You're my lullaby

I want to hold an umbrella over your head when the cats and dogs are falling.

I want to hide with you in piles of leaves.

I want to help build a snowman in the night calm.

I want to lie together in the shade of a tree and find out how your day was.

I want to secretly hear you singing to yourself in the kitchen.

Will you run away // if I try to be true?

I wore blue jeans today. If you know me that could only mean one thing, for the last time I wore them the same act was being performed. Family portraits at the nature center. Trying to smile. I am so very poor at this, it isn't that I don't like my family (well that's 4/5ths true anyway), I just don't like the feeling of manufacturing an emotion or a moment. For me I need it to be real. I crave the purity of an engagement or a snapshot of time.

Is that the problem I am having with her? That I am too often catching myself memorizing certain lines and plotting spectacular events of snowflakes falling and first kisses?

Another photograph is snapped. I thought of what our pictures together would feel like.

A necklace of leaves // Spirits in the trees

One of the greatest friends I will ever have in my entire life and I. Everything smiles and dreams and magical beginnings to a shared apartment so very soon as we entered University.

The back side of the photograph contains far more words than it does numbers. Just hours later would be the devastating phone call that would send a great love, a great hero into oblivion and cloud my newly free and open eyes. Just days later it seemed like what innocence remained with me was shattered along with everyone else. It is remarkable how the moments have woven into memory. Where I set the camera to take this photograph. How I remember the feel of the couch. How I remember chasing the moon down the freeway that night and the horrible feeling of losing her forever to the unknown realm of 'moving on'. The Tuesday morning seminar class and walking on a crystal Detroit morning back to the parking garage, only faintly overhearing that classes had been cancelled because of some sort of bomb threat. Driving the freeway unaware and listening to Dido and signing onto AOL and seeing the image, getting a call from Tom just as my television began to focus. Every channel. Everywhere.

The uplifting moments following such tragedy and madness were found in seeing individual people taking the time to actually stop and give. Give time, blood, food, even just a smile. Walking the campus as the snow and the fires of the winter slowly dissolved, these small moments seemed to glow ever brighter. My belief in the human spirit, the hope that those living in poverty and fear will someday walk their streets free of the tyranny that breeds such feelings of contempt and anger. Maybe one day we can say that we are Christians and Muslims and Jews, but we are human beings first.

Bless those who passed 9/11/2001
Bless those who dream of something that is beautiful but never reach it on this Earth

This is possibly the only time // The last time I can tell you

It was the last hour of the greatest August in recorded history. Driving under electric candlelight towards a gathering of the most wonderful people that have ever existed, I stopped. The lovely Fiona Apple and my Sister and I sharing Death Cab/The Flaming Lips and Baseball + Breweries and Nicole's wedding. The tree was ripe with so many gigantic memories. The difference in all of it were the memories riding between those great skyscraper moments. Those secret seconds slipped away under the shade and the walks under crystal clear midnight skies and the windows down and the music up. And the last hour of August. Sitting beneath the lamppost and turning the old pages that would bring my voyage on the Hispaniola as well as the smiles and adventures with Capt. Silver and the crew to a close. I am one month older as the calendar speaks to me, my heart whispers to me something altogether different.