where i am

I’ve never been good at being poetic. I try, but it usually doesn’t work.  Or maybe I just don’t think it works, I never can tell.

 

My brain is going in circles today, detached and playing tricks with me.  I’m sitting in my cubicle with pictures and favorite quotes and lyrics all around me.  Snippets of things that speak to me, make me laugh, make me think.

 

This whole post-college graduation, extended adolescence phase is something I could do without.  I could also do without this part, right now, where my brain is playing tricks on me.  I’m trying to find something to ground myself with.  Writing this helps, makes me focus.  Focus, focus, focus. 

 

How did I get here?  Fate?  I don’t know if I believe in fate.  We say things are fate because we don’t have any way of knowing how things would turn out other then the way they have turned out.  Is it fate, all this, these personal problems and victories, crucial to me, to making me who I am?  I could give you the line about being a better person for all of it, but I really don’t know.  Maybe I’ve learned some valuable lessons along the way about my strength or some other such thing.  But maybe I would have been better off without certain things.  Maybe I would have been a better person for turning right instead of left.  There’s just no way to know.

 

I got here by chance then, the right turn at the right time.  Or the wrong turn at the wrong time.  Either way, only thing to do is try to sort all this out.  Find something to focus on, something to ground me.

 

It occurs to me that this post is rather pessimistic, which is not always typical of me, if you happened to know me.  But I get like this every once and awhile, and it’s a part of me, so it has its place as well.

enero in the mountains

it was enero in the mountains.  the big pink truck picked me up.  i looked at the window at grey skies all the way through kansas.  i kept shoving my jacket at the door to keep out the cold prairie wind.  i could care less where i was going, only wished that i would get there.  the bar door kept swinging shut in my mind, hippie sounds creeping out into the crisp evening.  the door was swinging and i was going nowhere fast. 

all the things i kept solid in my mind had jelled into an awful mess.  the piling of wishes into a careful pile with which to flee was as if undone.  there were no waves, no inspirations, no exultations or photos of the great dash onto another field.  there was no map beneath my feet, only a faded mat with the shapes of two shoes. 

my belongings lay haphazardly behind me, my cat slept in a purple-tylenol induced haze by the radio, listening to garbled static as we breezed by cleveland.  i couldn’t remember what i was going to do yesterday.  i know there was something i needed to do.

but after ordering a baked potatoe from a confused clerk at mickyd’s in toledo, i didn’t care what i ate or who i was anymore.  there was little to do but ride the pink truck all the way to the end of the road, which i had so negligently carved as i sat in front of pbs one night drawing pastel november drawings on the floor.  that was all before, before that war.

when i landed it was snowing and there was no red wine in the refrigerator.  the dishes matched.  my necklaces buried under scarf and snowflakes in a flat land, where i grabbed the outstretched hand.  there was nothing more, nothing less but unpacking the pieces until i built a house of cards once again to dwell in.  enero in the midwest, my first. 

i tried to breathe frost but my lungs were tired from holding my breath since the mountains.  my cat stretched, slept more and begged for daytime t.v.  i greeted spring smoking cigarettes under my purple fuzzy comforter in the backyard of a surburban house i never planned to live in.  i looked at my canvas and it looked at me. 

 - a few thoughts on a piece that got me where i am – Raelynne