forty years in the desert

i met a woman at church in eastlake who told me that she was lost in a desert, a forty year desert. as a young woman, she was vivacious, blonde, always in trouble. she went to university in boston, where several men proposed to her and she refused them all. one of the best pranks she ever pulled, she said, was stealing the lofty stone busts of great theologians and historical figures that lined the entrance of her school and arranging them so that it looked like they were having a lively conversation. she even put wigs on several of them.

after years of refusing men and running wild in boston, she said she made a deal with god that she would accept the next christian man to propose to her. within a month, a dashing stranger from london had asked her to marry him and she consented.

they lived between london and the states, switching back and forth every few years with their five children. she said that her husband was brilliant and stingy and that for the majority of their married life she raised her five kids in a two-room flat without heat, an oven, or a bath. she called it a loveless marriage, proudly showing me a picture of her handsome husband that she carried in her wallet. he had been dead for several years, and her house was full of his oil paintings, perched on every wall.

i met her sitting in a pew at church, and she told me that her heart was dead and barren. she said that she had not felt the lord's presence or the blooming of anything in forty years, but she kept coming to church every sunday in the hopes that her desert would blossom one day.

PSALM 107: 35-38 "he turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into flowing springs; there he brought the hungry to live and founded a city where they could settle. they sowed fields and planted vineyards that yielded a fruitful harvest... and the LORD blessed them."

a resolution after global trends

Though Westerners equate jihad with terrorism, Islam teaches Greater Jihad (struggle for personal sanctification) as normative and Lesser Jihad (armed warfare to protect, expand, and purify Islam) as an extreme recourse.

            In order to work toward harmony between the domineering West and hostile Islamic nations, a process of mutual education must take place. As CS Lewis wrote in reference to hostility and judgment between Christians and atheists, “We are usually not thinking about real people whom we know at all, but only about two vague ideas which we have got from novels and newspapers… Unless we come down to brass tacks… we shall only be wasting time.” In a similar way, Westerners and Muslims cannot begin to live in harmony and diplomacy until they take the time to get to know one another personally, ideologically, and religiously. A first step toward this goal could be a proper understanding of jihad as primarily a pursuit of holiness, not a death wish against ‘infidels’. Emphasizing this common desire for peace rather than violence by educating Westerners about the true teachings of Islam will further cooperation, erode hostility, decrease prejudice, and calm terror between the West and the Islamic peoples.

Having spent part of my childhood in Kosovo, I grew up amid the tensions of Kosovar Muslims embittered against Serbian Orthodox Christians after their barbarous agenda of ethnic cleansing during the war. Seeing firsthand that Christian and Muslim extremist “holy wars” have caused both religions to be perceived as fundamentally violent has instilled in me a desire to work toward reconciliation and understanding.

I want to have intentional discussions about prejudice and combating misperceptions from which prejudice results, but that must start with my own personal commitment to tackle my own misperceptions. Therefore, I commit to reading part of the Qur’an by the end of this semester. 

dreams IV

i dreamed last night that i was racing through the woods with my mother, brothers, and sister. we were sitting behind horses on a wooden cart like the ones that carried prisoners to the guillotine during the french revolution. there was a man lying on the back in revolutionary dress, bright reds and blues and a plumed hat. he was unconscious and bleeding from the chest.

as we rumbled through the trees, running away from something, he turned paler and paler until we stopped beneath some white apple trees and watched him die. we were in an orchard, and as we stood there, wondering where to bury the dead man we had rescued in vain, my mother had a miscarriage.

the baby passed quickly and quietly, and my youngest brother turned to me and said, "we must give up our children as well." he took pincers, forced them down my throat, and pulled out a tiny fetus the size of a finger. i began to bleed. it looked like a gumdrop. he dropped it beneath an apple tree in full blossom, and then i woke up, a piercing pain in my throat.

airplane tickets

i've bought dozens of airplane tickets. i've been on one hundred fifty flights. my mom and i counted once while we were flying somewhere back when i was in high school, keeping tally on a napkin that came with our standard lunch of a white dinner roll, lasagna, a fruit cup, an lettuce salad with italian dressing packets, and a shortbread cookie, all contained in one plastic tray.

but in spite of all my travel experience, i still feel thrills of uncertainty and terror every time i buy a plane ticket. my mouse hovers over the 'purchase' button on my computer screen, second-guessing, doubting. what if i accidentally entered the wrong month? what if i'm buying one-way when i need round trip? did i spell my name wrong? by the time i actually click the button and purchase the ticket, i've stared at the screen for so long that i'm afraid the flight has filled up while i was deliberating and proofreading all my information for the fourth time.

airports feel like home to me. i've heard dozens of people say this, nomadic people i grew up with. there's an overwhelming sense of comfort and belonging as i maneuver my way through scurrying crowds of people and their groaning luggage carts. i travel light, usually with just a backpack, even when going home for christmas. i sit in the faux-leather seats, looking out at the runways or watching families at the gate across from me. i am never lost in airports, even if i've never been there before. there's an instinctive navigation that sets in wherever i am, whether it's berlin, heathrow, LAX, o'hare, atlanta, skopje, frankfurt, zurich. they all follow the same path: check-in, baggage, passport & security, waiting at the gate, boarding, take-off, in-flight, landing, disembarking, passport, baggage claim, customs, arrival. there is some variation, as in zurich you pass through security before showing your passport and the reverse in skopje. but the general pathway is the same. i've done it a million times, but i'm always nervous up until the point of passing through security and walking toward my gate.

i need to buy this ticket to memphis for an interview in march, and it's just sitting on my screen.

third lobby couples

as RAs, part of our job is doing rounds during open-dorm hours to make sure covenant contract is being followed. during open hours, rooms that host mixed company have to keep the door at least a foot open and turn on at least one light. since the founders trash cans are about a foot wide, most people just stick a trash can in the door to prop it open. the definition of a light has also been much debated as of late. a few weekends ago, we had to clarify whether or not a lava lamp counted as a light. it does not.

this weekend i was on duty with alicia, which meant that whenever i saw a dimly-lit room with the door open only a crack, i hurried by, not wanting to know what amorous pair lurked within. alicia, on the other hand, stuck her head into every room to surprise the happy couple with a greeting or comment about the weather while checking to see if they were sitting upright. "keep it vertical," she said as we walked around first belz. we differ in the brand of our curiosity.

you'd be surprised what people find themselves doing even with a light on and the door open to the rest of their hall. but even more surprising is what people are willing to do in third lobby, which has fluorescent lights and is the entrance to all of founders. i thought briefly about busting up a couple the other day who had draped a blanket over themselves like a teepee and disappeared beneath it on the couch outside our RA office. every once in a while, i would see one of their heads peek through the window into the office, where i was working on homework, and then dive back into the relative safety of their blanket. i say relative safety, because one blanket was not enough to conceal the intimate massage taking place beneath it. one blanket does not a true teepee make.

i should have told them to stop monopolizing third lobby with their awkward love... but instead i just stayed safely in my office and then rushed past when it came time to return to my room. alicia would have been ashamed of me.

first attempt at literary journalism

The window in my last Brooklyn apartment, a hardwood room in the dim ribcage of a slim maroon townhouse sandwiched between a deli and a men’s barbershop, faces back into a neighborhood block of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Sitting on my fire escape in the June sun, I stare out into a vacant lot between the rows of houses, empty but for two scraggly trees, a grill, and a ripped tire sitting in the gravel. I hear a gospel choir practicing at the Baptist church, two blocks east. Through a chain link fence, I look down into the street toward Nostrand Ave, one of the neighborhood’s busiest avenues. The cracked, uneven sidewalks are lined with brownstones and local businesses: Star’s Bar, Momma’s Kitchen: Food for the Soul, Malcolm X Bookstore & Barber, Brooklyn Deli, Dominican Hair, Miss Dahlia’s Bakery. Dahlia’s is famous for her cucumber lemonade and coconut cakes, recipes the original Miss Dahlia brought with her from Mississippi in the 1920s. I walk past these shops every day toward the subway station, the post office, or the Fulton Street Grocery.

While shopping in the Grocery, I’ve been stopped in the aisle several times by irate women who block my path, refusing to let me pass, sometimes hissing under their breath. These same women often guard the washing machines in the laundromat, telling their children to stand in front of them when I try to load my laundry and glaring me when I say hello to their daughters. For the first month, I thought I was doing something wrong, breaking some unspoken neighborhood law concerning the pasta aisle or laundry hampers. Then, one afternoon in the Grocery, a woman ran at me in the cereal aisle and rammed me with her shopping cart. “White folks!” she shouted. “Why you white folks gotta move here, to our neighborhood? Our neighborhood!”

springtime

spring has always been a season of goodbyes. we talk of fall as the time of fading, but every year since before i can remember, spring is the season in which something golden shines bright and dies.

we always leave at the end of spring, the beginning of summer. i've left twenty houses, all in the spring. every spring since i was three, i pack up everything i own into trunks or suitcases and everything changes, again. again again and again. eighteen springs of leaving and being left.

spring looks like a trunk, a plain black trunk with silver buckles, duct-tape on the side with BRINKMAN lettered in permanent marker. amid the flowers, the fresh green, the lone daffodil that pokes its head up out of the wood chips by the library, an early riser- there's always a black trunk waiting to swallow up my belongings and my past.

i've already found myself sitting in the rocking chair in my room, a gift from my roommate's father who outgrew it and bought a recliner, staring at the row of books under my bed and wondering whether it would be wiser to put them in one big box or an array of little boxes, easier to carry. i've already considered whether to roll or lay flat my paintings, whether i should give away my desk lamp. it's an awkward shape to fit in a suitcase,

even for an expert packer.

dream 3: becoming the RA of balcony

at the beginning of this year, the night before the freshman arrived on campus, i had a nightmare about being on a balcony. i was in the projects, staring out across the street at a building identical to my own: tall, brick, uniform, blank. i was as high as the eleventh or twelfth floor, looking at the balconies across the way. most of them held laundry lines, barbecues, tires, toys- the sundry items of everyday life. i saw a baby crawl unobserved out of the apartment directly across from mine, pulling herself up on the bars of the railings. as i watched, breathless, she slipped between the rails and began to to fall toward the street as i screamed. i saw her family inside, eating dinner at the table, oblivious as she fell.

she hit the ground, and i felt myself throw wide my arms, outstretched to catch her even though i was twelve floors high, too far to do anything but tremble or shout. but when i looked around, i found that i was standing on the street level, only a few feet from where she had fallen. i was only a few steps away, and i did nothing. my arms were empty.

dreams 2

i've been dreaming about oceans as well, oceans, water, and floods. several years ago, i dreamed that my house in new york flooded and the christians came with bows on their backs to hunt down the gays. they dragged away my friend chris, tying him up and throwing him in the bottom of their canoe, paddling out my window and around the fire escape to my neighbour's. they chanted scripture as i screamed christopher's name.

last year, i dreamed of floods that took my brothers. in one, our college campus flooded and i found them floating on a door, trying to drift down the mountains steep edges. another night, i dreamed that i was watching them play at the beach with a girl who had gauze wings like a fairy. i turned my back for a moment, because collin was burning things in the oven, baking my mother's pans with nothing on them until they turned black with smoke and heat, and when i looked back out toward my brothers, i saw a greedy wave rip them off the shore and out to sea. my father and i ran down to the beach in a panic, diving into the waves. i pulled the little girl out by her wings, but as we stood knee deep in the water, the ocean became a dark green rug. we knelt down and ran our fingers over it in lines like a farmer plowing every inch, feeling for a lump beneath the carpet, that lost penny, my brothers.

two nights ago, i dreamed that i was on the boardwalk at coney island, but the far end had broken away from the rest. i clung to the railings as wave after waves crashed down over the pier, crushing me to my knees and then surging back out with the tide. they towered over me. i looked back at the ferris wheel and roller coaster and hot dog stands in the distance and knew i couldn't make it back. i couldn't let go, but i couldn't hold on much longer. then the pier became a room around me, with circular glass windows like a submarine and i sank beneath the waves.

dreams

i had a dream last night that i was lost in a forest, and that as i wandered, the forest shifted. one moment i was in the black forest, hiking through blackberry and rosehip bushes, the sun dappled through the tall slim trees. next i was in africa, walking through tall grass and baobab trees so broad and wide they looked like cradles or ships. then i found myself in rwanda or the philippines, where the land is tiered and sculpted with grooves, emerald shelves stacked up toward the sky.

the most beautiful forest, though, looked like somewhere in asia. i wandered along the ridge of the hill, at the end of which towered an ornate temple, crusted gold intricacies and faces like gargoyles. the trees  sloping down the steep hill were slender and white like bones, soft like chalk to the touch. they had dark green leaves that looked stiff like gems.

visions at night, like ezekial's angels with their four wings, and the faces of a man, a lion, an eagle, and an ox, never swerving or turning as they flew. a glimpse of holiness or another unearthly beauty.

eat my scroll.

I DIDN'T WRITE THIS. but i typed the whole thing out by hand.

      ‘Men,’ said the fox. ‘They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?’

      ‘No,’ said the little prince. ‘I am looking for friends. What does that mean—‘tame’?’

      ‘It is an act too often neglected,’ said the fox. ‘It means to establish ties.’

      ‘To establish ties?’

      ‘Just that,’ said the fox. ‘To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…’

      ‘I am beginning to understand,’ said the little prince. ‘There is a flower… I think that she has tamed me…’

      ‘It is possible,’ said the fox. ‘On the earth, one sees all sorts of things.’

      …’My life is very monotonous,’ the fox said. ‘I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”

      The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.

      ‘Please—tame me!’ he said.

      …So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near—

      ‘Ah,’ said the fox, ‘I shall cry.’

      ‘It is your own fault,’ said the little prince. ‘I never wished you any sort of harm, but you wanted me to tame you…’

      ‘Yes, that is so,’ said the fox.

      ‘But now you are going to cry!’ said the little prince.

      ‘Yes, that is so,’ said the fox.

      ‘Then it has done you no good at all!’

      ‘It has done me good,’ said the fox, ‘because of the color of the wheat fields.’

                                                      —Antoine de Saint Exupéry

On Anne Lamott's "Giving" from Bird by Bird

I am not a giver. Lamott speaks of the world as an orphan’s home that she feels compelled to fill with beautiful words and communion. I see myself as a soapbox preacher perched on a street corner, belaboring commuters as they rush home, pleading for a moment. Maybe hurling some wafers and wine as they pass by. Or I see myself as a gypsy nomad, wandering up and down the city streets with a dozen suitcases on a string, like my donkey caravan. I drag them along the sidewalks and beg passersby to take one home with them, carry one of my burdens.

I am callous to the cry of my reader’s heart, bringing only pain and no redemption. How can I bring peace to my reader’s heart and wake her from her trance when I can’t quiet my own heart? Can’t wake up and walk into the light? I don’t know how to tie things up. I can hand you a mess, but the brown parcel paper and string to bundle it up neatly? I don’t own it. Is a gift still a gift without the wrapping paper, without the trappings?

Lamott’s sermon on giving reminds me of the children’s book The Giver in which Jonas receives and bears the weight of all the community’s forgotten memories—memories of snow, colour, sun, war, family, love. For each burden he must bear, he discovers a new joy as well. That’s the pattern: pain turns to joy, suffering refined into peace, weakness becoming strength. That’s the evolution of any novel, essay, that elusive narrative arc I’m hunting after.

Poems are easier, because you can end with a question. I suppose a question is a gift as much as an assurance, but it’s far less tidy. In memoir and essay, I feel the need to provide an answer, a foundation, a silver lining—anything but unresolved heartache. For what mother would give her daughter a stone when she asks for bread? 

june-time

The wind that blows up from the midnight valley is warm and smells of honeysuckle; the stars are glowing dark like pencil shavings. Oh my sweet Carolina, welcome to the velvet times, the ferns and bees, the driving with the windows down, the molasses months of lemonade, the sugared times, the candied hours, crisp and spicy sweet.

Welcome to Graceland; welcome to the battlefield; welcome to the age of innocence and the shedding of guilt. Welcome to the afternoons of keeping secrets and the evenings of sharing them, the mystery of bruises, the reinvention of the balcony and its bars, the smoky blue view.

Come down to the riverside, and welcome it yourself: set down your sword, beat it into a spoon, and eat of the honey tree. The bees are baring their teeth and drawing near only to return home, walking through the cemetery, speaking to the tombstones, this great cloud of witnesses: the ground thrums with their heartbeats, a great cloud of birthdays.

i wish i knew less about breastfeeding

last week, my friend posted on facebook about how obamacare had provided her with a new breast pump, commenting "thank you obama! now more mamas can nurse their little ones." a few days later, she made a status about how she felt obligated to brag that her two-year-old had sat through a musical production of 'white christmas,' only for a mom-war to ensue underneath her status. while one mom bragged that her two-year-old AND her newborn had sat through the same musical, a third mom topped all three of their claims by letting the world know that not only had her her two-year-old AND hew newborn AND her five-year-old sat through the entire musical, but they had learned a song and dance from the show. she posted a video clip of their scintillating performance.

today, her status is: "watched a beautiful documentary on home births last night: 'the business of being born'. definitely a must-see!" underneath, one friend commented, "already seen it five times. so good!" while another added, "i have a huge collection of birth films. we'll have to get them out at our next girls' night!"

i love my friend, and i love her toddler. i love motherhood and pregnancy and all of those beautiful things. i cried when i found out she was having her first boy, and i will cry again when she has the next one. but i really wish i knew less about breastfeeding.

2301 S Andrews Rd

i've been thinking about moving into the windmill on my mom's property. she and my two brothers live in a tiny house surrounded by cornfields beside the train tracks in indiana. it's a tan house with pea green shutters and steps leading up to the front porch and the gingerbread orange door. inside, there are country-style murals on two of the walls, depicting scenes of rolling hills, orchards, and red barns. the other walls are yellow, with tall, curved archways separating the rooms. the floors are hardwood, and a screened sunporch peers out the righthand side of the house.

the property itself speaks to the landlady's eccentricity. to the left of the house, a reconstructed civil-war-era cannon molders beside a marble bench. the stone statue of an angel peeks out from the fruit trees behind the cannon. in the back on the house, a garden and a screened pavilion with long benches for summer parties have fallen into disrepair. the front of the house boasts an elaborate arbour and trellis covered in vines that hang down over a path to the front door. red-berried trees line either side of the path. the right of the house seems to be focused on outmoded energy-efficiency machines: a defunct water wheel and windmill sit side by side, rusted immobile. the water wheel stands silent behind a bridge over a dried-up creek with stone swans frozen on one side, looking like they might jump into the dusty creekbed. a heart-shaped porch swing sways in the wind beside the bridge.

but the windmill is my favourite part. it has two stories, circular rooms of cinderblock. the second story has a ladder up to its doorway. the rooms are filled with feathers and straw, suggesting that the previous tenants kept chickens in it, or that doves have been nesting there during the house's abandonment. for a child, it would be the ideal clubhouse. for a college student worried about future unemployment, it's a sentimental back-up plan. maybe mom would let me live at home for free if i agreed to tend the garden and live out in the windmill to pay my rent. i could even try to get the water wheel running, polish the angel statues. anything to not end up broke and subpoenaed in new york again.

i just want to go back to childhood. but i know i'd be miserable if i tried. i'm just scared of the unknown that lies ahead, and the thought of living like the little rascals in my rundown windmill clubhouse sounds like the only safe plan i have so far.

memory

memory has been a theme for me throughout this past school year, and it seems to have been so for others as well. readings from stranger than fiction and creative writing, dr. green's chapel talk, many of my friends' recent obsession with memoir and their own pasts, dredging up past memories for my SIP.

most of us talk about being afraid of forgetting things. when i moved into an apartment of my own in new york city, i felt like i was beginning to forget my childhood, like the memory palace that had held by childhood was being swept clean and replaced with a new reality of bills, recipes, street-names, addresses, and the other paraphernalia of responsibility and adulthood. my uncles and aunts often speak of their worry that they're losing pieces of their past, or that their memories are becoming faulty with age. but i think we're more afraid of being forgotten than of forgetting. it may be terrifying to lose your place in time, for gaps and voids to open up on either side of the precipice of the present, but it's even more terrifying to find yourself erased from time altogether, like some twisted version of "it's a wonderful life".

i had a friend named johann in high school, a half-austrian, half-texan whose family lived in darfur at the height of the sudanese conflict. he seemed fearless. he sat through all of our junior prom wondering whether his entire family was dead, as their village had been overrun that morning by the sudanese liberation forces, and he didn't speak a word of it to any of us. my mom found him sitting on a street corner in macedonia once, with a rucksack over one shoulder and wearing orange indian pants, just sitting. he had flown from darfur to greece, caught a train up to macedonia, and then realized he didn't know our address or phone number, so he just picked a street corner and sat down, hoping that someone would find him. my mom saw him and thought, "he looks like someone my daughter would know- lost and brightly plumed," and she came home from the market with a bag of peppers and plums and johann in tow.

he kayaked up the nile by himself and got caught trying to go over a dam by the egyptian border police. he backpacked through the himalayas for fun, and smuggled bibles and guns to african rebel groups in the mountains, accessible only by donkey caravan. when we were in rome, standing on the dome of st. peter's basilica, he told me he wanted to see how far the dome he could walk. before i could even register what he'd said, he had jumped over the railing and was stepping down the dome's curve, eclipsing rome. i've almost never been so furious in my life. i screamed until he came back, back over the rail, shouting and then asking him, after i'd caught my breath, what in the hell he thought he was doing.

he said, "i just wanted to write my name on the dome. it's permanent. everyone else is too scared to climb out there and wipe it off, and i don't want to be forgotten."

i will never forget johann, but he almost died making certain i'd remember him. he showed up once at my door in new york city, asking for a place to sleep two years ago, spending the night and then disappearing before i woke in the morning. i ran into him in an airport in switzerland last year, where we were both sitting, drinking coffee to counter out jetlag. he said he had been in the airport for two days (i'm still not certain why) going between france and maryland.

fear will drive you mad if you let it.

G. The absence of a father: abandonment

This November, I met a woman named Jean who told me about her own father, a man who spent his life in the army until it broke him. His crew cut grew out and his beard tumbled down his chest as he disappeared into himself. Every day, he woke, ate breakfast, and began to pace in circles inside their house—through the kitchen, dining room, living room, hallways, entrance, and back through the kitchen again, never looking out the window at the Indiana cornfields that framed their home. His orbiting tread began to wear the carpets thin, until the threadbare rugs split to reveal the floors, like the silvery trail a snail leaves behind. He was like thread winding itself around a spool, growing tighter and more deeply lost in his mind. He paced for five years, waking up for one lucid moment to meet Jean’s baby, his grandson, and then dying quietly one night as he slept.

Jean told me about her father as we stood outside the funeral home where my father’s body lay. This November, three months ago today, my father died by his own hand. It was Election Day, the day that Mr. Obama won his second term. I was in Tennessee, studying for an exam in the library. My brothers were at school in Indiana; my sister was in Seattle; my mom went out to vote, and when she came home, Dad had hung himself in my bedroom. She called me as the police were taking his body away, and my world turned inside out.

After his restless year in Macedonia, starting with the summer he spent pacing up and down the street before my senior year of high school, Dad moved our family to France. It was the year I moved to New York, and though they were supposed to come back to America for furlough that year, but Dad was eager to begin pastoring a church in Strasbourg, France, right on the border between Germany and France. Strasbourg was an enchanted city, its lacy cathedral soaring up over a web of canals surrounded by half-timbered houses with steep roofs and bright shutters. My family moved to an apartment that was a few blocks from a little cottage-manor Napoleon built for Josephine and just across the street from the St. Maurice cathedral and the university’s observatory—a domed stone building that often opened its roof at night, a long telescope protruding out into the starry sky. At Christmas time, the city had a world-famous market that surrounded the cathedral, booths selling mulled wine, caramel apples, ornaments, loose tea, cinnamon sticks, and gingerbread. The city carousel was covered in mistletoe and holly, and choirs sang carols in the cathedral.

But in spite of the city’s beauty, Dad’s mind continued to splinter. The church he had stepped into had been strained before his arrival and came close to splitting just a few months after he became the pastor. His insomnia worsened and he began to lose weight. When I came home for Christmas that first year, his hair had turned white, and he weighed less than me. He was gentler than ever before, and had even begun to write me letters while I was away at college, as he watched me drift away across the ocean. But he was fighting to keep himself from drifting away as well.

During their third year in France, Dad stopped sleeping altogether. After an entire month of sleepless nights, something in him snapped and he went over the edge, taking a full bottle of whiskey with him and spinning out of control into desperation and darkness. He left home and traveled, visiting a dozen countries in Europe and driving around half of America. He even showed up in Tennessee for a day, shocking me when I looked up from my cubicle to see him tapping on the window of the office and smiling in at me. In the course of his three months of travel, he resigned from our mission agency, rented an apartment in a town we’d visited once in Indiana, started a consulting business, bought a car and golf clubs, and nearly got my mother’s name, Patricia, tattooed on his arm. We learned later that this was the manic phase in a disease he had managed to tame for most of our lives, bipolar disorder.

My family moved to Indiana that summer, leaving behind their lives in Europe, and I continued to work in my office in Tennessee, sitting at my desk and listening to a cardinal tapping on my window. The cardinal thought its reflection was another bird, and it spent the entire summer trying to meet itself on my windowsill, rapping on the glass like a handshake. I often watched it and thought of my father, wondering if the cardinal was a persistent messenger from God that I was ignoring, or my father’s doppelgänger—I studied its wings, its ruffled feathers, its cracking beak. It beat itself to death against the glass, relentless.

That July, as the summer drew to a close, my father slipped from his manic phase it deep depression. Unable to find work in a town where he knew no one, surrounded by shell-shocked family grieving the loss of their home in Europe, everything stood still and bleak. He saw that he was about to turn fifty and felt he had nothing to show for it, other than years of failure, leaving, and children who feared him. I was dressing for work when my mother called me in tears, saying she had locked him in their bedroom because he was trying to harm himself. I felt the world spin, like I was in the center of the Panopticon and all the dark and grim things of this world and every other world had turned to face me at once.

I went to Indiana the next week, after Mom put him in the hospital to keep him safe. We picked him up from the psychiatric ward just after I arrived at the Greyhound station, and he stared out the window in the front seat, pulling at the plastic band on his wrist, smelling like he hadn’t showered in days. His hair had been shaved off, like a sheared lamb.

When my grandfather died, he died slowly, as his body devoured itself. Grandpa lost his hair to chemotherapy, and he began rearranging the living room of his farmhouse every night like an auditorium, preparing to deliver lectures and speeches to empty rooms. Every day he seemed less like himself, like parts of him were being shed like a winter coat. Death does not occur on one single day, but over the course of weeks or months. It’s the slow fading of a life, grey walk toward eternity, surrender. And after death, the memories live on. The mind forgets, loses its place in time. Our landlady in our last house in Kosovo kept all her dead husband’s things in my bedroom, his shoes under my bed, his old Yugoslav army uniforms crowded into my closet, his papers and passports and even a half-drunk cup of tea, sugared over and thick, in the desk drawer. I felt like I was sleeping in a tomb, but now, looking back, I understand the haunting. Even three months after my father’s death, I dream that he is alive, and when I wake up and remember myself, he dies again. I lose him again every morning.

The morning that I left to go back to school in August, he tried to swallow a handful of sleeping pills. Mom found him and made him spit them out, and that was the last time I ever saw him. During the next three months, we battled to keep him with us. I wrote twenty letters, each one saying simply, Dear Dad: I love you, Erin, and I sent two a week, each one different and beautiful. I timed them so that the last one would arrive the day before I came home for Christmas, sending them like prayers. I thought that by the twentieth one, my love would have begun to heal his heart, my forgiveness to set him free from his chains.

The morning I mailed the tenth letter, he died. When I was home for the funeral, the letter came in the mail. I found it sitting on the kitchen table where my brother had dropped it, lost between bills and condolence cards and catalogues, my heart in an envelope, unopened, unread.  

It will never be opened.

When I was a child, Dad used to tell me when he shaved off his mustache that he had rolled it up inside his ear, like a striped awning rolled up above a shop. As his mustache grew back, he would let me crank an imaginary handle on the side of his head, rolling it back out of his ear again. In childhood, things wax and wane with ease, like flowers that bloom in the spring, wither, and blossom again when the sun returns. I would give anything to sit beside those flowers again, beside the sunflowers and poppies in our Ferizaj garden, drinking sweet çaj with lemon, sitting beside my father as he practiced his faltering Albanian on our elderly landlords, watching dusk settle the garden’s corners, curl up beneath the apricot trees. But those times have faded away, never to flower again.

The night before he died, I found tears in my eyes without knowing where they came from or when they had arrived. Questioned, all I could answer was, “I feel myself standing at the edge of loss.” I felt like a man leaning out from his porch, squinting out into the night after the sound of a footstep, looking to the left and the right, straining to hear something dark approaching unseen. A thief in the night.

He let the darkness carry him away, and he left me behind. 

F. vendors, the polar plunge, cousin paulie, and subway santa: margins & distance

The boys I loved were the boys who never asked me out, and I loved them because they were impossibilities. If you never love anyone within the realm of possibility, you can never be hurt—the distance is salvific. It preserves and delivers you from heartbreak. The fruit vendor at the corner of 86^th and 2^nd, he sold me cherries, tangerines, and a sense of romance that would never pass from my dream world into reality. He didn’t even speak English, just gave me a dazzling smile as he weighed the fruit, and I left dazed, with boxes full of blackberries and peaches.

I doted on the Hispanic men who ran the grocery store near my house in Brooklyn. The store had everything from papayas, curry, and rice to pigs’ tails in bloody buckets and salted fish drying on the shelves, their metallic eyes cold and glazed over. The men who ran the store, five or six of them in all, appeared to all come from the same family—very short, eyes creased at the edges, tanned like leather, and sullen until a smile lit up their faces. Honestly, I found it difficult to tell them apart, but I took care to try and make whichever one I was speaking with at the moment smile. One of them, close to my age, frequently asked me what my plans were for the weekend and offered to teach me Spanish, but I always demurred, keeping him at bay. One night, as I was buying a week’s worth of potatoes, onions, and pears, I heard two of the men talking about me behind a heap of pineapples they were unloading.

“She’s beautiful,” one was saying, “the one with the blue eyes, who was buying the pears.” I was the only white girl in a shop filled with African American and Hispanic women, all dark-eyed.

His friend snorted. “Don’t get your hopes up. She only dates white men, I’m sure of it.” His friend protested, and they bickered quietly, switching into Spanish behind their pineapples as I tried not to laugh on the other side. These were the compliments I stored up to smile over later, the ones that held no threat, no danger of actually affecting my world.

I found myself drawn to marginalized men—immigrants, vendors, delivery boys, gays, cross-dressers, other people on the edge of society. One of my good friends when I was at Sarah Lawrence College came to school as a gentle Jewish boy named David from Philadelphia. He had long eyelashes and dark curly hair, worn long, and he always looked like he was flinching, like he was waiting to be hit. By springtime, he had changed his name to Davia and started wearing dresses and eyeliner. We often talked about faith, wrestling with the idea of condemnation together, struggling to reconcile righteous judgment with the grace of God, and I found myself crying for him as I fell asleep at night, for his doe-like tenderness and lost soul.

The next year, when Jenna and I lived with the artists, a gay couple sublet a room in our apartment for the month of May. All the doors in our apartment were made of glass, including the bedroom doors, so that we had to put curtains on the doors to preserve any sense of privacy. While some of the boys we lived with—the type of boys who skulked around in their underwear and left used condoms on the floor after their girlfriends visited—made me wish there were iron bars on our door instead of curtains, I trusted Liam and Stephen the second they moved in to our house. They brought with them a record player, a box of recipes, two mandolins, a violin, and Stephen Fry’s autobiography. We spent the weekends reading out loud to each other, baking pies, and listening to my grandfather’s vinyl Reflections of An Indian Boy. That summer, I went to the East Village to see the neo-futurists, a confessional theatre group that ran a show of thirty micro-plays in sixty minutes, honest, bizarre, and engaging. I had been often, but had always managed to avoid being pulled up on stage until my last visit.

Near the end of the show, Dan, one of their regular performers, came out onto stage with the skeleton of an umbrella, sheets of paper clothes-pinned to the umbrella’s arms. As he spoke, he pulled one page at a time off the umbrella, dropping it on the floor like a tree shedding its leaves. As the pages swirled about his feet, he told us that they were the pages of his first novel, which he had scrapped after showing the completed product to his mother. She cried when she read it, saying, “Dan—it’s just so gay.” She asked him never to talk or write about being gay again, and suggested therapy. When Dan’s umbrella was bare, all the lights went out and we were left in our seats in the dark of his loneliness. When the lights came back on, and a few funny skits had brought laughter back to the room, Dan came out again with a bucket, which he filled with ice and water. He began a monologue about the Coney Island Polar Bear Plunge, and as he spoke, he took my hands, led me from my seat and plunged both of our arms into the bucket of ice water, holding my hands underwater in his. As our arms went numb, he spoke poetry out into the audience, describing the feeling of leaping off of Coney Island’s pier into the bay to celebrate the New Year. He spoke of everything being washed away by the bite of frigid water, of the old year being stripped down to its skin and being born again into the new year. He spoke of forgiveness and purity, and when he was finished, he looked straight into my eyes for a moment and smiled as our baptized hands surfaced, up and out of the water, regaining sensation.

I rode home on the subway that night, sitting by a homeless man on the A line as we rushed beneath the East River. He thought he was Santa Claus and sang me carols all the way home, snapping in and out of lucidity to tell me that he also was a dentist from Guatemala. His blackened teeth suggested otherwise, as he switched back to the North Pole and tried to sell me one of the poinsettias in his shopping cart. As I listened to him sing, his growly voice became more and more endearing. We all were on the fringes—Davia, Liam and Stephen, Dan, Santa the Guatemalan dentist, the fruit vendors—and needed to make safe havens around ourselves to harbour one another in the gaps between our small worlds.

For the past three years, I’ve received a telephone call every few months from a man who introduces himself as Cousin Paulie from Connecticut. That’s how he opens every conversation after my hello: “Hello! It’s Cousin Paulie from Connecticut!” Then, without fail, he asks for Marge or Nancy, his spinster nieces. Every few months, we have the same conversation: I tell him he has the wrong number, he apologizes but persists in asking for his relatives, I repeat that he has the wrong number and ask how he’s been doing since our last conversation and we eventually settle into a rhythm of chatting about the weather, his nieces, and his increasing senility. He must be in his late eighties, by the rasping sound of his voice and his constant state of jolly confusion. These have been, historically, my most pleasant friendships with men: distant, on the fringes, guarded against any sort of reality or love, and therefore with nothing to forgive. I keep my heart in a box, and I would bury it if I could, to keep it safe.

tortoise-shell glasses

i'm wearing my glasses today because, when i woke up this morning, my eyes were still swollen from last night, and i couldn't get my contacts to stick. it was a big weep, the kind that you try and hold back for a week as the storm grows inside of you, waves slapping at your ribcage, and eventually crests and breaks, flattening everything in its path. 

lyss is writing her SIP on tears, which i think is brilliant, examining why we cry, why different emotions produce the same physical reaction, their social utility. my question is this: can you store up tears? is there a well, or a rain barrel, that gradually fills and overflows? some people seem to pour out their barrel often with only a few inches in the bottom; others wait until the well is filled to the brim and let it all out in one, long torrential downpour. some people's barrels fill more quickly than others- some overflow in a couple of days, others a couple of years. 

i cried for so long that i fell asleep crying, until hannah came in and woke me up, laughing at my "raccoon eyes." grief has a way of creeping up on you, sneaking up and undoing you just with a tap on the shoulder. i made a photo album at christmas time full of pictures of missing things, things i associated with loss, and i looked through it for the first time last night, leafing through photographs of my family, our houses, childhood, my dad, flight, roots, wings. 

everything comes in waves: grief, tears, loss, seasons. the palm-reader staring down into my hand sees not lines but circles, spirals, things that come, go, and return again. i feel like everywhere i look, there are parallels, signs that it's beginning again. it's time to leave again, it's time to lose again. i was born in a brick house in illinois and moved to new york city at the end of my first summer. after traveling the world, we came full circle, and i turned eighteen in that same brick house in illinois and moved to new york city on my own at the end of the summer. both times, i took nothing with me but clothes and several boxes of books. one of the last times i saw my dad, i picked him up from the hospital, the psychiatric ward. he had a plastic band on his wrist with his name and numbers, and after he took it off, we tried to play a board game at home, as he stared out the window, distracted. on sunday, i played a board game with a dear friend who stared at the floor, distracted, and on monday he committed himself to the hospital, to the psychiatric ward. the hospital didn't keep my dad safe from himself, and i'm afraid. i can't sleep at night. i fear for the people i love, that they will come to harm. that they will harm themselves. 

my barrel fills quickly, and when i am alone, in solitude, it overflows with a force that takes my breath away and makes my body ache all the next day. 

C. Mr. Brockelhurst and Jim’s guns & love: shame

By the time I was fifteen, everything shifted around again, just as they had when we left Detroit, Sichuan, Chang Chun, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Chicago, Ferizaj, and Minnesota. Everything was always shifting, a fact of my childhood. We spent four years overseas and returned to America every fifth year, my parents moved to a different country every three years, and of each year’s twelve months, I spent eight at boarding school and four wherever my family was at the time. That summer, just before my fifteenth birthday, my family moved from Prishtinë to Macedonia and I moved two villages south in Germany, from Schliengen-Liel to Holzen. Mr. Jespersen and Aunt June had gone back to Canada to be near their twin grandchildren, and I lived in a new dormitory with twenty other girls.

I had four sets of dorm parents for my four years of high school, all wildly different. There were the quirky Canadian Schultzes from the Ukraine who made better kimchi than the Koreans and sent their daughter to the prom with a corsage of red chili peppers instead of flowers, the boisterous Grays from Philadelphia who had been camp cooks for several decades and served everything with a side of Ranch, and a young kindhearted couple who had lost their first baby, a little girl named Anna Pearl, the year before they became our house parents. The last set, the Patersons, arrived late, as they had been trying to sell their house to pay their way to Germany.

Jim and Lynn were from Toronto, where Jim was a full-time artist. Their house had a white picket fence around a backyard that Jim had decorated with a few dozen television trees—old televisions sets put up on poles with faces painted on their screens, looking like they were trying to escape. He explained it to me once as a sage commentary on the nature of reality, but I think it may have increased the difficulty of selling their house.

Jim often sat by the fireplace in the evenings, patiently building a fire and waiting to see if any of us would join him beside it. My sister Hallie and I most often came down to talk with him and drink tea on the leather couches, our conversations leaping from the mundane to the bizarre. My favourite conversation with Jim began when I sat down on the hearth one day, and he said to me,

“Erin, my friend. Speak to me of the profound.” I laughed nervously, knowing that the depth of Jim’s mind was immeasurable, and nothing I could say would ever be ‘profound’ in comparison.

He waited for a moment, then turned toward the fire, and sighed, “This morning, as Lynn and I were eating breakfast, I turned to my wife and said, ‘Darling! Speak to me of love!’ and she stammered and blushed and said nothing of the sort.” He shook his head and stared into the fire, brooding. Later that night, Jim showed me his designs for the furniture he was making for the dorm. He filled the kitchen with paintings of our village and painted sunflowers onto all of the cabinets and closets. He slowly to change the dormitory from a building deadened with stained grey linoleum and ripped, donated furniture into a home filled with rich rugs, paper lanterns, and bizarre sculptures.

Even Jim, though, couldn’t entirely transcend the dismal rules and regulations of our boarding school. The only day Jim and I ever bickered, I was running down the stairs, late for the bus, when he stopped me by the front door and told me to kneel on the ground. In his hand, he held a yardstick, and on his face he wore a grim expression I had rarely seen. I stared at him, and he told me again to kneel, that he needed to measure my skirt to see how many inches it was from the ground, if it missed the modesty mark: two inches. For a full thirty seconds, we stood staring at each other, he with his yardstick and me with my book bag, until I slowly shook my head, no. No, I will not kneel and be measured. I turned and walked out the door, feeling numb.

As I walked to the bus, I remembered that Jim had recently met with our school’s dean, a Mr. Laird, a stickler for modesty who often made girls wear a full painter’s jumpsuit if they wore anything against dress code: jeans with rips, tank tops with straps thinner than three inches, or shorts that were shorter than their fingertips. For my first two years of high school, Mr. Laird doted on me, a model student, soft-spoken and high-achieving, interested in studying medicine later in life. But during my junior year, I found my spirit, stumbled across it as I awakened in the bloom of a Black Forest springtime, began reading EE Cummings and Khalil Gibran, and started dating a boy named Collin who played in a folk band, wrote love songs, and graffitied stencils of me as a ballerina on the town firehouse. Collin and I got caught skipping class—trespassing in the town recycling center looking for treasures, exploring an abandoned house we found out in the woods, climbing apple trees in full bloom, and finally trying to crawl through an underground tunnel we found connecting two of our school buildings. Mr. Laird gave us a week’s worth of detentions, kicked me off student council, and hated me after that day. I have vivid memories of sitting in the teacher’s lounge, scrubbing dirt and spilled food off the floor, as Mr. Laird sat in a chair and watched me, hissing in my ear that I had disappointed him, that I was deceitful and untrustworthy, that he would make me resign my National Honour Society membership because there was nothing honourable about me.   

During my senior year, when Jim was my dorm dad and I had fallen from Mr. Laird’s good graces, Mr. Laird began to have conferences with Jim to talk about my behaviour. When I had mono, Mr. Laird called Jim into his office to say that I was probably lying and that I would be penalized if I ever missed class or an assignment, regardless of any supposed illness or the doctor’s orders I had to stay home from school. I only missed one day of class, despite the fact that the doctor ordered me home for two weeks. When I tried to switch out of a calculus class I had taken unnecessarily, Mr. Laird wrote my mother to say that I was lazy and belligerent because I wanted to take choir instead. I stayed in calculus in attempts to appease him, and even wrote an elaborate apology that I read to him in his office. When I started a petition asking the administration not to cut the funding for the girls’ weekly Bible studies we all were part of, Mr. Laird told the board who reviewed my petition that I was more interested in causing trouble than in studying the Word. Not only was our funding cut, but the school announced a ban preventing girls from meeting together to study the Bible in unofficial groups that had not be reviewed and approved by the activities board. They never approved a single group. A month before I graduated, Mr. Laird called Jim to tell him that my spirit needed to be broken before I left. That was his mission when it came to me—to break me.

I shouldn’t have cared, but the fact that Mr. Laird had spread poisonous words about me to all of my teachers, my dorm dad, and my parents made my stomach feel sour. I shook whenever he walked by me, and felt bitter resentment knot my throat whenever he was nearby, hating him for the power he had over me. It was a small school, and a long year, as I felt Mr. Laird looking over my shoulder everywhere I went. He began lashing out at my friends as well, taking an interest in my best friend, taking her into dark classrooms, closing the door and asking her personal questions about both me and her boyfriend, trying to get information by paying her strange and flattering compliments. He wrote several mass emails to the entire teaching staff about my mentor, the poetry, theatre, and choir teacher, saying that she was incompetent and accusing her publicly of having affairs with students. When she found out that she had breast cancer my senior year, he tried to have her fired, saying that she was too weak to be of use to anyone, despite the fact that she battled through cancer twice and continued to teach. Jim, who had several times expressed to me his outrage at the lies Mr. Laird spread, had begun to design a prayer machine—a sixty-foot machine built like a long arch or tunnel that moved when a crank was turned at one end, swirling around itself and whoever walked down its avenue, mimicking the way that prayers are formed and wing their way to heaven. I often pictured myself walking down the prayer machine’s serene center whenever Mr. Laird came near me to rebuke me, or to make me kneel before him as he measured me and found me wanting. I imagined myself walking through the machine and up toward God, like the angels Jacob saw climbing the ladder to heaven.

That same spring, a month before I graduated, I confessed to Jim and Lynn that I had been drinking on the sly for several years and that we girls had been sneaking out of the dorm in the middle of the night to meet boys and have bonfires out by the vineyards. Jim and Lynn, with tears in their eyes, put their arms around my shoulders and told me that Christ’s command was to forgive one another in his name, and that they absolved me of my sins against them. They showed me grace when they could have had me expelled from school, and taught me about loving rather than hating. At the time, Jim was building a series of guns out of found items, and he pulled one off the top of his Schrank to show me. The gun was built of wood, wire, an old trumpet, a bookend, and something painted dark green like the velvety head of a duck. When I put the gun to my eye and aimed it, staring into the sight, I found that I was peering into my own face staring back at me in surprise. Jim replaced the sight with a mirror, so that whatever you tried to shoot, you aimed at yourself.  If there was anyone I wanted to shoot, it was Mr. Laird, the man who filled me with shame and a sick sense of helplessness every time I saw him. But Jim’s gift to me was the gift of grace—looking in the mirror and walking through the prayer machine instead of descending into violence and bitterness. 

boys, boys, and more boys. and men.

sometimes as the RA of a girls' hall, i just feel like i'm going to tear my hair out or my heart is going to break if i hear one more thing about boys. probably 70% of the heart-to-heart conversations i have with girls involve, in some way, boys and the problems they bring. there are just so many strings attached. i guess the more accurate term, too, would be men, because some of these issues are all grown up, and not frivolous in the least.

in the past few weeks, these have been some of the situations i've talked girls through (remembering that this is anonymous and private, as a journal):

1. there's a girl on my hall who came to covenant as a freshman and was dating her 40-year-old, married-with-two-kids, catholic-in-name-only history teacher from high school. through a lot of interventions and god's work in her heart, she was able to see the light and break off that relationship, but now she's trying to navigate dating a regular, presbyterian, 18-year-old, pre-engineering college freshman, and the transition has been jarring. she's spun so far in the other direction that now the things i'm trying to talk to her about are whether or not it's a good idea to have bible studies with a guy you're interested in and how long you have to wait between relationships for the second one not to be a rebound. i'm almost grateful for the tediousness of these questions.

2. two girls have come to me recently with sudden memories of childhood sexual abuse that have been previously suppressed. what makes it complicated is that in the midst of dealing with these serious things in their past is that one girl is trying to figure out whether her three-and-a-half year relationship with her boyfriend has come down to an ultimatum of commitment, and the other girl is dealing with pain as her ex-boyfriend from the summer starts dating someone who is in all of her classes, while the boy she currently likes (the brother of another girl on the hall) gives her the cold shoulder. it's just a big mess of playing telephone with each other's hearts, approaching boys for each other, getting advice from anyone and everyone until everybody is talking about everybody else and we're all somehow involved in things that aren't really our business.

3. there have been so many girls that have come to me to just talk about their hurt and confusion that boys never ask them out. they wonder what they're doing wrong- are they intimidating? ugly? boring? cold? why does it always seem like everyone else is in the midst of some flirtation while they are forever wallflowers?

4. two girls recently have talked to me about their medical issues, and the fact that they may or may not be barren. the pain that causes and the uncertainties the brings into relationships and romance are colossal, and in ways that are so difficult for me to comprehend.

5. two girls on my hall have been the sole confidantes of boys who struggle with severe depression, and have become increasingly attached to these sweet girls who give them a listening ear and an encouraging heart. but these dependent relationships can become horribly dangerous for both parties, as they try to navigate keeping a distance while also trying to care for someone obviously in need of help.

6. two more girls are in committed relationships of several years and have talked to me about the struggle to be emotionally (and maybe physically) at a level in their relationship where they really should be married to their boyfriends, but they still have two more years of college and aren't financially ready to take that step. what do you do when your heart has gotten ahead of its time?

7. three more girls are interested in guys who aren't christians, and trying to approach them about that discrepancy between their faith and their love lives has been incredibly difficult. saying anything at all seems to be like stepping over the line, and there's no way to confront that without offending deeply. but as an RA, it's somehow my job to speak those difficult truths out of love.

all of these things are constantly tugging at my mind, because i'm engaging with these issues and desperately trying to share any wisdom i have with these girls, but i feel so unqualified. i've only had one serious relationship, and it was in high school. i have my own set of insecurities, uncertainties, defenses and walls built up, foolish mistakes. and over and over again, i'm amazed at how affected we as girls are by the men and boys in our lives. how can they possibly merit so much of our attention? are they even aware that they are the object of most of the late-night discussions on my hall? what is it in us that yearns for these relationships? will we always feel unfulfilled and insecure whether it's in longing for a relationship or struggling through the mess of loving someone?

i only have questions, and yet so many girls are looking to me for answers.

auroch

i got a tattoo on wednesday, at the place on the bridge that looks like it wants to harvest your organs. the name is 'rite of passage', which only adds to the terrifying effect, written in red block letters. inside, there are streamers of skulls strung across the ceiling, black leather couches with pillows shaped like bats, and sketches of the seven deadly sins on the back wall.

the man who did my tattoo was named jack pendergrass. he had metal plugs, a nine-year-old daughter named shannon, and hands that shook if he didn't have a cigarette every hour. he stuck out his tongue whenever he concentrated, which was most of the time, as our conversation took place while he was tattooing my thigh. he grew up in soddy daisy, and he didn't laugh when i told him about a conversation i overheard at stone cup when one stringy, smoking boy said to another about a hick girl they were laughing about, "she's so soddy daisy, she knows the difference between soddy and daisy." the girl at the table next to them turned out to be from soddy daisy herself and she jumped into the midst of their conversation at that comment, declaring herself to be from the daisy side. i thought it was a nice story about soddy daisy pride, but jack didn't seem to think so.

jack told me about his daughter, about how he wanted to take her to europe to travel and see the world, but that her mother, his 'baby mama', didn't think she was old enough to go. i told him about a trip i took with my dad when i was nine, going around the greek island of thassos on a boat on a beautiful june day.

he seemed to like my tattoo pretty well, saying that he'd never done a cave painting before and he liked the 'clean lines.' when i asked him if he had a favourite tattoo that he'd done, he shook his head and said that his favourite tattoos weren't necessarily the ones that were the prettiest or the most challenging, but the ones that made people the happiest. he said he'd just as soon tattoo pink hearts and curly music notes on people if his customers were pleased by his work. we talked for a long time about the ethics of tattooing- the idea of permanence, the issue of racist or gang-related tattoos, the artistry behind something that couldn't be scrapped and begun again.

that's the beauty of a tattoo. it's there forever. that sentiment, that idea, that person- they stay with you, physically on your body. my tattoos remind me first of god's grace and his triumph on the cross and then secondly of my response to that grace: praise, from the heart. auroch on my thigh, tune my heart on my shoulder.

running away

The summer before my senior year of high school, my father’s restlessness reached a magnitude that we had never before witnessed. This was the summer that he spent walking up and down the city streets while everyone else slept, and I spent the month of June watching him from our balcony. In the light of the day, he still wore his tweed jackets and collared shirts, a wise man with crow’s feet stamped beside his eyes from years of laughter and tears. But at night, some devil worked its way into his heart, pricking at his mind until he became frenzied and wild-eyed. One night at three or four in the morning, as he marched toward the door in his boxer shorts, I tried to stop him and ask where he was going, but he only drew his eyebrows down over his eyes and snarled, “Don’t question me,” snatching the key out of the door and leaving.

Our mission board had a policy that parents had to send their children to boarding school if there were no suitable international schools in the area, since home schooling took time away from ministry. My parents always took positions in developing countries and impoverished areas that hardly had schools at all, let alone international schools of any high caliber. In all the years that I had lived at boarding school, from just after my sixth birthday until my senior year of high school, he never once called or wrote to me. To me, this was proof of the fact that he had abdicated his position as my father. I began to see myself almost as an orphan, and boarding school as my foster home. The tricky part was that Dad still expected me to submit to his authority without question whenever I was home in the Balkans.

Our relationship throughout high school was turbulent at best, as I chafed against his tyrannous moods and struggled to measure up to his impossible and exacting standards. Failure was never an option with Dad, but it was also an inevitability given his expectations. Though the fact that I lived in Germany and he lived in Macedonia separated us physically, the winter and summer holidays I spent at home distanced us from each other even more. That last summer I spent at home, his restless summer of pacing, crackled with tension between us, as his temper boiled closer to the surface and my tearful defiance grew in intensity. Our fighting peaked during a trip to America’s West Coast to visit colleges.

The two most painful arguments both began in the car. The first time, he was angry that I needed help carrying my heavy suitcase into the Nevada casino where we were spending the night. The town was called Elko, a cowboy town that looked like it had materialized out of an old Western film, complete with sagebrush, tumbleweed, and spurs. His fury grew, railed, and rambled, moving from the luggage to my dreadlocked hair to the laziness of teenaged girls to all the ways I was a disappointment to him. Reduced to tears, I could do nothing but turn and leave as he shouted, walking until I reached an old, overgrown cemetery. I paced among the graves, worn smooth and crumbling at the edges, the faint traces of engraved dates telling the story of the cemetery’s inhabitants. Most of the deceased were soldiers in the Spanish-American war, which I had never heard of, and I laughed myself sick through my tears over the abbreviated inscriptions: “Henry Lewis, Veteran of the SPAM war.” I lay for a long time in the tall grass under one of the graveyard’s trees, calming myself before walking back to the hotel to hear Dad’s mumbled apology.

The second argument was one of the last we ever had. Driving through Portland, Oregon, I tried to navigate our path to Reed College on our road atlas, its pages unfolding to obscure most of the dashboard and windshield with blue and pink lines and numbers. Frustrated by the number of times I had turned the map upside down, exclaiming, “Wait, I found it! Oh, never mind, wrong road,” Dad snatched the atlas away from me, crumpling it into the back seat. The longer we drove, the more lost we became. I sat quietly twirling my dreadlocks as Dad grew silent and terse. Finally the dam broke, and he began softly, with sentences ragged and half-swallowed, bitten short between his teeth. He moved from the fact that I had gotten us lost to expound on my uselessness and stupidity, warming up like a Baptist preacher taking off his suit jacket. By the end of his tirade, he had told me that I was slowly destroying our entire family with my selfishness and that I had ruined his life, plunging him into depression when I forced him to move to Macedonia. I knew that the move to Macedonia hadn’t been my decision, that I had even begged him to stay in Kosovo, but I could hardly breathe, let alone find the words to deny his accusations. I slumped in my seat, crushed by the force of his resentment and the weight of my crimes, shaking. The second the car slowed near Reed’s campus, I jumped out of the passenger door and ran for the nearest tree.

The day was grey and crisp, typical of a July morning in Portland, as I climbed up as high as I could. I stopped on a sturdy branch far above the ground, too high for Dad to reach me, as far as I could get from his bitter anger, and glared out at the river, trembling and steadying my breath. The college’s beautiful buildings, brick with white trim and columns, stood behind me, and the city stretched out before me, across the river. I heard Dad walk up behind me, staring out at Portland as the sun climbed higher in the sky. Looking out at the college, the river, the city, pale with the morning’s frail light, I saw my escape open up before me, worlds away from the Balkans, boarding school, and my family. As I recognized the avenue of my escape, so did my father. And for the first time, I think he understood that the second I turned eighteen, I wouldn’t be walking to a Nevada cemetery or hiding from him up in a tree. The next time I ran away from him, I would put thousands of miles and an ocean between us.