The bareness of feet

I like the way the ground feels on my feet. I like to feel the fingers of grass between my toes, the firm girth of the dirt pressing back against my bare soles. I want my feet to be hardened by the love of the earth. Worn and blistered and solid, a mountain range of calluses. I want to be softened in their hardness. And when I die and can walk no more, I want them to say, she knew the grass and the sand and the dirt. I want them to say, she knew the earth by the curves of her feet.

Home

Something about being on a train makes thinking about things more fun. And people more beautiful. And the world more interesting.

A middle-aged asian man carrying a beautiful tree branch. A couple huddled over an Ipod. A young white mother with her mixed-race daughter (mixed-race children are so gorgeous, I think). A man wheeling a bicycle down the aisle. I wonder where they're all going, who loves them, whether they listen to M. Ward, what their first word was, whether they like malt vinegar on their french fries. I can't tell whether I think difference or similarities are more wonderful.

I really like traveling alone the best. Much more than traveling with other people. It's the silence I like, the pensivity (is that a word?), the ease of thoughts. I think I feel emotions more deeply when I'm by myself.

I can't wait to be home.

I'm listening to Neil Young's "There Comes a Time." It's a good album for moving. Trains or cars or planes or even walks. I think music that's good for moving is the best kind of music.

I love moving.

I think I would like to take a train to no destination. I think often about how wonderful it might be to be lost, but I wonder if I could really like it. If I could walk off the train at a stop and not know where I am or how I'll get back. I wonder if I could enjoy meeting people, or if I'd be too preoccupied trying to get back. If I could listen to their story or if I could only ask them how to get home. But what is home anyway? But a name. Isn't everywhere home?

"Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions."

Today, JD Salinger, I disagree. It was sunny and warm and beautiful, and after these gloomy hell-in-a-handbasket frozen months, I felt sunny and warm and beautiful. Maybe I should be less dependent on the sun for happiness, but how can I go outside--green grass sneaking up between my bare toes, cotton floral dress hitting just above the knee--and not be happy? Spring is a very good thing.

I feel: lost, persistently unhappy, insatiably tired, severely and incurably unstimulated--unable to be stimulated. Reading diaries in english makes me ever more sensitive to my own writing and journaling, even more aware of my shortcomings. The world is filled with so much beauty, and I am terrified that I will leave this world without creating any of it.

Give me soft soft static, with a human voice underneath

Fell in love on the way to spanish today. That needs to stop happening. (Walking to spanish, and) Falling in love. He had dreadlocks and he was examining a display case with computer chips old and new--how they have developed over 30 years or so. I wonder what I would have been like 30 years ago, if they would put me in a display case with a little caption underneath. If I would be large and bulky and cumbersome, if people would ever stop at the case to look or if they would be in a hurry, walking to class or head down texting or in their mind. If, when they stopped to look, would find me old, ugly, irrelevant. If a boy with dreadlocks and a backpack slung over one shoulder would think I was beautiful.

This is "pretty" in our town

A few years ago in english class we read a play called Our Town. A conversation from the play:

"Am I pretty?"

"Pretty enough for all practical purposes."

I'm sure my mid-pubescent eighth grade self skimmed a Spark Noted summary of this conversation the day before the assignment was due, an assignment much less relevant to my life than whether or not I should straighten or scrunch my hair for the school picture and whether the blonde haired boy in my biology class was looking at me today. Five years worth of puberty and gel-saturated hair, I realize that although the content of the play itself is hazy in my memory, this particular conversation has been immaculately preserved. Has, apparently, lodged itself somewhere deep within my prefrontal cortex.

I've often wondered what it is about this conversation that made it attach itself to my cerebrum and hang on surreptitiously for five plus years, long after the blonde haired boy and The Scrunched Hair Dilemma dissolved into the black hole of pre-pubescent memories. (Thank god for that black hole).

As much as I would like to say that physical appearances are superficial and irrelevant, if I'm being honest with myself, that could not be farther from the truth. As a society we romanticize and idealize beauty, place it on a pedestal and fuss over it. We say beauty is irrelevant, that it is less imporant than "a good sense of humor and a great personality," while we spend hundreds on teeth whitening products and makeup and push up bras, as though physical appearances define our worth as a person. Which, in doing so, has become the case.

I don't at all mean for this to sound feminist. I don't mean to argue that our idealization of physical beauty is wrong or right or immoral or appropriate or inappropriate or whatever.

It just is.

And that's why this conversation, from Our Town, is so relevant. To subjugate "prettiness" to "practicality," to say that one is "pretty enough for all practical purposes" seems unfitting and foreign. We like to think that physical beauty is intangible, that it's poetic and romantic and whimsical, a transcendent truth that surpasses all ideas of realism and practicality. But ultimately, what purpose does it serve but a practical one?

What purpose does anything serve but a practical one?

The most terrifying thing in this life

Is to realize you're nothing special.

Good evening synapses, I'm Emma.

Sixteen years taken for granted in this house and the knowledge that this is my last night spent breathing the calm air of this room comes reluctantly, feels sudden and sureal and too far to grasp. My ears are perked and my eyes wide, for the first time, to the sights and sounds that falling asleep in this house make. The wind combing through the branches outside my window. The neighborhood dogs belting their nighttime ritual. I recall labeling these sounds disturbing, as less valuable than silence, but in the light of the last night they are peaceful and harmonious. A welcomed disturbance in an unwavering pattern of ignorance, habituation, and misplaced priorities.

Your fingertips

Your fingertips left tracks along my body as they moved, sensually but swiftly across my skin. Tracks that, to this day, still smolder and smoke, long after the scent of your own skin has vanished. Where are your scars, I wonder? Do you wear them proudly upon your skin? Or do you treat them, still, as fresh wounds, bandaging, cradling, nurturing their surface? Who sees them, I wonder. Do you?