Pomegranites are like geodes. You don't look at them twice when you see them lieing in the sun under a tree, but when they split open it is an ambush, it is silk from a magician's sleeve, it is daimond and rubies. Pomegranites taste better, though, I'd imagine; less like dirt.

The pink plastic curl of a sheet sled. So bright and so slick, and down we go.

That particular stench of chemicals. That particular toss of her head.

Eric's mom makes caramels. They are wrapped in chalky wax paper and they are hard and rectangular and they taste like brown sugar. They are not like normal caramels. They are tougher and daker, almost the color of my hair. I am overcome by a wave of love for these seventeen. Damnit, if this class just isn't keeping me alive. If Mrs. Davis's guilty bright-eyed laughter and cocaine-skinny Jake's blank smile, Eleni's rainbow wooden jewelery, if all of them and all the others aren't the only thing left to get up for.
They aren't, really. But they are the only thing right now.

At City Park the lights are on; they lean over the pond in swooping dangerous arcs like the lantern fish's antenna. The snow is still falling, glittery,glittery, glittery. It just sparkles so hard. I almost can't stand it,the feeling of it's particular blindness is too good to keep up with. I walk on the water. I slide on the ice. I can see the etch-e-sketch lines of a thousand hockey goals, a thousand eight year old prodigy's thousand figure eights. I lie on my back and make an angel, right there. The snow keeps falling and glittering and blinding, it covers me up with glitter and blindness. In the back of my head I can hear Colin Meloy singing; the bombs are fading away, he says, and they are, I can feel them fading. My mother is somewhere nearbye. She came with me and now she is a child and there is a bigger angel near mine and what do I miss, what do I miss the most. The fairy tale childhood of wild green grapes and the mean neighbor's stripey cat. Having someone put sleighbells out on Christmas morning, even stomping fake deer trails all around; or maybe those were real, the deer trails. What do I miss the most. Your fingers. Your fingers, I miss the most. Or elderflower water, which was too expensive anyway but now is gone. Or nothing. Glitter glitter glitter goes the snow and all is good right now.


The apple and the cherry and the watermelon suckers are delicate jewels, shiny and bright. We swallow them whole.

Somehow in sixth grade I was so certain. Maybe it was still being pocket sized and having still gold hair, maybe you just loose something no matter what. Or maybe, maybe not. I never thought I was invincible. But some of you did. And some of you I guess realized that you aren't and maybe that is why this is all so weird and lonely.

Maybe the one thing that will remind of my adolescense is sour sugar, a constant shene of half-off valentines day candy on my lips, a sudden whiff of lemon as I turn my head.

Yeah, and the world keeps spinning. Feel us furrowing on towards spring.

Another one of my wisdom teeth is growing in and it hurts like I'm teething.

Something bad happens.
Something bad happens, and for a while it is a physical pain, it is your lowered head and your over-bitten nails, it is the whiteness of your cheeks and the stillness of your lips.
Something bad happens, and for a while you can't let it go, you can't get away from it, you can't concentrate on anything else, you can't breathe, you can't think.
Something bad happens and then it is just something bad that has happened, something that is done. You raise your head, shy at first, and your cheeks become the color of skin again and your nails grow back and your lips even murmur.
Something bad happens but eventually you forget. Or no; you never forget, but you get bored of being broken so you put it aside and you turn to other matters: to a blue sky so bright that it hurts, to a paintbrush, to a new friend, to every glittering thing in the world. You are good again. Sometimes in quiet moments, there is that familar bad ache, that old bitter edge that you thought you and worn down to softness from all that use. But mostly, you are good again.
Finally, you start having normal days.
Things have a new pattern. It is starting to fit you.
You have one normal day after another.
Then, one day, one normal day, you are feeling fine, normal-good even- when suddenly something happens and in a dry-lightening flash you remember, you remember everything, and suddenly you are right back where you started and Something Bad Has Happened, and even though it has already happened, it is already done, it feels just as bad as the first time and you bite your nails down to the skin and go silent and pale and never ever raise your head.
Maybe you find a wilted yellowed letter. Maybe a glossy photograph. Maybe a little braided ring or maybe a small plastic dinosaur. Maybe you sit in a spot where you used to sit. Maybe you drink a soda that you used to drink. Maybe you just see the fall of her hair, or the way his fingers curl around his sleeves. Maybe it doesn't take anything at all.
You always think it's over, but it's not.

A barn raising, maybe. Or all the fireworks set off at once,the sky a single epileptic blurr. Or frost. Or maybe long grass, yellow and green and brown, scraping at your legs as you run down a hill.

The Bell Tower:

The quiet, the gray metal walls with the wild webs of graffiti,the windows, glowing and white, the view that never ends, the smoke and the clouds closing in outside, the slanting sureity of the lines of the ladders. The peace. The solitude. The little drift of snow, the swirling draft of air. The freedom.
I can not begin to express my love for that place.

When one day I try the door and it is locked,I don't know what I will do.

Hey, guess what you guys?

I actually will be able to vote in the 2008 presidential election...

Yep. I'm sure you weren't wondering/ probably knew about that, but still. I'm excited.

Also, I was thinking about war and half-off valentines candy and politicians and grime and little kids eating chips of sweet lead paint and reindeer and counterfiet coins and accoustic guitars and three colored flags...and everything, everything there is. And I came to a conclusion:

The world could really, really, really due with a few more idealists.

I had an epiphany the other day. Something that had really never occurred to me before. Amidst rivers of sunlight and meltwater, I realized that things might actually be okay. I might not have done myself in, yet. There might be just as much sunlight and snow three years from now.

God, and for so long I have been underwater, heavy and salty-eyed, seeing everything in terms of possible peril, not possible....just possible! Things are possible. Good things, too. I might-- I really really might-- be okay after alll.

He is dressed as the statue of liberty. He carries a torch and a sign that says, 'HAVE SOME FUN, GET YOUR TAXES DONE.' Before I saw his face I expected him to be different- older and more defeated, maybe, but he is young, and miserably defiant. His hair and his eyes are black and his skin has a tint like thin shene of soysauce. His jaw is clenched and pointy, and shved almost clean. I catch his eyes; they are so smart and so sad and they follow me for just a moment as our car slides by. I think how it was the only job he could get, how they are paying him next to nothing even though there he is, humilated and cold, and probably hungry, too. There is something ironic about the stiff, awkwardly draping grayish green clotch, the spikey crown, the torch that does not even have a real flame to warm him. He looks noble, though, bitter and brave behind the patriotic facade. I try to think of something I would give him, if I could, if I had passed him on the sidewalk instead of the road, but all I can think of is the bland hot chocolate you get at sporting events, and that is not good enough, that is no match for the precision in his eyes.
We are gone.

There is this line in this song that goes, “You want to be a perfect fire burning white and tall, and to be free of all this terrible impurity,” and then later this other line, “You just want to be held and told you’re worth it after all.” And it’s close, so close, too close. When did everything get so muddy? When did our maps become Australian? That’s it! That’s why. That’s why there is ‘AUSTRALIA’ in big loose letters on my pimply ceiling. Because Upside Down. I got it. I figured it out. I remembered. I think I should get some sort of reward, now. A drink that tastes like roses or the solace of darkness and shiny shiny snow.

And there are types like him all over the world. Comforterably caucasian, male, and middle class.
Terrified of adverbs.
Everything in this room is souless and stale. I can not keep my eyes open and the air tastes like dust.
I need a window and endless hair. Escape.

Down by the rivers where the willows bend it's cold and still and there are leftover crabapples soured but not gone always under foot. Everything is all right, there.

Ah, the remarkable blueness of newness!

I want cold that I can bury down deep in the middle of my bones, and the cleaness of ice. Snow more than anything. Fernlike dendrites and whirligig wings. Fallen angles, all white and rainbow. Magic in the world again. I want my winter back.

Silver fluttering through the sleek dark sky like a raindrop, then suddenly gone into the muddy water. Wishes weighed for worth. Coins assigned. Promises forged.
But the next day, more spectacular yet, a zoo lost as completely as our change opens up its lion's jaws, and lets us in.

I had the most remarkable day. Ask me about the lions.

It never fails to strike me how much of a difference there is between CDs and live music. And JJ Alberhasky was no exception.
It didn't even bug me too much to be in UAY.
Love songs and murder ballads played with closed eyes and his neck turning red.

The best parts, other than the music:


"You guys are quiet. Not to blame you, that's fine. You're here to be entertained, not to laugh and make me feel comforterable."


"Hey, do you have any questions? They don't have to be about the songs, etiher..."
Some tall guy kind of in the middle: "Where did you get that shirt?"
"I got it from an old friend who borrowed it from me long ago..."
Tall guy: *faux-uncomforterable laugh*
"Sorry. I'm abusing my power. I have a microphone. I can be louder than you."



I'm feeling pretty infatuated, actually. But don't worry- you would be too. It's only too bad I'm so shy. I'd wanted to say something to him. I'm not sure what. It probably would have ended up being embaressing no matter how hard I'd tried, but even that might have been better. But it didn't matter that he laughed easily, or that he wore a white shirt embroidered with roses and arrows but dingy orange and gray running shoes, or that he is a substitute teacher; he was intimidating just by virtue having written a song that I fall asleep listening to.
Damnit.

((This is going to confuse you. Mostly because I switched it's place with the place of the entry I wrote before it. Plus, it is really long and fluffy. Just to warn you.))



So, apparently some of you actually read my diary.
I had no idea.
I always assumed that whatever I wrote here was just me talking to myself.

I understand that I am writing on the internet so anyone can read this, but I never make my entrys friends only, so you aren't notified, and it had never crossed my mind that anyone would be either interested enough or bored enough to bother without my prompting them.

Anyway, I'm a little unnerved, but also kind of flattered, I guess.

So don't go away. Because I always did know that it could happen. I'm bound to embaress myself now and then; but I've decided that I don't care. I'm not going to be any less honest because I am being overheard. Which is a warning, in a way; though my honesty is a usually softer sort. It's actually sort of nice to feel like I'm talking to someone, instead of just cyberspace.

Have you ever felt really reluctant to write something new because you don't want to have written anything more recent than the last thing you wrote? Wait. I'm not making sense. What I mean is: you know when you have an experience so happy or just overwhelming that it was all you can think about and all that you want to think about, but then the world keeps spinning and new things happen, and you can't help but think about them, too, and it makes you feel guilty? Like disloyal. To the old thing. Was that any clearer at all? Probably not. I am feeling very sleepy dreamy and unable to think straight or at all. My point was: I still can't stop thinking about that concert, and while I feel like putting this in my diary now, I don't actually want it to show up on the page before the entry about that. Don't want the memory to be eclipsed, even partially.

So I'll say this: this entry is completely uninteresting and unimportant, I'm just thinking with my fingers because I am, as previously mentioned, too tired to know better. How come Jill Barnes never gos away and leaves her tramautized classes with JJ Alberhasky when I am suffering through her odd, sometimes gentle tyranny? I don't know; but it doesn't seem fair.

I almost hope you aren't still reading this. Not because I mind; it's fine with me, but I am simply not at my most articulate nor my most lyrical nor my most interesting. If you really have nothing better to do, though, you should at least stop reading this rambling entry and read the one below it, because that one is at least somewhat entertaining and amusing, and I can't tell you how long I am likely to keep finding irrelevent tangents to continue along.

I really like concerts. I wish there were ones I actually wanted to go to more often. I miss Caleb Brown's mandolin. I miss Jack Whiteside's guitar. I need to find a new quiet boy with an acoustic guitar, who will be too good for me to be really friends with, but will sit in a corner and play where I can hear him. Those sorts are always comforting.

The only reason i started writing this at all was over and done with in the first two sentances. I just wanted to say Hi. Hi, whoever you are. Hi, and I'm very confused, but thank you, and don't worry.

That's all.

Hi.

A green so bright
it surely must be sticky sweet.

Little chalky marbles amougst shards of broken glass.

Japenese Soda in undulating bottles.

Smiling spheres.

Throats filled with honey and dew and melon.

In the shadow of the railroad tracks.





....I was in a mood to count my losses.

Madeline’s Trip to China



It would not have been so bleak had it been dry. Though, nor so sleek. It would not have been so bad at all, really, had it not been damp. But it was: long and sleek, damp and bleak.
Madeline looked down at her little pink feet. The tunnel stretched out so far in front of them, that it was nearly impossible to believe that she was not at the very mouth of the thing. She was one hundred footsteps in. Well, give or take. She had several times strayed from her counting, lost track, forgotten, added numbers at random.
It was taking a very long time to get to China. A very long time to pass through the center of the earth. And she suspected that there was still much, much farther to go, as she had heard that the center of the earth was molten and orange, and the tunnel had not been getting any warmer.
Madeline wiggled her little pink toes.
Barefoot had been a bad decision.
But how happy they would be to see her, how surprised! Immediately, they would abandon their colleagues, and forget about the concept of a business trip. They would scoop her up and fit their fingers into her curls. Then they would take her out into the streets, and there would be paper lanterns and kiosks that sold glistening fish meat. Somewhere, there would be a big thicket of bamboo. She would hang a paper lantern from one thick green stalk, and sit in its quiet pool of light, eating her fish with her fingers.
Then, it would surely be worth the walk.
In the meantime, however, it was a very long tunnel for such little pink feet.
Madeline began counting again. Numbers marched from her little pink lips one by one, two by two, and finally, three by three.

Deep amber wax freckled with soot. Then silence, then smoke. Twining, rising ribbons of smoke like a deadman's tresses. The gentle, warm smell of beeswax: honey and embers. Brimming pink lungs. Uncomforterable-but oh, how sweet!

I could tell you a story.
I could tell you a story that you already know.
I could give away the ending.
Then the ending would be different.
Just because I told you.
You'd have time to change it then.

I could wake up every night because I am on the verge of tears
Because my throat is closing up like it does when you are crying really hard.
I could wake up from dreams of your own betrayal and of salt water dragging me down and the world all warm and empty.
I could.
I know this because it's what I have been doing lately.

But also,

I could read Swedish picture books about bright yellow sleds and little swedish boys with bright yellow heads.
And I could sit under our christmas tree where it smells like twine and treesap, and where the lights are only festive fireflies.
And I could tell myself stories there, where it's safe and green.
And I could change the endings.
Just for myself.

And that's easier, anyway.