...and warm, soft cookies

Sometimes I like being happy. So happy that wind in my face and clouds in the sky make me smile. So happy that I grin when I almost run into people because it reminds me that I'm alive, that I'm sane, that I'm better today than I was a year ago.

I told myself last night I'd make a list of all the things that make me smile:

• Nicole grinning at me, looking into my eyes, softly saying my name, telling me she loves me and cannot wait until our kids look at her with my eyes, or smile at her with my smile.
• Listening to really good music, the kind that swells and soothes; the kind whose parts I can follow with my mind, as if I were the automated camera at a dog race, running alongside the track, and each part were a greyhound, bounding with its own ups and downs, it's beats and abruptness, the cadence of the footfalls, the yells, and the heartbeats, so many heartbeats--dogs, spectators, trainers--all reaching a wrenching, and inescapable crescendo of emotion.
• Feeling like things fit in my life, so much that when I think about them I can find no hidden agenda, no buried reason behind why I do the things I do, only plain fact.
• Learning something new about myself, especially something positive that I can build on.
• Knowing reasons why--why aluminum foil is shiny on one side and matte on the other, why men's shirts and women's shirts button on opposite sides, why artists chose the words they did and why those words work--those kinds of things that make me feel like I know something.
• Figuring out something very intricate--how to solve a logic puzzle, how a simple machine works, how the world around me fits together, without chinks or gaps or tears at the seams--knowing all that, well, it makes me feel secure.
• Tasting really good food, food that excites the tongue and attaches memories to it, food that then becomes the reason for telling certain stories to strangers, for remembering certain occasions--like homemade pies, or authentic Mexican food.
• Feeling triumph--either on my own, or vicariously through a good movie or a well-told story or a friend's success.
• Feeling accepted and knowing that God approves of me and loves me. Heck, knowing that ANYONE whose opinion I care about approves of me and loves me.
• Feeling the Spirit.
• Knowing and being able to feel other people's love for me, especially my wife's.
• Being active and accomplishing something with my time, volunteering to teach, to sit-in, to participate, to watch over, to clean, to organize, to be constructive in any way.
• Writing and having people approve of my work, having them compliment me for it, tell me that what I've said touched them in some way, that it moved them, that it spoke to them and they connected with me even though I wasn't there with them.
• Knowing that I've made those connections with other people, even without having realized it; knowing that something I've done has made other people smile--not in derision, but in understanding, in exuberance, in knowing.
• Helping others, even when I myself feel like I need help.

Starting from Scratch

My fingers are pealing again.

Layer after layer, I feel like my soul is slipping away. Every time I touch you, I feel further from you, as if I were slowly morphing into a dessicated skeleton--without skin, without nerves, without feeling.

My touch becomes more calloused, and then I'm scared of not only of losing touch, but also of hurting you. I'm scared of scratching you. The little, dry, hard flakes of skin stay attached to my fingers, and no matter how much I pick at them, no matter how much I try to make my fingers smooth like they were before, there are always more shards of dead skin waiting to be pulled up and redden your soft skin.

So, I resort to other methods of expressing my affection: I caress you through the fabric of your shirt, your clothes; I run my fingers slowly through your hair, down your back; I let my knuckles touch your smooth, warm cheeks, and I bury my cheek against your shoulder. But when I go to touch your skin with my fingertips, I imagine I can almost feel you flinch. I see you unconsciously dust away my hands as if I were massaging harsh sand into your soft skin.

This happens every time I play my guitar--for weeks after I've slid my fingers up and down those frets, the tips of my fingers are like bits of harsh slate, coming of in hard, sharp chips.

Boxing

Another late night
another hot fight
and you're gone

another long sigh
another goodbye
and I'm wrong, again

another 2 am
another glimpse of the end
between two cold sheets
these empty weeks
keep bringing their friends

I fell in love with writing during my senior year of high school. Coach Grimes, the gruff softball-coach-turned-honors-English-teacher, had us write response papers every day in class. He'd put on a Beatles song and tell us to write. He didn't care what we wrote, as long as it filled the space. At first, I would fill up my obligatory two pages with gibberish.

But, eventually, my in-class ramblings gained structure. As I learned to free-write, I also realized that the parts of life that bugged me most could be sorted out. Putting my ideas on paper, arranging them logically, and rereading and revising them until they made sense gave me an outlet. At least half a decade before the glut of prepubescent soul-bearing that is Myspace, or the guilty collegiate, time-wasting pleasure called Facebook, I was typing out my anxieties on the old Fisher-Price styled iMacs at school.

I enjoy seeing how one word can change the entire feeling of a paragraph, how a paragraph break can give rhythm to the pacing of a page, how rearranging the structure of a sentence can add more impact to the message.