in my life. I've become self aware of things I never would have noticed otherwise. Everything from exactly how distasteful meat is to me to the wonders of how to make the perfect tofu smoothie.

Food can be the most basic information about ourselves and we all have incredibly different relationships with it. Sometimes we make someone else's priorities in life our own. That's love. You sincerely can't blame anyone for the fact that you love them, you can only be responsible for the fact that you have neglected yourself. I'd like to find the grace and maturity it takes to be authentic when madly in love.

I used to spend hours in a suburban grocery store in Upstate NY. I would wander the isles looking for every ingredient for a perfect dinner. The right barbeque sauce for the ribs, the cream for the homemade macaronni and cheese, the strawberries for the ultimate dessert. I would fill a cart and cook all day, polish the silver, sometimes set out the china.

The fridge was always full and every night I'd cook. Plates and plates of food, tupperware of left-overs and cookbooks with bookmarked pages.

I used to wander around the store with a big coffee and cart stocking up on cans of soup and boxes of cereal and tea, just in case. I'd lug out to my hatch back then into the house or up five flights of stairs to the apartment. Even when he'd dissapear I made dinner, even when I couldn't eat I cooked, cause no matter where he was when he came in he asked what was for dinner. Even when we sat down to eat he'd ask what was for dinner tomorrow. I was always worrying what I was going to make for dinner. I constantly knew what food I had at home.

Now I pick up milk and bananas on my walk home from work. I wonder how many books I could have read, how many languages I could have learned, how many conversations with actual content I could have had in four years of cooking, shopping and worrying.

I can't remember the last time I worried about dinner.

tell me what I want to hear

I pulled the rocking chair into the sun and set a heavy book on my lap.

I could hear finches, robins, song birds, and I swore even an owl.

There is a quartz wind chime slightly clinking from where I hung it up at the corner of the porch.

The chime sounds like fine bone china making odd, inconsistent and tiny toasts to something grand.

In the distance some dogs bark here and there and someone is cutting a lawn.

I rock back and forth and fall asleep.

It is a high spring day and not all of the orchestra has arrived yet.

There is no sound of the wind rustling oak leaves or the mad dash of tiny winged beasts among the azaleas. There is no sound of ice resettling in a sweating glass of water. There is no razor sharp hum of beetles and cicadas. No chance of heat breaking thunder or lightening in March.

In the distance from the other end of the dead end street the traffic of the world passes.

But form the rocking chair it only sounds like waves attacking a beach and in my dream on the porch I never have to leave home.

February Chills

Will we ever know what goes through the head of a song bird nesting on a cold night?

Are they furious at the weather? Are they miserable in their lot in life?

Do they fear they won't see morning?

Do the regret the songs they've sung?

Do they lament about the tree they chose, or the flights they mapped to there?

Is there worry for tomorrow, is there pain, is there a conscious feeling when they go numb?

Does a song bird pray to something powerful?

What flashes through their mind as they panic?

And when sun marks their survival, are they thankful?