This all feels familiar, and yet it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.  Being careful, but not out of fear.  No fear?  A Sharla without fear when her heart is beating like this?  That’s new.  Well, mostly without fear, anyway.

I feel that this is so incredibly delicate, but not from fragility.  Simply from newness.

How is it that I feel so safe?

when little me crawled
under the bed to hide

or maybe explore I
saw little dusty pets

made by the air that
swirled around our feet

I saw little Lucky Charms
dried from the last time I

was there and I saw a
big man who was

crying to my little mother
because he’d lost his

and he was so big too
big to hide under beds

with dust bunnies and
old dried cereal the way

little girls and boys do
I thought maybe he hoped

his tears would melt him
and he would fit in little

places again and wait
for his mommy to find him

but they didn’t melt him and
he couldn’t shrink and
no matter how much he cried
he stayed too big

I remember
lay lady laying
with you.
Waking up in the
middle of the bed
middle of the night
to argue Bob Dylan lyrics
(you were right)
and who wrote which
Beatles song
(I was right).
Squinting to see you
and the colours I wanted
in the dark.
Dragging on the night for months but
now it’s nearly the break of day and
I’ll hate to do it
hate to leave
hate to hear you beg
lay lady lay
stay lady stay

I am someone who is affected by her surroundings.  I always want to be a part of the world that’s around me.  I want to feel it, understand it.  Whether I’m in the middle of the country or downtown in a city, I want to KNOW the place.  This doesn’t mean knowing the name of every road or where it goes, it means understanding the personality and spirit of where I am.

My favourite part of my spring break this year was the driving.  Sure, it was wonderful to see Kait, wonderful to finally meet Amy & Thomas (!), but really, the 22 hours of driving I put in that week were the best part.  Going down through Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, I was on the interstate and I hated it.  I don’t trust highways like that.  I can’t enjoy the air when it’s whipping by me.

But Tennessee and North Carolina were beautiful.  I was driving on state roads through the mountains.  I was hugging the hills, weaving in and out of them with the road because here the road was a PART of its world, not trying to own it like an interstate.  When everyone else was afraid of the turns on these roads, I was in my element.  I grew up in the mountains, driving through the hills.  I trusted the roads.  I trusted the trees.  I trusted the air I breathed.  I felt like these places were being honest with themselves, which made them honest with me. 

Not to say Indiana isn’t honest.  It’s straight-laced and open.  It’s just that I’m not.  A line too straight for girls like me.

South Carolina, though, didn’t feel right to me.  Clemson was fine, but when we went down to Charleston, I felt like I was in a place that was putting on a show for me.  There were only yachts in the harbour.  No fishing boats.  I don’t like an ocean without fishing boats.  If fishermen don’t trust it, neither do I.  Everything about Charleston just spoke to me about having an easy life.  The plants there were so BIG and so LUSH.  They’ve never known a winter.  They’ve never had to fight to survive anything.  The Canadian in me can’t respect anything that’s never had to survive a winter, that’s never had to force itself to sleep in the cold and wait for the sun to get warm again.  The moment Kait and I arrived in Charleston, I was ready to leave.  She was raving about the beauty and the warmth and the history and yes I guess those things were there but they felt wrong to me and I just wanted to go.

I don’t belong in a place like Charleston.

—–

The American cities I love best are the ones I’ve been able to walk around in and get to know.  I remember walking through Boston with Andrew and taking the trains to wherever we needed to go.  I remember walking along the Chahles Rivah, through the gardens and through the city streets where the boys told me not to make eye contact with the bums (I always did anyway).  Running from Ruggles to the apartment in the dead of winter with all my stupid, heavy luggage.  I love Boston.  It’s got spirit.  It’s got feel. 

So does Chicago.  I love the history of Chicago, I love walking around and feeling the baudy personality the city still likes to hold on to.  In Chicago, I with I could travel back in time to the 20s, the 30s.  I want to cut my hair short again and wear hats and flapper dresses.  Heels.  And sneak off to a speak-easy.

For me, it’s not enough to drive through a city.  I want to get to know it.  I want to walk around and ride the trains.  I want to feel its breath and get to know its personality.

I love Marion, Indiana for its brokenness.  I walk around this place because I can feel the poverty, but also the life that’s teeming beneath it.  I can hear the laughter of people who can smile despite of it all.  Poverty isn’t glamorous.  It’s not fun.  I hate it when people try to say it would be better to be poor; they obviously have no idea what poverty really means.  But when people can love and smile despite of the fact that their kids are having to get free lunches from school, well, there’s something beautiful in that.  Something that Charleston didn’t seem to get.

Writing about this makes me excited about the places I’ll get to know in the future.  Next up is Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.  Who will you be?

Echo says:
 the swinging of a pendulum, everytime you build yourself up, you get knocked down again
sharla says:
 yeah but there’s an upswing after that too
Echo says:
 oh yes, the sun also rises, with each dawn revealing a world more bare
sharla says:
 the sky isn’t though
 and neither is the world
 it’s alive and thriving
 it’s just very easy for eyes to die

if she hadn’t been sitting there
waiting, wide-eyed
I’d be less annoyed.
if she hadn’t been sitting there
frizzy-haired
reminding me that she is still
like a child,
afraid of things like
bees and
boys and
change and
her toes being painted anything other than red
if she hadn’t been sitting there
frizzy-haired child who is older than me
I wouldn’t be thinking about how
her skin is so wet
and mine so dry
her eyes so wide
and mine narrowing
she so innocent
me so cynical
she a new piece of 23-year-old fruit
me a tough piece of 22-year-old beef jerky
who secretly misses the wide-eyed
frizzy feeling of wondering when
you stop being afraid (never)
and when
your heart really starts to beat (whenever)

The truth is, I DO post more often than it looks like I post.  I post probably every couple weeks, sometimes even once a week.  I post about how I’m feeling, but lately, the way I usually feel when I feel like writing is angry.  So I write something and post it, but within hours I hide it or take it down.  Since my teenaged years, I’ve gained a filter.

In my ripe old age of almost 22, I’ve forgotten how to forgive.  My problem is that I always “forgive” too soon, want to patch everything up as quickly as possible, so then down the road, when the feelings of anger I was suppressing actually come to the service, they are stronger. And there’s nothing I can do about them because now too much time has passed and didn’t I already “forgive” anyway?

Forgiveness is a selfish act.  I keep forgetting that.  I always forgive quickly so as to make the other person feel better.  God forbid somebody feel bad about their actions toward me.  God forbid I take away the cushion once in a while and let someone see how they hurt me.  No, forgiveness is something you do for YOURSELF.  You allow yourself to let go and break free of the chains of anger and resentment you’re feeling.  The other person doesn’t feel your hurt and your anger.  Your saying that you forgive them may alleviate their guilt somewhat, but just saying “I forgive you” means nothing for yourself.  Three little words can’t change anything inside you if they’re not true.

To forgive someone doesn’t necessarily mean that everything goes back to the way it was before.  It just means that you don’t feel the anger, you don’t feel the hurt anymore.  A few years ago, I actively cut someone out of my life (for the first and only time).  There has been forgiveness there for long time now, years even, but that doesn’t mean that there will ever be a friendship again.  Because in order to forgive someone, you also need to have learned something.  They were teaching you a lesson, and in forgiving them, you’re saying you learned it.  I learned that sometimes a person can just drain all your energy.  Sometimes a person expects too much of you, and you need to know when to stop.  My lesson learned in that situation was that I cannot expect myself to be friends with EVERYONE.  That time (it feels so long ago now) I was finally able to forgive. 

So, lately I am angry.  Not all the time, certainly.  I’m feeling hatred sometimes, which is odd for me because I’ve never felt that before.  Never allowed myself to hate before.  Even now, I don’t allow it often–because you know what?  Hatred tastes sweeter than it ought to.  And I refuse to be tempted into consuming it, and letting it consume me.  But sometimes I can’t help myself.

The worst part is that I don’t want to just forgive on my own.  I don’t want to just be sitting in my car one day and decide, well, it’s time I forgave isn’t it?  I want closure.  I want to say “you were an asshole and treated me bad.”  But I can’t.  The time for such things has passed.  All I can do is wait, and patiently work on this forgiveness thing.  I can try to make my anger less sharp, allow it to dull over time until eventually I can forgive on my own.  I don’t have a god to pray to, to ask for help, so I’m alone here.  It’s a long process like this.  But I want to be free and I want to be done, so this is how I have to do it.

————

I have happier things to write about too.  I just always put those ones off.  Soon I’ll write about mountains and skies in Tennessee and winding roads and friends in North Carolina.  Soon I’ll write about the spring.  Soon I’ll write about how much older I’ve gotten, how much easier it is for me to be happy (despite the mood of this post).

Soon.

Today is one of those days where I go for a long drive because I’m colder than it is outside.

I wonder if my chemicals
evapourate to make rainclouds
melt to make salty oceans
sublimate to make inspiration
depose to make achievement
I wonder if I condense
ionize
deionize
crystallize
I wonder if I become
wise or
anything at all
without first freezing

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to quit everything and just be poor and write all day.  I like to imagine that I’d feel more accomplished.  I’d hone the skills that are important to me.

It’s all imagination though, and my responsibilities will also hold great importance.

But still.