City Reflections

I’m on a bus right now, driving through parts of San Francisco I have never seen. Its like a whole new world. This is my new home, I can see a church bell tower rising in the distance, a few miles away and it looks almost like it belongs in a fairy tale with smaller flanking towers, points toward the sky topped by crosses. San Fran is a living, growing and changing place, there is so much life that even one who has lived here has yet to see it all. There is so much I do not know. We are closer to the church now, a large green lawn with people everywhere. The church is huge, a might work of art. And we pass it just as quickly as we do everything else. Nothing in life stays still, I am learning this.

Life is a living art, it is something that we can only do, there is no way to really control what happens to you, where you go, what you do. Because its all one crazy, thrown together, insane design that is pulled by the strings by something no one knows. God is only a word at times.

The sun is bright outside the bus, its warm as February draws to an end. Yet inside we are given tinted windows and air conditioning. Trying to mark and changed what this world is will never really work. It will only alter slightly, not completely. And that’s okay, I wouldn’t want to be able to change anything drastically because after all you would most likely miss out on some great things if you could change the design. No one can see the design for their lives, just like a work of art does not know how it will look at the end. There can be the basic lines, the outline or placement lines, to give just the very basic idea, like the soul of the drawing is in those first few marks. Yet even the creator, the artist does not know what the art will be at the end of it. That is why I find it hard to believe that what ever higher power there is really has our lives mapped out for us. Its more, they give the paint, the pencil and we, the paper, the clay, we and the things given to us, make what we are.

Certainly, I thought I could plan and make my life neat and as I liked it. I was going to go to school and graduate, I was going to take my siblings away from my mom and live my life without a romantic other. I never needed anyone, at least I didn’t think so. Then design put Neil in my life, we could have totally ignored each other, but what are the odds that on a site with over two thousand members we two would notice each other and be drawn together. That we would both privately have crushes on each other that neither wanted to admit to.

Life is crazy indeed sometimes.

“I waited for you, today. But you didn’t show, no no no….I needed you today, so where did you go? You told me to call, said you’d be there, and though I haven’t seen you are you still there. I cry out with no reply and I can’t feel you by my side. So I hold tight to what I know, you’re here….and I’m never alone”

I am listening to that song, remembering. I use to think of it as my song for Eric, his death happened five years ago tomorrow. Hard to believe that much time has really passed. But it has regardless. I realize now the song is more about holding on to a feeling, a love even when the person is gone then it is about being alone. When I hear it it reminds me of one of my old foster homes, Melinda’s, or rather the Porters. Their kitchen, I would listen to this song while I did dishes, putting it into the little cream stereo that was attached to the underside of a cabinet. I remember the tiles of the cream and brown color counters, the stove to the right and the long island on the left. During the summer that long island counter would be piled with fruit and veggies from the garden outside. The sun pouring through the window over the sink, the laminated floor that I mopped often. The fridge with magnets from all manner of things and covered with the art work of her grandkids. During Thanksgiving break trashcans would be pulled out and potatoes were peeled by the bag, two, three, four, six bags at least. Cooking and baking day after day. A whole week of cooking all to get ready for one day that normally wasn’t fun anyways.

I remember how out of place I was there.

But then I have never really been ’in place’ I am nineteen but what many have called an old soul. I am odd and silly and sweet and tormented. Many have called me beautiful, and it makes me wonder. Brilliant, beautiful and broken, isn’t that what every guy dreams of? Isn’t that the stories make seem like the best type of girl. Then why was I shunned, outcasted? I was angry and hurt for years that people would call me the first two, know or see parts of the last and now do anything, not want me.

But now I realize why. Its because I would not let myself be shown that way. I pushed off the beautiful, I hid the brilliant outside of class and the broken, well the broken I held to me and shielded from everyone, from everything. Because my brokenness was for me alone. Broken For You, my favorite book, everyone is broken inside, little cracks that make us human rather then perfect. But we all hide it, we do. I have just in this past year found people with whom I can be broken and they are too. And they are okay with that, just like I am okay with it now. Its like coming into your own, realizing that there are basic human truths that unite us all. I just wish I had learned earlier.

No, that’s not true. Because if I had I would not have learned the hard lessons I learned during high school. There are many kinds of strength. First I had the strength to live through horror. Then I had the strength to rise above it, and then the strength to not regret it, the strength to move forward. But now I have the strength to move forward, to live for me and have no regrets, and with that the strength to know, life isn’t going to get easier, to know I have so much more to learn. Life never stops trying to teach us more, that’s part of the design, no one is a finished piece of art until their deaths, there is no end to art. I can see the bay now, the water and the cities on the slopes of the hills across it. Its odd to think that now I basically live on a island.

There is darkness and light in everything, there is strength in everyone, just as there is weakness and courage and cowardice. Everything is a balance, that is what is part of the design. And the design helps us move around, change the elements of our life until we get the perfect composition, the right people, things and goals in our lives. And then it moves ever so slightly, rather like a model posing before an artist. There is no way to really freeze the model so they don’t move, just like life they don’t stop moving, ever so slightly, changing the lighting, the shapes, the composition. Instead of being against those changes now I am for them, I welcome them. Heart break might be ahead of me or bliss, anything and everything, for every low there will be an equally great high. I use to be afraid to feel to much, especially after Eric died, because I never wanted to feel that low again, or worse. It was easier to numb myself to the world around me, to let people do as they wish and try to push past it.

Now though there is no way I can go back to the numb girl. I am alive, my soul burns inside me and I love and laugh. No regrets.