Love Notes

I find myself crying. For what I have missed, for that person I could have been. I confess to my Creator that I'm not sure I can do it. My lips move and brush against the text. The sound of my voice bounces back to me from the page. For a minute I'm not sure I can move. I cannot release myself from this moment of pure communication and simplicity to enter back into the space where Challenge will not let me live. Peacefully. I do not ask for much yet that for which I do request I find each time dismissed. Do You not also desire the streets to be filled with dancing?



The fabric folds and stretches in ways I do not understand. I attempt a tug every once in a while, but truthfully I sit and wait to be draped. I trust. In You. In only You. In no other being, human or not, of this world or of another, have I ever placed that thing. That word that keeps coming back to me as they sum up my inability to keep you close. And so I add to my requests that you understand my love and come back to me from across those long distances. I pray that you'll know I am waiting. I pray, my love, that you are reading this now.



The city expands from each step. From below it blows out before me, bigger than anything I could have dreamed. And the breeze mixes with the winds from the west, from those simple caresses that make me know You're here. She screams with a sense of finality as she forces a life from between her. I find myself crying. For this new one I hold in the folds of my flesh. I whisper sweet songs, "Kitzror hamor, ken dodi li. Bein shaday yalin."

She runs around the room with a wave of long blond frizz bellowing out behind her. Smallest eyes and sharpest mind, she looks for adventure in places I had long deemed barren. She dances alone in the center of the space. Her hands follow a pattern that I do not know while the beat adjusts to the song she cannot hear me singing. "Shuvi, shuvi shulamis. Shuvi, shuvi v'techezeh bach. Ki nechezeh bashulamis, kimcholot hamachanaim."

Hold your thumb up to your eye and all you see is a thumb. Remove it and you'll realize the world that has always existed just beyond your own arrogance. Run away from the fears that you have and they will follow close behind. Run from the strength that you have to confront them and you embrace the emptiness of misfortune.

Hold him close to you while you have him. Do not allow your hesitation to create space between your very limbs. For one moment to have his touch would I not give all that I am. Would my lips not lie, create falsehoods from each letter, for the chance to listen again to the sound of his heart through the skin of his chest.

Do I not yearn for You with the same burning pain. Look at me here and tell me, do I not wait for You each minute of the day. And when I cry, "bein kach ubein kach ani bocheh" do I not cry for this distance. My love compares so slightly to the feelings that are returned. I am not worthy. I harbor no doubts as to the condition of my actions and the selection of my merits. "L'man shmecha" for all that You are please send him already.

We should all have a year of life and blessing, of health and happiness, of strength and courage, and of revealed miracles. May this year end and the new one begin in Yerushalayim with the coming of Moshiach.

The Rubber Band Boy

I know why you're thinking that. It's my fault that you misunderstood. I wove your weaknesses through the flesh of my fingertips and then snapped you away as if you were nothing but a rubber band. You were shocked when I confessed interest in what you had believed to be a world I would not enter. I was stunned to find that you were exactly as I thought. Despite what I know about the world, I find it easy to trust you.



I tell her the number. The colored sign that appeared out of nothing and implies an existence I'm not sure I can handle. Fourteen years. Too much and too little for the worries I have. My babies will not whisper their secrets to the walls. There have been enough hardships nestled within the plaster.



He tells me we'll sit in a circle and discuss secrets. Lines that he trains to perform so perfectly, while I can't even make sense of meter. Words that he stretches until they say what he means. She falls asleep in the corner and her head nods from side to side like the little dolls that they sell at drugstores. Using the cheapest glue to stick together massive explosions of plastic and potential. Sometimes life can get too big for Crayola. The pens scribble away as they mark up her flesh with adjustments and revisions. I cannot speak. I will not read. My thoughts can't help bolting. Out of this room. Back to the safety of silence. Nor at this shall I be a master.

I'm Waiting for Tulips

I was so afraid. Unnecessary, irrelevant fears that cloud over your mind and create tension throughout each limb. Worry that can only be calmed by the sound of the rain and the faded daze that comes over the city during a downpour. But the secret was well kept and I walked off the elevator alone. He waited by the door with a forced expression of casual disinterest.

He took me to our park, despite the season. Old women and mothers with babies smiled at us kindly. We reminded them of something, perhaps of potential. We walked until my feet were numb and my heels were worn away by the hard sidewalks. He bought me roses.

My hand adjusts to the pattern of this writing. After filling notebooks with poems that condense and divide, this method of expression confuses. I have forgotten how to create sentences that roll into each other like waves. In these stories I find myself kissing the grass and planting seeds in your cheeks. Despite what I know.

I walk through the city and pray quietly to myself. I analyze fashion trends, study your laws to bring clarity to my own, and stay awake too late to reread your poems.

I watch you walk away in your baby-blue crocks. Smiling to myself because you are not for me. I have been given the blessing of time, the miracle of the continued search, and the opportunity to expand myself in ways I never thought possible.

But at the moment that he leaves I find myself thinking. If this was a movie I would turn around and you'd be standing right behind me. Smiling softly, the way you did that day at the park.

I am whispering secrets. Weaving them into the lines you think you have read. The theme is the past and the pattern it takes as we write it out, just one more time. This is for you, the Lady that looks for the answer with logic while her heart makes her wonder if it really could be.
It's true. It's me.

Why the Title (for raziel)

A search began, through no fault of my own, for a long lost friend. Words of the past entered my mind as swiftly as they once entered my heart. Lessons were remembered and fears were reminded that they would not succeed here. She wrote with a grace so separate from the things this world knows. Each sentence held the weight of a million kindnesses and that intricate rhythm of wisdom.
I have not found her. That girl who threw me a rope of sentences through the layers of broken glass that surrounded me. That one who promised me, with all of her heart, that I had not written my last words. I am here, ready to show her what I have become.
Instead, I found a bit of myself. I hadn't been missing it, not knowing it was gone. But I reread the words that were formed in the midst of that raging storm and suprised myself with what I was.
I found there are things that I have forgotten, and now I intend to get them back.