Perry

I met Perry under a bridge at the end of 6^th Street in Austin, Texas.  It was cold that morning.  It had rained the night before and it was windy.  The cold cut through my jacket, my flannel, and my t-shirt. My feet had long since gone numb.  I was freezing.  Perry had on a toboggan, a thin jacket, and a long sleeve shirt.  Looking at him you wouldn’t have known that it was 30 degrees outside. 

He had on black rimmed glasses and had a couple days’ worth of salt-and-pepper stubble growing on his chin and jaw line.  He looked to be late thirties or early forties and could have easily passed for a youth pastor at a medium sized non-denominational church.  Except for the fact that he was experiencing homelessness.  He didn’t fit into the grungy, alcoholic mold I had for homeless people.  If you walked past him on the street, you probably wouldn’t have known that he had spent the previous night sleeping on it and hadn’t had a hot meal in a few days. 

I didn’t hear much of his story.  He was already talking to a friend of mine when I walked up, so I was afforded the luxury of listening without having to interact.  I would hear parts of his conversation, the sound bytes coming into my ears and sticking to my brain.  “It’s just a beautiful thing man.  Don’t be a part of the machine.  Help people and do God’s will.”  He was a conspiracy theorist who believed in the spiritual realm and God.  The thing that struck me most about Perry was how he talked. Instead of listening to everything that he was saying, I started to listen to how he was saying things.  I watched his mannerisms and his facial expressions and his body language. 

He had gone so long without talking that the words had built up in him like water behind a dam.  All it took was one question and the dam broke.  A flood of words and emotions came pouring out of Perry.  He would get passionately loud, then passionately quiet.  He would talk like a wizened old sage passing along wisdom, then he would crack a joke that only a twelve year old boy could laugh at.  He would get angry at what people did to each other, then he would tear up talking about his daughter.  It was like standing next to a river about to spill over its banks.  If he had been speaking directly to me, I may have gotten swept away in the days of broken silence.

I realized that in a city of 800,000 people, Perry didn’t have anyone to talk to.  There was a desperate tone to his voice.  Like he had to get everything that was inside of him out before we went back to our vans and he went back to the overwhelming silence of loneliness.  I felt like he was trying to tell us everything about himself so that when we left, we wouldn’t forget him, so that he wasn’t just another coke can, or old newspaper, or food wrapper on the side of the street.  He wanted us to know and to remember that he was a person.  A person who had a mom and a dad and a story and hopes and dreams and a heart and emotions.  A person who had a beginning and who someday will have an end.  He shared this commonality with every human being that has ever walked the earth since God declared that it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone.  Perry wanted to be known by someone.  Even if it was on the shallowest level and spread out like a shotgun blast, Perry wanted to make his mark on our lives so that he could feel as if he belonged somewhere.

You belong Perry.  Your blood is just as red as mine and your soul just as precious to the Father.  I know this is only a fraction of your story, but I hope it helps in some small way.  I pray you never be forgotten.  I pray you can talk to more people who will hear you.  I pray you know that you are known.

The Wishing Well

In the middle of our town there is a square paved with flagstones and surrounded by shop fronts.  My little bookstore is one of them. In the middle of the square is an old stone well.  The rope holding the bucket rotted away long ago and was carried off in the wind like dust.  Nobody used the well anymore because it dried up.  It dried up before I was born, before my parents were born, before their parents were born.

Nobody knows if it ever had water in it.

It’s a wishing well.  They say that when you flip your coin into the well and make a wish, if you believe that wish will come true, you’ll hear the coin splash in the water.  If you don’t hear a splash, then you didn’t believe enough.

I stopped flipping coins into it years ago.

There’s a little boy at the well with his mother.  He’s pulling on her skirt and pointing to the well, pleading for a coin.  She gives him one.  He grips it tightly in his little fist; the whites of his knuckles cutting through in sharp contrast to the purple after light of the sunset.  Belief.  He flips the coin into the well, mouths his wish, and leans in as close as he can, listening expectantly. Five seconds go by. Ten seconds. A gentle breeze picks up. It brushes past me into my store, and with a firm but gentle persistence it blows half a dozen papers off of my desk onto the floor.  I leave the door to pick them up and when I return, the boy and his mother are gone.

I hate the wishing well.  I have read fantasies and escaped into the little black letters that are permanently stamped onto the paper, that are permanently stamped onto my brain.  I don’t hate fairy tales.  They don’t claim to be real.  The well screams its existence.  It echoes off the stones and the shop fronts louder than the footsteps and voices that fill the square.

The well is cruel.  It destroys our belief when we are young so that we never get it back.  It takes our faith and smothers it with silence.  It has been silent my whole life and it is silent now.

Before I can tell my feet otherwise, they are striding across the flagstones.  I stop at the well, my thighs and knees pressing up against the stone.  Some of the sun’s warmth is still in the stones.  I place my hands on the rim.  The stone is painfully smooth under my fingers. It’s as smooth as a dream, as sound moving through the air, as the passing of time. Too smooth to be real.  There needs to be roughness to cause pain to remind people that it’s just a stone well.

I want to scream into it.  To make my indictment against its false promises.  To make an accusation against its silence. I look up to the sky.  The stars are out.  Impossibly far away.  Twinkling quietly, perfectly content with who they are and what their purpose is.  Constant as the well.  I fill my lungs with the chill night air, preparing to scream into the well.  To break it with my accusation.  To do to it what it did to me.

But my voice comes out a choked whisper.  The well’s silence is as thick as the darkness and just as impenetrable.  The only sound to escape my lips is a strangled, “Why?”

I crack.

From the innermost part of my soul to the deep-set wrinkles around my eyes, I crack.  I plead with the well in the same strangled whisper.  “Why did you fail me?  Why were you silent when I needed you?  Why did you let me break?”

Silence.

Not even and echo from the well.  The stones have no reply.  Constant.  The sun’s heat still making its way from the stones to my legs.  It’s almost comforting.  Even in the face of my loss, my pleading, my pain, the well stood.  It did not break as I had broken.  The well remained the well.

I reach into my pocket for a coin.  I grip it tightly. In the dark, my knuckles are white; it looks like all the blood has brained out of my hands, like they have a secret desperation of their own.  I clutch at the wind, hoping for something else to anchor me, something other than the well.  “I want to believe,” I whisper. I flip the coin into the well.  Five seconds pass.  The breeze has stopped.  There is no sound around me.  My breath is trapped in my lungs.  Time freezes.  Everything tightens like a wire about to snap.  Then the softest noise.  As soft as rain falling on the grass, but as piercing as the bell tower tolling out the hour.  The sound comes up through the silence of the well. 

Splash.

Belonging

You have two choices when someone gets sick.  You can treat them the same or you can treat them differently.  Lee is sick.  He has chronic myelogenous leukemia and the doctor said if he can make it five years then he can make it ten, he was on two.  What started as a sore throat ended up being bone cancer.

                So, everyone was faced with the choice.  How do you treat this guy who a week ago wasn’t dying?  Most people started acting like he was made of glass.  I made fun of him.  I had to make light of it.  It’s not because it’s not depressing or sad or hard, but because if you don’t then there’s this giant elephant stomping around preventing any kind of meaningful connection, and I think that is the saddest thing about this whole damned sickness.

Lee is bald now.  The chemo did it.  It made his skin really thin like if you looked hard enough you could see his bones and the cancer killing them.  In the almost dusk light in west Louisiana on I-20, he looked like a skeleton.  We were heading to his parents’ house in Dallas for his second Thanksgiving after being diagnosed.

I started pulling out pieces of my hair and letting them go out the window.  Lee gave me the same look he gives me every time he catches me doing that.  It’s the, “You’re just feeding that addiction,” look.  He’s a psychology major so he knows all about my problem.  It’s called Trichotillomania and it’s a lot like OCD.  That’s what my doctor told me at least, which made me feel better since I couldn’t control it.  Lee seems to think it otherwise.  Apparently I’m addicted to pulling my hair out and doing it only makes the addiction stronger.

“You’re just feeding that addiction,” he said.

“I’m just trying to look like you,” I shot back.

He peered at me, like he was squinting into the sun.  He was trying to figure me out.  My skin prickled, like my body knew what he was doing and was trying to keep him out.

“You want to know what I think?” he asked.

“I know why I do it.  It’s a compulsion, I can’t control it,” I replied.

“That’s not what you told me when we first met.  You told me that you wanted to feel like you belonged.  That if you left even the smallest piece of yourself somewhere then you’ve staked your claim.  Then everywhere is yours and you belong somewhere because you belong everywhere.”

“Are you disagreeing with that?”

“I think that’s what you told yourself so you didn’t feel different.  You told other people that you wanted to belong, so instead of having a normal compulsive disorder and being boring and having people constantly watching you, you have this quirky endearing trait that makes you desirable and vulnerable.”

“So you’re saying I lied so I wouldn’t have to be like you?”  I don’t know why I said that.  He turned his eyes back to the road and a heavy silence fell between us.

The road took on a rhythmic quality, constant and unbreakable.  The sun was fiery red and dipping down right in front of us.  If we drove fast enough we could drive into it and burn up.  His face and scalp were reflecting the sunlight. Red. Like he was a newborn, filling up on life, not like it was leaking out of him.  The sun passed beneath the horizon and the car was filled with the after-light, the dusk.  His head looked like a burnt out sun that had run its course and was done.

ghosts

One time I was in a room.  It was full of people that I didn’t know and never would know.

I was a ghost.

So I screamed.  I screamed so loud and so long that my lungs started screaming, and my fingers, and my ears, and my eyes, and my stomach, and my heart.  Everyone looked at me.  Relief.

The scream validated my existence.  To the people that forgot that I was a real person who breathes and dances and laughs and hurts.  Sometimes I think that enough people don’t know me then I’ll just fade out, and one day I’ll try to talk to someone and they’ll look right through me like my voice was a whisper on the breeze.

I believe in ghosts because I feel like one sometimes.

If I feel a breeze, I look for the person who isn’t there.  “I hear you.  I know you’re there.”  I have to whisper because I don’t want to break them.

So when I feel thin, when I feel like a ghost, I scream.  I scream to give substance to my existence, to make my blood pump and my fingers tingle.

Do you see me?  I know you do.  You can’t look through me.

I am not a ghost

 

no

One time I said no.

It was the wrong answer.

Saying no is like an addiction, like smoking cheap cigarettes.  You think a while about that first one and kind of regret it, but each one after that becomes easier and easier, till it eventually becomes a part of your identity, as much as your hometown, or your favorite book, or that song that always makes you cry.

Now I’m stuck in quicksand that’s slow.  No turned into fear and fear turned into paralysis and paralysis turns into…into what? Death?

It’s automatic like sunrise and tides and words.

It’s comfortable only because it’s familiar, because there is no risk, no danger, no pain.  No pain, that’s wrong, not true.  There is more pain in no than yes.  I guess you just grow used to it like cold water or other people’s problems or that thing deep down that wants something more.

Can no go to yes?

No.

Why not?

No.

What is stopping me?

No.

Isn’t change part of the human experience?  Like the seasons and birth and death and age?  The next track on the cd, the next page in the book, the next something in the whatever?  Aren’t we more defined by change than by same?

Can I go from no to yes?

 

The Red Line

12:55 AM

It’s a lie.  The realization seeps through my bones, cutting through my skin like a cold wind.  Dread.  Everything that my parents, my friends, my tv, everyone, had been telling me about girls and love and feelings.

A lie.

Sounds dramatic yes, but to a twenty year old college student who’s had one girlfriend but never been in love, something like this undid the pas ten years, ever since I learned I liked girls.  I had been looking for someone, a girl, who was basically either a girl version of me or a younger version of my mom—both equally disconcerting now that I think about it.  A girl who is curvy yet thin, can cook, likes my football team, doesn’t want expensive things but comes from money, doesn’t care what I look like but is always tastefully put together, and a whole litany of other things that contribute to more of a mirage as opposed to an actual person.

I should have realized it was all fake with Alex, my first and only girlfriend.  She was all of those things, or at least on her way.  But there was a disconnect, or lack of connection, something.  I said it was because she liked State and I liked Tech, but it was something else.

I was blind.

Now the darkness is fading into something more discernable and I’m seeing something else.  Silence.  There are no lies in silence.  It takes up too much space.  No room for dream-girl Barbie, or masks that cover eyes and faces, or pretense, or politeness, or superficiality, or…or what?  Something else.  Is there room for knowledge? For trust? For love?

There’s room for desperation and need.  For the first time in my life, at 1:00 AM on the red-line train, I feel need.  It’s sitting across from me, with a scarf around its neck and a messenger bag at its feet.

I need her.

The rhythmic sounds of the train keep me from sinking.  I need her silence to fill the void that the lie, the noise, left.

I am crumbling.

Silence would fill me.  She wouldn’t have to know me.  I couldn’t know her.  We would just be.  Sit and be sustained by the silence.  Smothering yet fragile.  So easily fractured.  So easily lost, like smoke in the breeze.

I sit next to her.

1:05 AM

“I’m John.”

She shakes her head and points to her mouth.

“I don’t understand.”

She pulls out a notepad and writes. My name is Elle.

I can’t breathe.  It’s heavier.  The silence compounds, smothering me.  Those quiet letters on that yellow legal pad deafen me.  The noise is replaced by those letters.  Need.  Love.  Need.  Love.  Silence.  Elle.

The train stops at the Third Street Station.  My stop.  The doors open with a bing.  It fractures.  It’s so fragile, like smoke.  Like Truth.

1:10 AM

Life

Pro: “Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, you have a healthy baby boy.”

“Would you like to hold your son?”

“Welcome to the world Thomas.”

Con: “Jack! Why weren’t you watching Thomas closer? He hurt himself!”

“Denise, I can’t watch him every waking second.  For Christ’s sake it’s just a scrape. Calm down.”

“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down Jack.  Tom has to have at least one responsible parent and I guess it may as well be me.”

Pro: “Happy Birthday Tom! Dad will take you tomorrow to get your license.  Then you can drive to school tomorrow.”

Con: “Sorry Son, I can’t take off work for another couple weeks.  We’ll have to wait till then to get you up to the courthouse to get your license.”

Con: “Tom, honey.  Sit down.  Your father and I have something we need to tell you.”

“Son, your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

“What you need to know dear, is that this is not your fault.”

Con: “Sorry Tom, I already have a date to prom.”

Pro: “Mr. Reynolds, It is my pleasure to inform you of your acceptance into the University of Chicago…”

Pro: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the West Jackson High Senior Class of 2006!”

Con: “Why are you going to school so far away from home?  Are you trying to get away from me?”

Pro: “Welcome to American Literature.”

Con: “You have a twenty page research paper due at the end of the term.”

Pro: “Hey Tom! Party at Daniel’s! You’re coming with!”

Pro: “Hi, I’m Chelsie.”

Con: “Sorry Tom but I just don’t feel the same about you that you do for me.”

Con: “Tom, if you don’t pass my class, you’re not going to be able to register for next year.”

Con: “Mr. Reynolds, the Office of the Provost regrets to inform you that…”

Con: “Tom, it’s Dad.  Your mother is in the hospital.  It doesn’t look good.”

Con: “Don’t apologize Tom.  You being so far from homes isn’t what made me sick.”

Con: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

“She’s in a better place now Tom.”

Con: “I’m sorry Tom.  I know you’re going through some difficult stuff right now with school and your mother passing, but I can’t keep you on anymore.  I’ve got to let you go.”

It’s amazing to me how quickly you can lose control of your life.  I made it through high school fairly well.  Yeah it was tough but being dateless to the prom and my parents divorcing isn’t really a good excuse. It’s too common nowadays.  I got to college full of hope, expecting to remake myself.  What they don’t tell you in freshman orientation is that life doesn’t get any easier.  You fail classes, get fired, and if you’re me, you fall in love only to realize too late that you’re the only one who did.  Then you’re left with that sick feeling in your stomach.  Like every part of your body knows that you lost something that you can’t get back.  Then I started piecing things together and I realized the lie everyone had been telling me from my first rejection, “It’s not your fault,” is just that:  a lie.  It was like a bag was pulled off my head and I saw the reasons behind my failures and rejections.  I wasn’t smart enough, funny enough, handsome enough, close enough, and good enough son.  I got to that point and got filled with a pain that I’ve never experienced before.  Like the combined total of all the pain that I’d experienced to that point, that I’d been carrying, got heavier.  Made me feel like my legs gave out.  And it hurt.  It hurt so bad it curled me into a ball in my bed at night.  But then one day I woke up and I didn’t hurt anymore.  I didn’t feel anymore.  Nothing.  Not the hot water in the shower or my clothes or anything.  Nothing.  Then I realized something else.  Nobody knew I hurt.  I suppose that’s my fault as well.  Now I feel everything again because the realization of my loneliness ripped off that bandaid.  Nobody has even the slightest—

Pro: “Are you ok? You look like you’re about to cry.  My name is Mary.”

Pro: “Yeah, pick me up at my place at seven.”

Pro: “Of course I like you! I wouldn’t be dating you if I didn’t.”

Con: “I feel like I don’t even know you Tom.  You won’t let me know you and I want to so desperately.  How can I be in this with you if I don’t know you?”

Pro: “I know you’re hurt Tom, and I know it’s hard and you’re afraid, but I’m not going anywhere.  I don’t care that you’re screwed up, so am I.  We just have to move on, take the help when it comes.”

Pro: “I love you Tom.”

I love you, too.

Word

I am Word.

I am everything and nothing

depending on who you ask.

I am Creator and Destroyer.

I am Truth and Lie.

I am innocence and guilt.

I am the source of your greatest triumphs

and your greatest failures.

I am Love and Hate

community and loneliness.

I am grace and justice

fear and weakness.

I am both him and her

and neither of the above.

I am You.

I am everyone else.

I am freedom and chains

a gift and a curse.

I am sunshine and rain

comfort and despair.

I am knowledge and ignorance.

I am hope and hopelessness.

I am here and now

and never was and never will be.

I am ink on paper

and everything you wish you could say but cant.

I am what you are and what you are not.

I am Life and Death.

This is me.

This is you

I am the beginning.

I am

the end.

spring

The steam rose off the dark surface like a ghost, being stirred when it hit the slight breeze coming through the drafty walls and floor boards.  It floated over to the bookcase where it joined the stories bound by ink and paper.  He sighed.  The steam was in a better place; those stories being much better than his own.

His pen sat silent on the table while he waited on his muse to return from furlough.  he so desperately wanted life to flow from his hands.  He wanted to create, to invent, to fit better into that mold which had been set before he was born.  But instead of life and Spring and creation and dancing, he had a valley of dry bones and hands made of stone.

He did a lot of walking these days.  It was about the only way for him to feel alive, to believe he was alive.  He could see his breath hang in the January air.  He could feel the cold bite his nose and his ears, and afterward he could feel the life warmth flow back into his fingers and toes.  Feel.  He was so tired of wanting to feel.  Feeling wasn’t always truth.  The oak that had relinquished its leaves to the ground felt and even looked dead, and yet every year for the past hundred, it groaned to life when the warmth of Spring reminded it of its life.

So would Spring come? Yes.  It’s the nature of Spring to arrive; never late, never early, but always exactly when it intends.  But it would do no good to sit huddled in the corner hoping for a sign from the groundhog.  He sighed again.  The wouldn’t do at all.  There was still beauty in the winter.  A strengthening.  To be strong is to survive the winter.

So survive he would.

He blew warmth into his hands, releasing them from their stony cold, and picked up his pen.  The slightest hint of warmth tinged the page and the old oak creaked in anticipation.  Spring was coming.

He was fighting something. It made about as much sense as the ground resisting Spring.  Yet he couldn’t help himself.  He had enough trouble believing other people could change so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to doubt his own heart.

He finished removing the last bit of stubble from his chin.  Change wasn’t as simple as shaving was it?  Something sharp and some pain for a more polished look?  What happens when it grows back?  No, life wasn’t like this.  It wasn’t like Spring either.  Spring is beautiful yes, but it’s predictable, cyclic, and there was no way he saw this one coming.  He was in unknown territory and he wasn’t sure what to do.

He wasn’t drowning because he wasn’t panicking.  He wasn’t lost because he felt peace.  Maybe that’s what it was.  Like the man who had been a soldier his whole life trying to retire.  It wasn’t written in him to fight, he learned it, but he had accepted it as part of himself, conflict being as natural as breathing.  And now to unlearn all of that?  How do you erase a lifetime of experiences that built on one another, proving that conflict, winning, and losing were the only way?  And now he was given peace?

Part of him fought it because that’s what he did.  Then he saw that the peace was good so he fought fighting it.  There it was.  He was fighting again.  Despair.  He didn’t feel capable of embracing the peace.  Like he was spiraling out of control, a plane in a tail-spin.  What would happen? Would the fighting end?  Would one side win?  Would there be a cease-fire?  Could there truly be peace for this battle weary soldier?  He hoped the answer wouldn’t end him, but then again maybe he needed to be ended, so he could start again.  But that’s scarier than fighting; at least he knew fighting.