This is written to remind.

Because some things are worth remembering.

And some things I’ll never forget.

Like her lips, soft as French Merlot after a hard day at the office, pink as a sun-baked horizon drunk off an afternoon rain. Or her eyes, green and round as grapes in the morning light. Or her arms, like a good nights sleep embracing my weary frame.

Some things I’ll never forget.

* * *

“That color of the sky,” she said, eyes staring upward, “is the color of true love.”

“I could live and die to that color and not mourn a day in between,” she gently whispered from the passenger seat beside me. And she asked, “Have you ever seen color like that?”

I looked up from the road in front of us and quietly agreed with her assessment. It was quite beautiful, and no, I had never seen a sky hold such color. And somewhere between lavender and teal, red and indigo, Los Angeles and San Francisco, I began to fall in love with her detailed understanding of her own lack of understanding, of wonder and fascination.

And it wasn’t so much the color of the sky that changed me forever, but her honest acceptance of mystery that so intrigued and caught me by surprise. Never before had I met someone with the audacity to revel and rest in the unknown, question everything, and hold on for dear life as she journeyed through desert and vineyard, cafe and savannah, canyon and ocean floor. All that summer the unknown grew upon us like ivy, and we could do nothing but try each day to enjoy the ride more than we did the day before.

* * *

On a quiet evening in the Appalachians, you can watch the breeze paint clouds upon the sky, push contrast against the contour of mountains and texture along the curve of the setting sun. On a good day in the mountains, everything is mysterious and wonderful and curious. And on any given night, you can hear everything important in the world and still be engulfed in silence. You can gaze into the faces of trillions of stars billions of light years away and still be pushed to your knees by the heaviness of the heavens.

“I think we’ve been invited to the greatest show on earth,” I whisper to her beneath the deep, purple sky of Appalachia, layer upon layer of stars accentuating the curve of her face resting on my shoulder. And she glances upward, folds my arm inside both of hers and quietly agrees.

And beauty takes on a whole new meaning when surrounded by great mystery.

* * *

And no matter how hard magazines, TV and the internet work to convince us that a beautiful woman is what they say she is, their attempts fail in comparison to the mystery of the sky and the women we actually love. And the blunt beauty streaming from the runway and advertising screens is flat and construed and unreal and tortured and twisted until it’s exactly what greedy media players want it to be. And they sell and sell and sell and push and push and push until we believe what they want us to believe and buy what they want us to buy and have sex like they want us to have sex and look like they want us to look. And then, a world once filled with genuine, robust beauty and genuinely mysterious women is suddenly filled with plastic, oil and look-a-like female drones attached to their Prada and phones because someone on some ad for some thing whispered, “This is what you need in order to be truly happy.” And it’s hard to find a woman without the glow of a screen reflecting from her face.

And a man never completely forgets his wedding day, what he once considered elegant and alluring, he just chooses to misplace the memory from time to time. And it’s just so easy to buy-in to what he’s told by talking heads and magazines and internet gurus, that women are beautiful if this and if that and if nothing else other than. And after a while he loses his young, cunning mind to apathy and lust and the pursuit of control, unwilling to observe who he has become or where the mysteriousness of life has gone. He chose consumption over creativity, porn over freedom, the web over reality. He traded thinking for entertainment, self-depreciation and envy for a pixelated world where love is but an image, a trendy to suit to wear then disregard. And it’s hard to find a man without the glow of a screen reflecting from his face. And surely, Thoreau, men really have become the tools of their tools.

* * *

“Where should we go today?” she whispered to me from her side of the bed, eyes closed, white sheet pulled up above her chin, face melting into the pillow beneath it.

And I could scarcely tell the difference between the softness of our sheets and the softness of her skin as my fingers traced the outline of her arm.

“I want to see the country and taste the wine of the land and feel the ocean breeze paint color on my cheeks and watch the green moss grow between my muddy toes,” she said through an irresistible smile and wrinkle of her nose.

I opened my eyes and agreed with her. “That’s exactly what we should do today,” I replied. “Right after coffee, of course.”

“Of course,” she answered. And she held me in her arms the way the ocean holds salt, the way the sky holds stars, the way coffee holds cream.

* * *

And she sat in the passenger seat beside me, quietly raving about the silty, turquoise hew of the valley below us, and I could see to the depths of her intrigue, a layered mystery as viewable yet unknowable as the stars above. And I was quite alright. And with every conversation, every mysterious blink of her deep, neon-green eyes, I swam further and further into the wonder of her self. And she was beautiful. And she still is.

So we’re clear, what follows is a fictional story.

Methamphetamine Chili

* * *

Chili goes down fast and easy when it’s negative five degrees outside. And in the Midwest, chili is methamphetamine, sardonic soup composed of everything from battery acid to cough syrup to gasoline to freshly extracted kitten intestines. And a thousand freezing souls will file through any given diner, slide in and out of crayon-red booths in front of cracked, pearl tables and order steaming bowls of purring red narcotics and never think twice to question the composition of ingredients slurping from spoon to esophagus to stomach, everyone thawed and satisfied with the digestion of dusty, red cayenne and burnt, brown paprika particles.

For breakfast, corrosive egg sandwiches loaded with chili and pepper jack cheese, red kidney beans spewing over the edge of white bread. For lunch, a wintergreen infused brat special splattered with chili, guaranteed to cure that drippy December cold. And for dinner, bowls of chili loaded with more lethal ingredients than any bowl should ever be forced to hold.

From this back-bending, crayon-red bar stool, my eyes follow an orange, slippery-maroon path of chunky, sloshed-off sauce across the checkered tile floor from the kitchen to the tables lined against the windowed diner wall, trailing up onto each booth, into each bowl rimmed with dry tomato sauce and garlic residue, onto every greasy napkin painted with finger prints and lip impressions, and up onto the shirts of each patron, their bellies and chests speckled with ground beef, kitty intestines and gasoline. The chili cocktail, a combination of all things brutal, goes down fast and easy and feels so beautiful when the snow’s blowing sideways outside.

An overweight gentleman, sleeves rolled past his bruised, white elbows, gristle resembling colon tissue caught between his teeth, declares to the rest of the diner in his finest Midwestern drawl, “If this chili is wrong I don’t wanna be right!” And purple and black saliva specks sail onto his wife’s face, and she wipes them away with the cleanest portion of her napkin, a trail of bean and blood smeared across her wrinkled, pasty forehead. The other patrons nod approvingly without lifting their eyes or mouths from the bowls in front of them.

Drip. Drip. Slurp. Slurp. Drip. Drip. Cough and Clank and Ah and I’ll have another please from each booth in turn.

And what I hear are hairy tongues and blistered lips, ravenous, with little minds of their own, slopping moisture from spoons, licking the base of ceramic bowls, oral cavities making love to silverware over and over and over again, in and out, in and out, each time, every spoonful, better than the last, sucking every molecule of sauce and spice from their plates till the dinnerware sparkles and the patrons wild eyes reflect upon there surfaces.

I can hear the kitchen working, silver pots and pans clanging together like fighting children, wrenches loosening rusty battery bolts, the twirl of gasoline canisters being unscrewed, the drizzle of cough syrup flub-glub-glubbing into a viscous pot of pure damage. And I can hear the cook and waitresses sneering and quipping and pointing their fingers at different patrons, laughing at customers with heads so low in their bowls it seems they’ve overdosed and died, faces permanently plastered to the cracked, faux-pearl tables in front of them. And I say to myself, “They’re not getting a tip from me,” and, “Thank God I just ordered coffee.”

I can see the cook, an obese pig of a man standing over his gigantic pot, fire burning neatly beneath, his thick, hairy hands gently caressing his giant ladle around and around the rim of the pot. And every once in a while a kitty screams, and a little blood splatters onto the wall behind him and there’s the sound of hairy hands squeezing a handful of saturated, seeping large intestine as the boiling contents pop and sizzle with welcome delight.

Methamphetamine in the Midwest, a bigger problem than this diner cares to admit, and it goes down easy when it’s cold outside. And in Indiana, it’s cold most of the time.

The happy customers, full of brine and meat and gnarly, black armpit hair discarded by our careless chef, shift cautiously in their crayon-red seats not wanting to move for fear of internal combustion, dazed out of their minds and as psycho-altered as methamphetamine-chili can make a person. I can nearly hear their delirious brain cells pop and fizzle, puddles of orange and maroon drool forming at the corners of their mouths, slowly sliding down their first and second chins, pooling at the base of their necks in oblong circles just touching the fringe of their collars and undershirts. From what I can tell, I go unnoticed by the obese chef and his waitress comrades as they slink out from the kitchen like snakes slithering out of their holes in search of mice and blood and bone. The chef has a quiver of a smile across his face, just revealing his left, front incisor, chipped and green from years of wear and tobacco abuse. The waitresses both wear wigs, neon yellow and jet black mixed upon their anorexic skulls, clowns of the restaurant world hiding behind thick layers of foundation and mascara and sky-blue uniforms and fire-engine-red lipstick smeared carelessly from cheek to cheek. Faces buffered and upholstered with sunken clouds of blush and powder, they look like moving, walking, middle-aged dolls designed for death, ready to tamper, ready to pounce on the first thing that moves and suck the blood from it before it knows what hit it. The three of them, smirking and slithering from the kitchen, a gang of pythons, fat and conniving, past the service area and into the diner, eyes wide, tongues on lips, breathing heavily from their mouths, approach each table of victims and sneer, “How was the chili Sir? Ma’am? I hope your time here has been enjoyable,” and, “Ya’ll have a great evening, ya hear! Come back and see us!” And they laugh simultaneously like a possessed choir singing aloud for the devil himself, their hot breath wafting through the diner air.

The chefs sloppy white apron, stained the color of baby-brown puke all over his chest and belly, is damp with sweat, grease, battery acid and gasoline, beans and pepper flakes peeling off the cotton hem, his belly bulging through the seems. His apron rubs against the sides of patrons faces as he combs through their pockets and purses collecting goods, money and jewelry, leaving smears of sweat and oil, babies puking all over their faces, the acne pustules already bulging through their flesh before he smiles wickedly and moves on to another table to collect the next round of valuables. The waitresses, likewise, go about snapping off necklaces from their former customers who are so high they have no idea what’s happening, caught in some chili fantasy world, floating in lard and spice never to return. Somewhere inside their heads, they’re warm and safe and 17 again and sitting in front of a fire surrounded by family and friends. But here, slumped over, drowning in their own drool and chili run-off, they’re just victims of drug abuse and drug induced robbery, innocent, hungry bystanders just looking for an escape from the negative five degree temps of the Indiana tundra, so cold only the suicidal venture outside.

In the early 80’s, here in the Midwest, people got sick of the cold really fast, but they couldn’t leave because this was home and everything they knew was here. Family, factory, future, it was all here in the antarctic, middle of America, and they weren’t going anywhere. And the middle class, the black and blue machine of expanding American economy, kept getting richer and richer working the line, and before long they were making more money than they ever dreamed possible. They bought boats, parked them in their driveways, and watched each winter as their expensive mini-yachts got covered in snow. A third foreign car, a pair of jet skis, an extended motor home, a fancy plane even, all lost to the ice and wind every winter. Like people had so much money to burn they could buy anything for the summer and afford to watch it rot in the snow of winter. But then, someone got wise and built a three car garage, and the concept spread like drugs across all of suburbia. People built garages as big as houses, and every winter they’d move all of their expensive toys inside, and at least then they could look at their valuables and keep them warm and rest easy knowing they weren’t being destroyed in the Indiana snow. And people just kept buying and buying and building bigger and bigger garages to put more and more stuff in.

And the chef and his two waitressing assistants make out pretty well today. I watch as they steal pearl necklaces passed down from great grandma to grandma to mom to this poor daughter with her face flopped in a pool of ketchup and oyster crackers. And the clown waitress strings the stolen family heirlooms around her flabby, sweaty neck. And the chef takes off watch after watch once belonging to grandpas who fought wars. And they pull off diamond earrings bought during the great depression by paper boys selling the daily news. They slide off wedding rings poor Irish immigrants saved for for years to buy and marry the women of their dreams. It’s all gone in a flash, one meth-infused, chili flash. And I watch them slither away, bells chiming above the door to signal their departure, and I reach behind the counter and pour myself another cup of black-as-the-night black coffee.

* * *

My first real girlfriend broke up with me via email.

The subject line read, “Sorry, I can’t do this anymore…Loser.”

Or something like that.

And maybe my memory’s a bit harsh as to the exact title of that email due to years spent mentally tidying up that trashy semester, but I guess that’s just the way I remember important things communicated through the internet. And even though email was still a fine and novel form of communication 10 years ago, her content chipped my soul like a climber chipping fragmented shale from a misplaced hand-hold, falling, thinking in a moment of insanely clear clarity, “Things always look better from an arms length away.” But then the rope snaps to attention and cinches the harness around his waste like a dogs collar cinching its neck as he’s choked back to reality by what ties him and his bruised trachea to the earth. “Next time,” the dog thinks, “I’ll get her next time.”

I say first real girlfriend because there’s a difference between the girl you ponder life-altering decisions with and the girl, Sally what’s-her-name for example, whose hand you held while uncomfortably squeezing down the tube-slide during first grade recess.

The pain associated with being dumped is always something extravagantly uncomfortable, right? Even little Sally what’s-her-name had untidy burn marks on the back of her stumpy, little legs from going down that tube-slide with so many different boys. Talk about painful. Friction burned holes right through her heart-patterned, raspberry-pink tights and singed the remaining baby fat from the back of her purple knees. She never seemed to mind, though. She’d slide with any decent looking, no-glasses-wearing, elementary-school-jock-in-the-making as long as it prompted envy in the other girls’ eyes. She loved elementary school, loved that slide. She may still be on that slide today. I can picture her, the 39-year-old version of little Sally what’s-her-name, red lips pouted, blond hair seared, waiting anxiously at the top of that slide to squeeze on, ride, feel the wind on her face and put a few runs in her stretched out, cellulose filled, raspberry-pink tights.

And when a girl chips your heart, the subsequent pain originates somewhere outside of reality. Like running through a dream world and all of a sudden you’re falling and then there’s ground. But you don’t wake up before impact like you’re supposed to, yet you don’t die in your bed either. You just lie there, somewhere between reality and dream, splattered all over the floor of that ravine, slowly trying to find the pieces and glue yourself back together.

Because we all know what it’s like to fall. We’ve been doing it since we were kids on the playground, stumbling to be the first in line to ride with little Sally what’s-her-name with the raspberry-pink tights. No one called us failures for falling back then. They called us clumsy; going through a temporary stage to be grown out of with age. Clumsy kids. So cute.

But when that first real girlfriend sent me that email containing all sorts of flowery words and run-on sentences about how much she was going to miss me but that she needed to be with someone who was closer, well, that felt like a serious lack of coordination. Like my heart turned clumsy, and I was the dork with glasses and mom-made buzz cut. My heart, excavated and dry, tossed down that tube-slide, screeching and burning the entire way down like little Sally what’s-her-name, landing aorta down, embedded with gray pea gravel and black silt. Then fat Harry, the kid who never rode the slide with anyone in first grade but now owns a corn syrup processing plant in northern Indiana and a neon green Porsche, came sliding down behind my heart and landed ass first on top of it. My metal-burnt, torn-out cardiac musculature, sat on by squirming, fat Harry until he finally stood and ran off with half my ventricles wedged between his two, pudgy cheeks.

Damn childhood obesity.

I associated failure with women for years after that first breakup, and the hard lesson to learn was that women don’t embody my failures, and that I’m really just like everyone else who’s ever shot for love and ended up shooting himself in the head instead.

So there I was, a freshman in college, unabashedly burnt out with a big, bloody, self-imposed hole through my skull. A hole just big enough to have read her email on the computer screen behind me and catch a glimpse of fat Harry driving away in a flash of green, my heart valves peeled from his brown, saggy khakis, caught in his German-engineered door as he sped away.

Here’s to growing up.

* * *

{photo courtesy of Alex R.}

* * *

In The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a 3-year-old girl is crying. She’s sad beyond words and hurting beyond pain because earlier that same day a man broke into her house, killed her parents, kidnapped her brother and brutally raped her. She was left for dead on the dirt floor of her own home. Three-year-old rape victims exist. Do you?

* * *

It feels something like a leg.

Like a leg, bent for too long, slung over the edge of a bit too high chair so it doesn’t quite make contact with the ground and slowly falls asleep. It feels like that leg. Like that leg, its blood pinched at the knee, dysfunctional for fear it might topple the world and disappoint those watching. But then, just as the leg begins its insidious decent, a shift, and blood slams through veins and arteries and the entire chaotic awakening sets sail right into the midst of a squall, spinning out of control because it’s been asleep for three hours and all that life pouring back in like a bursting levy, tiny corn fields smashed by all that withheld water, overwhelms the leg till it screams like a river after a hard rain. Like that leg wants to escape itself so badly it explodes out of its own skin just to relieve the pressure, a living, atomic leg filled with a trillion tiny needles relieving itself as it wakes.

* * *

In Ethiopia there’s a woman. She’s blind, rather; she has no eyes. Ten years ago the Lord’s Resistance Army tied her to a tree and forced her to watch as they murdered her sons in front of her. And then they, as if to sear the memory in her mind and keep her from seeing beyond that moment, slid a military grade knife into her eye sockets. They cut the eyes from her head like scooping seeds from a squash while her hands and feet tore away bark on the neighborhood tree. This woman exists. Do you ever question anything?

* * *

And you’ve never had anyone tell you anything but a leg feels like a leg.

But sitting there with your laptop or reading this on your $600 phone, you realize you’ve never had many people tell you much of anything at all, have you? Maybe most people won’t tell you that your life is like a comatose leg dying of radioactive fallout. But maybe most of what you hear doesn’t sound all that great or strange anyhow, and maybe this advice is just as good as anything else streaming from reality TV. Because most conversations aren’t really conversations, are they? And most of life isn’t spent actually living, is it? So you sit, gazing at your glowing tool on your comfy couch in your warm, well-lit house and think this kid must be absolutely crazy or doped up or protesting something because he isn’t making any sense and even seems a little upset with the world.

And maybe you kind of like it.

* * *

There’s this girl. This girl feels like pieces of freckled, internal cloud anatomy. Dissect a cloud, you’ll find her there. Like one of those wispy, white, powerful clouds descended and surrounded your entire body and you can feel her on every hair. She feels like that first, perfect kiss; like a floating cloud orgasm. And this girl has a lot of great ideas, but she has no idea what the hell she’s doing here. But she’s trying to figure it out. She’s trying to figure it out, and I’m just trying to get to class, yet somehow our worlds collide. And all of a sudden, I’m in a cloud.

* * *

In Kenya there’s a teenage girl. The Lord’s Resistance Army approached her one afternoon while she was collecting wood. They tied her down and cut off her lips. They took a knife and peeled away the soft flesh of her mouth and then proceeded to cut off her right ear. This teenage girl is real, and she is living today. Are you angry yet?

* * *

How can one person try so diligently to understand life, love and God whilst simultaneously dealing with such frustration and irritation and the next person not try to understand anything yet simultaneously claim to know everything about life, love and God?

* * *

Because sometimes it feels like a hill. Like a grassy hill that feels different during the day than it does at night when no one else is around and the sky is black besides trillions of stars speckling the spectacular darkness. And we used to sit on that hill for hours talking about life, love and God and whether either one truly existed and if they did, whether or not they were friends. It feels like a hill sometimes, sloped just enough so our legs don’t have to hang off of anything. They simply lie there, extended, perfectly aligned with the rest of our bodies, not falling into a coma or dying slowly or any of that. It feels like a hill where two unique souls can tangle in the messiness of life, love and God and not have to worry about who is more right, whether pot is more sinful than alcohol or if politics is worth it. And we think about Africa, cry over her as we gaze at the stars. And it feels like figuring things out without figuring anything out at all.

I’m awake. And nothing in my leg explodes.

Inspiration for African stories

This past summer my friend Lee sent an email updating Quinn and I on life in California. At the end of his email he left this note:

Listen to our friend’s wonderful expression of hope and leaning into God amidst adversity. These words have been an important expression for me during times when I have no expression to give – and I thank him for it.

Trusting my friend, and always looking for a reason to listen to new music, I immediately clicked on the link in his email and downloaded Love & War & The Sea In Between by Josh Garrels. Since then, I have listened to the album nearly 200 times. Garrels, I believe, has changed my life with his music. Never have I experienced such joy and pain moving together throughout an album. I do not say this lightly or to simply attempt attention for an artist. No, I say this because I believe in the sentiments and truths found in his music. Garrels’ lyrics and music place the inner trappings and longings of his heart on full display and so vividly mirror the desires of my own heart that I wonder if a part of who we are is similar in nature, stemming from the same heart. His music continuously touched deeper parts of my human capacity and spirituality and lightly pushed on my soul until it couldn’t stand to be challenged any longer. Love & War is an experience that warrants personal response, a journey into the depths of reality and humanity and our constant struggle between the known and unknown, the material and spiritual.

If you’d like to download Love & War & The Sea In Between, you can do so for free here.

Enjoy.