The light in our study was the only light on in our house as well as in the entire neighborhood.  I couldn’t find all the chemistry symbols I needed for my paper and when I did find them I couldn’t get them to format correctly.  For several hours the only sound in the house was the tapping of the keys above the steady hum of the refrigerator.  Outside the pencil thin moon was white but its glow was completely within itself so that when a light shone through the study blinds I knew it was her car in the driveway. 

The hood of my sweatshirt flopped as I jumped down the concrete steps to our house and she must have seen me as a lunging silhouette against the porch light.  My silhouette got larger until it was by her driver window and I stood still for a few moments until she rolled it down and looked up at me, her face obscured by my shadow. 

‘Let’s take my car.’

Her shoulder jolted as she cranked the window upward.  A second later her engine died.  She got out of her car and dropped her keys in the pocket of her puffy jacket with the fur-lined hood.  She gaited around the back of my Nissan Altima and her door thumped closed as I started the car.  She flattened her hands one against the other and notched them in-between her knees and looked straight ahead as I backed out of the driveway.

A car or two passed us in the roads lined with neighborhood inlets.  The night sky was dim and far away above the city’s tree lines, like a snow globe that was almost out of uses, but by the time we were surrounded by wheat fields and the stars were brighter the blackness in the sky had hollowed itself out like a yawning whale and we knew we could never get closer to it by driving. 

The pavement was fresher out where the farmers clung to their ancient lands.  Music played quietly beneath my car’s natural thrum.  The only light below the sky were the frozen headlight shapes groping along the country road before us and the neon green light of the dashboard and radio and clock that glowed against her cheeks and nose.  Next to us the wheat fields were silent and anonymous.  Beyond the sleeping seas of wheat stalks were rows of trees that hemmed in our view of the world.  On the other side of the trees were buildings where our parents would wake up and go to work and scientists who knew how to measure everything and bodies of water too big to fit into a thought and even farther away from us than the stars were politicians sleeping in halls of grandeur and orphans who died in the streets.   

Sometimes she looked out the window and sometimes she looked straight ahead but it did not feel like she looked at me.  Stop signs were infrequent and at first I stopped at them briefly but soon I stopped at them and stood the car before moving on, like we might turn, or like we were waiting for an invisible train to cross in front of us.  The wheat fields eventually gave way to split-rail fences lining open fields but we didn’t see anything alive in them.  After awhile of the sloping fields undulating on either side of us I turned off the music and we drove in silence for a long time after that.

We stopped at a small church that sat right by the road and I parked in the lot right in front of the cemetery.  I turned off the car after a few minutes and we listened to its metallic cackling from inside of it.  She opened her door and got out and I did too.  I joined her at the fence which she stood in front of but did not touch with her neck bevelled toward the sky.  We gazed at Alpha Centauri but we didn’t know it was called that and it didn’t know it either.  I don’t know how long we stood there for.  At some point she stared ahead at the graveyard and I looked over at her and watched her but it was sure to me that none of her meanings could be known from her face.

On the road again my view became close and I watched the plastic wrinkles on the top of the base of the wheel as the car traced the long-winded roads.  There wouldn’t be any deer away from the woods.  I wasn’t driving very fast and there still wasn’t any wind or anything to let us know that the world was still going and would be there for us to come back to.

‘Sorry I’ve been weird,’ I said.

‘It’s ok,’ she said.

We wound through bends that hadn’t been there before and by the time the sky had become blue rather than black we were lost.  I used my turn signals at forgotten stop signs and we found a creek by the road that we followed to a street that we knew intersected with the creekside road and when we found it I turned onto it.  It was about twelve or twenty or thirty-five miles on that road until we got home and found the neighborhood street signs again.  We pulled into my driveway and I parked where my parents wouldn’t know I had gone anywhere and I got out and walked her to her car.  She climbed inside and I thought it would be awkward to try to hug her through her driver window.  She held her palm up straight and waved by only using her fingers and I wandered up to the porch as she pulled away.  When I got inside the door I collapsed on the hallway rug and sucked up the dust off the floor until I had the power to heave myself up and crawl up the stairs.

What if I was wandering in the middle of this life and I lost you?

It took him ten years to dig the plot to bury her there; it was to be a graveyard of idols.  Sweat glistened off his back in view of the angry sun in the sky.  He looked out at the thousands of plots left over the hills; he would spend his whole life burying the city of squalid creatures that lived in his heart.  Until one day it would give and he would fall into one of the plots and be buried there by whomever found him next.

What is in our imaginations?

The middle ages.  Kings and servants, queens and knights, jesters and castles.  These are symbols that everyone knows; they sit in the background of our minds as long swaths of history, as waiting metaphors for our everyday speech.

Can you imagine having a different mind, a different world of symbols? 

Snowing by a lamppost in his heart.

There are words that you would choose to read only once over reading another set of words a thousand times.  Where are those words?  Why would we love them so?

Don’t you know there is too much meaning in the world for us to experience? Our minds compress it down and we assume that we are the truth.

Sometimes I think:

I am no one, I have no markers. My clothes disappear, my words are no one’s memories. Good, I drift in-between definitions. Humans are not meant for outward clothes.  

Other times I think:

I have no societal function, I have nothing to say when I introduce myself.  People soon figure out that I am of no use to them.  I should take up some societal role so people can say ‘Ah, this is what he’s good for!’

Why am I up?  I woke early this morning and thought ‘I should record every sound I hear today’ and I heard the shrillest noise I have ever heard around midday.  The city workers were sawing up the trees by the street and then throwing them into the grinder.  They all had stethoscope-looking earplugs. 

When I came home I only slept for thirty minutes when I could have slept for twelve hours. Now I’m still up and am meditating on the fact that the only thing I can ever think to say to new people is that I like words.

The best part of modern life is that you can always escape to another part of your life.

This is the hardest shift I’ve worked.
I was planning on giving you a hug afterward.

Won’t you let me grieve?  They were my idols!  Can a man have no affection for his own cowardice?

You are my son. I love you.

We raise our arms from the shrillest place in the city to the sky. Let it buzz all around me. Calm. I am calm.  I will be calm.  Let our hearts be calm.

It snowed yesterday dear. Did you see?
I don’t want to see the snow.
Come. Come see.

This is a social setting. We are all spending time together; we are talking; we are laughing. Well then – what is that feeling that we are all so far apart? That we all see this so differently? Oh Lord, how will the social world be redeemed?

Cultures forget; my children will not know people did not have cell phones. You can only know you are missing something if you once had it.  People who did not have a religious childhood feel the adult world is a perfectly normal place.

That a man has a trillion private moments and cannot communicate a single one of them we will accept all right.  If he momentarily mutters to himself, however, we consider this an oddity.

There have been so many secret holy hearts.

You love oh so many people and I am glad we are in this world together.

I feel like we’re interviewing each other.
You have to interview people to get to know them.
The truest things about someone are the things they could never tell you.

A crisp barn and a sunny morning; a house with a pool and a small girl running through the back lawn with her arms stretched wide. We are responsible for who we are and I want to feel clean.

I will miss the trees they cut down.  It was sad that they were gone.

And what about your friends? You feel this way about trees; do you not know every human comes to an end?

Maybe if these stories didn’t mean so much.

Don’t you know that you are my Virgil?

What if I lost you?

Isn’t it weird how we’re picking the content of our distant future thoughts? Let’s say I choose to hang out with someone named Bert. This is choosing to have a friendship with Bert. Then in five years say Bert asks me ‘Do you think I should put a toolshed in my backyard?’ and I summon all the things I know about Bert and Bert’s yard to answer that question. In those moments that is what the content of my life is made up of. But those moments are contingent on that decision to hang out with Bert five years ago.

Your decisions aren’t as local as you think; you are currently deciding what the possible worries and questions and appreciations are going to be in your mind in ten years.

The content of our lives is also dictated by how long we think they’ll be. If your life lasted for ten minutes you would think it was a whole different sort of thing. Who knows the things you’d shout and the places you’d run. If lives lasted for a thousand years maybe we would care much less about how they go; we have so long to live them after all. But as it is the care we have is compressed into what we think we will be seventy or eighty years; we thus have passion for it, but the passion is smeared across some time, such that we still talk about trivialities, we are still living in slow motion, we can still be tempted into believing that we are eternal, that there will be always be time later to do what is important.

Every moment is your death; don’t you know?

I like that there is a democracy about the things that happen. Every thing that happens happens just as much as any other thing that happened. Me writing this sentence has the same status of ‘being in reality’ as Obama’s dreams last night or the last supervolcanic eruption on earth 600,000 years ago or when Kofi Annan last brushed his teeth. They all happened to the same degree; no moment happens more or less than any other moment. Moments are a democracy where every vote stains reality to the same infinite degree.

You can’t really experience that there are other people. In physics there is a problem about observing some electrons that they try to fire through slits in a panel. They want to know where the electron is going but to see where it is going they have to shine light on it; but once the photon of light hits the electron, the electron’s course is altered. Thus it impossible to see the exact course of the electron; the observing undoes what there is to be observed. This is how people are in all your relationships; you want to know them, but in getting to know them you are affecting their status as a person totally independent of you. Even if they weren’t reporting their life to you, but you were just spying on them with cameras, your interpretations and thoughts would distort them out of their natural shape; every person you see you cannot really see.

There is something sad about being a perspective, about inhabiting a specific four-limbed location of reality. That you already have your thoughts and can’t unhave the ones you have. You’re stuck.

There’s a moment when you’re reading or watching a story that it suddenly isn’t a story any more. It’s a moment where you are drenched with the reality of the experience. In that moment you see far away from your life of mere dreams into a world that exists as much as anything ever could.

Have you had that moment about your own life yet? Or are the stars still just lines in a shelved book to you?

Write down what you worried about today. In ten years – all new worries.

We are skaters on thin ice. Every person you see is skating along, no matter where they are – in a telephone booth, in a dance club, at the dinner table. We are skaters on thin ice. Along we skate, until the ice breaks and we fall into a river that is either rushing towards eternity or is a simple sinking into a black oblivion. We are skaters on thin ice. That is all we know, and whether the river is flowing somewhere or not, it will be cold, so cold.

I don’t want to die! is it real yet? a democracy of moments. a death in every one. who do you love?

I will cry at so many graves.

She asked “what changes people?” and I said “everything.”

Time is so sad. Earth is such a tiny planet but it’s where I drive to work every day. Isn’t that weird how we answer the question of ‘where is your home’ differently depending on what we’re thinking about? We might say a street name and number, or a city, or that planet earth is our home planet. But what if you think about the entire universe? Do you feel this is your home? Or are we strangers? We are strangers. But where did we come from? It does not matter. What matters is that you cannot have a home in a place where you settled. Remember the last thing you learned? Why did you have to learn it? It is because this is not your home.

Do you know that if you forgot something really important you wouldn’t know it? I was in front of a big window at night and I sat there and I hoped I wasn’t forgetting something. I hoped really hard. But once you are older there is no way of knowing. I think I have forgotten something. Maybe that moment where it was all real. But there is no way of knowing; if something is forgotten it is nowhere. Give me a list of things you are forgetting. “Get the socks on my dresser, call my parents, go Christmas shopping.” Why don’t you do them? “I’ve forgotten them.”

You can see as little in a person as you want. But you cannot see as much in them as you want. It is sadly asymmetrical – we can hate everyone as much as we please, but our capacity to know and love eventually hits a limit. Some people simply cannot see each other.

Notice how everything I think about is all the same? I think about this too. But didn’t you read how it’s sad that we have to be a perspective, that we stain everything we see with our thoughts? I get really happy when I get intoxicated with some activity or some person, so much that I stop thinking all these things. In those moments I forget all these things; which you would think I would think is a bad thing because I think forgetting is such a bad thing, but in those moments, I’ve forgotten how bad I think forgetting is.

Sometimes I wonder about a person, ok, how seriously should we be taking all this? You seem to be saying a lot of things, but is it all that serious? If I followed you around, would I notice you trying to harmonize everything in your life toward truth and life and that you care about that a lot? Or in the future are you going to look back on this time in your life and think ‘wow, I was such a fool’? Because I’m working really hard on the whole life-friendship-suffering-death-God thing, so I need to know exactly how much I should factor in everything you’re doing and saying.

Maybe that’s why I like reading Kierkegaard so much. You can feel him trembling from behind each word.

Why does it have to be so hard!

Some things just punch me, they punch me real hard.

Like what?

Like everything in here -

you know what this is?

Sentiments. You always put sentiments into words. That is how you know it is a sentiment.

But what are people? People are things with moods.

You – no, I – I am a big conflicting mess of moods and sentiments.

My moods contradict my sentiments.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could believe we were only our sentiments?

But we’re not – we’re also our moods.

And gosh,

Apologizing is so hard.

Winter is coming. I can feel its deep Death wandering from faraway lands; he has left his home, he is on his way for me. He will be here soon.

It is good to walk the snowy streets alone, to stop and stare at houses that do not stir. To be a sensory creature that knows its senses are alone. Your sniffling nose, your frozen feet, your view of the abandoned street of silent cars.

I cannot wait to walk these streets alone.

It is good to be away from everyone else, to feel how spiritually thin you naturally are without them. To find out how much of you is external validation, and how much of you comes from within. To wander around sick, weary, wondering and worrying. To hate everything, and to then love it all and hate yourself for adding to it the possibility of it being hated. For it is nothing but a stare; you are everything it ends up being, deep within you. The world is a chaos of interpretations and you are the only one you know is guilty.

I don’t think anyone today experiences the story of Jesus because we already know what we are supposed to feel when we go to the text. We read it and as we are coming to the part about the cross we think ‘This is the part where he dies for me, and I am deeply grateful’. At this point in history you do not experience your own emotions about Jesus, you experience everyone else’s emotions about him. ‘I should kneel, I should worship, I should pray’ are translated as ‘I have been told to kneel, I have been told to worship, I have been told to pray’.

Stand in the winter streets alone; if you knew no songs, what words would you sing to God?

Maybe it’s only love against the chaos.

We keep having conversations out of fear that without them we’d find we’re nothing. But maybe we are nothing.

Deep in that death, maybe finally we’ll know, we’ll find something alive that can’t be stamped out. A candle in a forgotten chamber, a song someone left at a grave, a rain in an abandoned desert. But if we find ourself there and then cannot find our way back? Then we will live and find out if it is better to be alone than nothing.

Oh, winter world!

Come quickly now, be unfurled!

Lose our hearts in snowy swirls,

Keep your lovers closely curled,

Let me find your precious pearls

Stain my heart,

in your beautiful mural.

But perhaps we will find the chamber and there will be nothing in it at all.

I looked down at my notes but then I realized that if you have to read them they aren’t really your thoughts. To own a thought you need no one to tell it to you, not even your past self.

Our hearts come to know so much.

“You lose one thing, and you lose another thing, and eventually it is you that ends up lost.”

I left my home in a panic to find out what it is that makes people change; I sloughed home wondering if there was anything that could keep them the same.

What have we done to them? I know I do not care about that sports team, about eating that food, about having that brand. What is essential to me? I did not pick being this gender, having this many limbs, being able to speak this language. What could a man possibly be? People are the only thing left to discover, the only thing that could be New. I am not this man, I did not choose to inhabit this body. What have I done to the people I’ve seen? I wander in silences of regret. I’ve never really believed other people when they use the word ‘I’.  Could we really make this street brand new, these empty dilapidated houses?  It has already been lost to so much pain.

How old is your oldest smile?

It is our conceptions of happiness that ruin our lives.

You were given the winter to stare at the world and squint at what it is but bury it all deep inside, a time and place you will die having been in. When does a man die? When his heart stops beating, his cells stop replicating?  No, when he is in a place where he sees the world and stops in his tracks. He is alone and takes it all in, realizing he did not place himself within it, that he does not know what it is, but that there is a light on somewhere inside him, and it knows what it sees is beautiful. Some pain is worked into the very truths that make us live.

Would she be the last thing you would see of the world?

So much is created in each moment we see of the world; much of the time we have to spend working on the earlier moments. We need to not just experience the world, but experience our experience of it. We yearn deeply to see into our own hearts.

When I see a new friend hug someone else for the first time I suddenly realize ‘Oh! they love people too!’ and they become a human to me all at once. For some reason I don’t realize it until then. ‘People mean things to them too,’ I realize, ‘and they run out of words in trying to show it, just like me’.

I am ready to be taken up again, for a new death to prove I am still here, for my past sorries to become my present tears. I want to know the special relationships others have with their own words. I want to know I have any thoughts at all. I want to die in this winter world, with all its beauty and truth, and come up with a song of worship on my lips that I never knew before.