Sweet Emotion

An Enya CD
The Superman Emblem
A Christmas Tree
The 5 Olympic Rings
This one photograph of my sister and me.

These are a few things which stir great emotion in me. I’m engaged with a rush of powerful response towards all of these things.

I could take the time to explain why an Enya CD reminds me of our beach house, one agonizing sunburn, and my family. But it wouldn’t be worth it, because I’d have to scratch that story as soon as I told it to relate a completely different instance.

One involving another Enya CD on a cold autumn’s night with the bedroom window open, gripping the covers for dear life, and loving every second of it. Then I’d abandon that story for no fewer than 5 more great Enya recollections.

A week ago my world encountered a storm as big as I’ve ever been asked to weather. The story of which will not be recounted here as the re-telling of it has already worn out its welcome in my life.

However I will relate this much. There has only been one other time when I have felt so much. I was in torture so acute, so heavily laden in anguish, there are very real parts of the day which are blacked out in my mind with zero remembrance for hours at a time.

I offered one unanswered prayer many times that day, as many times as I could scarce grab the thought. “Please turn the emotions off. Please stop me from feeling. Please turn the emotions off. Please stop me from feeling.”

True to nature, my mind has been the frenzied product of a well employed heart. I’ve tried to sense and make sense of the turbulent feelings I’ve had from and towards the lessons I’ve been learning.

I am frequently heard to utter the comments “aahhh, it hurts my heart” or “awww, it warms my heart.”

About a month ago my roommate commented on the health of my heart after using one of these statements. She observed the regularity to which I exercise the organ noting I would either live a long life due to the relentless training or die young from sheer exhaustion.

So tonight while driving to a friend’s house, a lyric materialized in a song I usually skip which I had the fortunate and incredibly lucky blessing of hearing.

“Oh, there's no heart. And I've spent all this time feeling something you can't feel at all!”

And…wait for it… my heart leapt.

The obvious implication of the lyric has much to do with love, with romantic love. Yet I couldn’t help but apply more liberally the sentiment being presented to me.

Why are some of us so content to walk around this world building up fences, road blocks, and other fortifications around our feelings? Because if left vulnerable, one might get hurt?

I assure you, it will get hurt. You will love and lose. You will love and lose more times than you win. You will love and live, and live and learn. Perhaps even to despise that love.

But you will feel. You will feel a rainbow of emotions which will take a black and white world and color it with the vibrancy of existence. The very breath of life.

You will sit in your scanty boat while the winds and rains of living wallop down upon you and there will be tears.

Still, I also assure you those tears will NOT all be of melancholy. Since tears of melancholy generally bleed into achievement.

And when you look around to see who might rejoice in THOSE tears with you, it aches to see over half the population whose hearts have waxed cold and want to scream, “Oh, there's no heart. And I've spent all this time feeling something you can't feel at all!”

So tonight, ironically one week to the day, I have to say I’m grateful to feel. Even the stomach churning negative crap.

Come Here & Sit Down

In the past few weeks, I have scribed no fewer than 3 lengthy blogs. Yet as I develop each essay, I can’t seem to bust one out containing the emotion and power with which I’m used to penning into something.

So I sat down and put on some music in the hopes to pick one of these out, brush it off, dress it up, kiss it with passion, and then post it.

Anyone who’s had a pulse musically this year has had an affinity for Chris Brown. As he was shortly found among the C’s, I clicked on the song “Say Goodbye” and took a moment to enjoy a throw back to 2005 when the song was released.

Chris’s work is completely reminiscent of Usher’s 90s hits. And in THAT, I found some new inspiration.

It was a cool pending summer night. The moisture in the air was more soothing to the skin than it was a nuisance to a hot body. The moon acted as a whitish yellow night light embracing the tree limbs, roof tops, and worn cracking pavement we call streets back east.

I was driving down the back winding roads of the country in my mother’s Plymouth Voyager minivan… a white vehicle with faux side wood paneling.

It was a vehicle I wildly paced too fast around turns, whose brakes I fiercely had a love affair with b/c of my youthful attraction for speed, and a nose I gently pressed to the bumper of a classmate’s car when he chose to slow for railroad tracks I had zero intention of crawling over. It was a vehicle we final few kids in my family have a fondness for.

The windows were down and my younger sister was in the passenger seat. The conversation had dwindled and the radio took over with the smooth R&B sounds we were channeling. It was one of the many times I had heard the words, “it’s seven o’clock, on the dot, I’m in my drop top, cruising the streets, yeah baby…”

For a teenage girl whose life was ferociously transitioning into a mysterious new realm, it felt to me as comfortable as anything at that time could.

We were grown ups, my sister and I. The fake kind. The adolescents who were picking up the boyfriend to bring back to hang out with at our house kind. The kind who was still mildly surprised the request for the hang out, excursion, and car was granted. The free kind.

The cicadas were thick in the shoulder grasses. Their buzzing and clicking add to the cadence of my memory’s soundtrack of the night. Additionally, there was the croaking of tree frogs, the screeching of crickets, and the humming of an enormous underworld of insects crouching in the lush foliage which is Pennsylvania.

The memory is crisp in my mind and definitively paramount to my familiarity of my home state. The new song with the old memory made me think of one person. A person I love. A person I need to call.

And while sitting over two thousand miles away, in a desert state whose sun is literally scorching the paint off of my car this year, I found some passion. It’s why I have always written. It’s why I write.

To preserve the memories.

The beliefs I possess. The associations I make. The memories of my people, my places, and my experiences. And here is the epiphany Chris Brown led me to whilst engaging in a music appreciation moment.

It is easy to feel so small and perhaps even insignificant in this world. There are 6 billion people and only one me. We are ALL seeking to be understood while hopefully remembering to seek to understand others as well.

This is why we engage in relationships. We desire to summon another witness to our lives… to be apart of our existence.

What is the way we connect to each other? By the sharing of ourselves. And I query, what are we sharing?

It has been said, “to understand a man, you must know his memories.”

Perhaps from now on I will print out my journal and print off my blog entries and bestow this book of my past to any new being of whom I wish to connect. But as William Faulkner said, the past is never dead; it is not even past.

One of My Heart's Beliefs

The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.
-Earl Nightingale