Travel Log #32

March 20, 2010
Rule #1 after testing glucose and shooting up with insulin and watching the carbohydrates: never go barefoot. So no more toes curled in the sand or mud squeeze between them. Luckily, I usually don't like bare feet anyway, and I don't make it to the sand or mud very often.

Also luckily, I wear finger picks, which won't exacerbate the millions of little pricks that are already beginning to collect on my right hand. My left hand, I'll leave alone because even though I have to give up some of life's small pleasures (like sand and bare feet, for instance), guitar is not one of them.

If I start singing out loud right now, people will probably glare and complain about the crazy American girl in Room 2 in the Internal Medicine ward. But I can't help it. It's my only real form of catharsis. It has been my shoulder to lean on, my enveloping symphony.

Now, for the first time ever, maybe, there is a real shoulder for me to lean on, with real arms attached to wrap me up. I'm not used to it and a large part of me fights it, warns of delusion, of yet another overwhelming loss, screams accusations of "stupid fool!" at me. And the other part of me lives in the moment, relaxes into it, lets somebody love me before it's too late.

Sometimes, there really is a rainbow above me. Maybe hard to see sometimes, but it's there. Even if I have to imagine it. What's real in the mind is what's real--to the person containing the thought.

"If you wait long enough, wishes do come true. Perhaps not the way you imagined them. But they solidify."

"Maybe. Or maybe they come true for a little while and fade away. Then you have to wait again..."

. . . .

"'Or maybe they come true for a little while and fade away.' Listen to you own words. You have waited and expected nothing. Behold what has come."

"And believe it? Didn't you tell me that there was nothing for me?"

"Take what comes and expect nothing."

March 25, 2010

Once upon a time a little girl knew that life was short. She faded in and out of visions, her body was a time bomb. But at the end, she finally learned to let somebody love her--it's only too late after you stop breathing.

"Uriel," she says to the angel, "nowhere's ever safe. Can't run from my body or my mind, right?"

The angel bows. Then angel loves the Little Girl.

"Is this all that Time has been? A test leading me up to this point?" she asks.

"Where would that be?" asks the angel.

"Where I can feel, physically, the ebb and flow of Eternity. The way I must count my existence as nothing short of miraculous."

"You have always known this."

"But I never owned it. Now I do."

"And you turn your back on the wish of ending. Don't you remember your own desperation? The desperation of a child with a life gone wrong. What you did not know then is that while yet you remain a little girl you have, indeed, grown up. You have grown up like children are meant to, but you did not think of the possibility of childhood wishes being granted. The answer comes and you revoke it."

"Because Forever changes. Not all is dark anymore and if it is, I have learned how to make my own light. I have learned how to see in the dark, how to make pros of cons, good from evil. But nothing good lasts for long, does it? So I revel in the moment."

"As you must. As you do. Yet you have always been closer to us than others. It is why you choose Life over Eternity, although the latter is what all of the Living receive in the end."

"Am I very close now?"

"Mortals are always very close. You know how to cling to Life, with one eye on G-d."

The angel smiles.

"On the mirror?" says the girl.

"And on the world with all of its aspects. Good and bad, you understand that the greatest love comes of an equal hate."

"Can you give me that hate again, just so I can feel the love?"

"Open yourself and perhaps it will comes on its own."

"I am trying."

"Yes. Little Girl, you are." The angel pauses then says: "How does it feel?"

"Good. But different. I'll never find that again. But they say it's different every time."

"Yes. They say it is..."

The Little Girl reaches out to the angel that loves her and gives it, again, the Humanity is has been cursed against for just a moment. The angel shuts its eyes.

"I must not, Little Girl, for I am a Seraph and you are of Mortal flesh."

"And you still have the propensity to fall."

"You are not only of Man. Nor of angel. There is something of you that is neither. It disrupts the Scattering. The nature of an angel is not meant to be altered. Your existence allows the impossible. You create of me a Man of no flesh and bone. And if I fall, I will be gone for a long time. Again. Only longer."

"Because they'll keep you away again?"

"Yes."

"But you can't change what you are. Maybe you're in between, like me. An angel and cursed, but infused with the Human like I am of the Point."

"I must leave you now, my Little Girl."

"Come back to me. Cover me."

"I promise," the angel says and then is gone.

But the Little Girl knows that promises are meant to be broken, so she turns around and forces Uriel from her mind and finds her own sources of light.