Snapshot

Completely exhausted. Been chasing kite strings and butterfly wings and stealing sunsets from childhood photo albums. Now I find myself awash to my chin in overdue Homework. Senior Project, movie scripts, hard-core research, fixing machines at work, pecking out intellectual blather into the keyboard.... so many books to read and the occasional shot at sleep.....

Ahh life is good...

Reverberations of friends sift heavily inside my chest. A new friend, a mystical talisman, is permanently stowed in my right pocket, keeping my keys and loose change company. I clutch the granite orb and say the greatest name on my way to work. I think about friends. I smile.

I feel young. I feel like I am twelve. The same morning I arrive back to Peoria I walk into a bookstore and am yelled at by the manager. She's an old friend of my grandmothers and she read a short story of mine that was published. She told me that she was dissapointed in my writing style. Told me that she didn't like how vulgar it was. Told me that she even thought my late father would be embarrased if he would read it.

"Thanks for reading," I say. Smiling to myself. This is not your Mother's Mara...

But, concerning that same story, a lady who was raped once at gunpoint read it and told me she cried. Told me that she connected with it. She thanked me for writing that story. Said that it meant something to her. I smile. I embrace her. I tell her that this is what life feels like--this constant flux; this constant movement, this constant love of all things that are bleating out epiphanic hymns along your rib cage.

I had a golden timeless afternoon with Arya. It was one of the best times I've ever had in Chicago. The past summer we kept hanging mirrors of our lives on the internet. Detailed frames depicting our dreams and visions. Arya blogged about mysticim and Mexico; about the Pro-fessor (favorite protagonist of the summer!) and about her biography. Daniela blogged about her passions of art and music while floating through the wilderness of California. I blogged a crooked mirror about what it feels like to feel like you are always ensconced in the moment; that wonderful swift cycle of reality, gyrating, incessantly spining in an atmospherical cage. I blogged about trying to feel bliss even when everything around you is blurred.

On Navy pier Sister A and myself stepped up in front of cicus mirrors and began to gaze at contorted refletcions of ourselves.

"No honey your not pregnant, your just fat." I say, trying to be funny as we gawk at extremely inflated reflections of our bodies, reflected to us across a coiled sheet of glass. Arya hits me and smiles. Along with Daniela, we've been looking at each other through a glass sqaure all summer. Commenting on each other's worlds. Now, both Sister A and myself were next to each other, already knowing what was inside and we still looked at our reflections in the carnival mirrors, seeing what spontaneous twist this vessel of life would paint next.

Ambling down Navy Pier, our shadows sagged in front of us migrating dual-towered silhouttes of our bodies across the sidewalk over which we stepped. The sky was a pool of deep blue overhead. The thick wind racked against our shoulders as we watched the blue shoreline lip of Lake Michigan spittle into foam as it touched shore with sand.

She kept on trying so hard to connect. Arya was trying so hard to get a hold of someone she had an appointment with and she couldn't. She tried the payphone in her mother's office building on Michiagan Avenue. She tried the payphone inside a bar we snuck into. Her thick-plastic heels clattered into the convient store in search of a payphone. Into the McDonoalds where no one spoke english. Into the Starbucks, in idle search of a payphone. Whenver Arya located a phone, she would tightly grope the plastic spine of the payphone handle with her itching grasp, punching in digits with her free hand. She would get excited. She would say that she was sure she had remembered the number. She would pause. The rushed merlot-hue of elation that filled her cheeks would empty. She would then hang up, close her eyes, rush out a numerical mantra and then try again.

She kept trying to connect. She said she was sure she remembered the number. Her fingers smashing the square digits, her body stationed in front of the payphone as if she were positioned in front of a slot machine and it was always one cherry short.

I felt so sorry for her then. I made a joke about messing with the switchboard before I arrived, but the truth was, I wanted so direly to help her connect. I wanted to fasten that truncated bridge and allow her voice to be heard. I wanted so badly to help her to hear the voice of the person she needed to hear. I wanted to tell her (only I didn't) that life seems to be like this. That my life is like this. That I keep pushing the little square buttons as fast I can. That I keep trying so hard to hear the voice. To hear the voice of my mother whistling in encouragement, to hear the voice of God, to hear the voice hibernating inside my chest, burrowed inches below my heart.

That so much of life is trying to conncect; so much of life is trying to feel that you're a part of something. A part of something greater than yourself.

As we did last summer via blogger. The three of us connected. The three of us, our cyber trinity of arya, daniela and david somehow found ourselves, found our seperate crazy worlds suddenly forged into one linguistic stream; our discrete, seperate lives somehow flowed into one linear tributary, emptying out into the ocean of each other's soul.

What a blessing last week was. Here's part of the prayer I paryed with Arya in front of the Art Institute last wed. It's one of my favorite prayers b/c it reminds me of my bloggin-buds...

"O Thou the Compassionate God. Bestow upon me a heart which, like unto a glass, may be illumined with the light of Thy love, and confer upon me thoughts which may change this world into a rose garden through the outpourings of heavenly grace. "