With August's final hellish bellows, I found you,
Fingernails thicks with loam, hands and knees strained and filthy
With answers to neglected questions she left in your untended fields.
We spent the night searching the cool air for its sweetest scents.
I remained
In harsh Midwestern winter we tread clumsily,
Like feet asleep, across each other's tender knuckles.
In the field we dug trenches just to smell fresh earth.
At night I washed our hands in bleach to watch the stains fade.
We continued
Filling our trench with smoke and silence,
I unwrapped your bandages for months, scraping away old blood
As I swelled with my own forgotten cells until my cracked hands grew blurry
And in the harsh white light of your dim room I screamed at your nakedness.
Thank god Joe broke the clippers, I had an uncontrollable urge to shave all the hair off my head, but I've done my scalp using a razor before, it's too annoying with hair longer than stubble, so my eyebrows and hair remains intact, just did normal shave.
::
2008 11 August :: 2.12pm
:: Music: Bloc Party - Kreuzberg
I have decided at 25, that something must change.
I feel less and less like a human and more and more like a series of words on a white page as time goes on. Most of the people I truly care about are people I don't ever get to see. Instead, these are people I keep in touch with through emails, chat windows and the odd phone call now and then. So to them, that's exactly what I must be; a series of words on a white page. If that's how the people that matter the most see you, doesn't that define who you are at a certain point?
He was driving his moped from Kroes to Courtland, right by my parents' house when he was hit by a car. The police say he didn't yield but I think he really just thought he could make it across in time. He wasn't wearing a helmet.
He was 18. He was going to attend Aquinas in the fall. I was getting his information ready for STAR when Ashley found out.
I saw him do stand up at Rockford High School. He was a funny kid.
July 1st.
I was standing in the Warsaw airport at 6am having gone to bed only two hours earlier. I felt sick from getting food poisoned in Ukraine and everything felt very surreal. Rafael, and Prudence watched quietly, Monika gave me an eiffel tower keychain from her recent trip to Paris, Nella smiled and joked in the discrete way that she does, Britt stood anxiously beside me, and my host mom Danka held an American flag. I was feeling nauseous from the food poisoning, but also the added nerves of leaving the country. Daniela smiled at me warmly and lead me to the bathroom where I threw up. As we walked back to the small crowd, she rubbed my back and mothered me. Minutes passed, Britt and I went through the gate, and a strange calmness came over me as we boarded the plane.
It's been one year since I left Poland and my exchange ended. Today the exchange students after me are coming home. The first time I saw them they were timid but excited to start their own exchange and everything about Poland sounded strange. Then I saw one of them when I visited Warsaw six months ago and she knew better Polish than me.
A year later and I'm sitting on a blue couch with glass sliding doors in front of me watching the Aussie sky turn from day to dusk. I have a beautiful girlfriend, an awesome cat, and I wash dogs for a living. A lot of things can change in a year. A lot of things changed for the year I was in Poland. But right now, things are starting to feel more stable. I have the person I want to spend my life with, we have a place to live, and we're building a savings account. We've got the simple things down; it's just the future that remains unknown. But that's ok.