Time

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last. "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." -Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

It is interesting, and heart-breakingly tragic, the way we take the destructive traditions of our parents and continue them, replicating them in exactness.
I shouldn't write in moods like these. The sentimentality splinters things. I am unable to see the forest for the trees. That is the story of my life, really. I see life through faceted eyes, like an insect's. I see everything in detail, in pictures, and am unable at times to logically draw conclusions, to arrange things so they make sense. I suppose, though, that there is greater worth in that than in being unable to see the trees for the forest (too many cliches, sorry), because a forest cannot exist without trees, while trees are the constituents of a forest.

So I will write in pieces. It is so much easier than the mental taxation of constructing narrative.

My dog threw up blood all night. It came in large puddles, long after it seemed possible that she would have any more food or liquid or acid in her stomach. We brought her home from the hospital yesterday, and she was doing well, and she ate a lot and looked alive. This morning she lay in a pool of her own blood with her head down and her eyes yellow and sad. Tomorrow will probably be the day, the euthanasia. Does it feel wrong to me because of my moral views on animals and consciousness and agency? Or does it just feel wrong because I am selfish, and need her desperately? I have discovered that when looking at the world through a moral lens it is the intentions that clarify people, not the actions.
Death is something, I suppose, that cannot be escaped. We tried. She lay there with IV in her paw, naked in the shaved area. We fed her halibut because it was all she would eat. We believed, for a day, that she would get better, but she did not. That's why doctors should never tell the family of a loved one that they have a 50% chance of surviving- because the loved ones regain 100% of their hope, and it hurts so much more then to lose it.

On Friday when Josh came I felt something I've never felt before, something I can't pretend to understand. I sat downstairs on the couch with him, watching a movie (Dragonfly) and I believed there was no way I could hug him hard enough to squash the urgency. Not sexual urgency. I don't know how to describe it. I needed to be inside of his mind. It wasn't enough to be sitting by him, hugging him, holding him. I needed to be him. I needed to surrender all of the doubts and pains and walls and become something more. It was a more intense, insistent need than any desire I have ever experienced before. As I sat there, I felt that that moment could only dilate, that time couldn't exist sequentially, only simultaneously, only in that moment, oriented on love.

And time... I have been wondering whether it is the human conscience that forces time into sequence. Perhaps time could exist objectively, constantly, non-linearly. Maybe it is possible to escape the human interpretation of time into a more godly one. Though that doesn't explain Einstein's hypothesis, that at the speed of light organic, biological functions slow down in the speeding body will not on the motionless planets surrounding it. That implies that people can manipulate time, which is ultimately far more frightening than the ability of manipulating even colossal matter. But can we manipulate our experience of time, even to the extent of manipulating biological processes?

There was a moment Saturday when we stood beneath a tree, and I noticed everything in the way I do. My mind takes photographs, not footage. It takes effort for me to arrange the moments and somehow reconcile time. Anyway, in this moment we were surrounded by this halo of blossoms, a tree with flowers whose white centers radiated outward into a deep pink. I felt anchored to the world by his hand and his eyes (I have always had a blue-eye fixation). The air was just warm enough for me to feel safe. The ground below my feet was scrubbed from all the snow and then the sudden warmth. Noise from a bicycle convention drifted through the selectively permeable membrane of blossoms. Disarmingly full of life, the smell from the tree make the reality of spring inescapable.

My friends met him in their usual unorganized fashion. JoAnna and Siobhan continued existing in their somewhat isolated sphere, punctuated only by the advent of some new loud breed of laughter that JoAnna developed. Josh was protective in a way I desperately needed. There was the usual constant jabbing from Siobhan, sarcasm on that uncomfortable edge between mutually funny and symbiotically predatory; however, this time I had a shield (who looked very hot in plaid shorts... so hot that I almost forgot the evolutionary advantage that I had over the wooden table in that I possessed a brain). I wondered briefly whether I deserved protection, whether maybe I deserved the cynicism, but then I shut up the voice and reveled in safety.

There was a moment in a museum when my lips might have found his and the sculpture of a tree with its swirling, multi-colored leaves (fabric and the thinnest batting) made darting shadows on the hardwood floor and we were surrounded in art and beauty and time but the real art and beauty and time were coming from inside of us, not the painstaking creations of charcoal and oil and fabric and clay.

Layer after layer of makeup piling on a face... you wouldn't believe how many layers of differently colored concoctions it takes to make a face look human. The eyelash curlers tugged slightly at the translucent vein-laced skin over my eyes. Foundation, bronzer, blush created plateaus on my cheeks. Four different shades of eyeshadow covered my abused eyelids. It was all executed by my sister-in-law with an air of reverence for my air, put up by a stylist wielding an infinite supply of bobby pins, curling down in layers around my face.

I tried to feel beautiful, in the moment, but I had lost my shoes and the ones I wore were a size too large (although I later escaped the awkwardness by shedding them at the dance). I felt like some tangerine vision. I concentrated on beauty, and I found it in some places- in my hair, my face, my dress- but that insufferable voice inside of me would not yield its opportunity to remind me that I need to lose weight. It means something, I suppose, that in my most beautiful, invulnerable moments, I am still completely defenseless to that voice.

Do you have any idea how beautiful a boy with blue eyes and blond hair and freckles can be in a tuxedo with an orange bow-tie and cumberbun(sp?) and shiny shoes? No, you don't. I think that nobody has ever seen beauty in the world in quite the same way that I saw in that boy in his tuxedo.

Even when completely lost within someone's reality (the way I was in Josh's), the guilt still pounded constantly down on me in heavy anvil-like strokes as I ate dinner and took pictures of the way our hands looked under the table, framed by the yellow roses in my corsage.

The dance... what matters about the dance... is the way two humans (or three or four) can become an island in dark waters. It's not that I will judge my peers for what they wear, or the way they act, although perhaps I am, unintentionally. It is that prom, for them, was about rebellion... dancing close enough to completely level boutenaires(sp?) plastered against buttonholes. For me, in prom, I find myself in adherence to beliefs. There were four girls (including me) out of over a hundred wearing dresses with sleeves. I won't lie, and say a part of me wasn't embarrassed. But the part of me that found a sort of pride in being able to squash that embarrassment with my desire to serve something more than what my peers decide is popular was more powerful. I felt... yes, alone, almost completely, in the way I was dancing, the way that I acted... but I knew it was an okay kind of alone. I have nothing against all of the girls there that don't believe it's wrong to wear sleeveless dresses. I know that's part of my religion, and I don't share my religion with them. But it hurt to see people that I know believe in my religion letting their fear of others win out over them... friends from my church dancing in that way that repelled my eyes, wearing those dresses that I only imagine wearing for an instant before I reject the idea. It's not that I'm disappointed in people for having beliefs different than mine, I know that's inevitable. But I'm very disappointed in people that have the same beliefs in mine but don't stick to them. What I admire in people is not the way they act when it's easiest to follow what they believe in, but the way they act when it's most difficult.
Not, of course, that I am perfect.
But in this way, we were happy islands.

Of course, we cannot escape prom without some horribly embarrassing story. We requested a slow song (they don't play many slow songs at prom, because people don't need slow songs to dance very very close these days) and we were standing at the dark bottom of the stairs, pretty much in privacy, and it's not that we were doing anything really wrong, or that it was any different from the way everyone else was acting, but I guess it was that we were alone in that alcove, which I'm sure did not look good to the police officer that barged in on us and told us we'd better leave that area (or to the people that laughed at us as we did).

There is something so fulfilling about finally going to church with someone after so many months of fighting darkness. I can't describe that. I guess it's a photo I can't share.

Shauna asked me on Friday if I thought I would really make it to marriage without having sex. I think it's unfathomable to her. But you wouldn't believe how many amazing things you can do "just kissing." It doesn't really get old.

Upstairs, it still smells like vomit and blood.
Every joy, I think, is sandwiched by some tragedy.