I'm moving

Or this writing is anyway

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Keeping Quilt- from last June

A keeping quilt to keep and kill, to wrap around you in the darkest moments and to warm you with a woman’s love. I kept you in my heart so we could bind ourselves together. Our keeping quilt was a hooded sweatshirt- it had holes in the sleeves and patches on the arms and reeked of pot and cigarettes. And I would wrap you in it and hold you close, in the remnants of the bathroom light that crept through the cracked bedroom door. Your prodigy fingers caressed the back of my hand and I told you we’d always be together.

The killing fields were behind your house, were on the border of an abandoned Amish farm. And men rode by in their hats and beards, the clicking of the hooves and the pounding of your chest ringing in my frozen ears. November was cold but your body was warm, hot underneath your wool skirt and sweater. Your school seal covering your right breast, I lined up little deaths for you on the border of your father’s land- your mouth open, your lips parted, perhaps you took that moment to forget your Bible. Perhaps you took that moment to damn us both to hell. Your father damned me, he lined up a great death the first time he met me. He did the killing in a simple way, taking what was his, stealing what was ours. The wizzing of his Chevy tires on the fresh blacktop, the clicking of his truck on your asphalt driveway. Trucks do not click like hooves- your heart beat in panic, not ecstasy.

I stumbled off from the massacre morally wounded, a heavy load in my knapsack and your sweater on my back. The distance grew longer in the dark and my betrayal was perhaps the greatest death of all. I died on the road to the Lancaster Bus Depot, your father killed us in the house with his scripture.

The keeping quilt came on your wedding day, in a pure white box with a silk ribbon- the first time I’ve ever seen your mother happy. The killing field was the altar where you swore your love and purity and you denied everything we were for years before. Your keeping quilt will keep you safe and keep them blind and your children happy. Your keeping quilt will keep me and us away.

The night I almost

The night I almost stepped on the moon, it was just perched on the edge of the abyss. The stars had come down to meet the mountains and I couldn't tell where the earth ended and the cosmos began.

"Esai," a firefly spoke, or didn't speak or barely said. The bonfires around us were just as bright, the native children leaping over them like planets orbiting a star. I waited my turn and breathed my air, knowing that some turns never come to pass and no one can own the atmosphere. We rolled cigarettes in newspaper and confused Austen with Tolstoy; dreams of the future were sacrificed for a chance of living forever.

Drumbeats covered Talaingod, absorbed by the earth, reflected by the moon. The drumbeats said, Mindanao and the croaking frogs said, we're leaving you. I begged to stay with every glance and the natives smiled and kissed me goodbye. The moon was so bright, I really couldn't have missed it but my eyes were closed when I danced off the earth. "Esai," it spoke. And I watched my step.

"I'm not your planet. Don't step on me."

Great Wall of Chaingmai

I broke my crown when I fell off the great wall of Chaingmai. A missionary shouldn't be wearing a crown, in fact I didn't think I was. I didn't notice it until I hit the ground and heard it clatter on the cement behind me.

Thailand was just too much of who I am- too much white, too much money, loud and boisterous, demanding demanding. When I go home, if I go home, that's who I was and who I am. It's okay there. And it's not okay that it's okay because there is no need inside all of that wanting. The needing is still there, but it's for affection and touch; touch we push away.

In the Chaingmai temple, the energy seized me: It strangled me as I sat at the feet of the meditating Buddha. I turned my own feet away. I turned them away and I hid my face. I hid from everything that was in the darkness, and in the hiding I opened myself. If this is a foreign idol, I will not bow down. I will not surrender to what is unclean. But what is this peace, what is this power? Truly, truly this is the peace I wanted- peace that fills emptiness, that releases the valve that suffocates my heart. What is this wanting? This waiting. Then my soul was empty, empty of even the emptiness. I was staring into the eyes of the meditating Buddha. He did not see me and I didn't see me either. I just saw the great wall. The great wall that keeps me from where I'm going and keeps me in who I am.

I wandered out of the hall and into the courtyard. My feet moved like the unmoved and I was brought low at the thought of the Creator. The God of Chaingmai held me steady and strong, the grip tight on my mind as the song filled my ears. It was a quiet song, low and lonely, whispering for what we all lost when the white people came to Asia; when I came to Asia and tried to make it my own. Chaingmai is not for me, none of this is for me. It's more of what we've taken. I will not be the one to seize it.

I stepped away from the wall and begin the aerial descent. It was dark and deep and full of the love I've given away, never to feel again. It's saturated with who I wasn't and couldn't have been, but who I wanted to be in every dream and in every reality. And that's what I lost in Chaingmai. Falling from a wall, great or not, is all about letting go. Loss of selfishness is the path to nirvana. Loss of self is the path to Christ.

"It was more beautiful up there in the temple," I said, getting up from the cement on which I'd landed. "And I was more beautiful in my dreams." I looked into the dark where my crown had rolled away.

A history

At six weeks old I was baptized with the name Virginia and my soul was saved from hell. At six-years-old I redamned myself by asking my mother “What if God doesn’t exist?”

“He does,” she said. I still think this is an unsatisfactory answer for a Christian of any age.

My religious formation started early. While my brother and my friends were goofing off in Catechism, I was hanging on every word. Everything I need to know in life, I learned from Sister Grace Marie:
Every time you sin, you alone nail Jesus back to the cross. (I lamented all through the day that I had failed to make my bed that morning.) Dogs don’t go to heaven- God only saves people. (My dad said Sister Grace was not only wrong, but frigid. He was still a Methodist then.) Jews may or may not go to heaven, but that’s not your concern. The crucifixion really, really hurt. Holy Eucharist is the greatest gift Christ gave us. Your non-Catholic friends can’t take it.

The time I was most afraid of my father was in eighth grade when I got in a fight with him about why I was being so moody. I went to a convent that weekend with some of friends to do community service. There, I got my first beer. One of my friends attacked me for what seemed like no reason. Years later I found out her father sexually abused her. I’ve never figured out what to say.

I read my first National Geographic later that year, specifically a story about nomadic shepherds and camel herders in India. “A dying community” the article said, “the local church is trying to help them keep their livelihood.”

“I want to be a missionary,” I told my mom.
“I thought you wanted to be a doctor,” she replied and handed me the dishes to set the table. It’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re wearing tie-dye in 1997.

I fell in love my last year of high school. I saw God in every mile the Greyhound bus traveled to Lancaster. I felt like I understood Psalms. A man I’d defended wrongfully died on Orthodox Christmas that year. I felt like I understood Isaiah.

God’s come in many forms since then. He fell like an angel out of the sky while I was doing data entry in an office on H Street. “Was that a bird?” I said to a coworker. I stood up and peeked out the window. The jumper lay in the alley for hours while the police analyzed the crime scene. I was 18 and had not gone home for the summer. I could not look away.

God is a black woman who was locked up for using crack. While in the slammer, she became a dealer. We called her Ma Belle and she was the kindest soul I’ve ever met. God is a white man who got addicted to heroine in Vietnam. He lived in a box outside my building and we went to McDonald’s together. The day the big hurricane came to Washington I couldn’t find him anywhere and I haven’t seen him since. I called him Doc but never knew his real name.

God was in the bear at the Russian carnival. Chained to a pole, the bear was beaten with reeds until he performed tricks. I also saw people beat him for fun. I hope by now the bear has died. And God is the 14-year-old stripper at a nightclub in Moscow. The bartender told the marine she would show him a good time. The marine paid up and led the girl to the back. If God did not damn Lot for offering his virgin daughters to the mob, will God damn a US Marine? And if he damns even one person, do I have a chance of salvation?

Salvation was my own apartment in Glover Park, was my dog coming to live with me and sleeping next to me in bed. If sin was listening to “Songbird” with my 25-years-older boyfriend, redemption was loving a dog. And then a person, and then people. And then maybe, just maybe myself. Loving is hard. You have to start small or it’s just impossible.

Sixteen years after I damned myself, I tried to save my soul. “Do I exist?” I asked the bathroom mirror as I studied the blue in my eyes.

“You do,” it replied. An unsatisfactory answer, yes, but part of life has been learning to take some things at face value.

Reading fiction on Mindanao

After reading the memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" I was forced to rethink the way I've been perceiving fiction and in turn the way I've been understanding reality. Two hundred pages into that book I saw the two shift. I had set the book down and wandered out into an empty field in the "urban" poor community where I was spending most of January. I grazed the tips of the high grass with my fingers and let the sun pour onto my pale skin like language flowing over a page turn.

What is to live? Is it to only live for the revolution? Whether for wealth or for change, is living for one physical concept any different than another? Most revolutionaries think themselves to be superior to capitalists because they live for the cause, not for money. But what is a cause in the realm of the ancients? Causes fade, as does justice, just like money. Surely I will keep fighting and will only further dedicate myself to the rights of the people, the katawhan but where are the people in the context of the universe? I did not see them in the field, only the grass and a goat and the sky that was busy hiding the stars. The revolution did not warm my face or dirty my shoes. The field did not speak, but it was not silent. The reality could not contain its beauty and its desire to be known.

Fighting for something hardly means we should live for it. Seeking truth hardly means we should be bound in it. The foil of truth is not always lies, sometimes it's unreality- the parts of being that cannot be contained on such a fragile planet. Or really, just cannot be perceived by our weak sense. Because the beauty of fiction and the neverworlds can be right in front of us, as it was when it wrapped around my galoshes in an empty field almost swallowed by the foliage. And its pull is nothing I resisted, I grasped onto it and wept for it.

"I'm sorry I'd forgotten you," I said with my toes curled up inside the rubber boots. Toes don't talk and fields don't answer but that's why the most important things in life never really happen.

Colonized mentality

My host mother, Cita, never tries to explain. Whenever I don't quite understand her Visaya or she doesn't understand mine, instead of trying to work through the gap between us, she immediately runs to get someone who knows some English. Often I just need her to speak slower or gesture, so her helplessness in communicating with me is very frustrating. And her helplessness comes with shame; shame that she doesn't speak English, shame that she is wasting a white woman's time. And the insanity of it all is that we we're in HER country, in HER house and yet she feels at fault for our lack of common speak.

It's moments like this that I feel the sadness creeping back in, ever-present, ever-ready to take over one more time. It tempts me with the safety and familiarity. Do I like being depressed, do I like the feeling of utter loneliness? It's a drug. A drug I know because it served me well for such a long time. And in this country of color-based isolation and overwhelming poverty, it's an easy script to fill.

And I want it to fill me. I want to slip back into the place I know and clothe myself in my long-time companion. I love it, I hate it, I want it because it's frightening to not know the woman who shows up in the mirror. And that woman is changing everyday as I grow here. The girl with puffy eyes and the empty smile is my friend, the woman covered in mud and talking about small-scale revolution is from another planet.

Successful colonization is when the oppressed willingly give their souls to the colonizer because they don't know who they are without the foreign invader. Cita and I hide our eyes for different reasons, but our mutual darkness fills the air in leaky two-roomed shack. It slips in from the holes in the ceiling and the cracks in the floor. It seizes our hearts and creeps into our dreams as the soft rain on the rusted tin roof.

Tomb of the less known soldier

"What do you think happens when we die, Joseph*?" I asked my guide as he rose from his haunches. A bead of sweat ran from my temple down my cheek. Comparatively cool, I declined to wipe it away.
"I believe nothing," he said, putting his Mao cap back on his head. "I believe we go back to the ground."

We had taken a jeepney and a tricycle and walked through the heat to the cemetery. It was a festival of life amid the grounds of death. The top forty tunes played by the cemetery DJ swallowed our words into a sea of back beats and sex-filled lyrics. What was this holiday? Who were these people? I knew one at least, Joseph. I liked him as soon as I saw him and I'd grown to believe in the things he said. Closed-shop, militant unions, necessary violence. But here, sweating on an unmarked grave admidst a carnival of rememberance reality flitted like newspaper in the wind- at the proper angle its only two-dimmensional.

"There are worse fates, I guess," I said, wanting to hold his hand, wanting to nap, wanting to be in the middle of an ice cold shower. Wanting anything than to be staring at the place where a man's name had been but now wasn't, at the ground where a man was buried but wouldn't be for much longer. The man had been a soldier in the New People's Army and had been shot in the back when he was 23-years-old. His parents couldn't pay on the gravesite anymore, so the cemetery was going to dig him up and dump him in a mass grave. The marker was already removed. The stone had been rolled away.

"Let's go eat fried chicken," Joseph said. He could have suggested we strip naked and run through the street. I would have gone, anwhere but here. On this Day of the Dead, families ate the favorite meals of their late loved ones. The soldier had liked fried chicken.

I peeled the skin off the meat and dropped it to the floor for the benefit of the cat sitting under the table. "It's good," I said, feeling a little gross about the grease on my hands, but loving the chicken anyway. Joseph ordered a liter of coke to go with the meal. This was a holiday after all.

"I believe in universal salvation," I told Joseph, wiping my fingers on the napkin square alloted to our table. "I believe we're all resurrected when Christ returns."

"That's a nice thought," he laughed, not being cruel. He sipped his coke and looked at me square. "I don't think I believe in God."

I shrugged and drank from my plastic cup. Having boycotted this crap for such a long time, I've grown to secretly covet it. It's quite expensive here, so I could not refuse Joseph's generous gift. Sometimes formalities are so convenient.

"It is a nice thought, except it means we'll all have to face each other for eternity. It means we'll have to see the people who hurt the most and we'll have to live with the people we hated," I said. There was one last mouthful at the bottom of the glass. I nursed the cup for a while, savoring the sweetness to come.

Joseph had told me earlier the only time he'd been in the hospital was when he'd been shot. Had it been in the same attack that killed his friend? Was Joseph a member of the NPA, too? I didn't ask. I didn't want to know, for the sake of never having to hide such a secret. Across the table he became a different man, he looked 23 and terrified, like me. He knew nothing about defeat but he did know desperation and poverty. And then someone gave him a gun. Or did he buy it for himself? And he ran into the jungle and never returned. And I found myself lost in there with him, imagining a life of such brutal honesty, of a time when I could think that sacrifices must be made. But those sacrifices always seem to be other people, other people's children. Unless you're shot in the back when you're 23; unless they can't even afford a grave for you and you're dug up and tossed out with the garbage.

"You're a strange kind of missionary," Joseph smiled and offered me more coke. I shook my head and took the last sip. It tasted like candy, but my mouth went dry.

"Don't I know it," I said.

*name changed

A yellow fever

In true Asian fashion, the parasite turned me yellow- in the face, in the toilet, on the floor of the shower of the union boss's 2-bedroom balay. In the mirror I saw myself turn yellow, my skin, my hair, the light made the whites of my eyes the color of the inside of a pineapple. What came out was yellow. And when it was done my body still tried to send more, more of my insides out to the open.

"Yellow fever," I said in a heave, right before I heard a knock at the door. The mother peeked in and saw the blood in the toilet, on her bathroom floor.

"You should have woken me," she said. On the way to the hospital the usually chatty Filipinos were silent. They whispered words like 'Americano' and 'tubig' (water). It was not the water, it was the coconut milk. If it was not the coconut milk it was the open sewage pit I'd visited that afternoon. Everyone else is wearing sandals, I'll be fine.

"But we're yellow," the guide said with a laugh, when I complained I was the only one sweating.

And so am I. A different shade of yellow- a yellow that means death for those under three and a yellow that can be killed with 100 USD. And some time. Days later my throat stays red to remind me what has happened and my mouth tastes like metal from the anti-biotics I consume.

I smile when the workers offer me bananas and corn soup. I wear boots when I go to the fields.

An American in Polomolok

If being white is never having to say 'I exist' being an American is never having to say 'Jesus, the chickens are mating in the house!'

Reflexes.

"It's just like communion," the other American said. "There's a body and bood and then you eat it. Except we don't drink the blood. And at least we cook the chicken first."

Maybe I'm too new, maybe I just don't see it. I hope the chicken didn't suffer too much, but it sure took her a long time to die.

"Those are just leftover relexes," the others said. I nodded. We kill chickens in the US too, but we like to torture them first. And we never seem to look them in the eye.

These are just leftover reflexes. I come from a land without hunger, from a place packaged and polished and ready for sale. But I have been here a while and I have seen too much death to say, "Well that was just a chicken."

Manila morning

Only three weeks into my stay here, my thoughts of leaving home are still fresh in my mind- the smell of shampoo and the clicking of the paddle fan. "Are we going to be okay?" she asked as we stared at the ceiling. I rolled over on the bed to look at her, her bangs flipped haphazardly in the humidity. Whatever I am asked, I know I cannot give enough. I am starting to wonder if any of us can be "okay" again.

Here in a civil rights advocacy office in Manila, banana leaves and coconuts stare in at me and while I am amused with all the pictures of President Gloria Arroyo juxtaposed as Hitler, the fact that I am already sweating at 10 in the morning is not funny. It's just gross. I have not felt truly clean since I've been here. I have also not felt truly myself. But really, for all the times in recent history I've hated that self, I should just stop bitching and be thankful for rice and mangoes. And this new fruit I discovered, lam sodas. It's a small citrus with a bitter pit, but the meat of the fruit is heavenly. Like a lemon without bite, an orange with less acid. Lam sodas. Many of the words are beautiful here, but I am still lamenting the most beautiful things I have left at home- those I love, my bike, skim chai, and warm showers. Particularly this morning the warm showers.

Things are smaller here. The Jeepneys have tiny entrances meant for a smaller-sized population that does not subscribe to mass obesity. The walkways are narrow and seem a bit perilous and most taxis are tricycles, not Lincoln Town Cars. And things are bigger, like poverty and the smell of feces. The drainage system for this city is non-fuctioning and the spread of Dengue is always pending. One of the staff members at NCCP (National Council of Churches, Philippines) contracted the illness a week before I came. "The mosquitoes are attracted to the filth of Manila," he said with a laugh. Filipinos are always laughing, even this Dengue patient who was in the hospital for three days and lost 25 pounds during the ordeal. "It was good for me," he smiled, patting his belly. "And it is better for me that I am not a child." I smiled and later realized what he meant. For a Filipino child, Dengue will probably mean death. For an American missionary it would surely only mean an inconvenience, but I now wear long-sleeves anyway. The Filipinos laugh at my continuous application of bug spray. They laugh because I'm foreign, they laugh because they can not afford such a precaution.

If April showers bring genderfication, what does genderfication bring?

In this neighborhood
the rain doesn't cleanse, it just
moves the filth around.

Out like a lamb

It's a sad thing, when a dog dies. Because a dog, while "less than a human", is somehow more than a person, greater than its master and the sum of its antics. A dog means more to its master than it can know. A dog only knows it's a dog. Its master knows a dog is also an idea. The dog rolls in dirt and licks itself, wrecks the furniture and tracks in mud. But the idea reminds us that not everything is fallen, not all of God's creation has failed him. The dog, in fact, may have surprised its creator, may have made God question what "in one's own image" means. God may have a moral center, may be able to judge between right and wrong, but if He is truly (and I believe he is) solely about love, than it is the dog, and not the man, that best reflects the divine.

My dad brought home this dog when I was 10. I named her after a cartoon character. She peed on the rug, scratched on the doors, and pretty much made everything right in the home. Odie was a solace to my father when his children went through puberty and a comfort to my mother when we moved out of the house. And when she stopped eating and starting going in the house again, we all feared the worst. Right before she turned 13, it was time to put her down.

"We have to do the right thing," my mother said. "We have to put her down."

"Put her down" is a softer way of saying euthanize, which is a softer way of saying "it's time for you to die." My parents were there in the room; my dad holding her as the injection went in, my crying mother kissing her face. The doctor said it only took half the dose, half a shot and she was gone .

"This dog was ready to go," I imagine him saying. I see my mother clinging to my father, who is turning his face away in grief.

The vet put her down and sent her on. She was tired and ready and looking ahead and went out like a lamb in a wintry April, not a whimper or sigh, just a close of her eyes. Out like a lamb to the realm of ideas, to where God keeps his unfallen creation- a Garden of Eden with sofas and rawhide. I suspect a God of eternity will take time to scratch her under the chin.

Back at home where my dad first brought the dog, he's buried her body out back by the trees. So she'll sleep close by under his watchful gaze, under a bouquet of flowers he laid while weeping. It's a sad thing, to lose a dog. A dog is what we could be if we were carefree with ourselves and more careful with others. If we were unafraid of both living and dying of loving and losing and mostly of not knowing.

Unfallen and loyal, putrid but beautiful- I will miss the dog almost, but not quite, as much as I love her.

Apes out of Eden

We loped into Eden as animals, knowing our place and our world, knowing God in our very sense of being. We ambled into Eden with our opposable thumbs and our bellies growling, with a sense of entitlement only existing in terms of survival. We migrated into Eden as one, as a united front that lived to pass on what we'd learned, our evolution crawling over a hundred thousand years.

And when we got comfortable in this garden that gave us so much aplenty, when there was time for thought and ideas and fire (for God's sake fire!) that's when we finally diversified our selves, our race. We wandered into Eden with our heads in the dirt and we fell in Eden when we turned our heads to the sky. There is no turning back from knowledge. Eden was bountiful but unforgiving.

"It's not us, it's them," we shout to the stars, barely able to hear our voices over the blasts. We rain fire on Eden to weed out the terrorists. We cut down the Tree to make room for development. We orphan the children in the Cradle of Life then pride ourselves in giving them charity. And when we're done, we take pictures and film documentaries and bury our mistakes in the sand.

We ride out of Eden in tanks and planes, knowing our place in the world, knowing God in the way we've named him. We march out of Eden standing upright with our bellies full, with a sense of entitlement that comes from being as God intended. We migrate out of Eden as many, as countries that exist to push our agendas, our regression so fast that we could annihilate ourselves in the next hundred years.

In like a lion

Like a lion he calls his children to the East and like a lamb I will follow, head down, stepping slowly, afraid of what's to come. Is this as close to certainty as we can get, happiness in an overwhelming decision?

She steps out of the darkness and shrugs off the winter of her fears. It's been so long since she's faced anything but uncertainty and now fulfillment is no different. Reality continues to be uncompassionately thin.

20 years

Before you knew I was coming, you were preparing a place for me, for this second-born with her feet in the ocean and her head in the dirt.

My mother knew I was coming, felt me stirring inside of her, torturing her before I'd even taken a breath. Later on she would buy me women's clothes, trying to tempt me back to Christian sanity with promises of a new wardrobe. I remember standing in front of her in my bedroom in my boy's pants and undershirt, I remember both of our hearts breaking at the same moment as she saw who I was and I saw what she hated.

"Girls don't hug other girls like that," she whispered one day, afraid that the walls would report this indiscretion to my father.
"Like what?" I asked, my face heating up.
"Like that. They just don't," she said.

Years later, I told her that I'd fallen in love. I thought she already knew, that she'd understood from stories and poems I'd written in the year before, that this person I'd been running to visit at every moment was more then a pen pal or a roommate.
"What have we done wrong?" she asked, weeping over her appetizer.
"Nothing. There's nothing wrong with me," I said.
She was silent.
"There isn't," I insisted.
She dabbed her eye.
"Is there?" I asked.

Before you knew I was coming, you said no. "No," you said, "there is nothing wrong with what you wear, who you love, who you are." And for this, I am grateful. It is a hard thing after all, to be wrong just by being.

Deliver Us

As I was leaving Egypt, I bound myself to you. I threw you a net and asked you to walk with me, to hold my hand as we crossed the sea on dry land. My faith wobbled, the walls closed in, but I held to the rope and said myself, "I am not alone." And to you I said, "Tell me to believe and I will."

I guess maybe I held too hard, walked too slow, took too long. And when the walls fell around me, when the sea came back in, I pulled on the rope and it came to me. You were not on the other end. Maybe you never were. I stayed at the bottom like the chariots as you shook your head from the shore. You would not walk with me anymore; it was better for you to be on the shore, than it was to be at the bottom with me.

Who can blame you? You were only bound by a thread, I by a net. I always knew it would end this way, even when you promised to be there for my deliverance. I wonder if you thought you could deliver, if you thought you were the one chosen to lead me out of Egypt. You had a way of preaching at me, of being the one who decided how close the ropes would bring us.

And you head out into the desert, sure of yourself that you have paid for your sins and that you have done all you can. More than you had to, for sure. When I call to you in panic from the bottom of the sea, you say I'm only trying to drag you in with me and so you cast off the rope and build an altar to the Lord. I'm sure you still pray for me- you had a way of being an intercessor.

"Deliver me!" I cry to Him. "I took too long crossing the sea and the walls have closed back in. My friends have left me alone!" Does the Lord hear voices from the depths like He hears ones from the high altars? God, I hope so. God, I hope there is more than one blessing, that there is one left for a child who got trapped in her net and is now afraid of both drowning and breathing alike.

"I'm here like before," I cry out to the Lord, "but now I'm alone, bound by a rope that's tied to the darkness of the sea." Are there other children waiting for me by the shore, or have they all gone out into the desert together?

I feel around at the bottom for others like me, for the Undelivered who haven't made it across. But we're good at hiding, keeping to ourselves, clutching our nets tight against us. We'd rather be hanged by the ropes then be here at the bottom, empty-handed.

"Deliver us!" I cry out to the Lord, again and again as I make my way through the darkness. Without a rope to follow I have no idea if I'm heading towards the desert or back into bondage in Egypt.

The darkest night of the year

"I'm back where I started," I spoke to the night, to the layers of glass on the sidewalk.
"No," she replied, "not back but forward." Forward into restless sleep.

I dreamed of ballet dancers and friend, deceased. When I was a dancer, I never missed a catch. When I held my friend, he never let go. We embraced forever, I felt the heat of his skin. He held like we were saying goodbye.

It's funny how everything's new in a dream- the grief of loss, the joy of dancing, the idea that even on the darkest night, there's a way out of the nightmare.

I still got it, even with no sleep.

Stosch was doing the cutest thing yesterday. I picked up the phone and had the first four numbers dialed before I realized there was no one on the other end of the line I could talk to. Then I hung up.

I don't think I've ever felt more alone.

Okay. I have, but i was 17 and my girlfriend (so I thought) left me in her parents' house to go make out with her boyfriend (I later found out) in the driveway. But I was 17, so really I was alone anyway.

At least this time around I don't have to get permission to go into the city to sulk.