Alone

I sit alone at the table and survey the room, taking in my surroundings in this barely familiar house. A small family occupies the room making preparations for the anticipated soirée. A cool breeze blows through the screen and empties my mind. A forgotten book lies beside my arm. I wonder at my coming here at all, but after all it is by invitation. Should I have come? The guests begin to arrive one by one in a gradual trickle, casually meeting and mingling, they are each and all well acquainted. I still sit alone although I am surrounded by a growing number of people. A woman, maybe two attempt a friendly conversation, my mind wanders and soon they do as well. Why am I here? They know me only as my fathers child. Its not enough. I know each face that enters the room and the voices that chime in are not an unknown cadence. I realize I could engage some of these people but I'm not sure I remember how, so I remain alone. The minutes pass and feel like hours. I feign interest in the conversation over dinner abstaining from the food myself. As I watch the people, longing to remember and strike up simple easy conversation, I cover my eyes with my hand. Unbidden tears spring into my tired eyes but upon noticing them I quickly shake them away and gaze out the window trying casually to regain my composure. My mind is stabbed with desire, but to act upon it is not within my power. Were I in a glass box cut off from food within sight of a feast my mind could not long for something more. My head throbs gently perhaps it the voices, there are so many people. As the evening progresses I continue to watch my surroundings. I wish I had never come. They don't want you here. Was that true? A thousand thoughts barrage my mind weakening its shield. The voices of the crowd are dulled by the ones in my head, though they are only those of my own imagining. The pressure, the throbbing is growing stronger. Suddenly the body next to me laughs and I realize I missed the joke, in fact I have missed most of what has been said. I press my forefingers against my temples as the pressure builds. I want nothing more than to leave but I can't tear away, I'm stranded. Again the tears well up to my eyes and I swallow the lump in my throat. How can they not notice the pressure, and the voices? They are growing and building upon each other. It must be loud enough now. They walk around me smiling, their now silent mouths chattering endlessly, maddeningly. I try desperately to recall the reason I came but its is shrouded as in a dense fog. I must endure this self inflicted torture but a short while longer. My head no longer endures the gentle throbbing, no, but it has changed to a deafening, roaring, pounding. Hammers on anvils make the armor of a thousand armies within my skull. The blood rushes forward pulsing, pounding against my forehead, looking for an escape. There is no longer any pretense I hold my head in my hands and make for the open door trying desperately to hold myself together and yet remain unseen. A foggy muddled voice whispers “goodbye” I force my mouth to open and respond although it is dry and I can't hear what comes out. I don't wait to see if I have been heard only knowing that I must make my escape. Tears now pour uninhibited down my face but I neither feel them nor care if they are seen, they are hidden by the hospitable darkness. The pounding has turned into screaming. I feel and hear nothing but the jumbled mass of voices in my head combining together to break the last nerve that keeps my mind from breaking. I cry out desperate for it to end before it is too late. Suddenly my world fades into blackness although I can hardly discern this night from the one I knew before, but this is different here I am alone. It is silent. There is no pounding only dark and silence. There are no voices only me. Alone.

This is one of the first pictures that came up in Google when I searched "memories".

I am starting a memory project.
just writing down one or two memories a day from my life up until now.

The day I started I also started "Dandelion Wine" by Bradbury, it turns out he did something similar. that's where he got most of his material for his story.

I want to always be able to remember how our house always felt warm and how momma would make dinner before daddy came home so that the house would be filled with the smell of baking bread or enchiladas. and how daddy's coat smelled when he picked me up in my excitement to see him.

I never want to forget how it felt to try to break into the big boy's forts in the field or wear so many socks that you couldn't feel the pokers and then getting in a load of trouble for ruining them all; or "fishing" in the "pond" which was really just the low place on our road at the end of the driveway where rain water collected, but my big brothers said minnows came down in the rain so we had to try and catch them!

Or being scared that mom wasn't coming home and eating hot wings and reading "the Wind In the Willows" to Joel until she did. Or eating the green strawberries form the garden in the back yard, selling tomatoes on the street corner, climbing the huge cottonwood trees, even getting caught in a naked one durring a lightning storm and being retrieved by my brothers. lately my memory has felt like a strainer whose holes are getting bigger and letting more and more fall through so hopefully I can bring them back by just sitting down to do it intentionaly...

Today I got called a hippie and an environmentalist.
Is it wrong to love the world?
When I say world I do not mean it in the sense of fleshly temporal things but the physical world.
The world is God's creation.
Man is sentient and has reason, being made in the image of God and thus he is better than than the world.
However, as such it is our duty to care for the world.
Christ followers above all seem to be the ones to reject the care of the world.
One of my friends just today said that he could care less about the world.
It has become such a symbol of a view of the world which elevates it above man that we have become hostile to it.
I used to be right along with him, my friend, hating environmentalists and the earth right along with them.
But are we not commanded, primarily, to subdue the earth? To be its rulers?
shouldn't we be just then and careful rulers, caring wisely for the things which we have control over?
I am not an environmentalist but I will continue to care for the earth which God made and called good!

I was walking through fields of flowers.

On rolling hills.

Birds in the air.

I almost forgot who I was.

Then I looked down.

I saw the heavy brown boots encasing my feet.

Suffocating their desire for freedom.

Erasing all hopes of feeling the world beneath them.

All around me duplicate, thick shoes crush the life that greets them from the dirt.

Most don't take notice.

Some take pleasure in destruction, making their mark.

Now I remember.

We are the few. The proud. the undiversified.

I can't tell the brown faces apart beneath the greasy masks and the uniform doesn't help.

We all look the same, to ourselves, to each other.

The dull red light illuminates the path before me, taking the place of the moon.

The brilliant orb slips out of the sky feeling unnecessary, unwanted.

The brim of my hat blocks my only view of the starry night sky.

So I trudge on.

I just have to finish.

then I can can feel the world again.

Sleep 'neath the stars and toil in the sun
El cielo es azul, just don't go tellin' everyone
--Conor Oberst

Fo so many men life seems hopeless, event after event without change It has been described as a rat race, a futile quest for earthly goods, money, love, things.

Those who go from day to day without object find themselves wondering...why?

For them it is hopeless.

Pointless.

Foolishness.

But for me it cannot be so.
Can it?

I have a living hope and a future in my God do I not?

Plato makes me wonder and Aristotle shakes my foundations.

Wiser minds than mine have taken on and wrestled these problems like their own personal Goliaths.

I am crushed beneath their weight.

To wonder and to never know seems to be the lot of fallen man.

But has God not given us salvation?

And the knowledge of "things into which angels long to look" (1 Pet 1:12)?

But questions assail me from every side which I cannot answer and with Job I feel as though, "He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone; and he has uprooted my hope like a tree" (Job 19:10) that tree which once flourished beside living waters.
I am afraid and I have doubts, but I know that my God is mighty to save and knoweth all things.
If God is for us who can be against us?
whom shall I fear.

The barren desert,
a bitter return,
not wrought by unexpected change
but rather by a lack of change,
nothing new reaches the senses,
for the traveler comfort should be found
In home and memories of the past
but in the season conceived for change,
any turn to what is past
appears to be regression,
Should the soul embrace
what once for him held peace?
It cannot be for'er forgot
but no longer does it harbor joy.

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid out faery vats,
Full of berries
And the reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters of the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

W. B. Yeates

1886