reassess, re-envision

It's POURING rain outside right now, pounding hard on my double panes. I can barely hear the trains sporadically cutting through the tumult of weather. The thunder is absolutely deafening and the lightning shatters the dark of my bedroom and makes it look a little bit scary. I wish you were here to buffer the scariness. Nebraska in May, I guess I should have anticipated as much.

I never knew what a thunderstorm was, really before moving here, and I doubt I will ever un-know this.

Today at church, the teacher asked us to list places that we thought were beautiful, and I said, "NEBRASKA." Everyone laughed, and my ears grew hot with shame because I was completely sincere in my assertion. Earnestness met with ridicule is hard to bear sometimes; I've never learned the lesson from that. I think she wanted me to say "the temple" or something, but "NEBRASKA" was a more fitting answer for me then, and maybe now, I'm not sure. I didn't want to cover it up, so I just allowed myself to feel hot and ashamed. I think I heard one quiet utterance of agreement, but it's okay. You should come visit (again): I'll show you (again).

Sister friend was here for a week last week, and her absence makes the lonesomeness even more lonesomey and missing-y. So I spent the night at someone's house and had a really REALLY awkward morning.

It's hard to be by myself. I feel floaty in a detached, not-that-good, sort-of-lost kind of way. I had come to believe that I was getting good at being alone.

I'm not.

I need to remember what I am doing here. And where would I be if not here? I need a better system to lay down roots. I never learned that, really.

I think I would feel less like I had to convince myself of things every day if there were more feeling present. Prospects (so many) have shifted in dramatic ways lately, and things are different. I need to reassess and re-envision where things are headed. A relative stranger with insider information recently commented that she had heard that I "had some major life decisions to make". She was right, but I was annoyed that she would offer such an intimate assessment of my life, and the means through witch she received such knowledge about me left me completely enraged/frustrated/vulnerable-feeling. I didn't really know what to say to her, and defaulted a mumbled, "I think I would like to get married". Would I like that? It would solve nothing...

Maybe it would solve some thing(s), but I would still be this person. I love this person. But this person could/should/can/will/must be more/better/bigger/rounder/wiser/kinder/patienter/knowinger than present. How do I keep getting myself stuck here?

...make progress. make progress. make progress. make progress...

Mom comes for a visit next week. I hope that I will have figured some things out {by} then. I want to figure out some things with her, some things about her, some things about just me, and I want her advice on how to make myself not-alone. She is a pro at not-alone. Is she also good at not-alonely?

Is that a thing I can do? Surely.

And I force my dad to girltalk with me about every little emotional whim. I consider it payback for something, I'm not sure what, but it feels gratifying somehow. It feels like he's got my back, even if it's just because someone else now knows how I feel. He has a lot of hope invested in me, that is sometimes shocking to hear voiced. It makes me wonder how he sees what he does, and it makes me hopeful that he is right in his fullness and seeingness. Or maybe it's a lack of seeingness that is making him so hopeful. But even still, he thinks that I'm going to be okay.

I think wind is lucky because it can go wherever it wants. It's probably never lonesome. I think I need to learn to make plans, for the first time in my life.

I'm sorry if I make too many words up, but English is an insufficient language on its own.

East/West/East

The sunset is classic today.
Clouds scratch across the sky from the north east and point in the direction of home; southward, westward. Arching high above the prairie, they too seem to think that this is "fly-over country". I wanted to come here so that I could know the un-ness of that idea. To touch the ground, touch the country. They are white and high and straight as arrows that made this land work. They end together in the corner of my left eye, a soft peach patch next to the sun. And above those clouds and their lightness and whiteness and highness and straightness and pointingness, the sky is the softest, babiest blue that can't help itself but to remind me of my brother as a baby. Maybe that color is given to all baby boys; he was the one I knew the most, the one I held first.
The clouds look like they were stretched, or maybe that they are running. They are like a masthead that is leading a ship to the west, to the south, to "America".

....................................................................... 

I was thinking today about how I am an un-pioneer these days: pushing myself backwards from the history of my faith, from the narrative that had been my cultural harbor in so many ways, but that has also repelled and rejected me, and left me alone, here, in the middle.

Ogden, my birthplace, with its train memorabilia: Jack Kerouac talked about it once and made me feel valid and liberally liberated. My people settled this place and they dot the land there. Children of the "last living son of a Utah pioneer", they learned to love the land, and it pumps in my veins in very real ways. That baby boy. That summer dust in my nose.

And then westward, ever westward, the American Dream; Manifest Destiny. Progress.

San Diego, flourishing under early Mormon community, and the land of my adolescence. My people are there still, at least physically. Go west; paradise is there.

But I always push back. I always rupture the narrative.

Provo, with that university and my heart's home. This is where I found myself and came to know myself as the best that I could be. This is where I was first the happiest. There will be more, I know, but this was my first.

Lincoln now, where trains do not exist in memoriam, but in shining and cutting reality, declaring themselves consistently set to a schedule I cannot untangle. Where is the Mormon trail here? The trail my people plodded? There is a cemetery a little less than an hour away that I haven't yet been to, that might tell me more. I wonder if they were here. I wonder if they would care about me. That I am reversing their trail.

Un-cross the continent.

Those clouds are a deep purple now, yet they push all the same. They are reminding about how the west was won. Won from what? I am not homesick for a real home, but for a place that may have never existed; for vapor, high, white clouds that point ever west. Eventually, the land runs out.

The birds and the squirrels all assembled themselves in the trees outside of my window to watch the sunset. I have never seen such a thing. It might be because I have never lived at the height of treetops before. The birds fluttered and flitted around a good deal before they claimed their positions, sort of a clumsy dance. The looked more like they were falling, flapping their wings only to lift themselves high enough to avoid crashing. It seemed like they were contending, because once they settled, they stayed until dark.

Haiku for Lincoln, Nebraska

I spend lots of time these days
waiting trains which pass
and then make me late for school.