Some people say the night is for sleeping,

that it’s important for your health,

but health of the body is only one thing.

Those people did not see me in high school,

when I stayed up late and talked to God.

Now I’m in college and I still stay up late

even though God isn’t here any more.

Or he is and I’m just distracted,

and I keep looking over at him, 

with his sorrowful eyes and I think,

‘Someday’.

And on that day, the world will be itself again.

The snow glided down the windshield, slowly making its way into a future that would have no past.

“This weather always reminds me of being a kid,” she said hummingly.  “When I was a kid it felt like things were a lot quieter.  People said less things.  But when you went outside you could hear everything.” 

“You don’t hear it anymore?”

She did not say anything but looked out the windshield at my beige garage door and the snow sailing silently and safely to the ground. 

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“I would rather stay out here.”

“Me too.”

We sat in the car and waited.  Or at least now I see that I was waiting.  It wasn’t that it was cold, or that I was hungry, or that I only knew her so well, but I remember at some point I took off my seatbelt.

But I think she buried herself there; I left my coffin slightly open.

“Do you think we’ll ever be old?” I asked after awhile.

“No.” 

The evening grew around us until the snow was blue.  I could feel myself breathing and she looked very pale and just the faintest moisture in her chasmic eyes and the way she clinched her lips let me know she was alive.  I felt unsafe around her, in a good way.

“How did I find you?” she said.

I looked over at her.

“I mean, it seems like the same things happen everywhere.  People fall in love, get hungry, eat together, laugh together.  It’s all the same everywhere.  I wonder if we’re any different, or if we’re just like everybody else, doing the same things, we just have different names.”

“I don’t know.”

It was very cold so she turned on the car.  It shook gently beneath us and I could feel how cold my thighs were as they thrummed.  We listened to the radio for a few minutes but then we turned it off.

“What song is in your head?” I asked.

“Usually a sad one.”

It was dark and we had been in the car for hours.  The snow now liquified as it hit her windshield and I knew that I should go inside.  She said it was great that I came out with them, and I said thanks for the ride home.  Her headlights were pulling out into the street as I went inside and closed the door. 

Years later I saw that girl in a mall and I thought back to that winter, but that had been a long time ago.

I find every conversation, every time I’m with someone, to be a very meaningful experience. There is something so deep about it.

When you watch a movie and you see an early scene, it doesn’t really mean much. But as the characters go to scene after scene you see them stretching and taking flight from that earlier scene, and on and on it grows into something complex and beautiful. By the end that earlier scene seems to have had so much waiting in it, so many hopes and dreams latent in it.

You can keep your past constant or change it based on what you do in the present. When you walk the same way to work again today, you are keeping your past self constant that says ‘I always walk the same way to work’. If you move cities for the first time, you start to see your past life as one that had been waiting to move, that wasn’t settled down in a given spot. You suddenly realize the arc your life had all along, based on what you’re doing.

You can’t tell people about your past, because you don’t even know it yet.

‘Your life is what you try to do’ I told myself as I walked around the first floor of my house. I called Starbucks and they were open until 10:30. I went upstairs and asked my mom if she wanted to get some coffee. We never go out for coffee.

It was dark overhead as we walked out after it closed, but there was a commercial glow from the buildings all around us. The humming of the highway echoed in the distance. My mom sees this as the place where she moved to, I see it as the place where I came from. This road of businesses is the one we all would come to in high school, when we had no idea what was waiting for us out in the world. As I got in the car I felt sad that there were so many lights.

I was in a thrift store looking at books earlier in the day. It’s just nice to see a book and know you’ll never read it. One book was about the war in Iraq and how the military had made a mess of everything. But it was written years ago, and so much has happened in Iraq since then. That made me think about stories, and how it is up to humans when to start and stop them. Did it make sense to stop the story then? When you think about it, doesn’t it seem like there are an infinite amount of stories?

We think of ourselves as different people than we actually are. What you want to do is not the same thing as what you are willing to do. The only things you know you’re actually willing to do are the things that you do. Every other thing you think of doing might just be a part of who you imagine yourself to be, and have nothing to do with who you actually are.

I lose track of things, in my head. I know I’m not remembering much from these days. There are moments, hidden pockets lost in time, when God breaks my heart and I see how little everything matters next to him and his children. The rest of the time my head is in the world, and I can’t see much at all.

All of these things build up into each moment you experience. When you are with someone it connects to their future and their past, to all the stories that are going on with them, in subtle and undetectable ways. To be with someone shows you are willing to say ‘yes’ to their presence. Then as you talk every thing you say changes things a little bit from the way they were before. This overwhelming reality floods every moment and all I can think is ‘wow’ when I’m with someone. It is a deep moment that connects in uncountable ways to everything else there is.

But we pretend none of this is going on, that things don’t have that much importance, that it’s not crazy that there’s this huge complicated physical reality of houses and trees and stars and people. We pretend in order to numb ourselves, so that we can keep going without the emotion of shock blocking everything else out; but still, this emotion, ever potent, ever present, locks itself deep into the heart of things.

I saw a man I thought I knew
I ran after him for a brand new life
But the train passed behind me
And I had missed it.

I know if something’s too heavy
It wasn’t meant for me to lift
But I don’t know it’s too heavy
Until I try to lift it.

Now I think I’m lost.
And I’m all alone.
And that’s when I cry, Lord,
please take me home!

The mystical flutterings of the leaves silenced every other noise, left the forest and found the open air like birds who thought there might be better places in the world.  Inside the forest you couldn’t tell from the tangled branches where one tree stopped and the next one started. 

Flynn huffed and puffed like he did when he was forced to run in gym but this time it was Tilda and her ‘Come on!’ but it was all the same to him.  Her sneakers were red but his were black and bright green.

“I don’t know why we have to run,” he said when he got there.  But Tilda didn’t hear him and she took slow steps as she looked around.  Sunlight made her feel like her face was swimming as she walked through it but Flynn just felt sticky.

“I wonder what kind of trees these are.”

“I don’t know,” Flynn said.

“Well, duh. How would anyone know?”

They walked to the big rock that they usually went to with the other kids to tell ghost stories when their parents thought they were in the basement sleeping and most everyone ended up crying, even the boys who said they weren’t afraid. 

Flynn climbed the rock very fast like there was a glowing prize at the top, but Tilda was very slow because she was afraid at small rocks just as much as the mountains.  When they got to the top they sat next to each other and the leaves didn’t rustle, but birds called each other in the distance but they didn’t hear that because it was all too much.

Tilda put her hands to her eyes and began sobbing and her tears wetted the ends of her fingers.  Flynn looked over and was as frightened as Tilda was when she thought about the mountains.

“I miss Tandy so much.”

“Who is Tandy?”

“It was our dog.  He died.”

Flynn didn’t know what to say so he put his arm around her and she cried and cried.  In the years to come he would learn to try to talk to the crying person because he didn’t know that it’s only the arm that ever does any good. 

But arms don’t do any good either because arms are not a dog.

“Today my mom was talking on the phone.”  Tilda’s face was still shiny but she was only sniffling as her thoughts slowed down.  “She was mad.  They are going to add some pews to the back of the church.  She was talking to Susan’s mom about it.”

“Why don’t they want to add more pews?”

“I don’t know.” 

Tilda was pulling on her fingers and feeling her joints.  Flynn looked down at her hands but her red sneakers and doughy fingers and yellow dress were blurry and he asked,

“Do you want to be anybody?”

“What do you mean?”  Her eyebrows tightened.  She liked talking to Flynn.

“Well, I heard Ruthie say she wants to be a nurse.  Some others were talking about it.  They all had ideas.  And it’s true, I guess,” Flynn added from deep within his thoughts. “We’re not anybody.  Not yet.”

Tilda’s thoughts wandered to movies and other kids’ parents in their kitchens and her teachers and fire engines rushing down the street and she looked over at Flynn and he was tapping his feet as they dangled off the rock. 

“I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“I don’t think I want to be anybody.”

Flynn was a year younger than Tilda and was not supposed to be hanging out with her because if her friends knew about it then she would have to choose.  He didn’t think she would pick him, but he was happy it hadn’t happened yet.

“Well you kind of have to.”

“No. Let’s just stay here.”

“On this rock?”

“We’ll just stay here and not be anybody.”

Flynn thought about this for awhile and no one said anything and everything settled into a listless memory gone by high school. 

“Promise you’ll stay here with me.”

Flynn looked at her freckles and the gaps between her blond tendrils and the woods surrounding them to a point, the point of ignorance of the trees and pews and dead dogs but a knowledge that they were there together.

“Ok. I promise.”

The evening grew cool and the sky turned blue-grey and Tilda shivered as the stars poked their heads out from their covers. Flynn looked up at them and remembered his room where he usually looked at the stars through his window and he smiled because he liked this better and this is where he would be looking at them forever. 

A few blocks away the concrete porches scraped with the ankles of hustling parents leaving their doorsteps and hurrying out into the night.

This week has made me feel very strange.  I don’t think it’s been a strange week. It’s the sort of feeling you would get looking at an enormous bed, the kind enclosed by draperies in an aristocratic bedroom, while the room is tranquil, sunlight filtering in through the window, the idea nudging you that there is some subtle story at work and one of the scenes is before you.

I got a ticket for expired tags while I was at a parking meter.  I had been really excited that someone left 49 minutes on the meter, but I had forgotten about my tags.  Second year in a row that they got me.  Well, that I got me.

I was coerced into volunteering a blood sample, for my mother.  I know, it’s weird.  I rolled out of bed and drove myself to the little waiting room where I signed in but there was no receptionist and no one took notice of me for some time.  I was still wearing my clothes from the night before, when I had gone to church.  When they called me back I gave them the order form, but the doctor – an older woman who seemed to have an eastern European accent of some kind, calling me ‘Mr. Pilip’ – asked for a photo ID.  I didn’t have one, I realized, but I still had my nametag on from church that said ‘Phil’.  I mentioned this but the doctor’s and her assistants’ only reply was to stare at me.  Thus I said ‘I’ll go look in my car’ but when I couldn’t find one the doctor said ‘Well, you have your nametag from church.’ 

Tuesday night we discussed the existence of God at church and there was a girl named Rita who asked me why there are people with autism.  People with autism struggle with relationships, and if the purpose of life is relationship with God, how does that make sense? 

Later that night my housemate Amanda and I walked in the rain down to the river, and when we got to the bridge a lightning bolt cut the sky in half.

Wednesday morning I was running late for work and decided I was stupid enough to try to bike there as fast as I could.  A car was rolling through a stop sign at the intersection I was headed for, so I hit my breaks and catapulted off my bike onto the pavement in the middle of the intersection.  The guy got out and said sorry, but by that time I had already picked up my glasses and gotten back on my bike.  But it wasn’t enough: I was one minute late.

In the comments section of the write-up I wrote ‘A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.’

My hands and knees hurt all day.

It was rainy on Monday, too: Alex and I lounged on Stephanie’s balcony and talked about Tender Is The Night.  Alex likes it for its breadth, while I like Gatsby because it’s conceptual rather than autobiographical.

I have been in a daze from last weekend, when I slept tremendously to try to ward of the stress of everything.  I started talking differently too, I think.  I used to say too much, and there would be irresolution from how many things were said.  I’ve been more succinct, letting things be instead of becoming discursive.  There’s still irresolution because people have to read into what you say, and they’re usually a little off.  I suppose there’s always irresolution to conversation; how do find the perfect amount of words, just the thing to say?

There always seems more and less to say. 

It’s the month of May, and there is a lot that is going on.  Naps will be key.

Our abstract beliefs often do not correctly translate into our experiences. We either do not understand the content of a belief, or we have wrongly predicted that we do in fact have the belief.

In other words, there is often a divide between some belief you say you have, and a situation in which that belief seems it would lead you to do some particular action you don’t end up doing.

It’s like when mom said that dad’s girlfriend had been away, and he started sitting at lunch with her. Then when his girlfriend came back, he still walked with mom down to the lunch area and introduced her to his girlfriend. He did that instead of shrinking back from the situation. Since he liked mom, that showed that what he did was in harmony with his beliefs. What he believed meant something.

I often feel like this with respect to the truth; in fact, I have since high school. I’ve thought: I’ll do anything for the truth. I want the truth so bad, it seems to matter far above anything else, I clearly want it, give it to me!

But: how do you live? Life has a double meaning. We not only do particular actions, like drink orange juice, go home for Christmas, buy a wrench from the store – we do larger things with our lives. We choose, in the long term, whether or not we will be an apologizer, or we will persevere, or we will be a good father. These things are not choices where we can just say ‘I will be a good father’ or ‘I want to be a good father’. Being a good father actually looks like something, and it’s by doing all those actual things that you end up being a good father. Beliefs mean things, and sometimes we’re wrong about what they mean, or we think we believe them, but when it comes to actually doing what those beliefs mean we should do, we don’t do them, even though we said we believed the belief.

What you will do with your life is different than what you believe you will do with your life. Life has to actually be lived: you will choose who to be. You have not yet chosen; in this moment, you have chosen a little more, but only time will unravel your complete answer. Your answer of what you actually believe.

Kierkegaard thought he lived in a country where everyone thought they were Christians, but no one actually was.  If you want to find out what you believe, check your life, not your head.

Maybe it’s completely unimportant to have a pang of hunger for truth at one moment in particular; maybe a life full of honoring truth is all that would matter.  That’s why when people ask for God to strike them down, or for him to reveal himself definitively, nothing happens.  God is interested in more than just your feeling in one moment.  He asks us: would you follow me if it was difficult, if you found me slowly, like a film where objects gradually grew colored?  God created the whole universe and gave you your whole life to get to you; how far would you go to get to him?  More than a moment of shouting ‘Show yourself’?

So this is the intimate connection between our beliefs, our self-conception, the meaning of concepts, long-term actions, and life.