not mine:
Harvest
It grieves me to think of you in the past--
Look at you, blindly clinging to earth
as though it were the vineyards of heaven
while the fields go up in flames around you--Ah, little ones, how unsubtle you are:
it is at once the gift and the torment.If what you fear in death
is punishment beyond this, you need not
fear death:how many times must I destroy my own creation
to teach you
this is your punishment:with one gesture I established you
in time and in paradise.from Lousie Gluck's "The Wild Iris"
From this side, it was a dangerous and fragile equillibrium.
To listen, without subsuming myself entirely to another. To offer my own words, without denying entirely the existence of other points of view, other ways of being.
And I was angry: my rage caged, leashed, muzzled, packed away in the small place in my soul I reserve for it when i cannot afford to lose control of it. The panicked child, also shut away from the forefront of my conciousness, wailing about how I'd seen it all before, and it was happening again--
And that left me. Rational. Calmly rational in the face of another's anger, the perfect surface into which another's emotions might impact but never leave a mark. It's a defense mechanism, more subtle than simply not reacting at all but no less disturbing to face, I imagine.
Resisting the urge to cut him to shreds, to throw at him all of the unkind things I'd been thinking to myself in the wide silent spaces. I'm sometimes not a very nice person inside of my own head, especially when I'm angry.
Perhaps we were like two people in a Beckett play. I was busy both listening to him and to the chaos inside my mind to spare any attention to niceities like body language or tone of voice.
And resisting the fear. The fear's finally what broke through, what made it past the barriers I held against it. The barriers against the rage stood--although he begs to differ, that particular rage would have destroyed the last three years' worth of work on reestablishing the friendship. There's good, honest anger and hurt, and then there was this rage, grown all out of porportion to the cause and nasty, filled with broken glass and the shards of the history between us that makes these things so hard.
And when the fear broke through and was expressed, the anger stopped in its tracks. Looked around, the wind going out of its sails.
And receded.
Yeah, it's an imperfect life I lead. I keep forgetting that I'm still learning about this love stuff, about where my boundraies are and where, exactly, I quit being flexible with them. Where the willow ends and the steel begins.
But I've impressed myself, and he's impressed me, and I think we'll work it out.
Somehow.
Okay, this news is way, way too good to keep to myself.Those who know me know that my best friend from high school is named Misha. (not her real name, that's just what I and everyone else calls her. So there.) She's been living in Kansas for the last few years, and I (frustratingly!) haven't gotten to see her for most of that time.
So...it turns out that she's been applying to various grad schools in Library and Information Science. She's applied to UBC in Vancouver, UW in Seattle, and UCLA...and so far, she's been accepted at the UW! And no matter WHERE she goes, she'll end up on this coast, where airfare to LA is cheap and gas to Vancouver is cheaper, and well, if she ends up in Seattle I'd just be totally overjoyed.
[Just to note for the record: Misha is devestatingly intelligent, beautiful, amazingly literate, a belly dancer, and just an overall fun person to be around.]
Anyway, this needs to be done:
yay yay yay yay yay YAY YAY YAY YAY!
I like trema better than umlaut. Trema would make a good username, actually.Actually, now that I mention it, trema.org is available....
