While

For my creative writing class, we had to write a letter poem. I wrote mine to my adopted grandpa last Tuesday. If you've been keeping up with my blog (and you've known me for the past year or so), you'll know that he's been really sick for a while.

He passed away this morning.

So, Mr. Everett: this one's for you.

After While, Crocodile

Hey old man.

Been a while.

Five months?

Something like that.

It's my fault, I know - 

I promised I'd come back, never did.

I should have.

I'm sorry.

I don't know why I didn't -

You said I could come over whenever.

Maybe it's the thought of seeing you,

Sitting in that chair by the sliding door,

Your feeble frame under all those tubes - 

A shade of a hero,

The skeleton with the shaking hands

Who clasped me to him

While I worried that he would break.

It hurts, you know?

To see you that way, I mean.

You didn't used to be that way.

I heard you're in the hospital,

But that's about it - 

Nothing more than that,

No other details.

You could be dead.

Is that morbid?

I don't think so -

It's a logical possibility:

An eighty-seven-year-old man with breathing issues and heart issues and stress issues and a nagging wife and grief and war and experience and battle and fear and scars and baggage that I cannot begin to imagine would certainly start to shut down eventually.

I don't know how I can find out though.

I'm scared to go to the 911 house and find it empty

With no trace of you left in it.

Where are you, my friend?

How are you, my grandpa?

When will we get to share a Reese cup again

Or sit by your table with apples and Coke

And talk about us and God and change and secrets and gossip and health and fear and death and life?

When will I get to hug your frail body one more time,

Kiss that thin cheek that holds ragged breaths

And say, "Thank you for your service,

Thank you for your love,

Thank you for your time"?

Will I ever?

If not, that's OK.

You're my brother, remember?

We'll hang out again sometime.

Until then, though:

See you later, alligator.

Need

My creative writing prof told us to draw a map of somewhere that was important to us and write about it. Here's what I came up with.

~

I need peace.

This day has gone totally south, and I just need a minute. But there isn't a place on this whole damn campus to be alone. I really don't feel like wearing the happy facade today.

I start walking. Where is a piano? I need a piano. Can't afford a practice room. All the classrooms in the chapel are taken.

Wait.

I remember.

I head for the SSC, past Rinnova, up the stairs, threading my way through the cheerful masses, keeping my eyes on the ground so I don't have to speak to any of them.

On my way down the hallway through the double doors, I stop at the bulletin board across from Mr. C's office. How many times, in how many different ways have I come to this board? The elation of seeing your name - your very own name - next to Lady Pernelle, Sarah Goode, chorus, cook #3.

The trudge in your step but "congratulations" on your lips because you were an idiot and went with other people to see the results. And you wait until you're in the shower to kneel in the hot of your tears that are not selfish disappointment but terror at not having somewhere to fit this year.

As I slip through the door and down the hidden stairs, I remember coming here in another moment of terror, when I realized that I had fallen short again, been found not good enough again. I sat in the empty hallway downstairs with a journal in my backpack and Thomas Newman in my ears, trying to make myself believe the lie that I was not defined by my shortcomings.

The wonder in khakis and hiking boots saw me then, coming out of the room between the dressing rooms where he worked well into the night on his costumes, his masterpieces.

It's not the same without him.

If you keep going down that hall, lined with the pictures of the past that beam like postcards in an album, you get to the crowded room dotted with round light bulbs. It's in this room that I've been bruised, bedazzled, doused in grey hair color, burned with curling irons, streaked with old age, and dressed in both custom-tailored sparkles and a dirt-streaked sack.

Turn right out of the stench of burning hair and cheap hairspray and you're in the room of a thousand worlds, where a thousand characters have taken breath from the costumes hanging from the ceiling, the portraits of strangers glaring from the walls, the ancient books rescued from the garbage because someone saw their cracked bindings and faded names and said "perfect."

Out the right side and to the left is the alcove where I hid from the farce two years ago, crammed under the stairs with Fahrenheit 451. I've rocketed down these stairs at break-neck speed, in a floor-length lavender dress and high heels, trailing endless bobby pins and layers of crinoline, fighting to be street-clothed again before twenty others girls piled into the tiny dressing rooms, begging to be unzipped, unpinned, set free from lace and hatpins and pantyhose.

If you stand at the top of those stairs and look back down, it looks like the gateway to a dungeon: fluorescent-white light on the landing as the stairs curve and descend to nowhere.

Samantha blacked out on those stairs.

A true professional waits to pass out until AFTER they've delivered their lines.

I am honorary, but not professional. I swallowed a wad of gum and wrenched my dainty gloves from the waistband of my too-big skirt seconds before the curtain rose. I got the end of a parasol tangled in the lace of my dress dead-center-stage. I always broke character when l'Imposter shouted "GLORY HALLELUJAH!" and darted across the stage in handcuffs with a very grumpy constable in tow. I dropped a cigarette during the opening scene.

But still I belong here.

I fit here.

I always have.

I fit when Kelly took me to the makeup room and washed grey hairspray out of my tangled hair, working it into the crawling braid that I always wished she would teach me how to do.

I fit when I put my feet in a chair with Daniel's, my baby socks looking so small next to his huge black pilgrim shoes, and talked to him about nothing for the hour between his four lines in Act I and my three in Act II.

I fit when I took my dashed hopes of starring and learned to fly instead.

I fit when the witches and their accusers sneaked behind the theatre and danced to a drum-beat ringtone until the minister chased us back inside.

I fit even when I realized that character shoes and running on carpet don't mix and busted my knee all to hell, with one witness muttering "Hey, be careful there" without turning his head.

I shut myself in the movement studio with the old battered upright, finally away from the hoards that I don't understand and can't stand to be around. In an hour I have to be upstairs to sweep the stage and haul scenery down from the ceiling for Act I Scene I.

Another circus begins. Another hell week is upon us.

My time to do homework, socialize, sleep, wash clothes, eat will be seriously curtailed. But I can't wait. And I will miss it when it's over. So I will soak up every single minute that I have left.

It's where I belong. I'd be nuts not to.

<

When I was little my parents would put us down for naps almost every day. Especially on Sundays - after we got home from church, we would be herded upstairs into our pajamas and forced to lie down for an hour. It didn't matter if we slept or not, but we had to stay in our beds.

To me it meant "punishment." Even into my teen years, I couldn't take joy in falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon. My mouth always tasted weird when I got up, and I couldn't shake that sluggish feeling for the rest of the day. Even now, I only "hunker down for a mid-day respite" (my dad can never just say "take a nap") if I'm sick or working third shift in the summer.

Today I couldn't wait to get out of my Shakespeare class, change into my flannel pajama pants, and crawl under the covers, if only for half an hour.

I always get really excited to take naps now, which gets me so pumped up that I can't go to sleep - it takes a good ten minutes before I've calmed down enough to think about shutting down my brain and just being still for a while. But when I do finally get to that silent point, it takes a bomb to wake me up.

This afternoon I analyzed the process of going to sleep, the steps that got me from wide awake to comatose.

First I had to get comfortable. I plumped up the two pillows (the top one has flannel sheets now) and pulled the four blankets up over my shoulders. And because it's winter and I don't use nearly as much lotion as I should, I spent a good two minutes trying to scratch all the itches that were hidden underneath two long-sleeved shirts (most of which, of course, were in the middle of my back where my arms don't reach). I finally snuggled down and closed my eyes, which burned from staying up too late last night (and contacts) and were disappointingly un-soothed by the act of closing them.

I assumed the sleeping position that I've had since I was an infant: bent at the waist like a <, legs straight down, one hand under my pillow, the other curled loosely and touching my forehead. I consciously shove everything out of my head - assignments, plans to grab dinner before rehearsal, things to do before graduation, letters that I should be writing, projects WAY far down the road that I should be starting but don't have time to, praying for a snow day, wondering whether it would be worth my time to do laundry now or get up early tomorrow and do it (or bank on a snow day and brave the elements to the laundry room while everybody is still in bed). Because I need this. I need to sleep. Last night I stayed up way later than I anticipated and still had to get up early for work - if I hope to be any good to anyone later, I need this nap.

I remember catching myself as I fell down the "falling asleep" slope. There's always a point where I breathe deeper than I do when I'm awake, and that deepest sigh that reaches down somewhere in the bottom of my chest and relaxes my whole body is the signal: "I'm almost asleep."

And then, after fifteen minutes of fighting with my covers, pulling my hunting socks tight on my feet, taking care of all the itches, slinging my hair over the pillow and out of my face, and plumping my pillow one last time - I'm gone.

A hard, dead sleep that ends too soon when my phone buzzes under my head.

Time to get up.

The circus goes on.