24 April 2006

Any morning this week or last


We are cheerfully vindictive. Ashley and Eva are sipping Earl Grey with raspberry syrup and I have my green tea. We are laughing at old stories and people we will miss. And not miss.

I will miss these mornings over breakfast, egg sandwiches, granola, pineapple and tea, even the edge of our cynicism. We feel beautifully alive and awake, but jaded, jaded, jaded, and laughing at everyone in the cafeteria, even ourselves. Reviewing poetry reading or proofing papers or pretending to do both but not really caring. Everything feels false and irrelevant and almost over.

We know everything these days—who we do and do not like, who we are and aren't—or maybe just who we were and who we don't want to become anymore. It is easy to glide at this point, forgetting that there is a face beneath my face, a self beneath my self, a reality beneath this reality, that awaits me in a few short weeks.

All the seams of my world are loose and I can hear the creak as it comes ondone, the snap of string drawn by the motion of my thoughts or the motion of others or the hand of God. Sometimes it makes me a little desperate.

I am scrawling lists across the back of my hands with serpentine script, unraveled letters, to reflect the state of my days – all loose ends and wash-away-ink-plans and not enough time, but far more time than I am going to have when I move home in a few weeks.

How long have I been viewing everything through a button hole? I think the buttons are about to pop, bursting off, and the fabric is about to fall away. The world outside is crawling with things I've never seen. And it's alive, alive, alive with ideas—new thoughts, new words, new voices. And work and car payments and rent and taxes and brown rice and spinach. Whatever it takes to not give up at all.

We're promised the world, aren't we?
We can do anything we want, can't we?

For the first time in my life I belong to no one and no one belongs to me and when the summer ends I can do whatever I can pay for.

Is that going to feel like freedom?
Does the world arch open on everyone this way?
By unraveling before their eyes?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is easy to glide at this point, forgetting that there is a face beneath my face, a self beneath my self, a reality beneath this reality, that awaits me in a few short weeks.

That is good. I like it because it is true. And mysterious.

I went to Derek Webb. He did requests. Someone requested Somewhere North of Here, and it blew my socks off. Which was awkward for the people sitting around me.

jules said...

the buttons-bursting-off is painful at times. especially if you liked that sweater.

but hopefully there's something better underneath...like something from Forever XXI? ;)

Brutes In The Halls said...

The world outside is crawling with things I've never seen. And it's alive, alive, alive with ideas—new thoughts, new words, new voices. And work and car payments and rent and taxes and brown rice and spinach. Whatever it takes to not give up at all.

May I just say that you are a very beautiful writer? You speak of something that sounds like hope, something I have become intimately acquainted with in the last few years. There is a thing that makes braces us during all that bursting and popping and loosing of layers. That thing is hope, in who Jesus is. This is my conclusion.

I like the idea that there is someone more underneath, someone people don't know, someone who is being brought into the light by higher or stronger forces. It makes me want to meet her.

melissa said...

oh, hannah, how lovely it is to read a well written blog! this entry was particularly rich and has good rhythmn. you're definitely in my heart and thoughts, as always.

Pinon Coffee said...

It is true. I have only now discovered your blog (how could I have not known it before?), and you are a writer. I saw it in Nonfiction and see it again. Your words fly along, like the side roads and barbed wire and wild flowers and bushes and "Yield" signs along a car ride, and resolve themselves into landscapes and images and bright storms and bright clear sky.

--Carolyn <:3 )----