Nonsense...

A post I wrote on the plane, which makes it pretty much nonsensical. But just follow me to a world where aristotelian plot lines aren't necessary to happiness.

There was once a Spanish queen who was very proud. Her skirts were always of the finest silk, and the colors dying them were of the most expensive liquids. Her silvers were true silver thread, carved from the mountains by the villages who dwelt there. Her pearlescent greens and blues were made of the essences of pine and herbs, laid over by the tears of maidens.

Her panniers were so wide, they filled half her drawing room, and as she grew older, they grew with her, until they covered a tent-wide swath, so much that no one could approach her, and her underlings used long horns to communicate. In this time, she noticed a strange sound emanating from underneath.

The sounds croaked in the morning, and again in the evening. She couldn't sleep for the low tremors and aching gutterations from underneath her skirts. One day, her eyes carrying huge circles beneath them, she shrieked in frustration, and started cutting away all of her silks. In an hour or two of vicious hacking, she came upon the guilty parties.

Many frogs of colors, each tinged by the tints of her silks, sat happily in the huge shade cast by her enormous gown. The whole small city of frogs were joyfully communicating with one another in singsong warbles and strange narrations of coughs. The queen did not cry in fear, nor did she shriek in horror, rather, she carefully moved her feet around, which she could see again for the first time in many years, and her brow wrinkled in thought.

That evening, she crowned each knobby head with a ring of gold, and bequeathed upon them ponds of their own, each to a kingdom of water and stone. She set a new fashion that made skirts quite outre' and took to wearing pants instead, turning her skirts into luxurious canopies for her drawing rooms. She painted her eyes with kohl and took to writing music upon the Spanish chitarra while making eyes at her music master.

Drawers

She worked every day in, day out at the office. But her office was not so much an office as her own personal, working office supplies store laid out in a museography of beauty. It was something about her passion for the organization of forms that allowed her to feel totally and entirely fulfilled - even elated - by the properly signed and filled boxes of her countless forms, allowing others to do actions untold at the destination marked in box 5, subline 2.1.

When clients called at her shining workspace, it was to find a neatly arrayed set of pens, pencils, papers, forms, and files. File folders were comfortably labeled with an antique handwriting, when she opened drawers, it was to survey fields and fields of files, each one with a separate name and character, each one holding its contents eagerly. When she slid the lefthand top drawer out, it was to see a veritable ocean of different colored pens, all aligned perfectly as if they were placed together in happy families of vibrancy, each with a row of their own, each nestled carefully in place, at the ready if she should feel the need to draw one swiftly to mark, in red or black, a form destined for scanning and the photocopy machine.

It was a symphony to watch her work, and to watch her read back with efficiency, the boxes filled by clients over days and days. Each form familiar, each step an easy rhythm. She captained the ship of her mahogany-like workspace.

In the morning, she arrived at work as usual. But her hair was not neatly tied up, and she looked haggard. And she went to her desk, and laid her head on her hands, and sighed a soft, snuffling sound. Slowly and tentatively a drawer opened. Slowly, carefully, it slid to nestle against her side. She looked down at it, in dim surprise. It opened wider. She looked at her softly laid out pens, her tape refills glistened in sad understanding. She leaned closer, and as she did the drawer seemed to broaden until she could lay her arms, her head, her shoulders inside. And then she rolled herself into it, and it enclosed her, a warm place, where she lay on a rather lofty pile of printing paper, and cried her heart out. A small packet of tissues proffered itself. She accepted numbly and looked out on the beautiful world she had created. The forms rustled below in anxiety, and a small paperclip came to lay by her side.

Perhaps today wouldn't be so bad.

Nerves

Nerves so nervy that they make themselves nervous. Running around like light sockets waiting for a lightning flash. Nerves that tell me the next decision just might be the most important in my whole life. Nerves that are strung like popping lightbulbs around a light-bright fair. Oh nerves. Oh nerves. They wear and tear like violin strings, popcorn strings, celery strings, like the strings on a guitar, the strings plinked on a piano. They are playing me. So crunchy with a deep deep fear. Oh nerves. Oh nerves.

All Saints/All Sinners

It's All Saints day today. The saints are wandering around like wraiths. But who knows what lies beneath the shadows? The saints exclaim in ecstasy, proclaiming they know the way to heaven, but the truth of it is, they just deny it all and transcend into the pain of denial and self-flagellation. I know because I was one. And I know because today I am a sinner.

It started a long time ago, in Ephesus. The days were long and I was alone. A long day, a long finger of sunlight hit the floor, and I realized among the marbles of my house I was entirely alone. And I felt a stirring in my bones, a call to something I didn't understand. So I got up, and I followed the apostles and the anchorites and I gave away all my possessions and made my home in a small cave, my neighbors scorpions, my friends the bats. I welcomed the cold of night to fill my soul with something besides the vastness of an empty land.

And so I found a peace in all the rigor of it, in the practice of it, and the stillness of it. I exorcised my rage, the rage and the stirring in me, by wrestling with my demons in the night, denying my desires in the day, by calling them all by name and cursing them.

One day she came upon me though. I was not welcoming, but she starved and needed a place to lay her head. I offered her my pillow, and wrestled with my blackest thoughts when I saw the graceful turn of her ankle. Quelling them, dwelling in them. I offered her my meagre fare, and she accepted with the humblest thanks.

She bore a boy that winter. Her reason to come to me at first, as I had assumed. She was a lone girl in a hard country, she tried to tell me how she had made herself so, but I would not listen. I refused to touch or help her until the final moment, when I held her fast and the boy came to the world. She nearly died, and I nearly let her. My saintly creed let me not offer her help, and but lay words of condemnation on her, and so I did, but my heart was heavy and the words softly mumbled, like words of love.

It was a year past, another, and still she would not move forward. Every day I prayed God to remove her from my side, to remove her warmth and all that I desired. But she persisted, and I cursed her presence as a devil, cursed it throughout the night, with soft remonstrances of wrongdoing in the tones of a father cooing to his child.

Then one day, the boy fell ill. And it was with a heart rent from top to bottom that I watched him writhe in pain with fever, struggle for breath. We had nothing for him. Only in my other world would I have been able to save him, this devil, this angel, this blessing, this curse. And I watched him all the night, telling God in total prostration that it was for him, for him, for him to decide. Until in one moment, a finger of morning light touched me and the silence told me that it was not for him, it was for me.

I rose and I took my purse of gold, the one I had laid aside for a final offering to the church with my burial, and I took the girl and the child, and we made our way back to the city and to the medicine that could cure him. And I chose to turn away from a life of saints in that moment, to instead tread the harder path, the path of offering love and life and joy to those about me, to offer it to myself. I opened the shutters of my anger and let it escape into the daylight, mended the roof of my home, and lived there with the waves of fortune buffeting me as they do so many others. I hid no more.

And so I sit upon this steeple top, a spirit on All Saints day, watching the flitting saints run hither, thither, bringing judgment, bringing miracles, while I myself enter into a family's small room and make their fire burn a little higher. Today is the day of All Sinners, too.

A New Day

And so I write for a new day.
A new day, a gray day, a day of cat and cold.
I write for the moments I've lost with the ones I love, for the moments I've gained in the light above.
I wait for you on precipices of thought and dreams, and wonder if you'll enter into them.
The day above is gray and black, I'm black and blue and white all through.
And so I write for a new day.
A new day, a gray day, a day of coal and stripes.
I write for moments I've lost with the ones I love, for the moments I've gained, and for the light above.
I wonder in the stillness if I know the way home,
and I wonder if I'll get there and what I'll say.
I think of all the memories I thought I was sure of, and the way they've all been wished away.
I think I'll go down to the sea and see monsters,
I think I'll go and I'll control the waves.
But today is not the day I thought it would be, and I'm wondering wildly as I wait.
And so I write for a new day.
A new day, a gray day, a day of old and new.
I write for the moments I've lost with the ones I love, for the moments I've gained and for love.

Awakening

The basket dragged her hand down under the water, like a sail catching the current and pulling her further down. She had closed her eyes, but opening them under the water, the sting and the blurriness of the peaty brook mixed together to give everything in the water a feeling of being upside-down and inside-out. She struggled to paddle up to the surface, but disoriented, she didn't know where the surface was... in moments, her lungs were leaping for air, and she struggled not to breathe in the cold water.

She kicked her feet one last time for all she was worth, hoping the great light to her right was the surface, only to be shot by the current headlong into a boulder submerged in the water. Her mouth opened in pain and she gulped in a watery lungful, and a fire of rage began to burn inside her. She felt, more than anything, the great unfairness of it all, and it was as if the lit fire grew and grew, along with her burning lungs, and the drowning water in her nose. The fire was the great pain of being completely and utterly left to die in this cold, pushed by bony hands into water with no mercy, faced with dangers she couldn't possibly overcome, and in that moment she felt right, right to drown. It was the end that was the only possibility. There was no other way for this to end, but with her death. She was too little, too alone, and too unguided to know what else to do. The fire of retribution and betrayal, unfairness and bitter satisfaction rose up in her, and in her little box, too, it seemed to catch and cause a searing warmth to travel into her hip, her belly, her heart, and finally the hand that held the silver basket.

In that moment, as she lost all hope, but gained rage, the basket seemed to catch ablaze, flames licking out on the weave, from one to the next, until it was entirely alight. It lit up under the greenish-brown, black and gray waters. And as it caught, it lifted, lifted her to the surface where she coughed and spluttered and cried tears as she struggled to take even one breath. It lifted her up farther until it dragged her, as if she carried a makeshift torch, half in and half out of the water, to the opposite bank, dropped burning on the ground, and started to burn for certain.

The bonfire of the basket flamed royally beside her, large flames now, strong, licking upward to the sky, warming her body so chilled by the stream, as she coughed and her eyes wept with the water of the little river and the tears of rage that she had never before allowed to flow. The fire was so comforting beside her; all she wanted to do was allow the bitter thoughts to exit her like the retching up of the peaty streamwater, endlessly. It flowed from her until she thought she was going to die of suffocation, a drowning her still in the thin, breathable air. The warmth of the box at her hip sent comforting waves up into her heart, her back, the little box seeming to give off more warmth than was possible, allowing her to calm her survival spasms. And she lay upon the damp bank, taking short, uneven breaths, not enough, but enough to keep her alive.
Lucif arrived within moments, its mirrored eyes reflecting her back a warped image, as her consciousness still struggled to make sense of near-death. It dragged her closer to the fire of the basket, lay itself beside her on the other side, and snuffled warm breaths onto her neck and shoulder. "Little breaths, my dear one, little breaths," it said, its voice steady but low and solemn. The worry was apparent in the gentled rigidity of its back. "Focus on breathing, now. In, out. In, out. That's right."
As Penny Rose drifted off to sleep, warmed from both sides, her last thought was that she felt proud she was breathing the way she should.

The Basket Mother

Lucif looked at her silently. It was seated beside her, but she could sense its tension, as if it had been very very worried. It didn't say anything for a moment, and Penny Rose, still shaken by the fall, and the warmth of the box in her hand, and feelings of fighting happiness, excitement, and terror in her heart, reached out a tremulous hand to stroke its fur.
"Hello, Lucif," she said, quietly.
"Hello, my dear," it replied.
"Did you dream, too?"
"Yes, my child, I dreamed..." and its mirror eyes looked at her enigmatically. "They are the world you create, you know," it said, thoughtfully, looking in her eyes.
Penny Rose looked at the box in her hand. "Perhaps my world is more than I know," she said simply.
"It always is," Lucif replied, with a slight sigh, "in all directions."
Penny Rose smiled a little, "I see," she replied without wonder, and looked at the box again.
"It is morning, my dear, and we must be off again, I believe."
"Alright," said Penny Rose, and got up to go with it.
Lucif stared at her for a moment, and then, without a word, began to lead her down the edge of the stream, through the rolling woodland in which the water wandered, the rising sun gleaming golden and pink on the trilling waves and ripples of it.
They had gone for some distance, weaving in and out of the forest land, picking berries here and there to eat, and drinking momentarily from the stream, when they happened upon a strange figure.
There, in the middle of the river, sat a wizened woman, round and apple-cheeked, sitting upon the huge bowl of an upturned basket, large like a rock in the midst of the brook. She was humming and cross-legged, seeming to idly weave the reeds in her fingers, yet the way her hands moved, it seemed as if they were hummingbirds, striking here and there, the reeds disappearing under them into the bowl of another basket. And more, the basket was changing colors as she hummed, dull greenish-brown reeds turning a brilliant red under her song, a song that sung of energy and merriment and joy, with the clouds of summer storms and winter winds in it, too.
Lucif paused, transfixed. And Penny Rose, too, looked, but tried not to stare. The box still was warm and bright inside her pocket; she could feel it like it had been all morning.
The woman noticed them, and nodded, as if something had been confirmed. She smiled brightly, and whistling lightly, set aside her work. Penny Rose looked up, and the woman caught her eye, waving to her, beckoning her to come closer. Penny Rose glanced, unsure, at Lucif, who nodded slightly, and sat lightly on the river bank. Penny Rose stepped down to the edge of the water, and waited.
The old woman took her bright red weaving, touching it here and there, and then, with a whoosh of wind and water, sent it flying into the water straight to Penny Rose, where stayed, near her, a little boat. She automatically caught it, afraid it might float away down the burbling stream.
Lucif said, quite low, "Go, my dear, she beckons you," and Penny Rose, still quite uncertain if the little craft might careen down the stream, stepped timidly in with one foot, and pushed off with the other.
Like a line had been attached, the red boat sailed quickly right back to the hands of the little old woman, whose eyes shown with approval. She patted Penny Rose on the head, and stroked her cheek absentmindedly as she looked away for a moment. Then, in less time than Penny Rose could notice, she had upturned her basket, until it was floating sideways on the little brook, and the woman sat inside it, at the very place where the side and the bowl of its round bottom met. Penny Rose looked in wonder at what it contained. Baskets: baskets of every shape and size, every color of the rainbow, every permutation of design, baskets, baskets everywhere. The old woman looked at her, with a sort of strange concern. Penny Rose glanced back at Lucif, to find it was staring at her with a strange sort of tension.
The old woman waved her excitedly to come into the big basket, and in Penny Rose stepped, her little red boat obediently staying at the big basket's side. She looked around at all the many, many baskets, both bemused and curious, but unsure of what to do.
The apple-cheeked woman took her hand and gestured to all the baskets. Then she held up a finger, as if to say "one," and ushered Penny Rose forward to the inside of the big bowl, bedecked as it was with every woven color of the rainbow. Penny Rose looked around, but shook her head, "Thank you, but I cannot take anything," she said politely. "But they are very beautiful."
The old lady frowned at her, and shook her head, gesturing to the bounty once again, and urging Penny Rose to take one.
"I simply cannot. I don't need a basket for my travels," she replied.
The old lady nodded emphatically, and frowned again. Penny Rose glanced back, worried, at Lucif, who was still watching her with more tension in its posture than she was used to seeing.
The old lady smiled an apologetic little smile, and gave her a little push bodily toward one side of the basket bottom.
"Very well, if you don't mind," said Penny Rose, unnecessarily, and looking about, her eyes lit upon a little basket that was woven of a very pretty grey, deep and undulating. It was not perfectly round, but a little oval, and had little winglike-handles. It was not quite perfect, and for that, Penny Rose immediately felt fond of it.
"Is this one alright?" she asked, reaching out to touch it.
The old lady looked a little frightened, but walked quickly to it anyways, nodding emphatically, and handed it with a flourish to Penny Rose.
"Thank you so..." but before she could finish, the old lady was pushing her toward the edge of her basket, and very strongly, as if she were a strong strong wind. And out of the basket Penny Rose went, over the side, into the brook with a splash, her basket in her hand, to be swept immediately down the stream by the dark currents of the river that ran down in the deep. Her last view was of the basket upending once again in the stream, sinking, and sending up a bubble.
The cold robbed her lungs of air at that moment, though, and as she struggled, she flew down the stream in the quick, cold, snowy melt that ran in the heart of the little brook.