meels

Someone told me what someone else told them. The news was bad. It is supposed to be good news; the happiest news. Bad to me; the worst to me. One of my closest friends a year ago who deposed of my friendship because of what I am about to say is about to marry one of my closest friends of many years who was formerly about to marry the same fellow.

And my heart is grieved with sorrow.

That's what I am. Upon discovering that a once trusted friend, who has fallen from the grace of many, has made every motion to remove me from her life. I, who tried to help her. To teach her. To give her all that I could, even after she hurt me beyond recognition. I, who tried to be selfless only to realize that my self would be destroyed by her actions if I did not recede. I tried. I failed. And now any chance I may have ever had to hope that one day it could be reconciled has been squashed. My hope has been squashed. My faith (that this relationship could one day be joined again in some manner) is gone.

But there must be still more grace for Grace.

I suppose this is what they call, "turning the other cheek."

Well they are both grieved. I suppose sometimes people disappoint you more than you knew you could be disappointed.

Things have happened since last I posted.

I'm learning what it is to be loved. And how easy it can be to love someone who loves you in return. It is far easier than when they do not. It makes me think of how painful it must be for God to love people who don't love Him. To be ignored, as though He were not there. It's painful enough for one person to do it to another. But for populations of people created by Him to care not...one cannot even imagine how grievous it must be. Sometimes I feel as though I must be like the prostitute-turned-wife, who keeps falling back to her old life. But He comes for me and catches me up from it. And soon enough, His love will be so overwhelming that I will never dare try to leave His presence, "for your husband is your Maker, whose name is the Lord of Hosts."

It hurts to be brushed off. I can think of one who was close to me who is not, now. Every time I see her, I am grieved, for it was a relationship I cherished. I am saddened. I did not know that one decision could begin a series of dominoes that yet continues to be hurtful. Do people not care? They must know. Or do they not have ears for hearing? As long as they do, they must know. Do they not care? Does she not care? I hope she is happy. I hope at least that she has found joy in my pain. To put both in pain would be nonsensical.

But I suppose people are just that; nonsensical.

‎...God has this funny little way of using my OWN writing to tell me something when I won't listen, sometimes. And of using it to shed light on other situations. And it's not really funny at all. Actually, 'tis rather mindboggling.

I've been reading my scribbles blog for a while, this evening, hoping to osmosis inspiration for my college application essay. I'm applying to the University of Chicago and their essays are famously interesting. On some rare occasions, I, myself, am found to be famously interesting. Not recently. Recently, I have had nothing interesting to say. No profound remarks regarding anything. All profound remarks have been channeled into thought for my mythical screenplay, the one I have been talking about writing since the ninth grade. As I have finally started it, I have no inspiration for anything else, it seems. Ironically enough, I hardly have any inspiration for it, either.

Point being this: I've read things I wrote six months, a year, two years, and found them to speak to me exactly where I am now. Regarding things that are going on right now. Things that are specifically mine and things that I am helping friends deal with. As though they were spoken by a great sage especially to shed light on the situations, they profess great wisdom. Where did that wisdom come from? I tend to be a great dunce most of the time. I suppose God can use Me Two Years Ago to speak to Me Now. It's rather spectacular, though, that I knew exactly what to say that would be exactly what I need to hear, and didn't know it. Divine serendipity.

I'm going to post a few of these divinely appropriated bits of writing that I have restumbled across. All's well. See below.

August 28, 2009

No one is ever as fearless as they think they are. Oh sure, you may think the whole world is looking down on you and saying, "My, my, but she IS a mess." The truth of it is this: They are too concerned that everyone is looking at them to worry about you. You know that girl who always seems to let the guys treat her any which way, and doesn't make friends with the other girls? Or the boy who gets into too much trouble, who won't open up to anyone? They're only afraid of rejection, just like you. Just like me.

Oh yes, me too. Afraid not only of rejection, but of being left by someone who accepted me. Me with all my flaws and quirks. A sensitive sort might say, "Oh, but we all have flaws." Sure. But no one ever worries about their other seeing flaws in their best friend. No, we're all concerned with ourselves. Our mediocre selves that never seem good enough. And when we are, when someone loves of, not even in spite, but BECAUSE of our flaws? We try to change and get rid of the very reasons they loved us in the first place! What is our obsession with being perfect? EMBRACE your flaws and quirks! They make you unique. No one has the same set as you do. And someone loves them.

When you quit fearing rejection, it's amazing the possibilities that open up. So what if someone rejects you? If they didn't want you, they weren't worth your time anyway. There is someone who wants to be around you--go find them and be busy being around them. And they'll love you. Flaws and all.

We're all afraid of something...and I think it's ourselves.

February 4, 2010


The world is very large.

The scope of my brief and relatively insignificant life hardly reaches beyond the walls of my home. I do not begin to ascribe any sort of merit to what I have done. In my life, I have accomplished very little. I do not even wish to accomplish much. I only hope to be continually filled with the love that has been given me by my beloved. He is constant as the northern star, the one light I can see in a world of darkness. He will never fail. He will never forget his love for me.

He will never forget me.

January 27, 2010


dear world,
dear sad and lonely world,

i am sorry for hating you sometimes. some days i truly love you, and then something will happen or you will do something, and i just want to burn you down. some days i just want to burn you down.

i am sorry for loving you too much. some days i truly hate you, and then something will happen or you will do something, and i just want to do everything. some days i just want to do everything.

some days i cannot stop. some days i cannot breathe. i am afraid of not being able to breathe. i panic. panic attacks. it stabs me in the gut and hits me in the chest, and it wracks my brain for a solution which i cannot find and i cannot hide. some days i cannot hide.

some days i do not want to hide. some days i go outside. i am not afraid of outside. i breathe. and it is good.

but some days i just want to burn you down. irreconcilable differences we have, world. but i, unlike many, cannot divorce the world and go to a better place. i must see it to the end.

oh God come quickly, the execution of all things.

i want to do everything and burn down the world in one instant; one single instant. forget me, world. i am of no particular consequence to you. perhaps to some in it, but not to you.

i love you, world. i love you and i hate you, too.

sincerely,
amelia

November 20, 2009

People are always telling me to “do something.” They never say what, exactly, and they never say why, only that it I positively imperative that I “do something.” What with, precisely? With my life, with my day? It’s never certain.

It is Friday night and I am sitting alone in my living room drinking a cup of black tea, one creamer, three spoons of sugar, listening to my brother arguing with my parents upstairs and wishing I were anywhere but here.

I have 48 pages left in the book I am reading and little to no desire to finish it anytime soon. All I really want right now is to be with my best friend ignoring the World.

All day long it seems as though all I hear about is money, money, money and how the President is a socialist and how the World is going to end and how it’s all going to Hell in a hand basket. And what if it is? It was bound to happen sooner or later. It is all so vastly important to the middle-class society people that I know to be throwing themselves into a pit of worry and misery over things which are both nothing and everything. Why work yourself up into a frenzied despair over things which are going to end anyway?

Lately I’ve taken to watching foreign films and listening to music in other languages. I believe I may rather hear things I do not understand and yet somehow the meaning transcends language. Words are irrelevant. I would rather sit in a room with someone I care for and not say a word than to talk to hours to someone who is incidentally a part of my life.

Most People are incidentally a part of my life. It may seem brash and rather ungrateful to say that I don’t really like most of my friends, but I’m afraid it has been becoming a theme of my life. Yes, I would rather sit alone on a Friday night than to go out with most of the people I know. Knowing someone does not make them my friend and seeing them does not, either. What makes someone my friend is someone in whom I confide, and who confides in me. Desires, frustrations, how work was, what’s going on with the family, I had chicken for dinner, etc. These are very few and far between. And in fact, several of them disappear. People who once were very good friends now never answer. Some of them I never call in the first place.

People tell me to do something with my life. And I do not understand what they mean. I am doing something with my life. It may not be what they consider to have merit and be of any worth, but I enjoy it. The problem with this existence lies not with me, but with everyone else. The reason I must “do something” is to stay their words. I tire of hearing their persistent asking and nagging. I have no interest in this World they say I must participate so much in. It is full of People exactly like them, all worrying and despairing over things I do not understand. I do not see the importance of a degree, of insurance, of making money and “something of your life.” Who are you to determine that I am not? Things like degrees and health insurance are a part of the Modern World. I resent the Modern World with great fervency. Before the advent of such things, one could become a lawyer without ever attending a law class. They could simply have the drive to educate themselves, a task which I severely doubt many Modern People would ever attempt. If you became sick, you either got well or you died. No great hardship to die. It was a part of life. In this Modern World, dying is a mortal calamity of great proportions. ‘You are not afraid to die? What is wrong with you? Do you not value your life, you fool?’

Yes, of course I do. But I value living while I am alive a great deal more than being dead from the neck up and then dying from the neck down a good deal later. My idea of living does not lie in a 9-5 or in midnight movie premieres or in doing nothing with my unfriends. I do not remember or care to remember anything about those beyond their mere existence at some point. Living was it always being sunny at my Uncle’s house and it always raining when I was 11 and everything being miserable and hating and loving everyone at the same time when I was 13. Seeing an abandoned woodshed from the car window and thinking, “This. This is what it means to be alive: to be here now, at this very moment, in order to see this.” And what was the great purpose in seeing a woodshed from the car window? Nothing, I suppose, besides that great feeling of peace inside.

Not peace, as in the absence of war, but peace: “freedom from fears, agitating passions, moral conflict;” knowing that things are right in my soul. I am right with God, and nothing else matters. Someone I know once said that “the price of peace is peace, because those who long for peace won’t know what to do with it when they get it,” and I suppose that is very true. People, as much as they say they “just want peace,” thrive off of going back and forth over the bills and the government and the rain and the sun and the price of gasoline and their Human Emotions. ‘And if there were no ups and downs,’ they say, ‘well, what would be the fun in that?’ They fail to realize the great true pleasure of being sure that though things may change, and invariably will, some thing remain the same. The sun will continue to rise and set, actions will still speak louder than words, and God is still good.

I crave peace.

But rather than peace, I have a consistent dripping into my soul that I am not accomplishing anything, that I am not doing anything “worthwhile” and that I could “do so much more” by so many People’s words. Some who’s opinion I value and some who’s I do not, but either way it begins to pry itself inside and plant a seed of doubt that then sprouts and stems into frustration. Should I go to school? Should I not? Should I work a dead-end job, purpose unknown, only to come home to nothing and no one? Should I not work, sparing my soul the disappointment of the job but instead granting the bitterness against Humanity that comes from being told one is “not going anywhere?” No, I’m not going anywhere, and I don’t particularly want to. I want to plant solid roots, not uproot and change pots and grow and change again and grow and change again. I once read that “if there were no change there would be no time.” If that is so, then at this particular moment, in this particular room, with this particular cup of tea, I am outside of time.

Time is passing all around me, and I am absent from it. However, I am more in the midst of it than many who are whirling about in it all the time. Being at the standstill of time gives me the opportunity to observe it, to truly begin to understand it. It is always the same. It changes, it passes with every second-onto something new and different-yet it is consistent in its change. One may be sure that tomorrow will indeed come, and then the day after that will as well. Every day throughout the established World, the sun has risen and set, and now in this Modern World we try to control it. If we do not like what time the sun rises and sets, we merely change the time. Forget how God set it in motion; are our wants not more important? How imperious are these Modern People! They set themselves not outside of time, but above it. Complaining of things that are undeniable; ‘Oh, how I wish it would rain, we do so need the rain,’ and then not a day later when it has rained a quarter-inch and the ground is hardly saturated, ‘Oh, I do loathe the rain, I wish it would end already.’ Never satisfied with what has been given, and always wanting more!

And I am guilty, as well. I am so ashamed to say so. I wish I could place myself outside of this Modern World and go on with the sun rising and setting when it will, alternating between sun and rain, warm and cold, as it will and does, and being outside of time, though it is always present. Were that I could remove myself. I have become as Americanized as the next person over. Were that I had not.

Were that I could maintain that peace. For I do have it, from time to time; most People do. But very few succeed in keeping it. They get caught up in paying the rent and the price of milk and dreams of strangling their boss and spouse and children that they lose it. Then when they do they long for it again, but when they do finally get it back, they abuse it and off it goes again, to return maybe never. If one is not satisfied with peace, what is the purpose in having it? The answer is simple: there isn’t. Go on living your high-paced life, letting it go off spinning out of control, trying to tie it down (but not very hard), and then giving up and going inside again and repeating the process. It’s your privilege.

Mine is to hold on to that peace.

The past is irrevocable.

I stand in the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror. I hold my own gaze until I am aware of every freckle in my eyes, every irregularity, every thing that makes my face different from someone else's. I stand in my bathroom peering at my own face and take in the vast account of what I have done. I am accountable to my own life.

I have committed sins against everyone who has ever been close to me. Some of those have been beyond my repair. Once I fully became aware of what I had done, so much time had past. Saying I was sorry would never be enough. Sometimes no words were spoken aloud; one moment of locked eyes said everything: I had been wrong. And someone else had to pay for it.

So I stood in the bathroom and accounted for all my deeds and offenses. My actions, which not only affected myself negatively, but those to whom they were committed. Some relationships may never be made whole again. Some may never be made part. And none may ever be the same as they were. What I have chosen has changed my history.

Despite my remorse over my past, I cannot change it. It shall always be what it is. I look into my own eyes and tell myself, “You have been redeemed.” Though I cannot alter the course of my actions up until today, I have been redeemed. I may not be capable of mending those whom I have broken, but I may be made unbroken, myself. I have not been repaired or refinished, but I have been made new. I may not change history, but I affect my future. Just as only I can look at myself and see my own face, only I can make my own choices.

I am responsible for every misdemeanor I perpetrate. Any good thing is not my own. I, myself am wholly spoiled, the bad apple in the barrel. But I have been redeemed. I have been made unbroken. I cannot repair what I have destroyed, but it too can be made as new. Those whom I have broken may too be made unbroken, though not by me. My actions affect more than just myself, more than just those whom I have transgressed against. The weight of my choices is held by all those around me, and by all of those around them. Atlas could not support the heaviness born of what I have chosen to do in my life.

But One can. And He does.

I have been redeemed.

You have this incredible gift to make me feel like the most useless person alive. Feelings are unnecessary. Especially this one. I don't know how you do it, but you hardly have to say a thing. And there it is: me, the most useless person alive. But all I really want is to be truly useful to someone. Never to you, of course. It is easy for you to discard people with such candor. I dwell long and hard about being discarded. It seems I will never be useful.

So many people are out there being useful to someone, and I am here being useless to everyone. Isn't there someone I can do something for in some small way? It would seem not.

It's okay, I was completely and totally useless to him, too. And look where that ended up. Eight months later and I still feel like the loneliest person in the world. My friends are all leaving me for husbands and wives and lovers and others and I am alone. Some say I should savor the delicious loneliness, that it will not last forever. Good. I do not want it to. I've been alone for 20 years. I think that's plenty long enough. Perhaps I should become friends with nuns and monks. They don't get married.

I do know that You will always be here, God. Just when everyone else leaves I feel rather pathetic. I suppose I expect too much out of the world. I don't know. Right now I just know that I feel lonely, pathetic, and like the most useless person alive. Give me a task, Lord. I'm going crazy.

there are things that smell like yesteryear
smell like love, smell like fear
all these things that we held dear
are trapped in time, just like we're

my mind keeps making lists
of facts and figures, charts and graphs
accompanied by endless plot twists
shown by rows and rows of photographs

I'm frustrated by myself.

I expect too much and always disappoint. I can't do everything and get overwhelmed. I try to make people happy and don't. When people do things like disregard what I've said, I initially perceive it as a slight but know that it isn't...it's just them.


I think myself to be entirely ridiculous but can't seem to help the way I see things. I try so hard at things but never achieve what I deem as fruition.

I'm tired.

You made the stars.


Why am I not satisfied?

i am sitting on a couch watching a movie about someone that lost their mind only to find out that they lost it.

i am the latter.


i am drifting through time and space going from one dream to the next. i am in love with an idea that doesn't exist.

i am a dream.

ennui
for me
today
i'll stay
in bed.



visual grandeur
and your
vicious rhetoric
make my heart tick

The rain is coming down with a vengeance. It hasn’t rained for a couple of weeks, and I think the sky got tired of holding it back. Texas has been beautiful since Easter. The wildflowers are blooming along the highway. First the bluebonnets, then the Indian paintbrushes, the Indian blankets, and the sunflowers. They’re just starting to fade away. Yesterday was the hottest day so far this year. It got up to almost 85 and even a t-shirt was sticky. But then today the massive Texas sky had enough. It’s too hard to hold it all back for that long. I think the Texas sky and I are in agreement. Sometimes it’s just too much to keep from raining. Even though everything is wonderful and the wildflowers are blooming, there is that small thing that keeps growing and growing until it is suddenly unbearable. And then, of course, the sky opens up. It pours out for an hour or so until it goes just as quickly as it came. It drips off the eaves of the house until finally there is nothing left to drip. That is all. Then there is nothing left. The sky builds up for another week or two and then it lets loose again. It is a cycle. Sometimes in Texas it won’t rain for months on end. That’s the drought. Everyone says you have to “conserve” and they have specific times you can water. I guess it’s like that for everything. I’m conserving right now. There just isn’t time for rain.

The man in the park
named the squirrel Bob.
What a sad name
for a slob.



Maybe a baby
Maybe a mom
I give up.
Nothing rhymes with mom.



A man stuck his tongue out at me
from his car window.
I think it is plenty time
for him to go.



I'll take a boat to England,
maybe a plane.
Either way, the poets say,
it all ends up the same.
(with regards to some song I heard one time)



I lost myself a year ago,
I knew not where I went;
I since have learned
I had returned,
my money all been spent.



"I know," you said,
but do you really?
It doesn't seem to
be the same as you though.
Yeah, little do you wot.

Am I what I seem?
I look in the mirror and see:
blonde (today); Caucasian;
got too much sun yesterday afternoon.

At school perhaps I am
"blonde English major;
likes tacos."
Is that all?

When dancing am I only
"blonde (today) lindyhopper,
quirky, and a follow."
Is that all?

At the store I am
what I am
wearing;
nothing more.

Or am I none of these, or all
of them, or somewhere
in between, or am I just
exactly what I seem?

"Please don't feed the humans,"
the sign outside the
human ground reads.

The ducks pay no mind;
they disturb the naturally-
habitating picnickers,

seducing them with tricks
while the human children
eat their sandwiches.

"Look at me," the gander cries
as the the goose glares subtly
behind his back.

"Come see our fountain," they say,
urging them outside their fence.
Fortunately, human children aren't that tall.

You are next to me and
I am wondering how you feel.
Is what i think you are real
or just imagined to be?

You get up for more coffee
and the feeling still surrounds me.
Is this something? is this nothing?
Then the telephone rings.

It is my mother
asking me to come home again.
I tried to tell her
I will never know when.

I am next to you and we
are in an uncertain state;
I think I will wait,
just wait and see.

mother earth, father time
brother, sister; none are mine
call to arms, call to daggers
call to anyone who swaggers
blood is bled
by boys in red
who keep speaking out of turn,
who just want to see the world
burn burn burn



trumpets and lace
in a life filled with grace

do you remember
the game that we played
we had our fun in
our funny little way

you were the sir
i was the dame
you were the sir and
i was the dame

and you treated me
the same
like royalty
with loyalty

you can grow old with me
you can make it hard or easy
you can grow old with me
you can make it hard or easy

and you treated her the same
like royalty

do you remember
the game that we played
we had our fun in
our funny little way

you were the sir and
i was the dame
you were the sir and
i was the dame

I seem to be incapable of maintaining more than one artistic strain at a time. I went from writing all the time to music to ranting all the time to photography but I really want to do all of them except maybe the ranting.

Some ranting is okay.