Eye for an I...do

It was one of those moments when the world around you stops. The air suddenly becomes thick, as though the particles of time are laboring to remain stagnant, giving you the sensation that if you turned your head in either direction it would be like spinning your finger through jello: the fragments of space would rip off in contorted chunks and re-stick haphazardly to neighboring fragments. I've seen it depicted in cinema as having a harsh light suddenly fall on the person experiencing the sensation, the remainder of the room fading out or even going black, and perhaps there is even a sharp focus and swift zoom on the person's face. It was one of those moments, and as it happened my heart was caught up in the camera close-up and jello-filled air and it drifted into my throat. I swallowed it down and ignored the moment.

Nothing had happened. There was no change in the consistency of the atmosphere; he didn't just look at me like that.

But he had.

The trouble with being a perceptive theatre/English major is that moments of anomaly do not go unnoticed. Each instant of my life is fodder for a character--whether one I stand proxy for on stage or one I create on the page. I had a phase in the fall in which I took detailed internal notes on every wound I received, on the off chance I would need to describe such a wound in a short story or novel someday. It is therefore impossible for me to ignore that when he looked at me the air was wrought with such a change. Nor can I shun the fact that it happened more than once.

But I am known, at least of myself, to be a hapless optimist when it comes to the realm of love and the opposite sex. I have learned from experience that the look may very well imply attraction, but there are many false motives that underlie it. Thus far, out of 5 such fellows who have heftily dished out such looks, I have only properly interpreted one and a half of them as actually romantically inclined. The half is because I'm not quite sure if he was really interested and just very shy about going for it, or if he was just the kind of guy that looks at all of his good friends that way. Therefore who am I to assume any different of this recent man?

Granted, the last to have given this look was in fact quite interested, but as he was more moody and touchy than a cat in a bathtub, I didn't eagerly dive into that relationship.

I was intending to be more vague with this but, alas... It is hard enough for me to look at him when he speaks without feeling my blood vessels are rearranging under the flesh of my face to spell visibly in cursive the words "I am utterly positive I love you. And I would be genuinely content to bear your children." Add in the factor that nine out of ten times he looks at me with that searing look that should only be accompanied with the overwhelming desire to run away with the person the look is given to, and you can see why I'm a complete wreck. How could I ever ignore how I feel when I'm constantly reminded in the way he looks at me?

I am determined not to let my optimistic self grab this notion and run with it, playing out ways he could corral me into a relationship.

Easier said than done. You try admiring a fellow in the fifth grade, see him randomly as a senior in high school, and now finding yourself with a severely logical excuse to see him for 2-4 hours a week at very close proximity and not be twitterpaited to some degree.

Just try.

Get to Where I'm Going

I have moments where I feel as though I want to take my soul and sever it from my body. Not in a suicidal manner, but in a desire to be free. A hope to fly. I often wonder why I can't simply shed whatever it is that holds me bolted to the ground. I stare out windows in moving vehicles and my mind reaches through the trees and clouds and finds a place where I am alone with nothing but myself, a place where I have achieved a fresh start--a fresh thought--and there is nothing limiting me from being.

I often think of Virginia. I roll the word in my mouth and as my tongue presses it against the roof of my mouth the juices leak out and seep like a narcotic into my system, and I feel. I'm taken to there, to Virginia, that same place my mind travels when the world outside my window isn't enough. It started with Jason Mraz. His story of uprooting and forsaking everything to shed the old and build the new with nothing but biology and telephone wires tying him home; to be in that place where he could Be. It inspired me. He went east and found it: California. It sucked him in, it called him back, it altered his life completely. Being, myself, already in the western portion of the continent, I began to feel that if I were to find what he found, if I were to ever let go and shed what blocks the light from my eyes, I would need my own California. I would need to go east.

So I named it Virginia.

But as the years have passed it has become all the more clear that I cling so desperately to Virginia not as a geographic ideal, but as a state of Being. It may well be that, should I ever truthfully set foot upon Colonial soil, that my expectations would only be half-met. It's not about the plantation houses or the cobbled walkways anymore. No, there are too many dreams hanging off the unlimited branches of the legionous trees. Virginia is where I will be once I shed the clutter that wraps around my ankles and binds me at my wrists and grips me, fettered, to the stonework of my own soul's dungeon.

But as fixed as I am on the idea that Virginia will render me emancipated, I am unable to pick the locks here beside these mountains. My entire self is convinced that to find this Utopia and to breathe the breath of liberation I must first forsake these surroundings. It is as though once I traveled such a distance as it would be to reach Virginia, it would be too hard to return for all the clutter and chains the strangled me back home. I would be free of it all.

Alone with myself.

I'm afraid to do it without the physical abandonment of this place. I am afraid to reach Virginia without reaching Virginia. Instead I look out windows and let the man who used his California to change my life carry me to where I stand outside the limits of Virginia, ounces from the entrance, seeing all I'll have when I get there, but unable to shake the shackles enough to take the step.

I'm so incompetent I can't even compose a post about how I'm incompetent. So forget the theatrics, forget the prose and poetry. It's time for raw words.

I knew I wouldn't be able to audition with that song. I've tried it three times and it just never works the same in front of the panel as it does at my piano. But I did it anyway.

And I HATE feeling so... You have to understand when you're best friend's in musical theatre and the majority of community shows they put on are musical theatre, and all of the freshmen in the theatre department are doing musical theatre... singing is a big deal. And every time I fail at it I feel like I'm a five-year-old again. An incompetent five-year-old that maybe someday will get better but for now she's just a dumb little kid and doesn't know better.

I feel like my confidence and my ability to perform in sync with that confidence determines my intellectual standing with people of this crowd. So when I stumble or reveal a short-coming I lose a few years and become the 19 year-old that doesn't know any better. They 19 year-old who is obviously a five-year-old on the inside because if she wasn't she would have gotten better at this by now, or learned to never EVER EVER rear her ugly head in this direction again.

And it's stupid but it really does shatter me immensely. I avoided singing in high school because I thought I could get around it, but if I ever want to perform again I have to learn to sing.

And it's shit. It's ridiculous that my self-worth is determined by whether I can control my singing voice in a public setting.

I don't want to sing. I hate musical theatre for the sole purpose that to participate I have to sing. It was okay in high school when I could get the old lady parts that don't sing, but in community theatre there are real old ladies to get those parts.

What do they need a 19 year-old for?

But the thing that's bugging me the most is that I felt I was making a decent impression on this brutally attractive man.

And then my voice cracked.

And who would ever be impressed by a 19 year-old who confidently sings like she's five?

stumbling block

It's like I can write one good thing every month. I've exerted all I have in me to be creative. I feel like by being given no limitations I am limited and caught in not knowing where to begin. I have guidelines that are serving as straight-jacket tendons that constrict the concourses of my mind until I'm sprawled about the bed begging from something to come out of me but the desire to submit to sleep.

My issue, I've now decided, is that what must be written must be performed. At the present pinnacle my words are not scribbles in a notebook or musings on the web. I am accountable for what I create.

And creativity is afraid of criticism. So it's running and screaming and kicking me and killing me and demanding I forsake these commitments and stay in bed a while longer, and scrub my hair a tad cleaner and focus on not demanding anything of myself.

My talent and best friend has become the fanged monster one must coax from the closet for the kill. It no longer walks by my side, but drags me back by my coattails demanding submission. It tells me I don't work that way, I can't write that way, I can't be that way, give up.

I want to push forward so badly. I want to do and be and enjoy and amaze. It breaks me up to realize the remainder of my being is against these petty dreams.

Be gone, believer. Dismiss the dreamer. Walk back down the path you have trod.
These thoughts are like cannons that kill all should come
Stop quick. Forget this old home.

Home Is What The Heart Is

I challenge you to take a moment now and ask yourself when you first felt at home with yourself. It doesn't have to be one of those wide-awakening moments where you felt fully liberated from insecreities. No. I mean that moment in high school you were suddenly confident walking in your own shoes, or that day in elementary school you had to hold your own.

I did this a few weeks ago, pin-pointed the moment I was home, and I haven't been able to let go of the idea that who I am at this precise moment is founded on one simple occurance.

And I know it sounds pathetic to say I was able as an early adolecent to stand tall because I had my ears wrapped around music by one specific artist. I tried to ignore the notion. There had to be another time I felt at home. Jason Mraz isn't my first notion of inner home, is he?

But I dug, and as obsurd as that makes me, it's the truth. And I stand by it.

Morrissey once said (to paraphrase) "There is one artist that comes into your life at the right moment-at that age-and they change you. And from then on, nothing they ever do can be wrong."

I've analyzed myself over the past few years over how I feel more akin to Mraz's first studio album Waiting for My Rocket to Come or his second studio album Mr. A-Z, and it has recently occured to me that I have given these releases significant importance because they were the first I had. They were the ones that seeped into my heart and created a foundation on which I build my confidence.

The way I see it is, up until 2005, my personality and my strength were swimming about in my body, with no stable place to take root and grow; and something with this man and his music pulled me together. He was like the mortar, cementing bricks of my foundation. For the years interviening I have built more to myself; I have customized who I am and what I believe and what I do and what I love, making the wall of personal definition higher and higher. But it's founded on the base he helped me create.

I think I forget I've built this inner home. I get caught up in the world and all the levels of my towering fortress, and just when I begin to be submerged by all that surrounds me-without even realizing I'm drowning-his song comes in and my heart takes flight, as though the base of my being is reaching out, shaking the structure to remind me who I am and how beautiful that is. And how beautiful it continues to become.

You can laugh at me, and mock me for loving this tree-hugging planet-saving music-playing nomad; but that is just who he has become. That is the result of all his brick laying since he played coffee shops Thursday nights. He is transparent, showing the world in love and song what his inner fortress holds.

And it's only because he's so willing to share and create that I can lean back and say I'm building myself, and say I have an identity. It's just still under construction.

If I never saw him perform live again for the rest of my life, it would disappoint me more than the world. But at the same time I don't need to see his love manifested live. Each cord, each note, each scat is manifestation enough.

I just hope I can find a way, once I know myself, to be so purely open and share the fiber of who I am.

I hope to rescue someone, the way he rescued me.

Waves and the Both of Us

I'm awake. It's like that hour was an exfoliating scrub to my soul; all the dead cells and dust particles were scourged from the crevices and creases and washed with a gush of water. I was held fast against a wall of force that ripped the ill-intentioned from me. I was scrubbed down and power rinsed. I fell to my knees, wet. By weaving our souls together as one and challenging to open to the world I became awake.

Even through my headphones, through this new album, I'm swimming. I'm swimming in awareness and it crashes gently against me like tender waves. The torrent that cleansed me swept the clutter away, but water continued to fill the space, swirling in peace about me.

I could fall in love today. That's how open my heart is. I could fly, that's how free my soul sings.

One hour has changed me.

One hour to remind me why I can't resign from theatre, one hour to wipe clean the slate I've scribbled observations on -one hour to show me the slate is still good; I can still observe.

One hour to find myself the way I'll be once my spirit melts out of this vesicular state and finds havoc in the clouds. Warmth. Currents of energy. Connection. Bravery. Peace. Love.

And it's turning into the longing to be somewhere else. The longing to know other voices, to sense other trees, to walk different roads and call different names. It's turning into the longing to run away -to grow old and escape. Or to take a pen to paper, or don a mask of recitation. To create, either through the faculty of my mind or that of my entire being.

I'm awake, fresh, alert, ready to dash waves against stone until I'm looking at something as perfect as I feel. Something awake.

To all the Michael J Fox’s:

I love you. I mean, I love you each individually, not as a collective group. I’ve only lumped you in a group because I realized a few short days ago that there is one common attribute relative to my feelings toward you: your euphoric charisma.

I’m a sucker for it, look at me. I’ve fallen for enough of you that not only can I put you in a group, but I can confidently title the group. To be fair, I could be addressing this confession to all the Jason Mraz’s out there, but biologically Michael J Fox came first. To me, he is the original. And the forerunner of charisma must be properly respected.

But now that I’ve got you all together and it’s all out in the open, I find I must confess the issue with my love. You see, I’m not the one for you. Any of you. As much as your charisma sways me, as much as I admire the look on your face when you’re reciting scripted lines, as much as I want to hug you every time you do a back flip or jump onto the kitchen counter, as much as my heart seeps red hot blood through my veins each time you say something singularly to me, I’m not right for you.

And I know you expect me to say “It’s not you, it’s me; I shouldn’t keep barking up the wrong tree,” but that would be a lie. It is you. You ARE the issue. You see, one of the contributing factors to your euphoric charisma is that each of you is a performer. And whether filtered by screen or delivered live directly to my face, you know I’m absorbing you—I’m taking it in like crazy. And you play to it. I’m not right for you because I’m a different performer than you. I don’t analyze my surroundings and react in an appropriate way. I pretend to. But really I invest in my surroundings and place the upmost confidence in my judgment, forgetting there are souls like you that will bend the surroundings.

You do realize you bring this upon yourself, of course. It’s the winking, the leaning in to whisper, the letting your arm linger at my side or holding my hand too long. It’s the singing my name and the secret eye contact and the fact that you just stick around.

As much as I claim to be mature and highly trained, my biology is not willing to shut down when you, the Michael J Fox’s, come around. Maybe if you weren’t so fit and beautiful my hormones could be still long enough for my mind to compute that the thing I love most about you is the very thing that would inevitably keep us apart: your euphoric charisma.