Erasing Commandments

We have an innate desire to define things. Everything has to be named and labeled. In my home, there is nothing that can’t be described… black shelves of bookcases that hold my favorite novels, a doorknob that can be twisted to reveal the skeletons in my closet, a place where my clothes patiently dangle from hangers each day, awaiting their turn to be worn. Even something as simple as my bottle of Irish Spring ‘Moisture Blast’ body wash has a world of intricacy woven into it. A complex combination of chemicals; sodium chloride, cocamidopropyl betaine, citric acid. Apparently, these things smell like a fresh waterfall. They even have instructions on the back for us first-timers: Squeeze gel, lather, and rinse.

I’ve heard that the closer you look at something, the harder it can be to appreciate. To take something beautiful and strap it down under a microscope, and with every soft click of the dial that we twist to increase the size, the image gets bigger, stretching out in multiples of tens, hundreds, thousands, until we can see the frayed, ugly split-end strands of worn-out fabric that refuses to unravel. We see that the Wizard of Oz is just an old man hiding behind a curtained projector with a smoke machine, making promises he can’t keep, forcing us to rely on ourselves.

We’re a society that’s fallen in love with actors and actresses. It seems we find insincerity and deception attractive, we want our love to be like imaginary love. Maybe it’s because so little mystery remains in our lives, so much has already been solved. The generations before us pulled and tugged so avidly on the baffling knots of life that now we’re sitting here in the present day staring at these long, straight, untied strings – trying to make music with them, wondering what the hell we’re meant to do next. We’ve attentively edited, revised, re-written, and marked ourselves with so many red X’s and crossed out sections that we aren’t even sure what we’re about anymore.

I think this makes some of us feel entitled. We’ve collected the surveys and gathered all the answers. We have them documented and we’ve saved the receipts just in case. We’ve seen this scene before. We can skip ahead. We’ve heard the story already a hundred times. We know how it ends. We have the cliff-notes being over-nighted and we’ve already watched the youtube review. We’ve read about it, blogged about it, posted tweets and updates about it on facebook (which people even liked).

We know enough to grab a chisel and hammer and chip away at this rock until we’ve sculpted something that we believe resembles the truth, carving words into the stone tablets like commandments. And we proudly hand them off to people like presents. People who are simply trying to walk their own path – we rest our heavy two-ton opinions on their shoulders and then applaud ourselves for being generous enough to help carry the load. We read aloud from our stones to them while they try and sleep, sharing the stories we’ve heard over and over, the unavoidable truths that we’ve come to learn. All the things we wish we could change, but can’t.

We have an innate desire to define things. Rebellious children, neglectful parents, alcoholics. Everything has to be named and labeled. In our homes, there is nothing that can’t be described… a grey carpet that collects stains like scars. Framed photos of a dysfunctional family that has learned to love each other again. A doorknob that can be twisted to reveal the crumbled chunks of shattered rock on my closet floor. The heavy stone tablet that once claimed to define me and everything I couldn’t be; the things people had written about me, that I’d written about myself. The same truths that I recently decided to start hammering away at, breaking them down, tirelessly crushing them into smaller and smaller pieces, until there was nothing left…

But a dusty reminder – of everything that was once written in stone about me.

SP

True Life: I’m A Dollar Bill

You’d be surprised what kind of stories a dollar bill could tell – even the one in your pocket right now. Have you ever wondered about it? All the things that bill might have gone through to make it to your wallet? All the hands it’s been passed through, the lives it’s touched, the things it’s been used to buy. This is a story of one of those bills…

I’ve traveled so long and far that I don’t even remember where I started or where I was first printed. In New York, there was a man who wanted me so badly that he shot another guy just to get me. I still have faint traces of his bloodstains on me. A Mayor in Georgia spilled some of his morning coffee on me from a styrofoam cup, the same kind of cup that I was stuffed in for a homeless man in Chicago. I’ve been crumpled and balled up, folded and creased in angles that felt degrading. I’ve been molested by white fingers, black fingertips, tan Florida touches, cold Maine caresses. There were wealthy, soft hands that smelled like mint and sanitizer, and then there were filthy fingers covered in oil and dirt, reeking of labor, blemishing me in gritty evidence of my captivity. I’ve met celebrities, murderers, cops. Politicians, bums, cross country skiers. A man in Louisiana used me to buy love from a prostitute. Then a prostitute in Louisiana used me to buy love from a drug dealer. There was a woman in Dallas who spent me on a private investigator to find her long lost sister. I’m not sure if they ever found her? But I did a few years later, under the orange glow of a California sun. There were business-men who would throw me carelessly at strippers, strippers who would spend me on college textbooks, booksellers who would spend me on company debt, debt that would fill the pockets of business-men who just threw me at the strippers again.

It was a cycle, just like my life. Wealthy women in mansions would spend me so carelessly like I was one of a million – as if my life was meaningless. Just a leaf off a tree, another piece of paper torn out of a notebook, balled up and tossed out, like a journal entry that was better off forgotten. I was insignificant to them. Yet to others, my faded green skin was beautiful, I was their world. Poor men with tarnished, gloved fingers accustomed to holding bent cigarettes instead of hope– they treated me like a savior. A messiah. They would beg for me and drop their dignity on the ground so they had a free hand to grab me with. Me. One of a million. Enough to brighten their day. They would hold me in their pockets long enough to forget what empty ones felt like. With me, they suddenly had value, they were worth something. I was worth something. They ached and longed for me like a neglected lover. But like most love, once they had me in their clutches long enough, I slowly lost my charm. Eventually, I was no longer seen for what I was, but for what I wasn’t. One of a million just like me. Not a 5, or a 20, or a 50 – just a 1. Dead faces that all looked the same. So it goes.

Maybe one day, someone will keep me. Maybe they will accidentally drop me between the cushions of their couch and I’ll spend the rest of my life with loose change and other possessions that are worthless enough to fall out of someone’s pocket and never be accounted for. A fossil of our economy. Or, maybe one day, I’ll find myself on fire and be slowly eaten alive by crackling orange flames – like my other paper relatives. I’ll be burned down to ashes, one of a million particles just like me blown into the wind. Scattered all over America.

Someday in the future, maybe I’ll be the dust collecting on your picture frames, and you’ll blow me off your memories during Spring cleaning when you feel like being nostalgic. The frozen images that depict important chapters of your story. Your life. I’ve come to terms finally with the realization that my life– my story, may never be heard or recognized. Insignificant me, one of a million just like me. I doubt anyone cares much. All those tiny encounters that are taken for granted. But I’d like to think I made a difference. I’d like to think something small on a dark day might be enough to brighten it. A single dollar, a single act, a single smile, a single touch. And maybe a single uplifting day might be enough to change a week, or a year, or a life. And maybe that’s all it takes. A single, seemingly trivial moment… that ends up changing everything.

I’d like to think I was worth something.

A History of Faces

I can still recall your face…

Like the distant memory of a scent, it’s not so much the sight of you that sticks out in my mind, but the feeling you evoked. I remember watching you. You were the first subject I felt compelled to study, the first time I remember genuinely wanting to learn. To take you home and open you on my bed, feel my way through your pages and search for the deeper meaning hidden in your words. Find what no one else took time to see. I committed you to memory. Religion and heaven seemed so juvenile until you smiled, then churches and moral sacrifices all made sense, no life deserved to be void of such light. Pastors preached and their verses held no weight compared to the gospel of your voice, a gravity so real that I couldn’t find the strength to lift myself off your sacred ground.

But…

I was too young to know, at that point, the fine line between heaven and hell. Too drunk on you to realize the reality of being sober, that cold and lonely feeling of falling with nothing to grab onto, of crashing into a memory of yourself. A you that you forgot about. I remember watching you as the years passed. As your songs became played out and fresh bursts of your flavor grew bored with tasting ripe. I watched the angels that lived in your eyes turn into abusive drunks and I saw the weeds stretch and spiral up the pillars of your heavenly gates. I suppose even heaven can grow old. A magnificent white beard that stretches down from the sky and it’s been there so long that all we see are clouds. Your bright red petals now blackened and withering, a paradise that can’t exist if there’s nothing to compare it to.

Fading…

We can’t travel back in time through all this cigarette smoke, it’s too thick. Too pungent. I can see the lines in your face now, like the lines of a play that we’ve been reciting over and over all these years, and every day the words lose a little bit more meaning. We don’t get drunk to have fun anymore. We get drunk to forget that we can’t have fun like we used to without it. There was a time when your presence served as a reminder, a doorway between our world and something more beautiful. A meaning behind all of this empty dialogue that we swim in, and get stuck in, like honey and artificial sweetener, the illusion of making something better when we’re only making it worse. You were an escape, my underground railroad, but now I see that your tracks just run in circles. Leaving to come and coming to leave is all we’ve ever really done.

I’ve collected years like junk in my closet,
I forget what’s in there half the time…

Every now and then I still hear your voice, like a whisper in the back of my mind, blowing dust off these memories that have grown old and neglected. A quiet prayer now that I finally know what to pray for. You seem stressed out, disappointed, tired. I can relate. I’m too worried about my own life to spend time studying you now, or giving your pages much consideration. I’ve already read them a thousand times. But sometimes… 

… like a light bulb that’s hell-bent on staying alive, you flicker. You flash like a struck match igniting before my eyes and drag me back to day one with a knowing smile. A glimpse in the rearview mirror. Stronger than any faith, anything I thought my jaded heart had learned over the years. I see a fleeting glimpse of what was locked away all this time – untainted, unbeaten, once known. A belief in beliefs; to stumble but keep going and trudge somewhere beautiful through all this mud, ignoring that the destination has always been inevitable defeat. Traveling to a place we always knew we’d end up. Even now, you have a way of making this failure taste a bit like victory. A type of success that only makes sense inside our home, this forgotten church. We spent all our lives questioning the existence of heaven and never stopped to consider that we’ve been surrounded by it all along.

When I see your face now, it’s not so much the sight of you that sticks out in my mind, but the feeling you evoke. A reminder —

That I still, and always will, have a lot to learn.

S.P.

Nostalgic Ache.

The purr of the lawn mower’s engine stretched all the way across my neighborhood and provided background noise to another summer day taking place. My house was close enough to the neighborhood pool that I could hear the distant sounds of children yelling and the rhythmic cadence of the diving board. It reminded me of a heartbeat that ended in a splash. The young lifeguards twirled their whistles and blew into them loudly now and again, inspiring nostalgia around the area in those who were once young, and sun-soaked, and sticky from melted popsicles that dripped down their hands.

I stood in the kitchen and looked out the front window of our home at our front yard. It was a modest patch of green grass about fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long that stretched out like a big fat green tongue. It led towards a waist-high collection of suburban bushes and a gigantic tree that reached high above our yard. We were the end unit of a strip of townhouses; a degree or two more impressive than the rest because we had a side area. But essentially the homes were all clones that used minor differences to appear unique; green shutters, a yellow door, a birdbath.

My father was cutting the grass and I could tell by the residue of soda on the counter and the mostly empty bottle of Jack Daniels beside it that he was probably drinking. I didn’t need to look outside to know what he was wearing. Probably just a cheap old pair of swimming trunks that looked like they were made in the 1980s and nothing else. The old man only wore shirts and shoes when it was a life or death situation, and even then it wasn’t a guarantee. He was maybe an inch taller than me, stocky and robust. Once upon a time, according to legend (and old dusty polaroids), my father was lean and athletic. He worked in a steel mill during his younger days, hauling heavy pillars of metal around. “No place could be so hot and so cold all at once“, he often said. The afternoons were like African summers. The molten, melted steel covered men in dripping sweat, leaving them black and sooty, panting in sauna air. Then at night, when the sun went down, it transformed into Alaskan winter. Steel would draw the cold from the starry sky like magnets and men would go about their taxing labor with foggy breaths and extra layers of clothes. All taking place in a small rural town in Ohio. It was always hard for me to picture that younger version of my father. Thin, optimistic, handsome. He felt like a stranger to me.

He still maintains some of those traits today, just aged versions of them. And as I age too, I get it. But the only real opinions I could draw from my father were based on my life experiences with him. I had pictures of family and friends thumb-tacked to the wall by my bed. They were usually the first thing I saw in the morning. There were a few pictures of me with friends, but old black and white polaroids took up most of the space. History always intrigued me. Not only the subject itself – but the passage of time. For example; there was a picture of my mother, young and beautiful, squatting behind a three-foot-tall child version of myself, feeding bread to ducks by the lake where we used to live. And another young photo of my uncle Ray (who passed away a few years back), looking cool as hell at one of our family picnics, drinking a can of beer with a burning cigarette in his other hand. A collage of people I love; all younger versions of the ones I knew now. Frozen frames of trivial points in their life, yet now those moments feel so important. It always gave me such a strange feeling.

Looking at them always inspired me to savor the simple things in life. I don’t think many moments can be properly cherished until you have the time and hindsight to look back on them, which I find sad. Maybe that strange feeling is a form of longing for what the images represent – places you can see but never touch again.

This summer reminded me of all the ones before it. The aroma of sun-tan lotion, old bay seasoning, burning cigarettes. The sounds of beer cans being cracked, of old rusty fold-out beach chairs that should have been thrown out years ago. A pile of steaming blue crabs on the table. The sun rubbed our backs and turned our skin dark and golden because we earned it – we turned enjoying summer into an art. No amount of heat or bugs could keep us from sitting outside long enough to enjoy the transition of summer day to summer night; when the crickets started to join in on our conversations and the lightning bugs silently looked for love, glowing bright just to fade away a second later, like flashing photographs… like the lives we live…

Like… the sensation I get at the start of every summer, and all the summers to come, until I’m made up of old pictures and memories…

… That nostalgic ache.

I should tell her about you.

Some day in the future, when I’m married with a child of my own and my wife is folding laundry in the other room, my daughter, as fate will no doubt provide me– will ask me about love.

 

I know what I’ll say.

 

I’ll speak of her mother and all the ways I care for her, but it won’t entirely be true.

 

.. I should tell her about you.

 

I should tell her about making love outside on summer nights and hopping pool fences. I should tell her about warm showers, where I would watch drops of water run down your skin and pretend they were traveling on roads and highways and you were the country I lived in…

 

I should tell her about how your face is tattooed on the back of my eyelids so all I had to do was close them to see you. I should tell her how everything I did reminded me of you. How every word from your beautiful mouth was another stitch in the only blanket that was thick enough to keep my soul warm.

 

I should tell her.

 

I should tell her how you were my hardened queen and my delicate princess. I should tell her how I stayed awake just to watch you sleep and how your breath inspired my heart to beat.

 

I should tell her how the only true affair my heart ever had was with each and every one of your fingers and toes and that your kisses were the sun, because they became my only reason for waking up every morning.

 

I should tell her about my tongue and how it moved before my mind could stop it. I should tell her how I held my heart down and strangled it while it begged for you.

 

I should tell her.

 

I should tell her about you.

My motivation.

Why am I doing this blog? Well, I like to write sometimes. I thought this could be a somewhat constructive hobby (or healthy distraction) that I could learn to look forward to. Maybe a therapeutic release. Something to keep me focused on more positive things. I’m not sure if anyone is even going to read what I have to write and that’s alright. That’s not really the goal. I think opening up to a potential audience through writing (regardless of their level of attentiveness) is still a step in the right direction.  I have some things I want to work on currently on a personal level, I’m sure we all do. So the hope is that if I can be honest and open with myself about things here, it’ll set a good precedent for my everyday life.

Who knows, but it’s a step. What will you find here? Just a random smattering of things. Poems, fiction, fiction that drawls from personal experiences, straight-up personal experiences, basically an abstract look inside my mind. So enjoy if you’re into that sort of thing.

Love always,

Sean

 

Winter.

The air seemed heavier now, dense, frigid. I breathed in and gave my lungs a cold shower to wake them up. And when I exhaled, it was fog that left my mouth. Snow fell and blanketed my hometown in a layer of white innocence – God’s bleach. Maybe he was hoping to cleanse us. The ice made me walk slower than usual. Headlights from cars crawled by in slow motion and stretched my silhouette into the distance; their tires crunched over salt, their exhaust blossomed fading ghosts behind them. It’s colder but people seemed warmer this time of year. Perhaps winter is a distraction. It’s hard to consider your problems when you can’t feel your fingers. Brilliant lights decorated homes, bright reds and greens and blues. Christmas trees stood illuminated in windows looking out at me as I passed.

     I walked the streets tonight for no particular reason. I couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong with me when I ended up outside of her house again. The compass inside me was broken. I tried to turn and leave but I couldn’t. The snow fell around me. Her home looked remarkably still compared to the flakes that descended, a backdrop of motion, hundreds of small reminders of passing time – and a house I could only enter in my memories. I imagined what she might be doing inside if she was there. Maybe cleaning or listening to music, which I could faintly hear. Images raced through my mind. Images of her standing in the kitchen, cooking one of the three meals she knew how to make. Images of her stretched out on the couch with a book in her hands; the room smelling of marijuana. Her smile haunted me. I saw it when I least expected it and it twisted my insides to the point where I couldn’t untangle them. But she’s a ghost now. And I’ve become just a shadow outside.

     I pulled the hood of my jacket up over my head to remind myself not to look back when I moved along. The street lamps were small golden moons above me that lit my way. My mind was saturated with thoughts that had no beginning or clear end, just a bottomless collage of memories– skin, laughter, tears. I believe in the eventual spring. I’m not sure when it will arrive, but I sense I’m inching closer. There are subtle hints of a change inside me, pieces of me that are aching for new experiences, an indifference in my heart to old habits. A transformation is manifesting at the core. The center of my universe. A desire that may hopefully rub against my bones and create friction, a heat that will spread and melt what’s around me.

     I remain uncertain of where I’m heading. I’m not sure how long it will take or how intense this transition might be. All I know is that I’m not going to sit around and wait anymore.

     I’m going to go find my spring.