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.
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