My voice may very well be failing me, just when I thought I was on to something. I'm trying, and I don't think it matters, because in the end, trying might not lead to anything at all, and I will be miserable still. Somebody help me find my feet. I am not good enough on my own, not yet, I hope not for long.

All the Wounded Ones Home

© Rachel C

The clouds are lying low on one side of the house; low, gray, foreboding rain, and thunder in the distance. But on the other side, streaming in through the blind-covered windows, sun streaks the living room floor. Where is the sun coming from, where are the clouds going, are they traveling together? The sun fades, then brightens, fades, the lights the floor again. The clouds are winning the back and forth battle, or the sun is standing strong. I am watching it play out on the living room floor: bright sunshine, dark clouds, shiny light, twisted shapes. Back and forth, back and forth...I feel so back and forth, pulled and pushed, and prodded and poked toward every direction. The clouds are being shaped by the wind, pushing them farther away, molding them into greater, bolder masses, darkening the sky, creating thunder. The sun is victim to the spinning of the Earth. She’ll sink, they’ll blow away, she’ll rise, they’ll build with evaporation, with accumulation of everything she’s created. And I have no doubt that I will sit here, sit here and watch it play out on the living room carpet.
The clouds have overtaken the sky. I suppose, if just for a moment, I can let my emotions settle.

April 3, 2007
Author's Note: I don't think I have anything to say...I think I am slumping, I think I need some work.

Diving Deeper into Something Good

Each Coming Night

© Rachel C

I am up and down, like the weather. One moment something makes me angry, the next moment I’ve found a reason to smile again. I am up and down, side to side, back and forth—but mostly up and down. The weather never compliments me. If it rains, I want to smile. The low, gray clouds make me happy. And I love the sound of raindrops on the windshield. When it’s bright, and the sky is blue, I am mellow. Light-hearted, easy going, I am indifferent. But when it is warm I feel lonely, as if there is an element missing—there is: my coat. I would rather curl up with my fleece; walk through chilled air just to see my breath. The cold is comfortable. And living here, I wake up without knowing how I’ll feel that day. Tomorrow, I won’t know if it will be raining or hot. And I don’t know if I will be up to a drop in the temperature. I don’t know if I’ll be prepared to smile again.
At some point in my early youth I was traumatized. I was stuck in a small, one-story house in—let’s face it—bumblefuck Glenpool, Oklahoma, curled next to my mother as a Gust Nato passed over, ripping away privacy fences, pulling branches from their trees, sweeping shingles from defenseless, bare-bottomed roofs. I was tiny, I was terrified, and all I can recall is the sound of my mother’s voice hurrying along a prayer. I don’t think I have ever been the same.
When we moved into this house, we only had the laundry room bathroom to hide in—which, if there had ever been a true threat, we would have all been demolished in that tiny space—and I took to it with speed each time Travis Meyer declared a tornado watch. If you haven’t been in Tornado Alley, or spent your life in the world’s twister capital, then you might not know, as I didn’t, that a watch was nothing, meaningless, a precaution. And yet I flew to the bathroom, kneeled on the floor between the cabinets and the toilet, and prayed to Jesus to save my family from any danger. “Please don’t let us die.” I would grow nervous to the point of stomach aches when harmless thunderstorms would pass over; I would whimper, rush to my mother, sometimes even cry from anxiety. Tornadoes stressed me out; I was a nervous wreck at six.
As I grew older, I began to note the differences in tornadic storms and simple, easy, beautiful thunder. I grew to enjoy the latter, still petrified of the former. When my father left, and my sister was away at her first year of college, a storm of the former came sweeping in, as they do every spring, and I found myself in the closet under the stairs sobbing and praying to a god I was losing belief in. It’s almost ironic that I found myself on my knees in a closet that only came into existence because of my father’s angry fist and the brittle nature of sheetrock. There I was, crying for my mother to console me, on the floor of an accident of anger. And my mother, she soothed me by telling me we were alright, that we survived the worst without my father, that we would survive this. She didn’t know I was sobbing for my sister, I didn’t know she wasn’t referring to the storm.
Just this past year, the sirens sounded in downtown Chicago. My friend freaked out, ran downstairs from the fifteenth floor, and hid in the basement with the other tenants in her building. Unlike her, I sat in my room, opened my window, and listened to the rain. “This isn’t tornadic; there is nothing to worry about.” She told me things were different here, that I could be wrong. I wasn’t wrong, I was experienced, I knew better. And yet part of me is nervous, each time it begins to thunder late at night, each time the sound of pounding rain wakes me up from much-needed slumber. My stomach turns a little, I feel the twinge of anxiety in my gut, but I force myself to roll-over; I convince myself I know better, I tell myself someone is looking out for me even though I know they aren’t—everyone is sleeping, just as I should be. But a part of me won’t fall back asleep, even if my body does, even if my mind does. I dream of mysterious things that leave me feeling lonely in the morning, and leave my skin tingling with the moments I remember of creepy scenes. My deep seeded anxiety manifests itself in my subconscious expression, and I wake up awkward, I wake up anxious; I wake up only to find I am not really awake.
It’s spring; the weather is up and down, cold one day, humid the next. I wake up without knowing how the weather’s changed overnight; I am not able to tell how I will feel when I walk outside. Maybe one of these days there will be a tornado and I won’t have to decide how to feel based on the weather. I will just walk through the day with mixed emotions spinning all around my head.

April 2, 2007
Author's Note: GAH, I fucking hate having to conform in my comp class to simplistic, 750 word, five-paragraph essay bullshit, and it is showing in my most natural of forms. Fucking hate it, fucking hate how this feels, but I also know that I have to write, and I want to write, and these things truly are up and down. Yeah, so it sounds like a two-dollar essay, but it's all part of something greater--all part of some giant, grand machine. I can only hope that the whole meaning wasn't ruined by my feeling of strain, even when I am writing for nobody but myself. It's so strange how these things affect you. Please, pray I come out of this stupor quickly. I cannot stand to let myself fall into this high school style slump. I need my voice back.

Go Cry, Emo Kid

You Haven't Called Me in Weeks

©Rachel C

My body is being left behind. Time is moving, and somewhere I am mentally aware that each day is passing, each moth is progressing, and that time is pushing forward. The older I get, the faster it goes—the faster it goes, the sooner I am old. Emotionally, physically, something is being lost in translation. My body does not feel that it has aged four months even as I write the date on my next week’s schedule, or on a payment to my brother. And as time progresses, I feel more and more emotionally unstable. I could crack; I could crumble with one word, or sent into a fit of rage with another. I am not physically aware of the pressure time is putting on my body, or my heart; and yet every day that passes I do not question with disbelief that it is March, that it is the Twenty-second, that it is another day I’m putting toward something, and still another day I feel I have done nothing. I feel like I am not moving forward at all, not one single step, and here time is, showing me up, becoming a new day each morning.
I’m left behind, I’m detached. I don’t understand. A week ago, I was somebody’s person. Somebody’s best friend, someone they could count on. I think that was a little bit of an illusion, on my part. I think that I misled myself, because I need her to be my person. I need her to be here with me, but she doesn’t need me. She’s moved on, she doesn’t need my advice, she’s found someone new. She doesn’t need a person. I need a person, but all my people are disappearing. I think when we said “life long”, we were counting in mouse years.
I hate what I am doing—I feel like I am only hurting myself. And, moreover, I feel like some whiney “emo-kid”, whom everyone wished would shut up and move on. That’s what I feel like I should do. That’s what I feel like people are telling me to do, each time they give me that look of abhorrence. I can feel it in their eyes that they don’t want me here—or maybe I am just creating that sensation...but it doesn’t make me feel better. This bitter song won’t make me feel better. I feel like I should try harder, work harder, smile brighter, and be everything they think they are. I feel like being bitter, even for the sake of venting, is only making everything worse. I feel like I should stop talking—I am talking too much.
I don’t want to be the bitter person, always striving to make others proud, always working to prove everyone wrong. I don’t want to be the person who wakes up and realizes no one is going to care how successful she is, no one is going to care how smart she is, because the impression is already made and they won’t change their minds. I don’t want to be the person who realizes they were always going to be alone anyway. Loneliness is a mindset—a mind-trap is more correct. I thought I wouldn’t be, but I also thought someone needed me, and I think I was wrong, so I think I am wrong about everything. I want to know who missed me, who wanted me back. I want to know who still feels that way. I want to know if someone thinks about me, every now and then, because I think about them all the time. I want to know where I went wrong. I want to know how I ended up here. Mostly, I want to know where this is going.
I thought I was somebody’s person. I thought I had something to say. My message has been lost somewhere between my mind and my body, lost in translation at the tips of my fingers, just as time has been misinterpreted in my body, and I am torn. I am torn by the inconsistency in my mind and in my body. I feel completely sidetracked just remembering what day it is. Let alone remembering who I want to be, or how I want to get there.
I was supposed to be the one pushing forward. I was supposed to be the one ahead of the curve. On my way, a published author, detached from the skeptics of my youth. And yet here I am, sitting in Tulsa, living paycheck to paycheck; completely alone in a house full of people—completely alone in my head. I just wish you would call, but I know you won’t. And, honestly, it’s bringing me down.

March 22, 2007
Author's Note: Yeah, still part of that series I've been putting together, or whatever. I guess it's all linked because it's all one autobiographical string of thoughts, but this one is a lot-a-bit different than the others in it's style, so I guess it's just a little off-center that way. It's pretty bad, and I haven't written in a while, and I am in a complete funk. It sucks, I feel like shit, I feel like no one wants to talk to me--and honestly, no one will call me back...so, maybe it's not all imaginary. Anyway, I am a little depressed, and thus: emo-kid, whiney, crap prose has emerged. Eh, maybe it's not so bad, you know, for an amateur.

Concerning An Emo Kid

To Me You Are Depression

©Rachel C

I could curl up in your arms, fold my body to the contours of yours, rest my head against your shoulder-to-cry-on. I could link my fingers within yours, elegant and slender, like the piano player’s, but you do not serenade me. I could linger my mouth just-so slightly near yours, and let you taste my lust before my lips, my necessity before my want. But I do not, though in my mind I can feel your warm hands rest along my waist; and the gentle way you kiss my earlobe. I can feel your heavy weight upon my delight, pressing my objection into submission. And though I lie alone, distressed and undressed along the sheets stained with memories of my slumber, I do feel melancholy fingers linger at my neck; I do feel misery lips press into my own.

Depression expresses its slightest intimacies with me, making love to my vulnerable body and devastating me in despair.

February 20, 2005

And I Know You're Somewhere on the Road

I know I've been dead. Don't blame me, blame the world.
News, news, news!: I just submitted my first piece of prose to a literary journal, Cranky. From what I've seen of the poetry they publish, I am hoping my submission is suitable, but we'll all just have to wait and see. As for the piece I threw out there, if you remember "Nowhere Warm", or "Nothing to Keep My Hands Warm", you can pray that it will be accepted as my first piece to be published. Fingers crossed.

Shaking in My Ballet Flats

When God Closes a Door, He Jumps Out a Window

©Rachel C

Have you ever been walking down an unfamiliar street, heading toward an address you’ve never been, and realized that you have no idea what you are doing or how to get where you are going? This feeling comes over you, like a warm sickness in the pit of your stomach, and you could turn circles around yourself, point in any direction, and it wouldn’t matter which way you went, because you either have to find a way home or reach your destination, and you have no clue which way is east. I hate that feeling, when all you want to do is find the train and head home, but you can’t stop walking until you’ve reached the station. You’re damned if you turn the wrong way, but damned if you don’t. If you stand still, what is going to happen to you? Nothing, because standing still is out of the question—standing still is suicide, eventually you’ll get tired of standing in a strange neighborhood and have to start walking again. You can’t stop until you’ve found a way home. You can’t stop.
So many people have made analogies to this feeling, “life’s just a ride”, one that doesn’t stop, turn around, or let you off. There are two ends to the tunnel, “but you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be out”, and if you turn around you’ll repeat all the mistakes you’ve made and be back where you started. “An hour glass glued to the table”, the sensation of running along sand dunes, “keep moving forward and things won’t fall apart.” Things will fall apart anyway. In time everything finds a way to crumble. Don’t stop, don’t stop, though. Just don’t stop moving.
I could have stayed in Chicago. Found a way to live, maybe dirt poor, but maybe happy. I don’t know that I would have been, though, which is all the problem with decisions—you have to try one option before you can understand which direction was the better way to go. So maybe I chose wrong, but the other side of the street is still a mystery to me. What if I had stayed? I could have been miserable where I was living, so poor I couldn’t concentrate, and having to deal with the consequences of poor grades. But, would it have been any better than this? I am facing retaking all of my courses again, making up for lost grades by losing time. As for poor, here I am paying for my car, my food, my rent, my tuition. I have a job, yes, but forty hours a week is hardly comfortable here. I was talking about comfort with a girl I work with; I was saying soon I might finally reach that level of consolation, after the next pay check. I don’t think I was lying, to her or to myself, I think some sort of relief may soon be on its way, but I don’t know how long it will last. But, then again, if I can find comfort here, with only a few pay checks and the savings growing steadily, I might have in fact made the better of the two decisions. But how will I ever know?
If, in twenty years, I don’t still regret leaving Chicago.
I asked myself, on my knees in the middle of the floor, staring up at a photo on the wall, “am I making a mistake?” I never answered my own question, and I got on the plane anyway. Would it have been a mistake if I had stayed?
I was damned if I did, I was damned if I didn’t, and I’m damned until I find a way to get back to where I belong.
My mother tells me I can’t be in control of this situation, that no one can. Is the situation, then, in control of me? If I stopped walking, I would have let the feeling of being lost overwhelm me, and I never would have made it to the polling place that November morning. If I stopped walking, the situation I’d found myself in would have overtaken my ability to find a way out. I didn’t stop walking, I did what I could to get where I was going, and once I was there, getting home was like an old habit, getting home was a walk in the park. Isn’t it funny how, once you learn how to get where you need to be, turning back becomes habitual, second nature? Right now I am doing all that I can, and I guess that is to find a little comfort in the sound my soles make on the concrete. If I don’t stop walking, at least I feel like I am doing all I can to be a step ahead of the situation.

February 16, 2007
Author's Note: Different names for the same thing.

Digging Up the Past

August 8, 2005
©Rachel C

Frivolous and monotonic
I spread my insight
across the virtual pages
of the Microsoft revolution.
I want to be laid,
imbedded into someone else's clichés.
I'm so busy poking my
overdone symbolism with the prongs
of my metaphorical fork,
I've become another child abused
by the internal tick of a raising
gone Chaotic.

I've raised myself into a form
of fictional deities and internal
narrative.
I am a sad day kind of girl,
who giggles at the melancholic
because it makes a good plot.

No one ever wanted a story without
drama. No one ever wanted a life
without fulfillment. And this shitty re-
presentation is a "Cold Hard Bitch"
of a thing to do,
but someday I'll get a good
novel out of this;
someday I'll stop writing my life,
because I'll realize what I've got down
was never realistic anyway.

August 8, 2005
Author's Note: I found this, I thought I'd bring it up again.
The original, if you will.

Coming Clean?

Hilary Duff Sings Songs About This

©Rachel C

Surprisingly, this move back—from Oklahoma to Chicago to Oklahoma once again—is letting me examine myself in a way I never have, a way I never thought possible. Before this past month, I thought I knew who I was, I thought I knew myself; but, then again I was the one who said “I’m my own best friend, and even I don’t know myself that well”. Maybe I thought I never could, that that level of personal understanding was the work of fiction, some fantasy created in the head of a writer more confused than I was. But after some time seeing how things can change, how quickly life can bounce from Rock Bottom to High-as-the-Sky and back to Rock Bottom again, I am starting to see parts of my personality and my abilities that where hidden under a mask of disbelief. I am starting to uncover colors I never realize where visible to the human eye. It’s strange, how standing in the downpour of humility and redemption can shed away the black and white, can shed away the familiarity, can bring to light dark and scary places and transform them into something bright, something shiny.

January 29, 2007
Author's Note: it's a series people....

Neatly Tucked Beneath the Spotlight

Third Person Objective

©Rachel C

Objectivity was my goal, but I think I’ve failed. I don’t know that I can ever be truly objective, because I am in this. I am in it, in it so deep and so thoroughly that any objectiveness I can manage is bias and cold. In my head it feels like everyday is a new way to look at the world differently, everyday I have a stark narrative, a voice that not only observes how I am responding to situations in my way, but is also narrating the scene as I want to remember it—for literary reasons. I have a running narrative, telling my mind how to remember certain moments in time, so that later I can dictate them accurately and eloquently as I type them into a novel. Part of me thinks it’s sick; the rest: something so unique more people should notice and appreciate. For the rest of me, it is as close to objectivity as I can get, and it’s a first person narrative, which doesn’t bode much for openness in the way the story is perceived. But, I had the feeling that seeing this situation objectively was going to be a difficult thing to wrap my mind around.
Part of me that has been denying forces like God and self conclusion is starting to turn. I used to be confused, when everything happened, when everything came down on a seemingly innocent child. I used to think that karma was a sick joke on me, sick joke on us all. Ever since early high school, even before the divorce, I questioned my belief. I always assumed what I’d been told was the truth, but part of me wanted to deny it while the rest wanted to believe it. My body was in conflict, and I felt almost without a god all the while I claimed to believe in God. I can’t much explain it, or describe it, and my eloquence is lost almost to the cliché of discussing God. And yes, it is all very cliché, or maybe it is all very Godly. Maybe we want to believe it’s cliché to feed the humanist ideals instilled in our minds to live on our own, to never give credit or ask for aide, and to survive in a world without God—because believing in something mightier than ourselves often implies believing there may be a plan already in place. We want to map, live, control, and complete our lives. We want to feel whole without holy influence. But, most importantly we don’t want to fulfill a cliché. We don’t want to admit that prayer works, even though, most likely, it’s only ever answered because we find a way to resolve it ourselves. We don’t want to give in to the idea of God because God is no one we can influence, no one we can tame; and our worldly manipulations are too little to sway Him.
Looking back at this past month, or more wholly, this past half-year, I’m seeing things fall into place in a way I never could as I was living them. When my father left the first time, or maybe even as late as the fifth time, I resolved to write a book, an analysis, of the behavior I observed and conducted. I watched, listened, remembered all I could of the arguments and aggravations, trying to stockpile it all in my memory for a later time to write it all down. It became overwhelming, and I decided to step back, determined to breathe in and let the air settle before taking up the task again. I needed to let my mind rest. I needed to let the memories sit and stew; I needed to give it time enough that, when I came back to the story, I could look at it objectively, from every angle, and write honestly as one sees from the future looking back instead of the past looking forward. And then, sometime this past year, more happened than I’d resolved to remember, and I rethought my strategy.
Overall, I haven’t begun to pen that novel, or analysis, but I am beginning to see for certain the effect of stepping back, the advantage and insight of looking from the future’s perspective. I’m seeing that, if I had never gone to Chicago, I wouldn’t know who it is I want to be; and if I had never taken the step back and packed my bags, I would never see the person I am capable of becoming. It seems to me that there was something in the works before I knew what I was doing, there was something in the making, a plan I wasn’t aware of. And that side of me that wanted so bad to find assurance in science, just so I would never become another cliché, is starting to step in the direction of understanding—that the little voice inside of me, the one that comes from my gut, may just very well be the kind of instinct to believe in. Whether or not what I am seeing unravel is the work of a great and powerful God, or just the insight of a trained writer, doesn’t seem to matter anymore. As long as I continue to feel as if I am doing something right, that somebody out there approves, I think I have an immense possibility of someday being happy.
Seeing the way my life has unfolded, truly looking back from a different point of view does something for me I have never imagined. I can see clearly the irony I predicted, or the symbolism I suggested was important at the time. I can see that, as I lived it, I understood it on some level, the narrative in my mind picking out the literary devices I would someday use; and I can see that, as I look back, exactly how to use them, and exactly how inspiring it is at all to see that they happened in my life and aren’t just fantastical works of fiction. The day I said it poured, it rained and rained; how it kept falling from the sky for days after I arrived in Oklahoma—all of that was real, and how very amazing it is to see. Writers create the rain, the sunsets, the metaphors and symbols to fit with their character’s mood. My metaphors, my similes, my symbols were already in place, the moment I was living them, tailored to fit my mood. I didn’t make the rain this time, and it’s so much cooler that way.
Objectivity is a bitch, but I am starting to think it’s possible, even for a crazy like me. My friend, she wanted it in that moment, the way it happens in the movies. The movies are fictitious; in real life the objectiveness kicks in much later than you can predict.

January 28, 2007
Author's Note: you know the one.

Hold Your Breath When People Pass By

Until Then, You're Waiting for Someone to Love

©Rachel C

The weather is changing, back and forth. Yesterday it was warm enough to throw on a light jacket and take the dog for a walk. Today, when I stepped outside, I anticipated the cold was due to the pre-sunrise darkness, but the chill lasted all day. Now as I run outside, my feet frozen from the cold, January moisture left like heavy dew on the grass, I can’t help but pray that days like this will last and last.
I remember once writing a poem about this weather. Actually, I think that is a bit of an understatement—I think I have written several poems about this weather. The chill, the way my breath hangs in the air, how the moon takes a pure-as-milk color and the star’s dazzle closer than I can remember seeing them. There is so much to explain, to describe; so much that I find enchanting each time I step out into the January night.
Tonight the sound of wind chimes rustle in the close distance, a weary wind nudging at them in an eerie way. Honestly, I love it. That distant discomfort, that something might be lurking in the unknown shadows; the idea thrills me, makes me smile, even though I know if I were to stumble upon some mysterious cause deep in the night I would be frightened half-to-death. Maybe that idea, in itself, is alluring. Terrified to no means by something I can’t explain. It certainly is, in itself, frightening. But, nevertheless, the sound of distant wind chimes in the wake of a chilled and subtle gust makes me ponder the possibilities, and all the ways to describe the feeling.
I guess it’s a simple explanation to why so much of my poetry revolves around the month of January and the cold that hangs in the air throughout the month—lighter than the depressed chills of February, ghostlier than the joyous snows of December. I have said, since I was fifteen—and very important year—that the twenty-sixth of January is my favorite day. And, to be less than eloquent, I don’t know exactly how I came to that conclusion. I think it all started with how lovely I believed the name sounded, as a title or a phrase. I think, at one point, I wrote a journal entry titled just that, because I couldn’t find something sarcastic to say in lieu of the day. And, though that does indeed still ring true—I would give anything I could find to deem worthy enough that very name—I think, mostly for me, it traces back to a moment in time, driving in a heavy snowfall, watching it billow down over the lane as rose petals would in the Spring. Nearly floating on air, passing between the trees, drifting across the road in a heavenly fashion. It truly was something I can never completely explain, something I will remember forever. Something I am certain will be penned over and over.
I wish, on days like this, when I can stand on the porch and see the stars for miles, that I could show them to you, or that you could have seen the snow stop as we passed by a tree and blow through the branches like rays of sunlight. I wish you could see things the way I see them, the way I smile at the strangest moments, and find humor in the most absurd things. Not because I want you to be like me, or to impress me, or even to predict me. Because I want for you to get me. I want for you to see beyond what’s been said and how I seemed. And I want for you to truly understand the person inside of me. The person who laughs at very silly things; the person who finds irony in the smallest corners; the person who notices details from across the room—and then feels ridiculous that no one understands the humor that she’s pointed out. I think that there is something beyond my layers of skin, my hard-to-read expressions, my knack for incongruity. And, I suppose, I think that you should notice, I think that you should find those things so very enchanting. And most of all, I want for you to see me, for all my imperfections; and see me smile at the memory of a snow drift that gave comfort in a very desolate year; and, say so very simply to yourself: she’s perfect, I love her, for everything she is. January 26 passed by this year without any conviction. Just another day in another year I’m determined to overcome. And yet every time I hear the date my heart skips a beat, I lose a breath, and I am reminded of wind chimes eerily in the distance, clouds of released air floating in the atmosphere, and a milky veil shrouding the silky moon. I am reminded of moments that allow me to smile while no one is looking, all the while I am thinking in my head: I wish someone could see me this way.

January 27, 2007
Author's Note: it's all just one giant narrative, isn't it?