Growing Younger (Part 2)

(Continued from previous post.) I asked all my friends two weeks ago what they thought their souls looked like, in regards to landscape or art. One of the dearest of mine said hers was an ocean of sorts. She is a glorious depth, though; a pressing of blue in a million shades, dappled sea mist, light-tipped waves, turquoise in the gentlest parts. There is a kingdom subsurface, and the rush of swells, the blast of current, can be seen occasionally, the gleaming bits of a watery country. Not to mention, entering the deep. Distant, boon, tempest. She says she stands on the shore, under the jagged crags, looking at the flat gray jewel of it all, afraid to step in. She doesn’t trust she wouldn’t be alone in there, which is essentially what we’re all afraid of if we’re honest. This is a shame because there is beauty afloat everywhere underneath (I’ve seen some of it). The weather in that place is cloudy today because of the fog. I’ll ask her for another weather forecast tomorrow. Some of my friends, I think, believe they are just columns of cement or lumps of ash and wet sand, but their souls are such weighty things of glory. We will be struck with the blaze of these when the right time comes.

I drove through Chicago once, and it made me think of how I’ve always thought life would be like once I was truly grown up (And what does that mean?). The apartment buildings there were mostly brick and ornate, sprawling upwards with elaborate cement patterns curling by the window corners. A black fire escape rested diagonally on various sides. Some were more modern with wide, glassy picture widows, white and black trim, the sky creamy in the reflection. Even still, but mostly in years past, I’d picture myself pulling on a pencil skirt while staring out at a city skyline, the sun a huge red semicircle, orange at the line were dusk meets the black earth. The city lights would be blinking on in the inky turning of the night, and the cars, two glows each, would never stop. But this was comforting – the white, yellow, and occasional red and blue, flickering around the skyscrapers. There is nothing of a child, gold-encrusted or otherwise, in this image. Reassuring this picture has always been but empty too.

Once, I stood in the fluorescent light of a stale, arctic frozen-foods aisle by the cheap ice cream. It was a sleepy hour, everything glazed over in the glaring off-white shade of the late night. Three boys, who were half a decade younger than I was, strolled toward me, suddenly, and pushed written numbers they had scrawled on the backs of ticket stubs into my hand. Call-me-baby, they said and sauntered away. I felt old and young at the same time then.

I think the idea of youth and the elderly is a different form altogether. Something stranger and more beautiful than we’ve all supposed. If you’ve ever known someone past small talk and past best friends forever and even past transgressions, you know that there is something in your heart that grows a little when it happens. A seed or something semiprecious. To be young was to be very straightforward – Will you be my friend? Yes. All right. – But now, that part has crawled away, and it takes layers and layers to peel back and see through to the purest of what we are. Community is a hot word these days, but maybe there’s a reason for this. Maybe all the learning, working, academics, the corporate ladder, the American dream, the five-or six-digit figures, the family with nice clothes and a sturdy house, the growing up, is really about crawling into the deepness that everyone carries around inside of them. There is something stale about growing old – stale and sad and lonely – but this is not how everything is supposed to be. It isn’t That’s how life is. Each day I am given the chance to grow but not young or old. The wrinkles humans don’t have or do, weight, muscle, skeletal build, is involved but not in the way I thought. It’s detached and irrelevant from this thing that is growing in our souls, out and over like a teeming forest maybe; it looks different for everyone. We are reaching toward each other.

Gathering at Diamonds Coffee Shoppe in Minneapolis, a small community of twenty-somethings, me included, sat in velvet chairs under cracking wood to practice growing; although, they called it something different than that, getting in-depth or going deep. A woman with short, dreaded pigtails behind the counter handed me the Ginger Ale I had bought. Just-an-ale,-huh? Ashley asked. One girl, another I had never met before, turned to me and asked how old I was. When I told her, she said, Well-ya-don’t-look-it-I-woulda-never-guessed-your-twenties. She had glasses and was sipping a latte. Normally, I would have felt burned. Inside, though, I smiled all over. It wasn’t because this was a compliment. I actually would have taken offense at other points in my life because I hate to be coddled. I was pleased because I recently have come into knowing that I’m not fastened - like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and his shadow – to this cabinet of a body that holds whole worlds. I am neither growing old nor young but simply around or near, my heart teeming, linking; a fastening with other hearts into a netted meshwork. We can toss this webbing into the ocean of the world then, and pull in the other free-floating hearts.

When my mother places her hand next to mine, I’ve stopped seeing our complexions.

The dog is only a sad thing because we think of animals having the same souls as people.

Someone I know well once said that she was not just a wall but a city of walls. I would think, in cities of walls, things grow slowly if at all. They are also hard to walk into. I’m trying to make a habit, now, of climbing over these bricked up places in those closest to me, helping stop the construction.

This is when I start to feel it coming. Slowly, and gently, the slow cover of dawn over a morning-flecked field.

I pause to turn my face to the sun for a vivid instant.

Something is blooming recklessly.

Growing Younger (Part 1)

 

(This is the first half of a creative piece I wrote for my senior writing capstone.)

Placing her hand next to mine, my mother compares our skin.

This happens in various settings. Sometimes we are shooting through the wind on the freeway at seventy miles an hour in a state with land like I’ve never seen before. Other times we’re in a waiting room. Once, we were eating dinner, and she put down her fork. Commenting on the smoothness of my skin’s pigment, the way the veins under the film of cells over my knuckles are barely visible, she holds our ages right up against the light in the kitchen and wonders.

I have a dog. I still have a dog. This is strange because it’s been more than fifteen years since we brought her home, a bundle of downy fur, docile and vibrant. Now she wears a blue polyester diaper made for animals too old not to wet themselves. Half-blind, she ends up stuck between the side table and the wall in the living room, generally, and I have to drag her out, one hand clasped on each brittle rib, to help her confusion and set her out in the middle of the floor where she can’t run into walls. There is always a smell of urine and must hovering. She slips down five stairs before I’m there again, reaching for her splintery torso.

Before all of this, we were much younger. We would race around the garden in a great rush of spring. Everything would be flowering carelessly after a rainfall, and the tradition was to go to the top of the hill, and wait behind the wet soil, which was sunk in the violet garden patch. At the count of three, the puppy (for she was a puppy then) would sprint on all fours up the hill while I sprinted on my two down the hill all the way to the monkey bars on to which I catapulted myself in a rush of adrenaline. Together, we’d breathe in great gasps of heavy, wet air.

I watch today as, now, the dog walks in circles until she has to sit out of exhaustion.

This is the stuff of beauty that I crumple as paper and cast out with the trash.

I traveled to Seattle this last summer. My family checked into a hotel in a dinky town in the early stages of Montana, and the woman at the desk asked me if I was over sixteen. This determined which color key card I would receive. I was twenty-one. I remember thinking that a tumbleweed would blow across the hot, dirty street at any moment, and anyone could notice the stale, yellow smoke stains on this lady’s teeth. The cracked plastic clock on the wall ticked loudly, and two men with pants that can only be described as “britches” sauntered in. Generally, I am pegged as a youth because I have no wrinkles and the skin over my knuckles is apparently smooth enough. Also, my voice is young. This all was to be resented.

Sometimes I think I am growing younger.

Everything is about rewinding in the world. Instead of reverently taking up each thread and binding it in careful beauty to the rest of the textile, we, women especially, yank the strands out with fervor. Dousing everything in chemicals, plucking out sagacity, tucking things where they aren’t supposed to go. That or trying to sew it up too fast, rushing the process, missing the detailed design. Either way, it all fades and shreds with the pulling. I always wanted the opposite.

I told my family once that I wished for wrinkles. Just one or two, I said.

Are-you-kidding-me-you’re-crazy, they said, and went back to eating corn on the cob.

I sloshed my fork around in my potatoes and watched birds land on the ledge of the roof outside the window. Robins have a lifespan of one year. Age is not a blinking thought to a bird, and then I noticed how I was living. That evening, sitting on the porch while the atmosphere was unrolling into dusk and beams of stars, the quietness and the green was what held it all, cradled the thought.  I was trying to peel off youth, or rather, scoop it out of myself, like an avocado. What is it that makes us shrink away from treasures we are given on earth?

Bob Dylan says, “He who is not busy being born is busy dying.”

He also says, “No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.”

In the apartment building next to mine, there is a man who is busy being born. Every few days, I see him, shuffling down the sidewalk, winter or spring, his shoulders so stooped that his head comes straight out of his chest. There is no neck. A long, wolf-colored beard muddles down from his chin, and his hands are typically clasped behind his back. He looks old, rabbi-like, thoughtfully strolling.

The first time I noticed him, tottering methodically, thoughtfully, down the street, it was a whitish, cold day, and the trees looked lonely. In a tweed coat, he was unconcerned about the furiousness of the world. I hoped he wasn’t cold. Every other time I’ve seen him, he walks and walks, undaunted, the sun within his reach. The world has laid flat his shoulders, and still he uses his limbs to motor through the earth. With that attitude, he will hold the light. If my head came straight out from my chest, I wonder if this would change things.

There’s something of a child in all of us. Perhaps that is what feels so strange when one looks in the mirror between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. The outward casing is fading into something different, the adolescent is going somewhere – crawling into a place in the heart that is gold-plated, softened, something where revel has gathered, and this feels cumbersome. We mourn the nervous affair. Fearing the husk – but is it a husk? – we pack the old into beds and in buildings with colorless drywall and leave them there with the dripping of IVs and the beeping of monitors to wait for the gray to become grayer. My grandfather said that when he walked in malls for daily exercise, he felt as though he were invisible, less than a mannequin, a shadow moving around the perimeters. This is what we fear, more than being old, because being known is a great part of what we were made for. Without a heart staring back into your own heart, being young or old is fairly terrifying.

One day, we will look as our souls do.

(Part 2 coming soon.)

Small.

To clear up some confusion, this is a creative writing piece I wrote for a class last semester. A regular essay takes a subject, states the central point, and supports it with two to three points of evidence. A lyric essay takes a subject and dances around the central point, never fully stating what the essay is about but circling its outer edges in fragments. This is a lyric essay. I thought about climbing inside of a tree bud yesterday. Everything would be damp and misting if I had: a rubbery birth green that I would pull up to my chin like a sheet. The weight of the vast happenings in my immediate living space had suddenly felt very thick and bulky that morning. Difficult. I was small enough, then - felt intimidated enough, in comparison to these great things, that I might as well have carefully crawled under the tongue of the leaf where it was smooth and guarded in the shade. In fact, I would have had the weather permitted. In my mind, my breathing would have been more secure I think - honeyed and methodically lyrical.

I was standing in the street, by the corner of Grand and South Oxford, when I first thought of it. The black-steel city lights were muted and had blinked off only an hour ago, and I felt the static from the late electricity just as I could feel that the TV was on in the family room all the way from upstairs as a child. I usually assumed it was a sixth sense I had.

You asked where I went that night three days ago when we were in the car and the spaces got all wide in my head and the lights on the top of the theatre flickered. I said that I didn’t have to tell anyone. And it was true because I didn’t, but I mostly said it so you would say that we were going home instead of out and throw all our unused napkins heavily into a garbage can. Families are such plaited things.

When I was six, or eight, or any of those ages when you can be completely unguarded and trusting, I used to sit in the backseat of the car while we drove through Minneapolis and watch the orange lights spot the black expanse and quiver as we went over the 35W bridge with a great rushing sound. That brown, velvety interior is the most secure place I can think of now. I could see that the safest locale for me was in a backseat, and so generally, I always volunteer to let others drive because trusting is a lot easier when that is one’s sole option. When we passed through the underground tunnels by the city yesterday, I felt like I was floating.  The downtown buildings grew in angles over my head, and it was right.

When I think of comfort I think of the night a lot because you don’t really need as much holding in the day.

Cummings wrote a poem about someone and said that the coolness of her smile was stirring of birds between his arms. He said this “in the woods which stutter and sing” (Cummings 8).

Pondering all of this, I felt very attached to the blue postal receptacle I was leaning on next to those morning streetlights. This road, flecked with sunspots and early-morning, grey light, was fastened in my mind as an insulated place. Mom, Dad, and I used to get waffle cones at the corner shop and walk along the back streets to look at the mansions. We’d finish them in the car, generally, while we were driving back by the old, abandoned Lowertown Depot and the stars were just poking through the sky. It was a compacting feeling. I was cased in snugly with my family.

Once I lay down in the middle of a crosswalk, like a scene from a book or a movie, and stared at the sky and looked at my fingers to see if they were normal. I always wondered what my hands looked like to other people. My dad has long fingers too.

In Francis Burnett’s book, The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox lives in India with her wealthy parents. Everyone in the village is dying of cholera: “During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone…Once she crept into the dining-room and found it empty, though a partly finished meal was on the table and chairs and plates looked as if they had been hastily pushed back when the diners rose suddenly for some reason” (Burnett 3). She ends up drinking a leftover glass of wine, feels intensely drowsy, and wakes up to an empty house the next morning without a mother or father.

In the movie, Mary’s parents die in an earthquake, and she grabs a small ivory elephant off of the trembling nightstand and clinging to it, crawls under the bed until she is backed up against the wall in her bare feet and white, lace nightgown. Smaller places have always been safer. I wonder if all humans revert to this at some point: holding a pillow tight or leaning close to others. Dense, compact, near.

In Iowa, two weekends past, the first thing we noticed on 235 South at night was that the streetlights were wider and flatter. Everything looked crisp and very clean, like we were in one of those cities where you could get arrested for dropping your gum wrapper on the ground. We were one of three cars out at that sedated hour of the morning, and that was the only time it felt different, unsafe. I felt alarmed that everything was so empty and scattered so evenly. I was the one driving that time, though, and home was hundreds of miles away.

Little things are less threatening; I see this as a trend in all settings. Crime is higher in metropolis areas, babies like to be wrapped up tight, close to the body. Minor emotions carry less of a risk than loud, exploited ones. A tiny room has no blank space, I can see everything.

Small is safer, but then you’d never live.