Oh, The Places You'll Go

     It's June 5th, 2013. Eight o'clock in the evening and I'm watching the Weather Channel. I'm wearing a shirt that doesn't belong to me and American flag shorts. Really good chicken and waffles rests happily in my stomach, all warm and cozy. It's raining outside, but I don't mind so much.
     I've been home for a month. I guess that means I'm a Sophomore in college (I just had to use spell check to figure out how to spell sophomore, though). I don't feel any different. Not older, not wiser, and not anything like I thought I would feel at this point of my life. Honestly, I haven't even thought seriously about my life and where it is going in awhile until this past Friday at Tribe graduation. That was me last year. That was me, all shining and new with hopes and dreams of falling deeply in love with Jesus and traveling the country and writing poems and living my life as an adventure. A life that people write stories about. I still have hopes of that. I want my life to be extraordinary. I want to point potheads and hippies and emo kids to the light and teach them how to sail straight. I want to be stitched to the man that has hiked along the stalactites of my mind and decided to stay. I want to have kids that have his eyes and my lips and teach them logic and philosophy and how to hear the voice of the Lord.
     I've always said it takes certain levels of stability and awareness to keep a journal, write free verse poetry, and paint, and I've been painting a lot these days. I haven't been able to form words lately. I don't know if I've been thinking too hard or not at all, you know. When you lay on your bed, hands on stomach, feeling your heart beat through your skin, do you forget to breathe? You can't. Not really. But it's like when you look in the mirror and pick apart every feature until your face is no longer a face. It's like that. Breathing no longer makes sense. The rise of your chest and pushing air out your nose no longer seems adequate enough to keep your soul tied down. I don't know what I'm saying anymore.
     All I know with certainty is you have to surround yourself with what you want to become or you become what you don't. I wish I would have realized the truth of that before now. It's not a cliché. Read a lot of John Green and Donald Miller and listen to Levi The Poet and La Dispute. Write down every chaotic thought. Talk to Jesus. Throw paint on canvas. Make your days count.
     I think I'll spend the rest of my life wondering what I could've been if I hadn't wandered as I so often do. I'm still wandering, but I know one of these days I'm going to make it back to California. Don Miller said in Through Painted Deserts that everyone has to leave their home before they can love it again for all the right reasons. I guess I have three years.
     It's June 5th, 10:05 pm. I'm sitting Indian-style at my desk, listening to LTP screaming about how anti-depressants used to scare him. I'm exhausted, and I feel more confused than ever. I'm going to bed.
    

Bleeding Heart Sinner

     I've been listening to a lot of real music recently. Weird music that a lot of people probably wouldn't even consider music. I mean, I always have, but I guess the words mean something more to me these days. After class, I like to come back to my dorm and listen to Levi The Poet. I lay on my bed with all the lights off, my head at the foot of the mattress so the sun streaming in through the blinds can turn my eyelids red. Levi talks about God and what it means to be human and how he's not always happy. Levi understands.
     Sometimes, I wonder what I would be like if I had never come to school here. If I had gone home after church that night instead. If I had never let myself love him.
     Something I don't understand among the seven thousand and five I don't is how fast your stitches you thought were healed get ripped out. They lied, all of them, and time heals nothing.
     It seems I struggle with everything anyone could struggle with just so my heart can be broken before the Lord. My friends from the International House Of Prayer side call it the heart of an intercessor. I'm probably just depressed. Tell me about the week you stopped praying. I wonder what it feels like to start again. I don't judge people anymore, though. When I am the biggest hypocrite of them all, how could I? People don't talk about it. They don't like the sound of it loud in their mouths, so they whisper about how it ruins marriages. But look around, it doesn't look like most of us are married and I'm not married. So, tell me why I spend a good hour everyday washing away the shame guilt and filth that clings to me.
     And even here, in this place that promises everyone has a place, I'm the only one. They all tell me to make jokes and I'll make friends, but I'm not looking for those kinds of friends. Because I don't think they'll sit with me when I stop washing my hair and painting my eyes black, when I live running and downing gallons of sea water and sleeping under the covers until I can feel my feet again. Ha. They'd probably think that was weird. What I wouldn't give to be back home, to the place I was always running from, with the people that know my name and don't care that I don't always talk.
     Everyone but me is looking for someone perfect, and Lord knows everyone is perfect but me. That explains a lot, actually. But I decided I didn't hate it here anymore when this boy that didn't talk talked to me. He always wore grey shirts and blue shirts that reflected his glances back at me. I could sigh all day about how his curls and waves stick to the back of his head because he'd rather sleep than stand under a faucet and I don't blame him. I don't remember deciding I loved him, but I did, and I decided he could love me. I've come to find my fatal flaw is loving too easily and setting my heart free when all it ever does is nosedive eventually. I never learn.
     I really love Anne of Green Gables. I think she's beautiful, and she never let her fire be choked out like I have. When your friends don't understand how a boy with curly red hair and a crooked nose could be beautiful, you start to forget, yourself. Do you know those weeds that grow in clusters by ditches in the summer? The ones with the purple flute buds? I used to believe they were flowers. I would gather them up into a bouquet for my mother, and she would fill up a juice glass full of water for them and place it by the kitchen sink. Even now, I sometimes forget they're not flowers. Someday, I hope my own daughter brings me handfuls of colourful weeds to place in water glasses beside the kitchen sink because there is something indubitably beautiful about loving a flower that everyone else deems a weed. I'm holding on to the hope that someone could love this dandelion.
     
    

Shout Transparency

    
     This is not what I had planned my blog post to be about. I wanted it to be cool and insightful and refreshing and bright. But let's be honest, we all know that's not me. Especially not today. You've been warned. And with that being said, welcome into my head...
      I was six minutes late to Math class this morning and the door was locked when I got there and I was sure Ms. Parker had XF'd me like she'd warned if I was late again. But I knocked until she let me in, so, cool. I think we learned how to change fractions to percents to decimals and back to fractions again, but I don't remember because I never took my medicine this morning. I need to go to the Math Lab.
     I cried all the way across campus to the art building because how do you tell someone you love them when you're never going to see them again and they don't even seem to care? Yeah, I don't know either.
     I bought a large iced coffee at Einstein's and forgot to put ice in it.
     My Russian Digital Imagery professor continued to teach us how to use InDesign. For our final project, we have to design and create a book. I still don't know how to properly use the pen tool. 45 minutes into the class, I had probably consumed 30 ounces of my room temperature coffee and I'm pretty sure the guy that uses the Mac beside me thought I was possessed by a demon, I was so jumpy. I didn't understand anything she told us. I ran back to my room as soon as I could and passed out asleep somehow despite the caffeine that was positively thumping through my body.
      I've been curled up in my bed for the last four hours with all the lights off. That is, until a second ago when I got up to nibble on gluten free cereal that tastes like the insides of a Quaker oatmeal package. I made myself a cup of tea with the loose mate I bought for $18 on sale (regularly $79) at this super fancy tea shop over Christmas break. I brewed it too weak, so it now sits on my desk, failing to fulfill it's destiny of bringing momentary warmth to my body just because it tastes like microwaved water.
     It's been one of those days that make you question your very existence and where you belong and if anything is ever going to improve. Sometimes I wonder why I am this way. I mean, up until a few weeks ago when Anna and I had a conversation, I believed this was a relatively normal way to feel. Apparently, it's not. She was horrified when I shared with her the barbed wire insides of my head. I still don't understand how someone can't not feel this way about themselves. It doesn't make sense to me. But before some of you start freaking out hardcore about me, I'd like to quote Stephen Chbosky because he's brilliant and he understands: "So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be."
     I know most of you that are reading this are thinking Wow, Melia must be a complete psycho, and that's okay. I know this post wasn't what you were probably expecting, but I will never apologize for being transparent because, contrary to popular belief, it is okay to not be okay all the time. I don't know when we started lying to ourselves that the only social acceptable answer to How are you today? is I'm good, how are you? I mean, come on, I can't count how many times I've heard someone ask the family at a funeral how they were doing, and they said they were fine. Bull. Your father/mother/brother/sister/husband/wife is laying in a casket and you are never going to see them again. You are not fine.
     When are we going to start giving ourselves permission to feel?
    

Pleased To Meet You

     Let's just skip over the awkward and unnecessary small talk, okay? All you need to know about me, in no particular order, is this: 

•  My name is Melia, but I will respond to Malaria if you scream it across campus or the caf.  
• I am an Interdisciplinary Studies major at North Greenville University, and my concentrations are (for the moment) English and Studio Art.
• I sometimes work at Walgreens.
• I am an INFJ (http://www.personalitypage.com/INFJ.html Just read this. I promise, my weirdness should make much more sense to you afterwards).
• I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, was homeschooled from the age of five until I graduated, and I now attend a private Southern Baptist university. My biggest accomplishment is if you were to meet me for the first time and didn't know anything about me, you wouldn't be able to tell.
• I write poetry, namely free verse and spoken word. I also paint. And by paint, I mean I brush various shades of blue on a canvas and modge podge book pages over it and call it art.
• The Lord has called me to be a missionary to the land of hippies and emo kids. After I graduate university, I plan to travel with YWAM which will include DTS and learning about the crazy mysteries of the Holy Spirit and not earning money to pay back my student loans (cue nervous laughter).
• I enjoy all things coconut, mango, and anything with mint and chocolate mixed together.
• I still use Internet Explorer because I'm too lazy to download Google Chrome. Judge me.
• I have AD/HD, and I am coming to realize it affects every part of my life. But it's okay, I enjoy having something merited to blame everything on.
• I currently have about three weeks remaining of a year long Nazirite Vow/Consecration.
• I am somewhat allergic to gluten, but I still sometimes eat bread because life without bread is not a life worth living.
• I wear sweaters that used to belong to old men and shoes that smell and no longer function as proper shoes, but I still wear them.

     Okay, I think that's enough for now, but be on the lookout for my next (actually serious) post. Peace out, boy scouts.

     Melia Quinn