writing group: lyrics

I hope that you see right through my walls I hope that you catch me 'cause I'm already falling.  I've never let a love get so close; you put your arms around me and I'm home.

When I listen to music, I listen to the melodic tunes of the song, but more specifically, I listen to the lyrics.  Lyrics are poems put to words; emotions expressed through words.  So when a particular lyric sticks with me, I usually find some emotional connection to it.  In fact, that’s why I have a hard time listening to songs I listened to ten years ago: because there are so many memories and emotions tied to every song that for me it is more emotional than looking at a stack of pictures.  The lyrics above I heard in the car while driving to post with my husband and I couldn’t help but thinking; if I wrote a song five years ago, this is what I would have written.   

When I first met my husband I was at a precipice in my life.  I had just spent my first year at college on my own and I was feeling pulled and conflicted at who I was or what I was supposed to be.  I felt as if the previous nineteen years of my life I had only been a mold my parents had created and didn’t know who I was or even what I wanted to be; I just knew I was unhappy.  I felt like I couldn’t meet my parent’s expectations and in doing that, I didn’t meet my own.  I was feeling vulnerable and began putting up these proverbial walls to try and keep people out: to keep people from knowing what a mess I felt I was inside.

And then I met my husband.  Never before had I met someone who I felt to see into my very soul.  We communicated without talking and instantly seemed to know the other.  In three days I felt he knew me just as well as my closest friends.  And in this chaotic swirling mass of emotions and doubt that I was he saw me and he loved me.  So although I felt like I was falling, I felt like I had someone I could cling to and more importantly, someone strong enough to hold me up from hitting rock bottom.  We spent hours in each other’s arms and just the intimacy of holding one another, knowing the other was always there was a safety net I felt I had never known before.  After we were married I told him that my favorite place in the world to be was in his arms.  Five and half years later and that still remains the same.  In fact I believe it more strongly now. 

During our marriage my husband has had to spend a lot of time away due to jobs, training, and deployment.  In five years of marriage, I have lived with him for two and a half of it.  This separation has been trying and downright brutal.  While he is away I have stayed at our apartment or house, or traveled to be with family, but it isn’t home until he is here with us.  So when he puts his arms around me, I am home.

Memory from what I imagine was my moms point of view

Every time I walked through the boor with an arm full of groceries, the race started.  I put up the items I had purchased as fast as I could before my two little girls would scatter the entire grocery store all over my floor, leaving sacks, cans and boxes of food everywhere.  At least I didn’t have to worry as much about the eggs and bread.  They at least had learned that the paper bag of fragile groceries was off limits until I was done.  Putting everything up became an obstacle course as I tried not to trip on the stampeding kids rushing from bag to bag, maneuvering my way around cans so as to not slip and break my neck, all the while trying to keep an eye on the kids to make sure they didn’t find the need to try and stick one of the plastic bags over their head as they ran around.  I was lucky if I got anything in the right place at all as I navigated my way across so many distractions.  However, the ruckus was always worth it as I watched with pleasure the excitement they found in something that was such a mundane task for me.  I don’t really know what it was about the paper bag that they cherished, but to them it was the golden egg of the entire experience.  They would wait with eager anticipation for me to empty out the coveted paper bag and then proceed to beg me to place them in it.  They looked like little groundhogs, peeping their heads in and out of their dark hole, grinning at the world they saw.  Yes, there were usually fights about who got to play in the bag first, but the threat of losing their bag was enough to usually humble at least one of them.  It usually only took ten or fifteen minutes until the bag was beyond use for their active imagination, but it became a prized fifteen minutes of fun for all of us every week.

Monongahela

The trees are beginning to change color and it seems ironic to me that they seem the most alive while they are slowly dying.  I can’t help but wonder if as humans we are subjected to the same fate.  Do we live only when the fear of death is in our hearts or do we always radiate the beautiful golden hue of life and living in our everyday countenance?  I want to vibrate my color long before my dying breath of a wasted life.

June 1987

As soon as I saw her enter the house with her arms full of bags, I knew there was fun to be had.   She placed the bags on the kitchen floor and began unloading the groceries.  My sister and I would peek into the bags looking at the colorful boxes and asking what she had gotten for us.  We looked for our favorite cereals and drinks and smiling triumphantly if we found ourselves the victors of discovering a great prize.  Plastic bags covered the floor, but we waited for the coveted paper bags to be empties so that we could crawl into them and hide.  Usually there was only one paper bag to carry the bread and eggs, but if we were lucky there were two: one for each of us.  We were used to sharing though and since I was the youngest I usually got to go first.  I remember crawling around on the brown linoleum floor waiting until we were able to claim the bag as our own.   Although the process of getting into the bag seemed easy enough, I often had a hard time crawling in and would ask for my mom to put me in the bag.  The dim yellow lights of the kitchen vanished to darkness.  The smell of the thick brown paper enveloped me and I laughed with joy because I knew I was well hidden since I could no longer see anyone.  After a few second I would tire of the loneliness of my shelter and lift my head out over the rim to expose my eyes, making eye contact with either my sister or my mom before I retreated back into my hole like a prairie dog. Once my turn was up I would push myself forward, toppling the bag and rolling out onto the floor as I waited for my sister to play in a similar fashion.  If we were lucky, the bag would hold up through multiple turns, but usually once was all we got before our paper fortress was nothing more than brown paper.

Body Part

topic #2: pick a part on your body (inside or out) and describe it in great detail...we will see if we can guess the body part on each other's posts :)

No one ever seems to notice me, just part of a group.  When I am noticed I am usually criticized for being too long, crooked or chubby.  I may not seem important, but if you lost me, you would be thrown off balance.  I know; I know I am pretty small, but I am always trying to get your attention even if it means I have to throw myself out at inanimate object for you to feel me.   I may seem the runt, but I do my part.  Only a couple of people recognize me, usually it’s my companions who are adorned with rings.  People are always taking me for granted; mushing me in tight places that were too small to begin with. I bet you won’t even guess what body part I am because I am so overlooked.

First prompt: word poem

Tpoic: Grab the nearest book to you (not a children's book) and pick ten random words. Now write a poem using these words. Make sure and underline the random words

Punishing*

Overstepping*

Deviant*

Yielding*

Dimensional*

Coupling*

Crayons*

Cloistered*

Reverently*

Turmoil*

Love is multi-dimensional;

Yielding secrets of what we are composed of-

Reverently overstepping convention into ourselves.

To some it is deviant, punishing themselves unknowingly-

These few fester and sink in turmoil.

But beyond oneself is a coupling…a sundry of attributes,

emotions and experiences cloistered together waiting to be attained.

Crayons of color for our soul.

I wrote this last year while my husband was deployed to Afghanistan, but still hold sjust as true:

As a sixteen year old junior in high school I didn’t realize how one day would shape the rest of my life.  I didn’t know then that what had happened would become the life I was to be a part of.  I didn’t understand its true significance.  Like others who watched the planes fly into the New York Coty Trade Centers, I had a hard time processing what was going on.  Why were they saying we were under attack?  Who was attacking us?  Did this mean war?  Why were civilians targeted?  Why? Why? Why?

                Although it has been (ten) years I still remember everything about that day.  I remember getting the news about a plane hitting the tower before the first bell rang at 7:20 A.M.  I remember trying to do math as the TV remained on, but muted in the corner constantly drawing my attention as news bulletins and updated flashed across the screen and I remember the gasp and the deadly silence of the class when the second plane hit.  The bells still rang and my day went on, but classes didn’t. 

                Second hour Spanish class I was lucky enough to sit next to my best friend Zach.  My teacher said there was no way she could teach when our nation was in such a crises and the whole hour I remember Zach and I sat hand in hand as we watched the towers fall.  I cried; we all cried.  It was so sad to know the thousands who perished.  It hurt hearing people frantically calling into the news stations searching for their loved ones.  It hurt because the safety our nation had always felt had been destroyed within a couple of hours.

                Classes crept by and the halls were filled with people crying for people they knew in New York.  As word hit that another plane had hit the Pentagon there was no debating that this was indeed an attack.  Who would do this to us though?  Teachers tried to comfort us, but they were just as disoriented as the rest of us.  No one had answers and no one knew what to do.

                (Ten) years have elapsed and that tragic day has fallen from the minds of many.  What was so catastrophic and unexplainable had to many people become just another story for the text book.  On the anniversary the hero’s and fallen are remembered, but it is now talked about as if it had happened decades ago.  As if we were not still fighting the same war, the war my husband is now in Afghanistan fighting for.  I know (ten) years before I never realized how personally involved I would become in all of this.  How close this war would touch my heart.

(Ten) years later and I still don’t have any new answers, just new information as my husband writes, “I can’t help but question why we are here.  I know we are trying to help these people gain freedom and a better life, but they hate us.  They hate what we stand for.  They hate what we believe in…then I think of all the innocents that will ultimately be helped by us and I am ashamed for thinking of the easy way out.”  Nine years later and we still don’t know who is friend and who is foe as he continues in a different letter, “It is a land destitute of joy.  It’s a place of heat, pain, and sorrow.  The children are raised on lies of hatred and anger and the adults thrive off of death and terror.  We’ve come to this place to help build it up, to try and give these people a boost to live happier more fulfilling lives and they smile and give thanks and as soon as we start to walk away they continue to make instruments of our destruction.”

I never would have guessed that the sixteen year old girl watching these images would become the wife of a soldier who fought to protect my freedom.   Married to a man who fought to protect the countries freedom and to secure a safety we lost on September 11, 2001.  My husband is my hero and an honorable man because although he sometimes cannot see his contributions to a definite outcome, he believes in what he is doing, which is why he has pledges his life to the United States Army.  

This September 11^th is very different for me as I realized more acutely that there has been more blood spilt that just on that fateful day and a couple of weeks ago I feared my husband’s name would be added to the list of those who dies fighting for this cause when he was wounded.  As he says though, he still has “fight left and a work to do” and he excitedly returned to duty as soon as he recovered. 

I never would have imagined how long this war would last and how much it affects each and every one of us whether we realize it or not, so I beseech each of us to recognize the war that still goes on around us and to remember to give the reverence and respect for those who will never return home to their family because of terrorists.