These are the kind of texts we have arrived at.
I've been staying with my dad, stepmother, and 17 year-old stepsister for about a week, and may stay almost two weeks more. I don't much like to leave my bedroom, let alone my hometown, but it's been a fairly easy venture since I have a private space while I'm here (my other stepsister is visiting her biological father in Maine), though no door, and a little close for comfort to Dad and Stepmom, but everyone seems to just fall right asleep at night, so I have that sense of the inner sanctuary and besides that a lot of free time.
I DO have to periodically remind myself that I'm no longer 17 and can leave at will, and that my father and stepmother are just fragile human beings and not the ultimate ambassadors for Christ, though they make good strides. Yesterday my dad worked a fairly full day and then silently filled out an elaborate invoice at mealtime (he has his own carpentry/renovation business, go Dad!) and said like twenty words to me, including criticizing something I was doing regarding dishes. (D. was like, "Do you have an exact count because you wrote them all in your notebook?" and I was like, "Better to air my complaints in my notebook than to peoples' faces"... but he also pointed out the rational course, about me being a Big Girl and not having to take others' inconsistency, moodiness, etc. personally.)
Today, however, he offered me a driving lesson-- I just got my license and will SUPPOSEDLY have a '97 Ford Taurus standard waiting for me when I get home, so need to navigate the shift. As this is dreadfully tedious, I requested in lieu a guitar lesson. He taught me a blues scale but looking down at the strings makes me a bit dizzy. I've been playing guitar for about nine years. I play once every 5 or 6 months for a couple minutes, with a couple notable exceptions (one of which launched this: www.myspace.com/cigmidcig - though I had a bit of help from this or that 'difficult husband': Just kidding, I'm saving all my marriage mojo for just the one; he asked today if he could make the wedding ring out of a spoon and embed it with little pieces of glass. I said that was the wrong spirit but maybe it's the right one. He also offered a Champion, TM, Sweatshirt as symbol of commitment, in that I'd wear it every single day. Oh, Pisces Moon, you castle-builder). It's pretty intense, to the point that TD, my first all-the-way, remarked this summer "What I don't understand is how you managed to get WORSE at guitar after all these years. Why don't you have Dave teach you or something?" So there.
My brother by contrast used to practice a full ten hours per day and, they tell me, phenomenal. No, he is really good, though perhaps a bit stiff and I've no right...I asked my father if this was NECESSARY and he admitted to periods of practicing up to 6 hours on a daily basis. But I don't want to be a "musician." I only want an outlet for all the poetry, since, as I wrote on myspace months ago, "my childish couplets can no longer contain it."
I had difficult dreams last night. My injured foot was falling apart and was rotting to the point that it would kill the whole body; this may or maay not have been influenced by recent readings in the New Testament concerning how it is better to lose a member of the body then the whole body. But in my dream it was not so much a giant hole bit out like when the gun did that thing to me, but that the bottom of the foot had a seem and flesh and blood was oozing out of that seam: it was becoming undone. There was also some encounter with a rifle which I believe my mom had and I was trying to convince her to get it out of there-- something which happens a surprising (or not) amount in my dreams. I also dreamt about D. making me jealous with his friends' girlfriend, I asked him to smoke a cigarette with me at the gazebo (by the way, it's Day Two Without Cigarettes, "It's the end of the world as we know it / And I feel fine")but he was like, "I already did that, with A." (A. is the friends' girlfriend, and he has spent a lot of time with that couple this year) and I cleared my throat and tensed up and said, "Just you and A.?" and he was rambling about other people / making strange justifications, when I think I woke up.
I hope I have a bun in the oven if not there will be tacos for dinner, with leftover turkey rice stirfry, and ginger bars ice cream etc.
I spent three hours at a coffee shop today, and I'm not going to make fun of any part of it, though we - the coffee shop, the British woman who owned it, what I did there, me- could all be construed as pretentious. The truth is it was wonderful, I did some first-rate eavesdropping, scribbled, read a bit of a Cuelo book: "The Day Veronica Chose to Die," or something, had three cups of fair trade "shade grown" (okay, whatever) coffee, an onion spinach tomato omelot on panini, lentil soup with a big hunk of wheat bread and very thick real butter; and a piece of orange ginger cake with thick citrus frosting (a lot like icing: where is the line?) which I still have like 2/3 of. The prices were good. It was a bit dim for writing and reading and I had a chill from washing my hair, but I kept my coat on and waited for it to dry.
*
Last night my stepsister started showing me how to sew mittens from old sweaters she got very cheap from a church-run thrifstore. You cut out and then sew the mittens in three parts each and then do fleece liners for the inside and unite them with a cuff. We listened to a Miley Cyrus playlist ( on apologies: "I'll believe it, when you mean it / If you text it, I'll delete it). I've of course heard her many times but never realized it was her. What a grown up voice she has! Then we capped our evening with an episode of Hannah Montana- a first for me.
*
There is a lot I could say-- about the way I want salvation for all but they say that's unbiblical, and how D. said he had "no sentimental attachment" to the same thing, and it scared me a little, but when I read the rest of his letter I could see that he was being balanced, and only really saying that he can't be pulled to Hades by downdraggers at his heels, but he balanced this with the need for compassion for those who "are in hell right NOW"; how horror sticks with you and pervades dreams, and makes you jump (sometimes even the toast popping can send me for a loop), but is not the main thing, and how no matter we suffer in this life, Jesus is very gentle, and we ourselves have a great deal of this light in us, and sometimes the part that makes you want to cry is not how hard it all is, which it undoubtedly is, but how light the load actually is, but perhaps that is just a perceptual trick of time-- but I am very hungry and I want to read a magazine.
*
Isn't it weird that we have no idea when we'll die? I know I don't get an originality bonus check for that, but it really is an original effort anytime you move close to really believing the truth of it, I think.
