The Remains of a Poet

The Ache

This is the house I grew up in
Sixteen years
Other people live in it now
They don’t know its history
But that doesn’t matter
I’ve got a new house
And it’s comfortable
Adequate

So why do I want to walk up those front steps
Open the door
Reclaim this house?
Why do I feel like without this house
I’ll always feel homeless?

How can a building mean so much?
Just two-by-fours and drywall
A giant, hollow, inanimate object
“If these walls could talk…” we say
But they can’t
They’re just walls
And they’re mute by nature
Mute to everyone
(Mute to everyone but the ones who know them
Who knew them)

Why do we miss these things?
It’s not the superiority of the building
It’s the memories it holds
But buildings don’t hold memories
We do
We still have the memories without the building
But we value it anyway

Why do I still long for home?
How can that building hold it prisoner?
Why can’t it let it go?
(But I’m the one who needs to let go
Aren’t I?)

They say “home is where the heart is”
But they’re wrong
Or they just never tell you
That your heart can divide
Into so many pieces
So that no matter where you go
A part of you will always long
For somewhere else

They don’t tell you that a piece of you
Gets left in the past
Where you can’t retrieve it
Don’t tell you about the ache
That never goes away

It doesn’t matter what happens
What you do
Where you go
You can stay in that house
Until it crumbles around you
And you’ll still be aching
Because somewhere between childhood and adulthood
A piece of your heart breaks off
Stays behind
And you can never get it back

You think if you go back to that building
That first home
You can retrieve it
But a building’s just a building
And hearts don’t come when they’re called

So you learn to live with aching
With homesickness
Forever

It’s called growing up

title: BH
fandom: Harry Potter
character(s): Ron, appearances by several others, including the next gen kids
rating: G-ish?
words: ~2700
summary: before Harry, before Hermione, before Hogwarts... Ron reflects on families lost and families formed.
notes: I don't really know what this is. It's not really a plot as much as Ron reflects rather angstily on his life, but I don't know. It is what it is, I suppose. I am worried I might have made Ron too introspective, but given that he's near forty at this point, I don't think it's too much of a stretch.

---
( There are things Harry and Hermione don't understand. )

It’s Friday morning, and it’s raining, and the very last thing I want to do is go to class. My lack of motivation isn’t helped when I discover my roommate has already commandeered the bathroom … even though she doesn’t have to leave until at least an hour after I do. Which means, of course, that I’m annoyed with her even before she starts playing Taylor Swift’s new song ‘White Horse’. If she were playing it on a CD, instead of out of her computer, I think I would have broken the disc by now. Swift whines in an emo half-whisper about how she’s “not a princess and this ain’t a fairytale”, and first of all, it’s “isn’t” not “ain’t”; second, how surprised is she, really, to have discovered reality; third, the whole problem seems to have stemmed from her dating a world class jerk, so again, how surprised is she by this outcome; and fourth, no she isn’t a princess, but she is a very rich, famous, and successful teenage country star, so maybe she should count her blessings and shut up already about her ostensibly terrible love life. Also, stop making stupid girls even more emo.

So I get dressed and trek off to class a bit earlier than usual, partly because it takes longer to walk in the rain, but mostly because I’m pretty sure I’ll be coming around on a white horse to trample Taylor Swift if I have to listen to that stupid song one more time. Consequently, I’m the first person in the classroom, but this blissful solitude doesn’t even last a full minute before the door opens and my least favorite classmate enters with her friend.

She’s a sophomore with the whole bohemian “I-don’t-care-what-people-think-of-me” thing going on, and has the extremely irritating habit of loudly proclaiming just exactly what she finds wrong with world at that particular moment – there’s always something – but she does it with an impressive vocabulary, and the other sophomores think she’s brilliant.

I’m not surprised, this morning, to hear her complaining about something – children or her Linguistics homework or the fickleness of men or her parents deciding to take a second honeymoon in Mammoth during Spring Break – it doesn’t matter what it is, really, her point is the same as Taylor Swift’s: life sucks.

And the most frustrating part is that I can’t really articulate why she’s wrong. I can’t help thinking that if I’d met her when I was a junior in high school or a freshman in college, I would probably have loved her and found her hilarious – which probably says more about me than it does about her. As it is, though, she happened upon me in the stage of my life where any cynicism that isn’t my own annoys me, for reasons I can’t fully explain. My ever-present optimistic streak is strong this year, and life’s rough, sure, but it doesn’t suck as much as everyone seems to think, and then my realistic side jumps in and snaps that maybe if people didn’t have such stupid, unrealistic expectations in the first place, they wouldn’t be so jaded now.

It’s stopped raining by the time I finish my classes at noon, and I’m walking back to my apartment still struggling with the paradox of my own cynicism and my loathing of the cynicism of others, when a cloud slides away, and I’m hit by brilliant sunlight. Suddenly I’m forcefully reminded of walking this same road two years ago as a freshman, wondering if this was how the next three-and-a-half years would be: the bright sun, and the awkwardness, and the vast, terrifying, unknown blank that is the future (and the terrible irony is that I wasn’t that far off).

I get home and try to distract myself for a few hours, and then one of my roommates comes home and announces she’s going for a walk, and I remember that I’m supposed to be exercising for my P.E. class, so I should probably go on one too. I get my shoes on and grab my iPod, and it’s only after I’m in the neighborhood that I realize this probably wasn’t the best idea if I didn’t want to have to think. It’s nearly sunset as I turn on to Hill Street, which is just far enough away from my apartment for my pessimistic side to kick in and remember, hey, wasn’t it supposed to rain again tonight?

I look up, but the sky is completely clear. I follow its ever-lightening curve down to the clouds lining the horizon, behind which the sun has just disappeared. Below the ocean is laid out, muted colors in the pre-twilight, pastel shades of orange, pink, blue, green, gray, and brown, and the combination should be ugly, but somehow it isn’t.

I’m supposed to be getting my heart rate up, but it’s hard to care about passing a P.E. class when confronted with such overwhelming natural beauty. Instead, I stop and take in its vastness, and – just for a moment – feel that maybe it’s enough.

Southern California is having a heatwave, my dormitory does not have AC, and 95 degrees is stifling even if your room does overlook the ocean, so today I did something I've never done before and went to Starbucks to do my homework.

It was really lovely. I got a frappuccino (even more wonderful because of the heat), and sat in one of the big, comfy armchairs in the AC, and read Madame Bovary. And when I finished my coffee, I got ice-water, and scribbled down quotes from Madame Bovary while the ice melted on my tongue. I have to say that while the beginning is fantastically dull and the ending rather abrupt, the book is actually rather good. There are many quotable paragraphs in Part III, and while I think Flaubert over-dramatises Emma's emotions in particular, there are several parts of human nature he got spot on. But reading it reinforced something I'd been thinking about as I drove to Starbucks:

I'm not happy; I'm not sure I've ever been happy, really. I was thinking about this because my oldest sister is working for the Peace Corps in Ukraine, and half the time her water doesn't work, and she can't use a computer right now, and she has to walk everywhere. And she's happy almost all the time. I wonder about that. I mean, not that water and computers and cars automatically ensure happiness, but it's just ... when she was here -- when she was like me -- she wasn't happy either. And I wonder about that.

I wrote this poem in class the other day. I wrote it in about five minutes, so it's not very good, but it sort of gets at what I'm saying:

My life is like a melody
Sweet, but just a bit quirky
Notes all blending perfectly
Then dissonance begins.

My room is large
My problems small
But I don't know I have it all
The harmony unnoticed 'til
The disaster descends.


The thing is, I look back at my life and think that I should have been happy, that I should be happy right now, but I wasn't and I'm not. I remember little periods of time when I was happy, but it always freaks me out when I get happy because I'm so used to being unhappy and life just doesn't work the other way round. Happiness just isn't natural for me.  Everything just sort of blends into this weary discontent that I've known for so long I don't even question it anymore.  And I wonder about that.


I'll close with another poem I wrote in class. It's made up of (most of) my lines from the pass around poems we did the first day of class. It's a little weird, but I like it all the same.


Pictures of the Soul

The wind churned the leaves like an ocean wave
Glass shattered, the shards fanning across the asphalt
Living pictures on a 2-D surface

Birdsong starts and swells to meet the sunlight
Homesick for a place that’s nonexistent
But here there is no movement but the water
It pushes forward still, unrelenting
Never thinking, only feeling, always creating
No brain for speech, no heart for emotion
Is it the only real thing in this world we inhabit?

Should I reveal my soul to an objective world?
Or be forever homeless, flat, and small?

Real Acting

I cannot act,
I’m too afraid
Of looking like a fool.
‘Cause crying, wailing,
Fearing, failing,
Won’t make me look cool.

What if I laugh
And it seems fake?
Or I show poise instead of fear?
What if I cry
And yet my eye
Refuses to shed tears?

Or even worse,
What if I
Actually show emotion?
If something frees
And someone sees
My inner commotion?

What if the draw
Of acting isn’t
The spotlight at all?
If its appeal
Is being real
Before the curtain call?

It would explain
My stage fright:
I fear letting someone see
All of the tears,
All of the fears
That are inside of me.

Even someone
Who is not real
Is not a strong enough shield.
My heart is walled,
And if that falls
I fear it won’t be healed.

So I cannot act,
I’m too afraid
Of showing my emotions,
At least today,
So look away
From my heart’s deep commotion.

So, I’m writing this short story for school. And, unlike my last one, I actually really like it (so far, anyway). I haven’t written the beginning yet, but I have written quite a bit of the middle. The following is an excerpt, and I must say, I’m really rather proud of it.

If I could ask you one question,

I would ask you, “Why?”

Why did you ignore me?

Why did you always lie?

 

Why didn’t you make an effort?

Why did you never care?

Why did you always push me?

Why couldn’t you play fair?

 

Why did you get on your cell phone

Whenever I got in your car?

Why did you say you wanted to be close,

But always stayed so far?

 

Why did you keep harassing me?

Why don’t you leave me alone?

Why can’t you simply let me be?

Why can’t you move on?

 

Why is this so important,

When it never was before?

Why did you change your priorities

After you walked out our door?

 

Why did you insist on using me

As a threat, or as bait?

Why was it, when you finally “cared”,

It was too little, far too late?

 

Why can’t you seem to understand

I want nothing to do with you?

You’ve hurt me far too deeply,

And our connection’s finally through.

 

I don’t want to be around you

‘Cause you’ve always made me cry.

But if I could ask one question,

Then I would ask you, “Why?”

When Did That Become “When”?

So now we’re standing here
Soon the miles’ll separate us
But that’s nothing to the gap between our hearts
Things have changed over the years
Lies and wounds have come between us
And we know that we’re better off apart

But before we say goodbye
There’s something I’d like to see
I just have one more question
If you could just tell me

(Chorus)
Do you remember when
Love was all we really needed
And it couldn’t be defeated
Remember when we took a vow
That we’d fight side by side
Unitl the day we died
Remember when we held each other’s hearts
And all of them, here’s my question:
When did all of that become “when”?

Author’s Note: This sounds better if you know the tune!