crucible

[intjonathan]

So uh, here I am. I've vowed to make a real journal entry tonight, my first since oh, Monday. It's felt a bit redundant to journal because I've been seeing everyone I've ever known so much, it's like what more can I say? I run out of words. Consequently I end up just pasting things in. Good things, no doubt, but not the meat I always intend to write here. I feel frustrated because it's like writing should help or something but the most I often do is draw outlines on the tear spots in my paper. That, I suppose, is enough. I just... my head is so full and so random, I say anything but the word or the sentence or line that is this week. I want to sum it, to write its fullness, and I am just incapable. I have written it on my friends, I have spoken it in silences in the noisiest conversations, and wept it all over my cracked, raw cheeks but have not said it. What is it? I want to reply when people ask how I'm doing with it. I want to request they pray for it. Maybe "it" is the Plan (not that one Graham), the Plan that has been marching on this whole time, the one none of us can see but we all know exists. It's not as if that knowledge (or even its details) makes death one iota less sucky, but golly it should would be nice to know.

Do I see God in all of this? maybe all along
It's just that we're so small, and simply not as strong

Today. I don't know. I dreaded it like I've dreaded few things. True to form, it lived up (down?) to it. Graveside absolutely wrecked me. I can't recall ever feeling so worthless. I felt like nothing. Like I was there in person, but my "self" or what i think of as such had ceased to exist. Like some sick game of Jenga with my soul, two bricks were removed at the bottom, and replaced with lit m-80s, then the stack was set on fire. Sometimes I put a couple bricks on top one another, but this morning there was nothing but ashes in my heart. I speak of it as if I'm over it now, but I'm really not.

I've always thought of myself as having a center. Like some magma core in the middle of my heart that - what did Poe say about Usher -

Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.

"His heart is as a lute suspended / Touch it and it will sound". Most of highschool was figuring out what got me right in that core. It is the center of meaning in me, any event that breaches the center is never forgotten and shapes all subsequent actions. Certain people have the keys to this center. It is closely guarded.

Yeah, that center? Rubbed out. It used to glow, now it's just blackness and darkness forever. CLEARLY not something I can reconstruct myself.
It is a singular experience to cry on God's ephemeral shoulder. He's all I've got most nights. God has literally driven me to my knees this week because I bring nothing. Every trapping of adulthood I may have claimed has been stripped away in 30 hours. I have no money, no car, and fewer friends. I'm still living at home, going to school, driving like it's my first time at the wheel, I happen to have a "job" but I'm hardly there, and I hardly know who I am anymore. I tell you I am 15.

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow

Yeesh. Church at 10am. It sucks - and I'm not used to it - but the last people I want to face right now are my church. I think that youth group missed Knowshit 101 or something. They are worthless for people in serious trouble. They mean well, but everyone's so damn flippant that I don't give them the time of day in my personal life. At least by now they know not to ask.
Y'all - everyone that knew them - have been golden. Alina, - God rest her soul - were she still here, could not be everywhere at once. As it is her values, mindset, love can belong to all of us. It is stunning, the more I read and hear about her, just how seriously awesome she was, and how (as ErinB socked me with this morning) we are blessed to have known her. Heck, man I even had a nickname. Nobody else gave me one of those. Bless your heart, Bethany, for taking it up. If every time you call me "sexy" it reminds me of her, so be it. There was everything good about her summed in her nicknaming.

I want a good hour with I don't know who to reminisce without fear. I want mention of the names Jason and Alina to be followed with "remember the time..." or "he/she was so..." not "                  ". I want to be... home.

I read this at the service today. If there was one thing more I could say about it, it is that while not literal (of course), this poem captures the vital essence of what Alina did for me: say blackberry.

Meditation at Lagunitas


All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

[Robert Hass]