Reincarnation on the Train to Prague

We trekked to the middle of nowhere, wine in tow, to the small white farmhouse set amongst the green hills. Dusk was beginning to approach, and the wayward travelers were in need of food and drink. Dinner consisted of vegetables from the garden out back. We cooked them in oil and talked politics as he peppered them. Glasses of wine lay scattered about, only to be forgotten, and remembered, and forgotten again. The kitchen caught the last light of the day through the open windows while the scent and steam radiated from within.

My professor and her husband are gone traveling, and we have the farmhouse to ourselves. He is an artist, and the big red barn is full of chalks and paints and oils. Dirty rags adorn the walls, themselves full of mistaken brushstrokes. It creates an art caught unaware of its own rugged appeal. The barn’s immense white ceiling allows for the occasional sun beam to stream in through her expansive windows, shining down on the faces and sinews of his paintings. I run my palms across the canvases, allowing the clumps of paint to leave dimples in the rivets of my fingerprints. It occurs to me that I have done this whenever possible. Walking through the art building on campus, late at night I loved the way the waves of paint washed up against my skin. It is a familiar feeling, one I have missed immensely these past few years. I wonder how many pieces I've touched, and what my hands would look like if the indentations they left on my fingers were permanent. A physical wisdom to remind me of the things that I have seen.

We ate on the porch as the wind rustled the wine in our glasses. We picked blueberries and raspberries for dessert, topped them with chocolate, and became content with ourselves. We talked about faith and the journey it takes to find it. He talked of trips to New York and about getting lost along the way. I told stories of hot chocolate mornings and palaces in Spain. One of us is getting married tomorrow, and this seems like the perfect beginning for that journey.

Someone brings out their guitar when it gets too dim for us to see one another. Music always has a greater brilliance in the dark. You can faintly make out a set of white teeth hiding underneath contented smiles as we all drift away with the music. The summer night lulls us into oblivion as only summer nights can; disconnecting us from our busy lives. Some of us are reminded of summers that were spent playing nothing but baseball. Another is reminded of family vacations lived from tents and forests. Across from me he sits thinking about when his mother took him to the farmer’s market on early Saturday mornings, recalling the way the flowers were so bright in the morning air. I remember watching the fireworks from the window of his second story, the panes wide and arching above the lit up sky. He perched next to me, playing slow soft notes on the trumpet. The summers have become collections to us, too precious to part with. This moment is strung next to so many others on the beads we wear around our necks.

The music fades softly into the night, as do our cares and fears. The glasses of wine are once more forgotten somewhere on one of the many book scattered tables. Much like ourselves for this brief moment in time.  

Out of it all, the last 5 years, I remember the tulips. The red tulips. I don't remember which house they were in front of, but it consisted of brick and mortar. I remember making wine and enjoying it during spring nights underneath stars that will outlive me. I remember coming up for air in the rain, and wondering what it was I felt when warm rain hit my skin for the very first time. I can't remember all of the moments that make up the firsts, but some of them count more than others. I remember riding on a Subway and thinking of all the people that had ridden before and after me. I remember the nook in the corner of a roof of a gray house where I smoked cloves during summer evenings. I remember falling in love for eternity with something pure and simple. I remember sleepless nights full of paint and charcoal accompanied candles to soften the blow of 2am. I remember open windows and summer winds, and the face of the sunset staring back at me. I remember what I looked like as a child. I know what I look like now. I can't comprehend what I will look like tomorrow. I remember friends that I have lost touch with, and those that still remain. I remember the details of every lovers' hipbone. I remember that once I lived off of the marrow of ideology. I live now from the precipice of time granted to me. Tonight, as the rain comes softly down, and the sun falls from her trapeze, I know it's enough for me.

My Grandmother's Marigolds

Every year it was the sense of consistency that met you on the doorstep.The familiar smell of the plump golden flowers always reminded me where I was, and where I had come home to. They where laid out in their neat little rows, respectful of each other's stem space, and bowing to the winds with a sense of graceful divinity. It was these flowers that witnessed many a scraped knee when I was younger, and kissed the bottoms of my feet as I got old enough to jump over them. They lined the walkway to my grandmother's house, offering a welcoming golden solace to all who walked beside them.

I remember when I was small, and she taught me the science of seeds. It was a lesson that I came to remember years later while sitting inside a stuffy botany lab. Her's explained the grace of the stem, the way it balked under the rains that nourished it. When the rains gave way the oblong seeds would scatter. She explained that when you collected them up, you could sow them alongside the flowers of old. They would take them into their soil and raise them up every year to be the generation of flowers for the summer to come.

"What would happen to the old ones?" I asked.

"Well, they have grown up and grown old. They will achieve what they were supposed to. They will enrich the soil for the next to come."

In the botany lab that wouldn't have been the answer needed to pass the exams, but it's still the one I remember four years and two majors later. And it's the one I prefer.

I came in while she slept yesterday, surrounded by tubes and breathing machines and nurses. There were no doctors there, because there were no hopes of getting well. And there were no marigolds. There never were marigolds by November, but only the slight stalk of something already gone. She wasn't quite awake yet. It took her a while to begin speaking, and even then things were jumbled. She spoke of feeling like a child. Like there was nothing left to worry about. She was comfortable and content. She spoke of my grandfather, and the look on his face as they told him he was dying. She said that you never know how it feels until you are truly there.

She passed away today. No one was there. I was there yesterday. But yesterday isn't today, and it doesn't change things.

Her marigolds are gone. I checked before I left the house. I can't remember what they looked like the last time they bloomed. Instead I remember her and my grandfather, standing right beside the yellow row as they waved goodbye every single time we drove off.

I hope I will remember the important things. I suppose if it takes a golden flower to remind me of those, then I will take it.

"i resist because the god i am seeking, the god i am slowly finding, does not live in that christian bubble. he does not dwell among the pretty scripture quotations and the 'be thankful in everythings' and the pat answers that bring nothing but guilt and shame and confusion. rather he lives in every 'why?' i ask, in every moment i am afraid, in every part of my heart that dares to be honest."

"whenever you try to regulate godliness you come up with something a lot less than god. you end up with a sanitized version of half-truths. it looks shiny and it sparkles, but underneath and inside it is decaying and rotting away...it's just that they were usually too busy worrying about the parts that showed, the parts that other people saw, the exposed parts that defined them to the rest of the world. they couldn't bear to look at what really mattered. and it caused them to miss what was really broken." ~renee altson

   The closest I ever came to god was on a mountain in Spain. I was living with a host family for a duration of the summer, in a little town off the beaten path of most tourist hotspots. The family, quite the mirror image of a typical nuclear American family, wanted to do everything they could to ensure that my stay and my visit would be as enjoyable and as educational as possible.

   My father was a big man who loved wine almost as much as a piece of cork, and soaked it up just as fast. He loved his family and was always looking for exciting adventures amongst the ordinary. He was a big man, broad shouldered and tall, much resembling a wine keg himself. His cheeks would redden with the thought of danger and daring.

   My mother was a prim and proper woman. She wore sweaters around her shoulders when the weather permitted, and made sure that she always had something "american" for me to eat. By American, she thought that we ate cereal sans milk, but instead with hot chocolate. I ate many a Spanish cocoa puff with hot chocolate, simply to avoid telling them that this was definitely not what we eat for breakfast. I probably wasn't a very good cultural representative, as they now think that all Americans eat a dangeroulsy high glucose overloaded breakfast to start out the morning. I should have just told them that really the same effect comes from the explosion of double latte's running through our American veins.

   My sister was the same age as me. She liked to do the same things as I did. She liked movies and music and friends and writing. She also like to hang out with her boyfriend. A lot. She liked especially to hang out with him while we were drunk off of Spanish fruity concoctions downtown, leaving me at times in a city where I spoke poor English and didn't know my own address. It was during her lovers trysts that I was left in the presence of a little wiry man who looked curiously like Balki Bartokomus from the sitcom Perfect Strangers, and needless to say precocious in his advances.

   It was with these three individuals that I met god on the top of that mountain.

   The events leading up to my departure for Spanish lands hadn't been the best to leave on. The relationship I had been in for three years had landed itself in unfamiliar territory a week before my plane did, and my heart had been broken. My mother suggested that my trip, a year in the making, could bring me the peace and solitude that home could not offer me. I was thinking that being alone, with no friends and a host family that I couldn't communicate with would offer me anything but.

   I waited out the trip trying to concentrate on my speaking skills, trying to bring about the peace that everyone talks so much about but which I really in my heart of hearts did not beleive existed. There were people to meet and new things to see and do, but in the middle of it all was a sense of loss and mis-belonging. Not all of it revolved around a relationship, some of it was the divorce of my parents and the uncertainty that brought me.

   But apparently, it brought me to this mountain. In Spain. And it was exactly what I needed. It was one of the last days during my trip that my host father suggested a trip to the mountains. 

   "To do some camping, yes?" he offered in his Englishly-eager way. "You like to camp, yes?" It was with excited nods and red cheeks he met my answer that, yes, I like to camp.

    "Good. We leave tomorrow, yes, at 4 am."

   I had changed my mind. I needed sleep.

   The next morning, with the car packed and the sleepy travelers loaded in, we left. Loading the car up, I had noticed that we hadn't packed sleeping bags, pillows, tents, or firewood. What kind of camping trip could this be?

   As it turns out the Spanish term for camping really means a day trip. So with our tired eyes and our worn bodies, my sister and I climbed into the backseat of a tiny vehicle. My father squeezed his way into the front, and my mother daintily placed herself beside him in the passenger seat. With that, we were off. We weren't sleepy for long, as it was evident that my father was going to kill us driving through the winding treacherous roads of those Spanish majesties. The narrow drive was not shielded from a deep decline full of trees and boulders and rivers, and other cars that had met the same fate I feared from the backseat. With every slide around the belly of the mountain, as we ascended to her crown, I became convinced that I would never make it back down the way I had come up. My father, of course, drove with complete jubilation. He assured me that everyone drove like this here, and that he knew these areas like the back of his hand; that many people had been killed because they lacked those certain skills needed to maneuver her. Though, for the level of my Spanish, I only heard the words "fast" and "careful" and "death". Not very reassuring.

   We drove like this for some time. Ascention, whip, swish. Descention, whip, swish. The mountains continued, and just when I hoped we had conquered them all and I had survived, another one would rise up in front of us, beckoning my father to challenge her curves. My father hugged her like a woman.

   We stopped for lunch, and I leaped out of the car glad to be free of the hot air and the tight spaces that didn't allow my limbs breath. We had pulled over at a cabin next to the side of the road. My father started a fire right away, and my mother started arranging the food along a carved and lover riddled picnic table. It seemed as if they had been here many times before. My sister knew exactly where the path to the river was, and where we could pee in the woods without being bitten by mysterious creatures. My interest was kept with the cabin. It was evident upon further inspection, that the entire inside had been burned out in a fire. There was no longer a door nor windows, and nothing remained besides the walls and a few scattered parts of the roof. The only thing that indicated a slightly human nature about it was the fact that her guts resembled that of the picnic table outside. There were lovers names, and poems, and "was here's" placed along the walls, sliced into the soot. Though her outside was decaying, her inside still resembled hope in all of the futures that remained with her long after her visitors had left. I read the whole time that my family cooked dinner. It was as if they knew that this time was for me as they talked quietly outside the cabin. I needed that more than anything.

   I traced my fingers over the names, and the dates, and wondered about the stories that accompanied them. I suddenly became small but solid amidst all of the world that had come before me. Always before it had been a feeling of insignificance; like the things that I would do would ultimately not matter, and that the things that I would accomplish would be short-lived in the grand scheme of things. But this feeling, this feeling of little old me on top of a mountain somewhere in Spain thousands of miles from everything I had ever known finally given me the solace I was looking for.

   The drive home brought beams of sun that dripped through the mountains' ribs. We all were tired, including my father who decided that the drive home could be taken a little slower. My eyes were met with the beautiful countryside of amber and emerald on top of which I resided. God became a peace in my heart. Not a man or a story or a power or a savior, but a simple solitude that came to me in the form of a mountaintop, dripping sunlight, and an effervescent sense of perspective.