Happy · 'Cause · They · Eat · Lard

If you could boil your life down to a few words, what would those words be?

Not easy, right?

How can you capture the essence of a lifetime in words? You are not solely one thing, you are not simply the skin you are in or the mistakes you have made or the people you have loved or the family you are in touch with no more than once or twice a year, or the experience of racism you have had or the culture you were born into or any of the other numerous things that have worked together to create "you".

What does it mean, any of it?

Does it even have to have meaning to be meaningful?

how messy life can become.

you knew this, have always known it...but somehow its messiness is easily skimmed over in all the mundane every day things that take up space and time between the things that you remember as important and the things that define your reality. but all the minutes and seconds and hours and weeks and months and years that have passed...what is it, truly, that has passed?

you think about the mystery that life is and how much of a struggle it can be to keep the things that are real to you in the forefront of your mind...so hard to trust once trust has been wounded. so hard to recall that golden moment of the sun just as it hits your horizon line. but when it happens, when trust is there and that golden moment presses itself into your skin with all the fervency of a lover...

you think and think. you remember all those years ago when the world seemed so much bigger. it has shrunk now, in many aspects. it has become diminished by the constant thrust of modernity probing into every crevice and sacred place. you are certain that when it is your turn to pass that you will remember her eyes and smile and the way the sun glanced off of her sunglasses on the hill as she passed you the songs & sounds of her heart....that and the way the sun looked on the snow and made blue shadows and the way the freezing wind smelled as it prickled the insides of your nose and the smell of rabbit fur and pine needles

You wake up from a series of disturbing dreams. In one you see your niece as a small child. She dies, somehow, and waking you go to your sister's house to tell her about your dream but at the house are your nieces, both of them, alive and teenaged. You wake, this time for real, and wonder about this dream. It is the second time you have dreamed of your one niece dying as a small child. You eventually learn from your sister that your one niece was abducted when she was four for six hours. It kills something inside of you, but leaves a ragged-toothed pain behind that erupts in a molten flower of guilt, impotence, and sadness for that little girl you last knew her as and for the young woman she now is who must deal with what was done to her.( Read more... )