Part Two in my Personal Philosophy: Just Circles
I was flipping through a journal from highschool to find some story or quote from our antics back in Woodstock (GA) and I found myself reading about the summer of '96 when my parents divorced.
I actually didn't write about it much at all. I mainly wrote about work and concerts and boys, and then at the end of entries I'd put something like,
"... mom and dad are sleeping in separate rooms."
"... dad came home drunk tonight."
"... I've lined up sleep-overs for the next nine days so I don't have to be here."
Just small insights into how I could have possibly been feeling, but nothing descriptive.
One of these little blurbs was something like, "...when are all the pieces going to fall back together?"
I stood in my kitchen, back in Tennessee, in October of 2000, and as I read those words I leaned forward against my counter and cried.
At that time I was working construction for a building on campus. I had graduated the previous July. My most beloved professor had been murdered the previous June. I didn't have a car. I waited tables at night and I was trying to quit smoking.
But in light of all this I had very recently - in the previous week - written that I felt like all the pieces had fallen back into place.
I wept in gratitude.
Four years after my untouched teenage heart had thought she was scattered, I actually felt like I had brought those pieces back together. It had come full-circle.
Even though all the general destruction of college had been going on.
Suddenly I realized the TRUTH. The moral of the story.
In my mind life's problems are not jig-saw puzzles where I can see a picture but some pieces are missing and then after the big climax it all becomes clear.
(When I talk about scattered pieces I mean as in broken glass.)
In my mind, life's problems are more like a connect-the-dots. First I draw in the dots, though.
As I stood in my kitchen that Ocotber it was as though the great Sharpee in the Sky was drawing a permanent line connecting the dots and I understood clearly the image that it left tattooed (old-style) in my mind.
I wish I could describe the image, but for that my vocabulary is too frail.
I don't see life as linear, basically. Sort of the Kurt Vonegut, Jr. idea of being "unstuck in time."
(Slaughterhouse Five certainly was a DOT. (and Catch 22))
I remembered a poem by John Donne, A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING, where he talks about the distance between himself and his lover, and then describes how their connection supercedes any distance and in fact makes their love expand.
Standing in the kitchen that October I realized that I'm connected to something, tethered to something, certainly a PART of something else that creates the distinctive, and perfect, patterns in which my life moves. The final three stanzas from VALEDICTION came to my mind and I rushed to find it.
Yes; it's perfect.
If they [souls] be two, they are two soAs stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my CIRCLE JUST, And makes me end where I begun.
I am certainly not navigated by a "lover" but I do not believe that I could connect my own dots without some firm foot that could assure the tying up of my lose ends (something a circle does not have).
That's me: just circles.
And that's the moral of all my stories: time will tell, and in the end we shall know, and I am only a contributor to life and not the master-mind.
Philipians 1:6 "And I am convinced and sure of this very thing, that He Who began a good work in you will continue until the day of Jesus Christ [right up to the time of His return], developing [that good work] and perfecting and bringing it to full completion in you.
ADDENDUM:
I got an email from Tylere from Monte Carlo today and he was AMOROUS (drunk, yes), downright LOVING and if I'm not mistaken YEARNING for me and I'm on the v e r g e of something drastic. I know I'll play high-stakes, sudden-death if I ever see him again. I know I'll say something like, "I'm deeply in love with you, what are you going to do about it?" The only thing that asuages the knowledge that he could break my heart is knowing that I can break his heart too (not that I would, but that he has vested interest to some degree, if not the same as mine).
He's back in the states next Wednesday: let's see if he moves mountains to see me.
