Ashes

They said it would be heavy. I honestly thought they meant the velvet bag and the box of ashes I had to carry away from the funeral home. What they really meant was everything that came after. 

You sat in the passenger side next to me, well on the floor actually, because i was terrified of tipping the box over and spilling dust everywhere. I kept waiting for the music to turn sad, for thunder to peal somewhere in distance, for the sun to hide behind a cloud. Instead, a car horn beeped, my blinker clicked steadily in the car, and I waited for red lights to turn green.

Life was very normal in the world around me. Like I belonged in a dream and stepped into the real world without belonging to it or being part of it. And then I began to understand what they meant when they said your ashes would be heavy.

I finally understand why the color for mourning is black. For one thing, it's easier. A choice you don't have to make at the beginning of the day. But the real reason is that life isn't in color anymore and everything looks the same anyway. Maybe if the world looks at me in my mournful clothes they will understand, just for a second, how heavy your ashes really are. Maybe they will forgive my tears at the grocery store that seem so out of place, maybe I will be invisible to the advertisements and tweets about Mother's Day, maybe Google will shoot a message to all my credit card companies that I don't want my mother's maiden name used as my security question anymore. 

You see, even though I took the urn home and put it where you asked me to, I carry your ashes with me no matter where I go. Someone once told me if you removed all the empty space that exists within the atoms of the Empire State Building, you would be left with an extremely heavy building the size of a grain of rice. That must be why your ashes are so heavy. All the love and memories we shared still carry the same mass even though your physical volume has been reduced.

They told me your ashes would be heavy. And I'm growing stronger every day to carry them.

Imagine

Birthday Stream of Consciousness

When it’s 5:00 a.m. and the upper story in the old house groans a little bit, foot on flooring, I smile in my sleep because I know I am amongst friends and family.

When coffee smells like three-quarters of a cup, that is enough, because I just happen to have milk in the car and when shared with friends, a little becomes a lot.
Like Jesus, I think five loaves and two small fish are enough for my world when served with prayer and a smile, well, maybe a little hot sauce too, ‘cause you know we have to represent the Latin side.

Leftover milkshakes are a warm reminder of how last night slipped under a blanket and turned into today. These cool mornings have sleepy eyes but I like it so much better when the fog is on the outside and not in my mind.

I love that you can flip furniture, cabinets, turn a house upside down and inside out and still have it feel like home, because home is where the animals are, curled up and stretched out on every chair you want to sit on.

Sometimes anxiety can turn to butterflies when a message arrives that I don’t want to delete but save for a rainy day like exponentially having 100% of your attention, digital.

And, I’ve said it once before in words that you haven’t heard because I spoke them on a different floor of my consciousness, that last stop on the elevator that requires a special set of fingerprints to open my emotions. But today, here’s the view from the top of the building. A snapshot, one that self-destructs with time and the infidelity of memory.

Our hearts don’t beat alone, exempt from the source that gave us life. So either I’m an echo and a memory or there is some umbilical cord that connects hearts of mothers and daughters, a cord that doctors and death itself can’t cut.

And, if I could, I’d wind that cord around my finger and listen for a dial tone and wait for your voice. The best thing about being half of you is not my eyes, but that we could read each others’ minds, and that sometimes when I talk I sound just like you.

Now the coffee is getting cold and the morning is getting brighter, a reminder, that success never sleeps and time sprints through the night. Heartbeats are just reverberations of the funeral drum so I hold my head high because my life is worth dying for.

So you can follow in my footprints, blaze the trail ahead, or walk beside me, but keep marching. Make the ground shake with every step and change the winds when you speak, because if a butterfly can have its effect, imagine what your thoughts can do.

THIS SATURDAY come get your signed copy at Firewheel from 1-3!

#truebeauty

DFW Book Signing

DFW signing next weekend! #caves #mzflawless

The Caves of Qumran is available!

Continuity

Superficial

The splendor of the night seems tainted 

with the truth of the day,

Where the rays of the sun shine brilliant, 

glistening over a million flaws.

The diamonds that glimmer at your neck 

under the city lights

Are drab in the daylight, covered with the ashes 

of last night's dreams.

There is a layer of grit that covers 

the silk cushions where you lay your head,

It smells like cigarette smoke, cheap hairspray, 

and last night's expectations.

Sunglasses can't hide the hangover in your eyes 

from too many shots of regret

and a few stale promises. 

There is no lipstick red enough to cover 

the pallor of long-dead smiles,

No corset tight enough to give shape 

to drooping potential.

The high heels you wear could reach 

all the way to the penthouse, 

and still do nothing to elongate your character. 

The bartender convinced you that 

an ounce of beauty, a smidgen of charm, 

well shaken and chilled with a little luck 

would transform you 

from cheap vodka into a luxury cocktail.

So you sipped away on lies and gambled 

the price of your happiness only to realize

that the audience watching you 

was both deaf and blind.

And now, standing here, seeing where your mascara 

has settled into your mistakes 

In the reflection of the taxi window 

that's already driving away,

The sun burns hot on your skin 

that's already scarlet with self-hate,

So you turn back to the shadows and hide 

with the beauty of something completely fake. 

The Elements of Love part 3- Earth

Have I ever told you you're my world?  Yeah, you're a little rough around the edges, but I love every mountain peak and canyon, proof of the changes that transformed you from the inside out.  

I love your opinion that pours forth like hot lava, recreating the earth as your thoughts harden and your dreams take shape.  The molten essence of you is raw and real and untempered, yet your will is strong. And like cold water to iron, it strengthens your resolve. 

I want to plant my feet in your soil and just grow into you.  I want to sprout roots so deep they touch your soul.  I want to be the leaves on your trees and feed you captured sunlight.  I want to blow you kisses on the evening breeze and shelter you from existential storms.

I want to paint our history and our future on cave walls and immortalize our love on stone.  I want to teach the rivers our story and collect our memories in the ocean.  I want to sing in the caverns of your darkest days and promise you a light at the end of the tunnel. 

I want to etch a lifetime into your sand dunes, shine on your deserts like the blazing sun, and run through your landscape like a gazelle.  I want to spread myself like a blanket of snow on your tundra and glow blue and green like an iceberg in the waves.  

I don't need a Ph.D. in topography, ecology, geology, or paleontology.  I'd rather just be an expert on you. 

Elements of Love- Water

The sky frowned and wept great tears, the condensation of heavy emotion. I realized that thunder is really the sound of a heart breaking somewhere, and lightening, lightning is the residual electricity left snapping between the ends of separated lovers.

I'm left wondering when this tension became magnetic, pulling us together and requiring a bipolar rejection at the same time.  I wonder when the meeting of these two friendly winds became a boxing ring, a circle of hot and cold that just brings both of us down.

Sometimes, words shoot from our mouths like tornadoes and destroy the bridges we built to cross over our differences.  And, it isn't just Zeus that fights with lighting bolts.  I've heard you say things that melt through my armor and scar my very being all for the sake of the shock factor. 

Our anger can swell so thick that we block out the rays of the sun.  And then, it's not just our own lives we are stealing.  The consequence of uncontrolled emotion stretches a long shadow.

All I can say is, I think we need to connect the circuit.  Passion and power are dangerous steeds to gallop without bridles.  So, meet me in the middle.  Drop your weapons and walk unarmed into the eye of the storm.  Because when we meet face to face as equals, we can give or take a few electrons. 

Elements of Love - Fire

Your possibilities are infinite. You are a single match, you are the flames that light my hearth, the fires that ravaged Chicago, and I hate to say it but you might be the very fires of hell. And I want to touch you without getting burnt. 

There is a corner of my soul that sustains no independent circulation, and I have found a warmth in you that brings that part of me to life.  I stand so close to your energy until I can't stand the friction and I step back.  But moving away from you is like facing the dark side of the moon.

I lie awake at night and wonder if there is a way to manage your power without stripping you of your strength.  Like If I were Delilah and you were Sampson, and I could cut only half your hair to keep you god enough to tempt me but man enough to love me. 

But you really can't win with fire.  If you smother it, it dies. If you free it, it destroys every good intention, strangling the future in thick smoke.  It will burn a hole in the earth all the way to Satan's footstool.  I took that journey with you and I saw fire afraid of its own fury.

I thought that I could pass through the flames and not get destroyed, but I'm made of flesh and bone not a precious metal to be refined by your critical heat.  I ended up a pile of ashes heaped on a heart of gold frozen with the cold of a wasted planet long after the fire has consumed it. 

See, I didn't just get burnt, I caught on fire with you.   We exploded with a brilliance that's still shooting through space a million light years away.  And in that moment, I lived.

Unequaled

Since "I love you" are words I said to someone else and since you are unlike anything I've ever seen I think it's time for a new spin on an old cliché.

If roses are red and violets are blue, then I'm nothing without you except for rooted in my past. You don't just complete my sentences you revise my future. You're not just my other half, you make my world three dimensional.

 I don't want to memorize every inch of your body, I want to be the blood pumping through your veins and the synopses in your brain so I can say that I know you from the inside out. 

You must be part Hercules because what we have together leaves me feeling more than human. I want to resurrect Salvador Dali so you can be his muse because you are the definition of surreal.  

God must had M.C. Escher create your mind, because i could get lost in your thoughts for infinity. You're so straightforward it's complex, so intimate it's external, so inside-out it's a whole new exterior, so upside-down it makes me question right-side-up. 

What I'm trying to say is if a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm gonna need a whole new language.

Winter

A titan wind blew through the canyon, flanking trees and rocks with the frozen breath of the river.  He was high in the branches above me, rooted firmly to his prison of ice and organic material.  I yelled, but my voice sank in the cold and rolled over the cliff's edge.  His eyes locked with mine and I promised him everything.  Fire, safety, a legacy.  He blinked.  His eyelids frosted heavy with regret and severed the bond between us.  

Pain seared through my fingertips as I wiggled them, trying to keep them alive.  I had given up on feeling my toes a long time ago.  I grimaced as I forced my hands to clamp around the frozen knots in the trunk.  I heaved myself up, gasping for oxygen in the thin, wet air.  I caught the lowest branch and straddled it.  I searched his face still ten feet above me, but he stared back at me empty, lifeless like a deer strung by its rear haunches.  

Upward I climbed until I reached him.  I touched my nose to his, my forehead to his, my mouth to his lips.  I breathed warm air onto his skin and whispered words as light as fog that lingered and swirled around us. But he wouldn't come back to me.  Fear had frozen him in a way the climate never could. 

A tear trailed it's way down my cheek.  Salt water never tasted so bitter.  I kissed him one last time and skidded my way back to the earth.  My heart felt as numb and cold as my feet.  Hallucinations of a fire that was long burnt out prodded me forward.  I didn't look back.  

A part of my soul is stuck there in that pine tree.  It stayed frozen to him like a wet tongue to an ice cube.  I know I'll never get it back.  Sure, my heart aches and my soul burns from that winter.  But I have faith that if I can grow new skin on my toes and my frostbitten fingers that maybe, just maybe, the intangible can regenerate too.

Shadow

My shadow stares at me,

A shapeless, faceless, two-dimensional beast,

Threatening to nip me and trip me and sneer as I fall

Into the inky vastness of my forever fears.

I am frozen by a wind that blows inside of me,

Fueled by a pilot heart and the icy flame it beats.

The chill seeps through me so deep that I can’t find the bottom;

I think I will drown here searching for an infinite reason.

 A slick bath of putrid cloaks me,

Melded against my flesh like a second skin.

I taste the rottenness flood my mouth as it seeps through my membranes,

A reminder that beauty is just a ribbon wrapped around a pile of dust.

My face is split down the middle,

Cracked and weathered by trial and error.

One eye sees bright things, the other the darkness that follows them.

Around my neck hangs a quarrel that strangles me, the Siamese twins of success and failure.

A Voice for the Invisible Girl

Sometimes, the smallest voices ring the loudest truths.  

She sits with her head tucked down, an effort to veil the intelligence in her eyes.  She slumps in her chair and crosses her arms, folding herself into the shape of the little girl she is out-growing.  Braces line her teeth, a metal gate that traps her inside herself.  She only smiles behind the curtain of her hands and never laughs out loud, except in text messages. 

A dozen plastic bands line her wrists.  She is her own billboard advertising her opinions.  Her backpack is a purple armadillo, shielded by pins and buttons.  You might laugh, feel guilty, or learn something if you stop and read them.  So, most people don't.  After all, someone who wears so much eyeliner has to be two-dimensional.  

She didn't win a trophy for the debate team last year.  As a matter of fact, she didn't even try to join.  But her notebook is a loaded weapon; she could shoot a hole in their logic from the other side of the cafeteria with less than an ounce of ink. 

I barely hear her voice and I'm standing right next to her.  "Yo creo que..." she whispers.  She is learning to tell her opinion in a second language.  I'm dying to hear the rest of the sentence, because what she believes and thinks matters.  

Trust me, if nuclear warfare happens, you'll want her to have a voice.  When you need a brain surgeon, you won't care how many piercings she has.  Her tattoos won't matter when she lifts your child into the ambulance or when she talks your sister out of committing suicide. 

Sometimes, the smallest voices ring the loudest truths.  I say we give the girl a microphone.

Wall

My heart pounded my throat like a hammer as I saw her struggling over the wall.  She hit the ground with a dull expulsion of air and lay there, very still.  I waited a minute, clutching my shirt around me tighter, hardly daring to breathe.  There had been a long line of us running away from the flames and I guess I was expecting some of the others to make it.  I kept staring at the darkness above me, the horizon between safety and what lie beyond.  A string of barbed wire winked at me above the harsh stones.  Screams echoed and died along the cobbled streets, a symphony of suffering on a xylophone of indifference.  

I turned my attention to the girl again.  She still lay crumpled just as she had landed.  No pool of blood surrounded her head, so I figured she would be ok.  I got up from where I was crouched and approached her.  A long gash ran up her leg from her knee to her thigh where raw skin peeked behind a curtain of ripped denim.  Her nails were caked with dirt and blood.  Ashes streaked her arms, a tattoo of the nightmare that was her reality. 

I moved the hair that veiled her face and her eyes blinked to life.  Around her neck, an amulet glowed the color of the fire inside both of us.  She rattled a stream of words I didn't understand, a language all her own that I could never hope to understand.  I just nodded.  Pain is universal.  My own tongue felt heavy in my mouth as I spoke words that were foreign to me.  New vocabulary.  I had never suffered like this.  She smiled sadly as I fumbled over the words.  She patted my hand and looked away from me, back over the wall.  Her gaze was as distant as the moon that glowed red from the smoke. 

The next moment we were walking.  Nowhere in particular, just away. 

Day by day, we put a day behind us along with the fire that nearly destroyed us.  Fresh, pink skin grows in places all over my body where new life insists on replacing the old.  But the smell of smoke still lingers in my dreams.  No matter how many times I wash my hair, I think the tragedy has invaded my follicles.  The rancid smell comes from inside of me, a scent of experience that haunts me.  There is a spot on my face that won't come clean, no matter how hard I scrub.  Maybe I will learn to accept it someday.  Things could be worse, I suppose.  I'm lucky that the scar that distinguishes me is in the shape of a butterfly.  A promise that I can transform into something greater than I was before I left my cocoon.  

The Glass

She stood there staring at me from the other side of the glass.  Her image was broken into rectangle segments, framed by the latticework.  She held one hand pressed against the window next to her face, as if she were whispering a secret to her own reflection.  

Magenta lips worked “oh’s” and tears rolled down her cheeks as silent screams that never broke through the glass encased her.  She raised a fist and let it fall against the glass and the frustration on her breath clouded the pane as she leaned her forehead on the window and wailed.  

I stood at a loss, not quite sure what to do.  She was in the wrong place.  This was no museum, no asylum.  We were standing in the middle of a Starbucks where life went bustling by.  I don’t think anyone else saw the girl in the glass box, her terror on display for a world who didn’t even notice.

She kept on murmuring words that I couldn’t make out, but then she looked me directly in the eyes and poignantly commanded me.  “Help,” she mouthed.  I tried to look away, but her eyes pierced down into my soul.  There was something familiar about her, something that I recognized but couldn’t put my finger on. 

I looked around for a rock or a hammer or piece of metal that would be strong enough to break the glass.  Out of desperation I threw a paper coffee cup at the glass.  I didn’t believe my eyes when it flew directly through and landed at the floor by the girl’s feet. 

I hesitated, unsure whether I should run away or step closer to investigate.  Her gaze still held mine and it pulled me closer like an invisible force.  I stood very close and watched her suffer.  I saw her wrists were red and bruised, as if she had clawed at her arms to remove some invisible bonds.  A thin line of blood caked her lips, evidence of a chapped voice that resonated back at her off of the glass.  

As I watched, her eyes slowly melted away, drowned by her tears like an ice cube under a stream of water.  Her soul still stared at me from empty eye sockets and I could feel the chill from inside her seep through the cracks in the windowpane. 

I felt sick.  I felt empathy and compassion.  I wondered what it was that kept her trapped there.  There was a part of me that wanted to reach through the glass and touch her, but another part wanted to order my double Americano and walk blindly past her like the rest of the world. 

I turned my back on the girl and walked away.  One foot in front of the other, I approached the counter.  I saw a little girl in a hot pink t-shirt waving and grinning broadly at the glass pane I had just deserted.  I breathed a sigh of relief, glad I wasn’t the only one who could see the girl trapped there. 

I took my coffee and stepped behind the little girl and towards the exit.  I turned to the glass for a last glimpse at the tragedy.  I clenched my cup so hard in my hand that I spilled coffee all over my shirt.  The little girl stood waving at her own reflection in a renovated windowpane.