A Long Time Coming

Tonight, I did something brazen. Tonight, I did something dangerous and exciting. Tonight, I did something wonderful.

You have a few caveats, as you so put them. Nothing too extreme, simple worries really. You wonder how to explain it. I call it dancing. "But without touching?" You say. I just smile.

We walk past my ex as she gets a movie with her date. We walk past the school where we first met. We walk to the canal. Where else do people like us do things like this?

What will they say? I'm not concerned. Maybe I should be, and so I try to give you words. Like you really need any of mine. Yours are quite good enough.

We Determine The Relationship, and I am giddy. And, you are giddy. I bite my lower lip and can't stop smiling. I just can't stop. I try, but I just make a silly face as you bury yours in your wrists.

I tell a story about a Giant and a Pixie. Nothing to make Neil proud, but the two friends I called seem to like it. At least on facebook.

We drink tea, and your housemate makes pleased noises from the living room. We talk for six hours, and I haven't had a cigarette.

I leave your house with a pleased pantomime, if untrained. Maybe Paul will give me some pointers. Maybe the sky will turn orange and drop citrus flavored rain. I would blame the pixies.

I should have gone to bed an hour ago, but I'm a little too jazzed to sleep. The most recent Wiretap episode on my iPod is all about family. It almost makes me cry twice, but not from any sadness. There's none of that tonight.

I don't know what will happen. This should worry me somehow, but my smile refuses to go away.

All I remember is your eyes, your unwashed hair, your smile. You know what you're getting into, and yet you got into it anyway. I must have won the lottery.

A Relatively Safe Conclusion to Come to at 2:30 in the Morning After Intensive Facebook Stalking

You're way cooler than I am.


Then again... I already knew that.

A note on the name change

I got a new g-mail address, and I was too lazy to log in to blogger every time I wanted to make a new post or obsess over my stats, so I just added the new Google Account to the blogger profile. In some ways, this is less pretentious anyway.

TJC

My Grandma's Bible

My grandma's bible is on the bottom shelf of my bookcase. It's been moved around quite a bit. It was on the top shelf for a while, but then movies and comic books took its place. It migrated down as textbooks and classic literature piled up like failed relationships, dusty relics of a college education.

In 1956 my grandma's house burnt down. The bible survived. The pages are stained with smoke, and the leather is brittle in places, but the bible survived. She carried it with her every week to church. She read it every night before bed. Eventually her hips went, and she couldn't go to church. Then her eyes went, and she couldn't read small print. She kept the bible anyway.

In 2007 I went away to college. I packaged up all my childhood memories into two suitcases and I went to her house to say goodbye. On my way out the door, she told me to wait a minute. She went into her room which was rebuilt 50 years before and came out with the bible.

"I can't use it anymore." She said, "you'll be able to put it to better use than I can." I think in that moment she put it to better use than I ever will.

She died four months later. We laid her to sleep next to her husband.

Sometimes that bible is a memory of her. It still smells like her house. It brings back memories of Taco Soup and CMT, of decades old jello and flower print nightgowns. Sometimes it is a symbol of a faith far older and more significant than any human life, but made up of so many human moments. Sometimes, I see it as a holy relic. Perhaps it will prove to be miraculous. I have a sneaky suspicion that it would not burn if I held it to a flame.

My grandma's bible is on the bottom shelf of my bookcase. Someday, I may crack the spine and read the 23rd Psalm in the Old King James. Or, I may not. That's not what relics are for, anyway. They are memory objectified and eternity encapsulated. It is evidence that some things survive in the fire.