Brings an unconscious smile,
forcelessly causes muscles to uncoil;
laughter that dissolves and falls and builds again like water,
endlessly recycled
dripped drop by drop through sharp rocks,
through pain, each laugh refined,
drinkable.
Against which you can play the trust game, falling back
(hard to catch yourself going solo, but then
maybe you don’t fall in the first place
as they say love causes one to do).
At the last moment scared of the shadow of another,
afraid it will fail, will flit away and leave you falling,
not to the ground, but forever, just falling.
That’s the balance of two lips: one for joy,
one for anticipation, fight or flight,
it’s always flight, never had to fight before,
never tried
because others got slaughtered and you know the arena well
from the forced perch of the sidelines,
watching from bloody infancy.
We all cause pain, screaming at first light and sound,
at the cold, leaving the wound, the womb, we scream.
Dear God, how we scream.
Two lips, a smile. Anticipation,
waiting to see how they will fail us,
and the butterflies in our stomachs whisper
that we will fail them more,
and that is the tragedy inherent.
But there is still the unconscious smile,
the one we don’t know we use when they come in the room,
refined through pain into something crude and plain,
into the body overriding the brain and saying
this makes you happy,
live with it.
by E.R. Womelsduff
Monday, December 28, 2009
Restless
People change,
and it takes too long to realize that you change, too.
Ah, realization.
Respect the genius;
marry the good man.
by E.R. Womelsduff
and it takes too long to realize that you change, too.
Ah, realization.
Respect the genius;
marry the good man.
by E.R. Womelsduff
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Home is Where the Heart Is
There are so many adages about the word “home” that it’s kind of sickening—they’re all kitschy, like “home is where the heart is” and, well, honestly, that’s all I can think of at the moment, but still, my point remains. Home, like love, has been simplified into candy hearts and sugar cookies, into Hallmark cards.
Home, however, is anything but simple.
I lost my home a long time ago; or not so long ago, depending on how long you’ve lived and what your perception of time is. It feels to me now a long time has passed since I misplaced my home, since it disappeared. Five years in the making, four in the taking, two since I chose to leave.
I am deeply rooted in things. In cars, in houses, in photographs and jewelry, in wood-handled hammers that belonged to my grandfather, in typewriters, in the ugly wallpaper that used to cover my grandmother’s kitchen. I cried, when I was four or five, when we sold the white station wagon, of which I now have exactly one memory. I cried when we sold the blue mini-van, which still remains in my mind a huge vehicle, but which was, according to my mother, rather a small van. I tried not to breathe when I touched the withered skin of my great-grandmother’s hand at her funeral, in the black dress I loved to wear, to twirl in. My cousin was very small, a baby still, and I was more interested in him than in the dead matriarch fifteen feet across the room. I remember the cicada skins on the olive tree, I remember the house on Nisbett that the city bought and destroyed and plowed and paved and I remember driving the freeway that replaced the house on Nisbett and crying even those years later because it had been my home and now there was nothing.
I remember moving to Washington, to rain, I remember leaving the desert, I remember hating my parents, I remember not understanding. Slept on my father’s sister’s family’s basement couch for a month while we looked for a house (why did we move 2000 miles when we didn’t have a house?) and then we found one and I hated it and we ripped up every inch of carpet and put in new carpet and tile and painted and painted and painted and moved in and then several years passed and the house was home and every time there was a new home it was time for something new to happen to make it not home anymore. Divorce, this time. Still don’t know exactly why, but divorce, and I’ve made my peace with it, but I lost the home, my home. I lost my sense of it.
Even now I can’t go back. If I’m near that town, if the freeway deposits me near, if we visit family in the area, I can’t go back. I made that mistake, once, to pick up firewood we’d stored at the neighbor’s after we moved, and I looked at the house and they’d chopped the limbs off the Japanese Maple so that it was naked and shamed and they changed things and my life there was being painted over, someone else, some other girl or boy was in my room, which was now their room, and my time there meant nothing. And now I still can’t go back because the memories are in the walls and the walls aren’t mine anymore.
I was hit, driving, today, yesterday, sometime recently, with this flash, this picture: suntanning on the deck, the light of the sun on my closed eyes burning everything blue when I opened them, with 107.7 The End playing, with condensation on the plastic flamingo cup, Dr. Pepper iced within, sweat rolling down my arms, down my stomach across my back, a beach towel and a pillow and a book, and getting up every now and again to get another soda.
I haven’t had a house since.
That was the biggest loss in my short lifespan, this house. Home. Bad things came and ate everything in one gigantic bite and it was dark in the belly of the wolf. Condos and apartments and anger and fear and rebellion because there wasn’t anything else left to do and honor roll and student council president and good faces and the real face and time. Home was left abandoned in the dictionary, a word, a place on a page; the definition held victim to circumstance.
I grew up. I got in a car with boxes (always boxes) and I drove and I studied and I worked.
A few days ago I got on a plane and I came back and we broke through the clouds and there it was. The Sound, the islands, the water, the pale golden sun silvering through clouds like strains of precious metal. The trees. Everywhere, trees.
It was sunk, this word, and something cut it loose, cutting through the clouds, coming back, it was cut loose and it surfaced, desperate for air, and I found it. The words on the page are returning slowly, and they are not the same words that made up the definition before, but they are words and they reflect the state of things. They are not candy hearts of “sweet” and “be mine,” they are not Hallmark cards with depressing endearments, they are rather bare and rather plain and they say exactly what they mean to.
Home. It is not simple. It is not stable. It changes, and perhaps that is necessary. I am simply grateful that I have begun to find it once again, after a very long time of feeling that it was lost to me forever.
Home, however, is anything but simple.
I lost my home a long time ago; or not so long ago, depending on how long you’ve lived and what your perception of time is. It feels to me now a long time has passed since I misplaced my home, since it disappeared. Five years in the making, four in the taking, two since I chose to leave.
I am deeply rooted in things. In cars, in houses, in photographs and jewelry, in wood-handled hammers that belonged to my grandfather, in typewriters, in the ugly wallpaper that used to cover my grandmother’s kitchen. I cried, when I was four or five, when we sold the white station wagon, of which I now have exactly one memory. I cried when we sold the blue mini-van, which still remains in my mind a huge vehicle, but which was, according to my mother, rather a small van. I tried not to breathe when I touched the withered skin of my great-grandmother’s hand at her funeral, in the black dress I loved to wear, to twirl in. My cousin was very small, a baby still, and I was more interested in him than in the dead matriarch fifteen feet across the room. I remember the cicada skins on the olive tree, I remember the house on Nisbett that the city bought and destroyed and plowed and paved and I remember driving the freeway that replaced the house on Nisbett and crying even those years later because it had been my home and now there was nothing.
I remember moving to Washington, to rain, I remember leaving the desert, I remember hating my parents, I remember not understanding. Slept on my father’s sister’s family’s basement couch for a month while we looked for a house (why did we move 2000 miles when we didn’t have a house?) and then we found one and I hated it and we ripped up every inch of carpet and put in new carpet and tile and painted and painted and painted and moved in and then several years passed and the house was home and every time there was a new home it was time for something new to happen to make it not home anymore. Divorce, this time. Still don’t know exactly why, but divorce, and I’ve made my peace with it, but I lost the home, my home. I lost my sense of it.
Even now I can’t go back. If I’m near that town, if the freeway deposits me near, if we visit family in the area, I can’t go back. I made that mistake, once, to pick up firewood we’d stored at the neighbor’s after we moved, and I looked at the house and they’d chopped the limbs off the Japanese Maple so that it was naked and shamed and they changed things and my life there was being painted over, someone else, some other girl or boy was in my room, which was now their room, and my time there meant nothing. And now I still can’t go back because the memories are in the walls and the walls aren’t mine anymore.
I was hit, driving, today, yesterday, sometime recently, with this flash, this picture: suntanning on the deck, the light of the sun on my closed eyes burning everything blue when I opened them, with 107.7 The End playing, with condensation on the plastic flamingo cup, Dr. Pepper iced within, sweat rolling down my arms, down my stomach across my back, a beach towel and a pillow and a book, and getting up every now and again to get another soda.
I haven’t had a house since.
That was the biggest loss in my short lifespan, this house. Home. Bad things came and ate everything in one gigantic bite and it was dark in the belly of the wolf. Condos and apartments and anger and fear and rebellion because there wasn’t anything else left to do and honor roll and student council president and good faces and the real face and time. Home was left abandoned in the dictionary, a word, a place on a page; the definition held victim to circumstance.
I grew up. I got in a car with boxes (always boxes) and I drove and I studied and I worked.
A few days ago I got on a plane and I came back and we broke through the clouds and there it was. The Sound, the islands, the water, the pale golden sun silvering through clouds like strains of precious metal. The trees. Everywhere, trees.
It was sunk, this word, and something cut it loose, cutting through the clouds, coming back, it was cut loose and it surfaced, desperate for air, and I found it. The words on the page are returning slowly, and they are not the same words that made up the definition before, but they are words and they reflect the state of things. They are not candy hearts of “sweet” and “be mine,” they are not Hallmark cards with depressing endearments, they are rather bare and rather plain and they say exactly what they mean to.
Home. It is not simple. It is not stable. It changes, and perhaps that is necessary. I am simply grateful that I have begun to find it once again, after a very long time of feeling that it was lost to me forever.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Made it Through the Wilderness
Every semester has its ups and downs, but this semester the high and low peaks have been a bit more manic, steeped further in elation and dejection than usual. There were a few long stretches of time where I forgot completely why I wanted to be a film maker, why the h-e-double-hockey-sticks I thought I could write worth a lick of salt, and why I even wanted to be in college at all.
I’ve remembered.
Which is odd, because this weekend has probably been one of the most mentally, emotionally, and physically stressful weekends I’ve ever had. But I’ve remembered, in the midst of this utter chaos, why it is I do this “film-making” thing - and the answer is simply that these are my eyes and these are my hands and this is what I was meant to do with them. I cannot make the camera see the world like Ty Tuin, nor can I manage permits and contracts like Emily Ford and Dan Matas, nor do any of a number of things that the many talented film makers at my school can, but still, I know that inside the bones of my fingers are written stories and they tap themselves out, seeping through the skin like blood onto my keyboard, who I am, what I made of drawn in words. I can do nothing less than this, I can do nothing else but tell stories, and there is a deep sense of satisfaction and peace in the realization.
There will always be highs and lows, there will always be chemical betrayals in the brain that unfortunately affect the being, but there is purpose and there is beauty in the striving.
I’ve remembered.
Which is odd, because this weekend has probably been one of the most mentally, emotionally, and physically stressful weekends I’ve ever had. But I’ve remembered, in the midst of this utter chaos, why it is I do this “film-making” thing - and the answer is simply that these are my eyes and these are my hands and this is what I was meant to do with them. I cannot make the camera see the world like Ty Tuin, nor can I manage permits and contracts like Emily Ford and Dan Matas, nor do any of a number of things that the many talented film makers at my school can, but still, I know that inside the bones of my fingers are written stories and they tap themselves out, seeping through the skin like blood onto my keyboard, who I am, what I made of drawn in words. I can do nothing less than this, I can do nothing else but tell stories, and there is a deep sense of satisfaction and peace in the realization.
There will always be highs and lows, there will always be chemical betrayals in the brain that unfortunately affect the being, but there is purpose and there is beauty in the striving.
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