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I tell myself you’re where you’re meant to be

with the elephants and the lake that floods and the mangrove trees spilling their muddy roots deep, deep down

with the sweat and the bats and the gumboots

with sun that rises when my moon is dawning.

I tell myself you’re where you’re meant to be although my heart says ‘I want you here, here, here.’

I tell myself I’m where I’m meant to be

but it’s much harder to believe.

I’m learning, sure.

I’m growing deeper, wiser, but not brighter.

I’m struggling to accept the darkness while knowing one day there will be light.

I’m watching dandelions burst out over entire fields of new grass

fighting to believe their promise of hope.

I’m reading blog post after blog post written by old students and knowing you’re not reading mine.

I’m searching for pictures of you because I haven’t seen your face in oh so long.

I hear your laugh in my dreams and I hold on like it could keep me afloat.

I’m tired of treading water

but I’m unwilling to let myself drown

or drift away to somewhere else

because anyplace without you isn’t worth going to.

I hope you’re happy because of course that’s what I want for you

but sadness still fills the space you left behind.

is it so wrong to hope that perhaps the space I left still aches inside of you?

in this screwed up world part of me wishes something will always be broken

until we find our way to the same soil.

I don’t care if it’s night or day, humid or dry, raining or blazing, Khmer or English

I just want to hear you say, ‘I’ll try.’

because my heart never wants to leave yours behind

no matter how many times dusk and dawn fill our separate skies.

“‘Hey, I got your postcard.’
‘Yeah, well, just because I send you a postcard every day doesn’t mean I think about you all the time.’
‘That would be blatantly pathetic.’
‘Yeah, yeah, even for me. I had this dream where we were at the jungle gym.’
‘Wait, I’m confused. I thought that was real life.’
‘No, no… listen. In the dream, we started at the jungle gym, and we walked in opposite directions until we met on the other side of the world. And then I thanked you for always having my back.”’

 

I am dreaming.

I am next to you, in a circle, playing Apples to Apples, with a group of other people whose names I do not remember, whose faces I do not see.

My arm is draped over your leg. You are warm.

I can feel that we are still estranged, yet we are here. I do not know why, but I am grateful.

I am explaining the card I have played, defending it wildly, with ridiculous reasoning. This, as always, is part of the game.

And you laugh.

And it hits me like a freight train and fills me up and part of me, the non-dreaming conscious slumbering inside, recognizes I haven’t heard this laugh in a long, long time. Your laugh.

I am so, so, so glad to hear you laugh.

And by golly, even in this dream, for once, it sounds exactly like your laugh. It is your laugh. And I’m smiling, keeping on with my explanation, making it sillier because I just want to hear you laugh again, keep you laughing, because it’s the best sound in the world.

I can feel my sped-up heartbeat, pumping away.

I am thinking, I am so, so glad to hear your laugh.

It’s been too long.

Way too long.

And it’s amazing.

You’re amazing.

And I can feel my heartbeat and I can almost hear it and everything else fades away and it’s just my heartbeat, my heartbeat, my heartbeat and I wake up to Easter morning with this gift in my heart that I didn’t have before.

I thank God for your laugh.

on the nights when you feel

lonely

cold

curled up by yourself

in a dark dark night

remember you can only feel this

because you once felt the opposite

held

warm

safe

connected

loved

and hope simply will not

give up

its burning

even in this sea of black

“To learn to love

is to be stripped of all love

until you are wholly without love

because

until you have gone

naked and afraid

into this cold dark place

where all love is taken from you

you will not know

that you are wholly within love.”

“She could remember how nice everyone had been that day… particularly nice… But by then of course, she was in The Pit, and when you were in The Pit, people being nice to you didn’t mean anything. Nothing did.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ said Roland, ‘how people being nice doesn’t help when you feel like that. You know they want to help, you know they’re trying to help, but it’s like they’re in another world. They have no idea how you’re really feeling. Or what to do about it.’

Yes, thought Jessica. Yes, that was pretty much how it had been.

‘And you can try and pretend that everything’s okay.’ Roland was still talking. ‘You can act as if you think it matters whether you’ve done any schoolwork or what you eat or what you wear, but in the end… the pretending is such an effort, and you get so tired, that all you really want is for it to stop. For everything to stop… You look around, and everyone else seems to be able to get up in the morning and smile and laugh and enjoy themselves… and you think, why can’t I do that? Why can’t I be ordinary?  Why do I have to be different from everyone else?’

‘And that’s what gets you in the end, isn’t it?’ It was Francis who was speaking now. ‘The being different. You want so much to be like everyone else but…’ He looked sympathetically across at Roland as he spoke. ‘You know it’s never going to happen. You’re always going to be different.’…

It was one of these letters that described something Jessica remembered and that the others instantly recognized as well. It talked about the extraordinary speed with which the feeling that life had no meaning could disappear on certain occasions and everything become normal again–for a while, at least. How one day you could be in the depths of despair and the next you could wake up feeling… okay. How little things like something someone said, or a scene from a film, or even a piece of music could change your mood in the blink of an eye. And how, when you were in one mood, the other seemed so silly. When the sun was out you could hardly remember the clouds and, when you were in The Pit, it was difficult to believe that sunshine had ever existed.”

“‘Do you know what love is like, Rose? It’s like having a sky, a whole sky racing inside of you. Four seasons’ worth of sky. One minute you are soaring and then you are all thunderclouds and then you are deep with stars and then you are empty.'”

“When you love somebody… it’s really hard when
you can’t see ’em anymore…

but, right now, you and me, here… put together entirely from atoms… sitting on this round rock with a core of liquid iron… held down by this force, that so troubles you, called gravity… all the while spinning around the sun… at 67,000 miles an hour… and whizzing through the Milky Way… at 600,000 miles an hour… in a universe that very well may be chasing its own tail… at the speed of light. And amidst all this frantic activity… fully cognizant of our own imminent demise… which is a very pretty way of saying… we all know we’re gonna die… we reach out to one another.

Sometimes for the sake of vanity… sometimes for reasons… you’re not old enough to understand yet… but a lot of the time… we just reach out and expect nothing in return.

Isn’t that strange?

Isn’t that weird?

Isn’t that weird enough?”

a poem by e .e. cummings your homecoming will be my homecoming– my selves go with you,only i remain; a shadow phantom effigy or seeming (an almost someone always who’s noone) a noone who,till their and your returning, spends the forever of his loneliness dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning feeling their stars have risen through your skies: so,in how merciful love’s own name,linger no more than selfless i can quite endure the absence of that moment when a stranger takes in his arms my very life who’s your –when all fears hopes beliefs doubts disappear. Everywhere and joy’s perfect wholeness we’re

I have felt, lately, that I have no new words. I do not have new things to say. I have said it all already, even if I feel the desire to express the same feelings and thoughts over and over again. For when expression does not bring change, and does not bring some new revelation, then it starts to feel useless. Words do not feel as powerful as they once were. For words to be powerful again, they must bring life. And right now, I do not see the life I wanted my words to bring about. My journal sits unfilled. I started writing about my life first because it was new and wonderful and the emotions and experiences begged to be chronicled and understood and valued, and then later because everything was so hard and I felt so lost and alone.

I find myself returning again and again to the words C.S. Lewis wrote. “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.” If I wrote every day, there would be bright spots, but mainly sorrow. I cannot change that. But it feels pointless now to chronicle it, when I do not know when it will end. Perhaps I have done all the understanding that I can do. I am sure I will write about it again, when I am driven to, or when my thoughts produce something worth writing. I am a writer. I cannot help myself, when life reaches its heights and depths. I must record the words to keep from bursting.

For now, I will turn to the words of others. Books are my friends, I hide and find comfort in their worlds and people. They affirm me. They remind me of hope. And so, when words of a wiser writer reach my heart where it needed to be found or express  what I feel better than I, I will share them here. For after all, understanding is also a function of writing. And I, like everyone else in the world, long to be understood.