like clockwork

Dear K-

You have nothing to feel ashamed of in this circumstance. People of our disposition fall in and out of love, even though many times we wish we could be in love, even if just to spare the feelings of the other person. I know I have debated with myself alone at the kitchen table over a cup of tea, asking why I no longer can feel as enthused, as mesmerized as I once was, and why I inevitably have to hurt anyone who dares to get close enough to me to care. The heavy chains of guilt are always there. The feeling is unavoidable. I blame myself for leading them on, even if it was inadvertent. I hate to be the source of pain for someone, especially when I don’t have a good excuse other than “I just don’t feel the same anymore”. It makes me nervous. Can I trust my own feelings at this point? When did I become so mercurial, that not even I can predict my sentiments in a month’s time anymore?

I think you made the right decision, if that means anything, coming from me. She doesn’t want you, she just doesn’t want to be alone. I don’t blame her; I’ve been in those uncomfortable shoes before and tried to waltz that same clumsy step. No one benefits.

You can find someone else to dote upon. You can find someone else to make smile. It’s one thing to find someone to elevate to be the center of your life, to admire and adore, but it’s another thing to find a Daisy Buchanan for which to waste your life away. Think about it. Daisy is Gatsby’s ideal, he falls in love with the idea of her, what she represents…but when you look a little deeper, Daisy is really an awful person. She’s a disappointment. Shallow and selfish, she gets by on her beauty and charisma, but she is barely a husk of a being once you scrape off those superficial layers. That was always the problem and the appeal of the Great Gatsby for me: Daisy didn’t seem worthy of the adoration awarded to her. As much as it frustrated me to see someone so hurtful and superficial be worshipped by a wealthy, love struck man for his entire life, it also seemed painfully realistic. Of course someone would throw everything away for her. Some people need that corporal source of light and purpose in their life, and Gatsby was one who needed a goddess, even one that he built up and embellished in his mind, in order to drive him. Don’t be fooled into thinking you need a Daisy Buchanan, K. Find yourself a powerful, eloquent women who not only appreciates your devotion but reciprocates in kind. Find someone who not only sparks the fire in your heart but douses it in gasoline and continues to stoke it with wood throughout the long years, after the initial fuel has long since burned off.

I know. Easier said than done.

I am probably a little more sympathetic than usual because I have also recently hurt a few men whose only offense was trying to love me. I have a heavy heart, K. Many men have tried to lift it and it has only ended in pain.

It’s spring. Try to think of the sun washed afternoons and the lingering cool twilights of summer to come.

Stay vigilant,
-k

Another

Dear K,

It's Spring and I feel guilty. I really tried to do the right thing. What I thought was the right thing. It gets hard to determine what that is sometimes. I was dating this woman, and we had a good time, however anytime it seemed as if the relationship would progress she would pump the brakes and say things like "maybe I shouldn't be dating you, I shouldn't be dating anybody right now, I should be single"

This was fine for a while. We had fun, things were casual. Then we started fighting, started getting distant from each other. We'd be in the same room and hardly talk. One day I said, "it seems like our dynamic has changed, maybe we should break up and just be friends". It seemed like what she wanted, what she kept telling me she needed.

The following week she said she wanted to get back together.

In that week I had realized that I had been spending a lot of time with her, or talking to her, and that this had taken up the focus of my life. I realized that I had spent the preceding months making things about her. I don't know if she ever felt this way, and maybe that's not even true, but it's how I feel about the relationship. Don't get me wrong I love doing that. I love doting on pretty women. It makes me feel good to hear them giggle and laugh and say nobody ever treated them so good. I like to be good, I like to do good things.

She's been sending me long text messages and asking to talk and trying to get back together ever since we broke up. I've been thinking about how I'm going to get to LA.

I still think she's a lovely lady. I still think she's funny and smart and cute. I just don't feel the way I used to about her, and that really hurts her feelings, and that makes me feel guilty.

I don't like it when anybody I care about is hurt. I'll usually try and do just about everything I can to make them feel better. I'll talk it through with them, I'll try and listen as best I can, I'll make jokes and dance around the room, I'll do anything, say anything to get them to stop crying. Sometimes though there's nothing you can do. It's not my job to make her feel better. I know that, but it doesn't stop me from feeling guilty because her feelings are hurt.

Anyways,

I hope everything's good with you,

K

Dear K,

Do you ever think about how hard it is to make things? And how hard it is to not make things? And how when we make things we tell ourselves that we have to make them so well that we become fabulously successful at them? And then we place so much pressure on being validated that it stops being fun to make things?

I'm in a rut right now.

I've got to get to work somehow. I did some good editing though yesterday. Things are moving slowly towards spring up here.

I hope you're well.

Best,

K

a brief response to your failing american dream

Dear K-

I sympathize with your despair at the nation's current state. I haven't felt truly American for a long time, mostly because I never really felt quite right here, never really totally at ease, at least in the same way I seemed to instantly click with Czech culture. Since then I've always pushed a bit against the "American way", and by that I mean the stereotypical American that you see on desperate television series like The Bachelor or MTV reality shows: ignorant, unhealthy, and usually a bit culturally insensitive. That being said, I still have to admit to my birth place and write on paper documents of importance my place of origin. I am American. That is a fact. Now, it brings me more shame than ever. I am embarrassed to discuss politics, in private and in public. It makes me feel sick. It makes me feel hopeless. It makes me shake my head slowly back and forth while staring at something infinitely far away, out of focus, and struggling to find any words at all.

Just trying to get through it the only way I know how,
-k

click, click, click, click

Dear K-

I apologize for the radio silence. I’ve been in a weird place lately. I haven’t been myself, and that’s been eating me away for the last few weeks.

When I say “I haven’t been myself”, I don’t mean it in the usual sense in that I just haven’t been feeling well. I mean I have been prevented through various means and commitments from doing the normal bits of my life and routines that make me feel like myself. Over the last four weeks, the nights that I have had off and to myself I can count on one hand. I haven’t been able to go on my normal runs. Even my weekly grocery store trip has been disrupted.

I shouldn’t complain; it is no one’s fault but my own. I’ve stretched myself too thin. Too many social engagements. The tedious burden of the working day. A new boyfriend who gets nervous if I don’t devote a certain amount of time to him. I like him, and I like spending time with him, but when I haven’t had a night alone to myself in several weeks I start to feel like everything is a burden, even him. And I know that isn’t a good place to be. I tried to explain it once but it didn’t go over well. I don’t think I had the right words. I don’t know if I’ve ever really had to right words.

Tonight, I cancelled plans with my friends. I saw them last night. I have plans to see them tomorrow night. I love my friends and I love the time I spend with them, but I really just can’t do it right now. I needed a night off. I need a night to go home, strip down to nothing but my underwear and an old club basketball sweatshirt from college and lay on my couch, petting my dog and playing video games. I need a night where it is okay for me to sit in silence and not have to actively engage my mind in listening and responding.

I really knew I needed a night to myself when I believe I offended a friend earlier this week. She was actively talking to me, vomiting up story after story about work, and I felt my mind drifting to and fro, weaving in and out of her stream of verbal onslaught. I nodded occasionally and tried to appear engaged, but I’m sure my eyes gave me away. I felt dead. I felt numb. Although I wanted to listen out of politeness and respect, I couldn’t force my brain to give a damn. I think she caught on and I could feel the shift in her mood from that point on. She still kept talking, but when I started to fade out and then return to focus, I’d meet her expression of exasperation and disappointment that I wasn’t providing the reception she demanded. It made me feel like I wasn’t a good friend. Similar to how I feel when I have to explain to my boyfriend how I love him but I don’t want to spend time with him. It’s like I’m on the high wire and trying to manage a difficult balancing act, and the wind has just picked up and started to gust.

I’m going to try to handle it the best I can. I’m being more active about identifying sources for my discomfort and trying to manage the cause rather than just the symptoms.

I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you lately. But, to be honest, I really don’t seem to have been there for anyone, even myself. But I’m working on that.

Still faithfully yours in friendship,

-k

Meditation On America In Late Winter

Dear K,

I've been on a journey backwards through America, and I want to set down some ideas that have been jangling in my head. Our current President disgusts me. I cannot say that in my short lifetime I have seen a man that I despise more take the presidency. I hated George W. Bush with a righteous fervor, with a fever that could only be stoked by the fiery passion of youth. I hated that man for the inglorious wars he started. I still hate him, and now I dearly miss him. More than him I miss our recently departed Barack Obama. I miss feeling like the office of president was held by a man with a cool head and steady hands. Now I feel as if it is held by a screaming infant, shitting in its drawers.

I know any number of people might take issue with this thought. But I do think America is exceptional. You can quote your Zinn at me and recount all the long list of sins committed under the guise of Americanism, and the list will be long and dark and bloody. I think it is a folly to look at American history and see anything but a long and bloody struggle out of darkness, but I think that's the history of mankind as a whole.

I think that what makes America special is not what we are, or who we've been, but who we tell ourselves we could be. The ideal America strives for is a land where each person lives by their talent and sweat. I suppose it's more than that, and has always been more than that. Pioneers didn't settle the land and prosper in vacuums. They joined in together to harvest. I don't know if there's a more powerful metaphor in my mind than farmers coming together to reap.

There's a book I read in college called Witness To The Combines. It is a series of essays and memories written by a man remembering his childhood on a farm in North Dakota. The title essay is about his father's death and the subsequent selling of the family farm. His father died a couple of months before harvest. The family was mostly grown and they all knew they would leave the farm and not take it up themselves, but still they thought they had a couple more seasons together. They needed that last harvest in order to get themselves out of the obligations they had to the land and set their mother up with a house in town. They couldn't do it by themselves. Their neighbors from all over the county came in with their combines and harvested that wheat for them together.

You know we're a republic, and one of the oldest symbols of republics in western civilization is the fasces. Now this symbol was corrupted and twisted by the fascists, which is a real shame. It was an ax surrounded by a bundle of rods. Individually the rods were weak, they would bend and snap and break if they weren't bound together. The symbol is evocative of a sheaf of wheat. The thing that makes us strong is our union, it is the bonds between us that give us strength. Whatever system of government we have, whatever symbols we use, whomever we choose to be, we must never forget that we are individual strands bound together, woven together. Together we are stronger than we are apart.

I hope you are doing well.

Yours,

K

How's Your Flame?

Just south of where I was born there is a town called Indianola that is famous for its balloon festival. When I was little I would see the balloons drift through the sky. If you've ever seen a mass of things drift in the air you know what sort of hope it inspires in a child's soul. I think that's why I write things. Not the balloons, but what they represent.

There are various lantern festivals all over the world and I think they get at what I'm trying to talk about. People put little candles in boats and float them down a stream. Or they put a candle in a lantern and let the heat from the flame take it into the air. Or they set a paper lantern on fire and it lifts off into the night sky. Thousands upon thousands of these things float into the dark. We do this out of hope, or to celebrate our lives.

This is why I write. Every time I sit down to write I am really setting a candle into a stream. I'm setting a bit of paper on fire with my soul's flame and watching it drift off into the night.

At some time or another everyone confuses the purpose of the festival. We think our lantern should be the grandest flame in the sky, the brightest, the most beautiful, and that our soul will only be magnified for its glory when everyone says it is the the brightest and most beautiful and the grandest one hanging there in the dark, floating down the stream. The flame will still go out. The candle will gutter and flicker and die. The lantern will still come crashing to the ground and nobody will know who set it in the sky or whose soul lit the flame. The point is to light the world, to let our lights shine, and not to be the brightest.

I think I'm getting at what I want to say. It's a hard point to make. The festival is our culture. The lanterns are all the things we make and do and say.  We look at others and think their lanterns are much better than ours. When really it is our task to just light as many lanterns as we can. To make them as well as we can. To light up the night sky. To reflect back to heaven the glory of heaven. To show God we love this world as much God loves this world.

That's why I write. It's the thing I've decided to make my lanterns out of.


I hope your soul is aflame and blazing,

K