She laid the cards out on the black table cloth and then she sucked in her breath.

"Well," she said slowly, "Some of this is very good. A lot of this is very good. But... some of it is bad, too."

"Okay," I said. "How bad?"

"There is someone who passed.... a boy, yes? Younger than you, maybe? Or... no... just shorter than you. Was he funny? An entertainer, maybe?"

"Yes." I said. "I had a friend pass-- maybe three months ago. He was a performer."

"Yes." She agreed, but almost as if she hadn't heard me. She stared down at the cards and said,

"And there is another.... an older man? Older... much older?"

"No." I said, "There's been no one...."

"Hmm...." She replied. "Well then it will happen soon. The cards can't tell if it has happened before, now, or soon. Time isn't linear to the spirit world."

"Okay--" I said, "It's not my dad, is it?"

"I do not know." She said, and looked at the last card on the table.

She fingered the edge of the card and then said softly,

"You will live a very long time. And when you are old, you will have many memories, and you will think about them all."

Something about the way she said it made it seem like something was wrong.

"Who else is there?" I asked slowly, and that was when she paused, and all of the air seemed to grow stale in the room.

"No one?" I asked, whispering. "You're saying... you're saying that I outlive them all?"

She looked up at me finally and said, "There are worse things."

"Everyone?" I said, thinking first of my parents, then my siblings, then my best friends... and then my own children.

I looked down at the cards and said,

"Children-- is there anything about my kids? Do I outlive them too?"

She paused for a moment and then said softly:

"You all ready have."

Dear lady can you hear the wind blow, and did you know-- there's still time to change the road you're on.

-Led Zeppelin

____________________

Okay, so here is my thing.

I have had a little advantage in life in that I always knew that I wanted to be a teacher and a writer. That desicion has never been hard-- as far as 'what will i do with the rest of my life' the hardest choice I had to make was whether or not I wanted to teach music or English, and the fact of the matter was that I would have been an awful music teacher.

I have also had a little bit of an advantage in that the idea of going to an out of state college was, to some extent, out of the question. I couldn't afford it, period. For the first year I probably could have, with scholarships and all, but most likely not, and after that it would have been any one's guess.

But my other main advantage is that I firmly, seriously, without doubt, believe that what is supposed to happen will. This doesn't necessarily mean that I have no control over my life, but I feel like there is no road that I can take that will lead me, ultimately, to unhappiness. And I feel like, as long as I am living, there is still time to make a change, big or small, no matter what the situation. I don't believe in being painted into a corner or having my hands tied. I just don't.

A dear friend of mine is in a situation where he has to make an incredibly important desicion... and I feel extra guilty because I know that if I didn't exist this desicion would be a very easy choice for him. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's right. He cried on the phone with me today, begging me to make the choice for him, but knowing that what I would choose would directly go against what his parents want him to do... and so he is stuck. And I couldn't make that choice for him-- he has to be able to stand naked in his truth. He must be able to say, right or wrong, that he chose this path for himself.

He is so scared. And so brave.

I feel like I can't really advise him in these matters because I have so little experience being afraid of making the wrong choice when it comes to my life. In the words of my brother, the sun is always shining on my playground. And in the words of my father, Fuck regrets.

I wish I knew what to say to make him feel better.

"I'm not here
This isn't happening
I'm not here
I'm not here"

 -Radiohead

"There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
But no one asks the question why,
He has been here.
Old men kneel to accept their fate.
Wives and daughters cut and raped.
A generation drenched in hate.
Says, he has been here."

-James Blunt

"Isnt it a pity
Isnt it a shame
How we break each others hearts
And cause each other pain
How we take each others love
Without thinking anymore
Forgetting to give back
Isnt it a pity

Some things take so long
But how do I explain
When not too many people
Can see were all the same
And because of all their tears
Your eyes cant hope to see
The beauty that surrounds them
Now, isnt it a pity

Isnt it a pity,
Now, isnt is a shame
How we break each others hearts
And cause each other pain
How we take each others love
Without thinking anymore
Forgetting to give back
Now, isnt it a pity"
-George Harrison

__________________

I'm sorry, but I'm not going to apologize.

If there is a God, then I think that He is going to have to understand that the way that I turned out is mostly because of his plan. I mean, come on. How fair is it to punish me for the things that I truly believe now because of really screwed up experiences that I had at the hands of Christians?

I don't care how Christian anyone is. The next time that someone tries to tell me that homosexual orientation, love, or marriage is wrong, I am going to seriously sit down and have an all out war with them until they suddenly come to the conclusion that --aha!-- even if it WAS wrong, there is NO REASON why it needs to be the number one thing on our agenda. How about we focus on all the raping and killing first-- which is pretty indisputably wrong no matter how you look at it and what persuasion you are.

The next time that someone who claims to be a Christian sits there and tells me that the woman in Duke deserved to be raped because she was a stripper ("What did she think was going to happen?") I am going to start praying for an hour a day that their God strikes them with some kind of embarrassing habit, like horrendous, unstoppable flatulence.

The next time that someone comes up to me and tries to 'save' me, I am going to start quoting verses from the Wiccan Rede.

The next time that someone has the audacity to tell me that my political, relgious, and general outlook on life is wrong, irresponsible, misled, dangerous, and then has the balls to say that the reason I am 'wrong' is not my fault because of something that happened to me EIGHT YEARS AGO, i am going to sit you down for a blow by blow discussion on exactly what happened to me then, and since, so that you can see that the only reason you are saying that is so that you don't have to take responsibility for the fact that Christians are the NUMBER ONE REASON for atheism, period.

Seriously people.

We should be focusing on building bridges, not on finding ways to tear them down. You can think that I'm wrong as much as you want too-- I think you're wrong, too-- and you can pray for me all you want too. I pray for you, too. And for as dangerous or misled you think my opinions are, I promise that I think the same thing about yours.

But... chances are that we are both powerful in our own ways. Chances are that we want, generally, the same things. Chances are that we love this world around us, we love the people in our lives, and we want-- with our whole hearts-- to keep them safe.

So lets stop bitching about why we are the way we are, and why I'm wrong adn why you're right, and why I'm going to Hell and why you're not. And lets fix what we can, NOW, HERE.

I'm tired of having my eye on eternity while today falls around me in shambles.

On the night of my friend's funeral, I went to a Death Cab for Cutie concert. I didn't really want to go, I wanted to go home and bawl like a baby, but I knew that it wouldn't get me anywhere, and I'd spent sixty bucks on a ticket.

'What Sarah Said" is a song that I had heard before, but you know how when something is live it changes everything (lyrics are in the entry previous). At the end of the song, the spotlights changed from being on the band to sweeping through the audience.

I looked up at the white light dancing on the ceiling, and for some reason, I felt like I wasn't alone, seriously, for the first time in my life. Concerts do that to people, I know, and I was probably more vulnerable to it since I'd just suffered a tragic loss... but for some reason, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was connected to something extraordinary.

For the last week, I have thought about the final words in the song, "Who's gonna watch you die?" and have been thinking about what people in my life would stand beside me in those moments and watch while my spirit is ushered out of this world. And, as I stated before, I know for certain fact that my sisters would be there, and my best friend Melissa.

This morning I woke up next to a man that I love.

We stayed up late last night talking about soul mates and destiny and fate-- and how neither of us want to get back together, but for some reason we also can't let go. We've been broken up for four months now.

"I think that you are my soulmate." Mitch said. "But I don't know what that means-- maybe sometimes soul mates aren't meant to be together. Or maybe we'll be together later. I don't know."

"Mitch," I said, "Lets be honest with ourselves, okay? I am not your soulmate, and you do not love me. How can you say that when I know you've been talking to Jennifer* about hooking up in a few weeks when you go home?"

He had the decency to blush, and then he shrugged his shoulders. "What am I supposed to do?" He asked. "We are broken up. You have said over and over that you don't want to get back together. Are we just going to be single for the rest of our lives because we can't get it together?"

"No." I said, resentfully. When I looked back up at him, he was grinning.

"What's that for?" I asked, and he said,

"I think I just won an argument. The first time in over a year. I think I won."

This morning I woke up with him, and we began our typical and practiced morning ritual of stretching, kissing, falling back asleep, begging each other to call in to work, wishing that we could at least wait until noon before we had to leave, kissing more, looking at the clock, trying not to close our eyes for fear we'd fall back asleep, kissing more.

"Morning beautiful." He mumbles, as he has every morning for the last year.

"You're beautiful." I always protest, and he pouts.

"I'm handsome." He says, and we laugh.

I was thinking on my drive home today about what death really means. Even though my friend died when he was 21 of something that was kind of a freak fluke in his body chemistry, to some degree, he'd been dying since the day he was born.

We all are.

And so I thought about Mitch, and how much we know about each other. How much we hide from other people but aren't afraid to share with each other. I thought about how many moments of mine he has witnessed, and how many things I have seen of him that I know no one else ever will. The secrets we have told each other.

Watching someone live is the same thing as watching someone die. Even if we have a lot more seconds ticking off our clocks then my friend did, we have no way of knowing that. I know for a fact that had I died in my sleep last night I would have gone off to meet God happy. So happy for the gifts in my life, so blessed by the presence of love... even if it is a kind that I cannot always use.

And it came to me then that every plan
Is a tiny prayer to father time
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself
That I’ve already taken too much today
As each descending peak on the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me
Away from me

Amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines
In a place where we only say goodbye
It stung like a violent wind that our memories depend
On a faulty camera in our minds
And I knew that you were a truth I would rather lose
Than to have never lain beside at all
And I looked around at all the eyes on the ground
As the TV entertained itself

‘Cause there’s no comfort in the waiting room
Just nervous pacers bracing for bad news
And then the nurse comes ‘round and everyone lift their heads
But I’m thinking of what Sarah said
That love is watching someone die

So who’s gonna watch you die?

-Death Cab for Cutie

"Miss Adrienne-- am I okay?"

"You are more than okay. You are perfect."

"Miss Adrienne! No one is perfect."

"Everyone is perfect. Especially you."

__________________________________

I was thinking the other day of the way that teachers shape us without realizing it. When I was little, I was not the kind of girl who internalized pain. As vocal as I am on my blogs, that's how I was in real life. Now, not so much. I'm much more likely to laugh something off and pretend I barely noticed it, or at least that I'm not affected by it.

I was wondering when that started, why that all began... and I remembered a moment when I was fifteen.

I had my first boyfriend, and I was baffled at how to be in a relationship. He was popular, all of my girl friends had liked him at one point or another, and for some reason, he was dating me.

There was one night where he called me and wanted me to go to a movie with him, and I desperately wanted to go. But I had promised my English teacher that I would go and help with the Speech float for the homecoming parade.

I went to the high school and worked on the float, becoming frustrated as we went with how disorganized it was and how no one knew what was going on. I could just tell I was going to be there all night, and I really wanted to go see my boyfriend.

"Okay." My teacher said, looking down at me. "I'd rather you not even be here if you're just going to bitch about it."

I was stunned. Absolutely shocked.

She turned away from me and went  back to working, and my first instinct was to start crying. Tears welled in my eyes, and I got that scratchy feeling in my throat. And then, in the same instant, I knew that if I cried, she would just yell at me for that, too.

And okay. I was being stupid. This was a boy, a high school relationship, and it was, and would end up being, much more important for me to be involved in things like Speech. However... I was fifteen years old. There was no reason for her to treat me like that.

I think about every word that I say to my kindergartners, and I wonder what I'm doing to their psyches. I leave work every day thinking, "How did I screw up my kids today?"

Butterflies are free to fly, and so they fly away.
-Sheryl Crow

________________________

There is a sickness to grieving. And there is an art.

Today I looked at my friend for the last time. He was wearing an orange sweater that I think I saw him wear about a million times in the years I'd known him. Like I do at all funerals, I fought the belief that he would, at any moment, jump out of the coffin and announce it'd been a joke. A terrible, horrible, beautiful joke.

Dear God... let me laugh.

An image that will burn inside my mind for the rest of my life whenever I think about my friend is what happened when they rolled that casket into the sanctuary. From where I was sitting, I couldn't see the casket at all, but I saw his dad and sister walking slowly towards the front, and I thought, Where's his mom?

I found her at the same time as everyone else did-- our eyes landing on her small, tortured frame, as she held onto that casket, trailing after it like she was lost. Her hands rested on the smooth surface, and she cried. God, she cried. I wondered how much energy, how hard she had to fight her instincts, to will herself to turn away from the body of her son. 

Forever in my mind will be the moment when his mother stood to give her eulogy, and her husband stood stoically at her side. I have many memories of this man, and every single one of them has taught me more and more about the way a man should treat a woman. Suffering, but strong, he stood beside his broken wife while she said goodbye to their baby.

Watching my brother rise with the other pallbearers, preparing to carry a boy who loved him to his final resting place. The look on his face, the heaviness of his shoulders. The way that he slumped on his heels and wouldn't look anyone in the eye. The way that there was a force field of solitude around him that I knew I was not allowed to enter, lest I crack the carefully practiced and applied veneer of I'm okay. It's okay. It's okay.

The Pastor said, "In this time of senseless tragedy, the one person who could help us to understand is no longer with us." My eyes were burning and my heart cried the name of my friend. 

Watching the casket roll by. Goodbye, for me, has never been a willful release. As my friend made his way out of the room, I felt the inevitability being stripped from my insides. Pulled to an place that I don't know, and soaring far, far, far... much farther than I could ever hope to reach.

My friend is dead. This man who shared with me so much of who I am and who I was and what I wanted to become. He is dead.

I wonder if the dead watch the living and roll their eyes at how ridiculous we are. How selfishly we hold on to the things that never belonged to us to start with. How foolishly we clutch at things that are much to fragile and amazing for our minds to ever understand.

Last night I tumbled into bed after arguably one of the longest and most painful weeks of my life. This week I have learned a lot about myself, my soul, my mortality. I have learned that I am selfish, that I am superficial, and that I am, quite often, discompassionate. I have learned that I am childish. I have learned that denial is not just a river in Egypt. It is an ocean, one that I drown myself in gladly whenever pain knocks at my door.

A week ago, when I was certain that a dear friend had closed his eyes forever, I had laid here in this bed and trained the sadness out of me. I reacted with anger, and then with sarcasm. I put a favorite episode of Family Guy on my computer and fell asleep to it, longing for a world where nothing was serious and everyone was always laughing. A world where no one ever died unless they and everyone around them was ready to accept that they would never see each other again.

Death is selfish, too. I have fought death valiantly over the last decade, and I wonder if he mourns his losses as much as I mourn mine.

I refused to cry.

Last night I took a rationed twenty minutes of time to think about what preparations needed to be made before the funeral. I thought about what I would wear, what time I should leave my apartment, what I would say when his mother took my hand-- I wondered if she would stare at our grossly alive bodies jealously and then look at her son.

And then I turned off my thoughts, rolled over, and fell asleep.

Sometime early in the morning my door opened and a man let himself into my apartment with keys that I forgot he had. He walked silently to my bedroom and climbed under the covers with me. I woke up, startled, and looked into eyes that I knew so well, but they had so rarely had this look in them that I didn't know what to say. He didn't either.

He held me to him, and for awhile we just breathed there in the dark together, listening to the sounds of night outside the window, his lips against my forehead. Finally, he said,

"It's so good to see you."

I'm not sure why I started crying. Maybe it was because of the long week, the exhaustion, the strain of letting go. Maybe it was because of the adrenaline rush at having an intruder in my home, followed by the sudden crashing of realizing that I was safe.

Or maybe it was because this man has never made me feel like I have to be strong for him. Maybe it was because, for all the wrongs he has committed against me, this man has never made me feel like I could not cry.

When I woke up this morning, he was gone, and I knew it might be a very long time before I saw him again. I miss him. The real him-- the man that I am undoubtedly in love with.

Breaking up with Mitch was the best desicion that I could have ever made for myself. There were too many things that were irreconcilable-- his position on women, his ideas on social justice, his general attitudes on lifestyle and the way he wanted to raise his family. Too many vitally important things that we could never have compromised on.

But sometimes, in moments where we are both being openly honest with ourselves and with each other, I see in us a potential that is so much greater than all of those other things. I fantasize about a scenario where we could run away together, and be together, alone, without all the pressures of his family and mine, and all the ideas that we have created about right-mindedness and the right way to live and die and be reborn.

Here is a man, I think to myself, Here is a man who will fight with me about every single iota of life that I find to be absolutely crucial. Here is a man who has rules about every single moment of his life, and every single emotion and feeling, too. Here is a man who has so much pressure on him to be something, and the only way he can see to be it is to not be with me.

And he loves me. He can't help it, and neither can I. We love each other even though we are so utterly, completley, and undeniably wrong for each other.

He loves me enough to sneak away from his family in the middle of the night, steal away an hour, and come to my apartment to tell me that everything is going to be okay. He loves me enough to be here with me, holding me while I sob, and witness a moment of my life that no one else will ever see but him.

And then, reality.

But he doesn't love me enough to stay.

The last time I saw you, you told me that you'd see me soon. No, that's not true. You said that you hoped you'd see me soon.

"Liar," I replied, and flipped back my hair, newly cut and dyed red-- such that you almost didn't recognize me. "You're never coming back."

You did come back, but not to me. I never saw you again.

I don't know what it is about death that stops me cold. I see my friends dealing with the same pain. They say, "That's so sad... man." And then their lives move on.

But not so for the suicide survivor. Maybe thats why. Maybe my punishment for wanting to die is that I will outlive all the people that I cared most about. One by one I will watch them all spiral dangerously beyond my reach.

I feel that I may have discovered something terrible about the universe. It is all... random. It is all an accident. Nothing has any reason or rationale behind it... maybe it really is just a lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. That is the only thing I can think of that would justify the awful unfairness of it all. The bull shit behind it.

One day I will accidentally fall in love again, and probably have children. What will I tell them about life and death? How can I explain to them that it doesn't make sense, that it can't make sense, that it never will? That I have been exhausted trying to figure it out? How can I make them feel secure and safe in a world where I cannot guarantee anything beyond the past?

And when they find out that the world isn't safe, that it isn't secure, that accidents happen and that innocent, beautiful people die every day... will they think I lied to them? Will I have become apart of the injustice?

The thing about death that's hardest for most people is that there is no one to blame. The thing that's hardest for me is that there is no one to forgive.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,--but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the
love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not
approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the
world.
 -Edna St. Vincent Millay

__________________

It sickens me, about myself, that my lungs continue to fill with air. My heart continues to beat. My organs function perfectly. And my friend is dead. One moment he was beautifully perfect and magnificently alive... and the next, something inside him broke irreparably.

It disgusts me, about myself, that I am allowed to continue to move, and breathe, and exist, when someone as incredibly NECESSARY to the world as he was is gone. I resent every breath that I have taken since he took his last, every blink of my eye, every beat of my pulse.

I keep watch by the telephone all night, waiting for someone to call me and tell me that it wasn't true. Or, at least, that it was a truth that I could change.

My friend is dead. It disgusts me that this is the best that I can do for him.