Rachel Moore is now Mrs. Rachel East, in a beautiful fairy tale wedding that culminated in a crazy time of dancing the night away.  My family knows how to party…


And, true to form, we met for dinner tonight(yes, ladies and gentleman, my sister, her husband, and I went out for dinner tonight the day after their wedding. Only us.).


Photos and more stories will be forthcoming.


In other news, it’s 8:30 and my child is feeling very neglected, so I am going home to be with her.

Oh, look, another single Valentine’s Day.


This was made special, though, by a new doctor, who cheerfully told me that I would need fertility drugs to ever get pregnant, and even then he’d didn’t know if they’d work, but the sooner I had children the easier it would be.


I just looked at him in disbelief.


In other news, I auditioned for a play last night.


I haven’t done any of my homework for midterms, which is a clear sign that Sara is sabotaging yet another good thing in her life.  It’s becoming a disturbing habit of mine.


I watched “Girl, Interrupted” again last night.  I always laugh hysterically at this:


Susanna: I am a crazy girl. Seriously.
Tony: You’ve been in a hospital?
Susanna: Yes.
Tony: Do you see purple people? My friend, he saw purple people. And so the state came and took him away. He didn’t like that. Some time went by and, and he told ’em he didn’t see purple people no more.
Susanna: He got better.
Tony: Nah, he still sees ’em


And here’s my favorite quote from the book:


Robert Lowell also didn’t come while I was there. Sylvia Plath had come and gone. What is it about meter and cadence and rythmn that makes their makers mad?

www.xanga.com/fireandicequeen


 


My newest story….

Polly Lamphier is a newly minted recipient of a master’s degree when she takes a job in the small town of Fulton.  She’s not partial to small towns, but Fulton is on the shores of Wakega Lake, and Polly refuses to live anywhere there isn’t water. 


Patrick McGinty is twenty-three and already a veteran volunteer firefighter.  He doesn’t do much but hang out at the fire house and his job at Anthony’s Grill, but dreams of becoming a paramedic. He falls head first for Polly when she moves there, but Polly has already been burned-literally–and has the scars to prove it. She lost her father and two sisters in a house fire as a child, a fire that left her with burn scars on her back and neck that she desperately tries to keep people from seeing.  It’s only after getting to know Patrick, his fire chief, Scott, the school principal, Anita, and others in this town does Polly discover the truth about Fulton.  Everyone in Fulton is a burn victim…some just hide it better than others.


 


 

Just when I thought my life was bad, I read that a 37 pound woman delivered a baby.  Of course, she’s only about three feet tall, and I decided that my life is not so bad after all.
Actually, my life really isn’t that bad…just, well, boring.


And my little sister gets married a week from tomorrow…now, that’s just weird.

It’s odd, the places angels show up.


It wasn’t a very good day.  In fact, I was bordering on a very depressed day, though I managed to do laundry and homework and other necessary chores, I was upset and frustrated and felt like my life was going nowhere and clearly everyone was right and I really am mentally ill.


I expressed my rather disgruntled feelings to God on my way down the road, explaining that I was annoyed with my life and felt like He should, perhaps, send me some friends so I don’t feel so alone. I’ll take ANYONE, I said.


Be careful what you pray for.


The needle on my gas gauge had been pointing to empty for quite some miles, so I pulled in at the local Kwik Fill in Horseheads, primarily because they pump for you.  There was only one car there, so I pulled up behind it and parked.  I handed the attendent my debit card and told him to fill it, regular.


The man in the jeep in front of me jumped out and started to walk back.  He was wearing dress pants and a tie, and a long, flowing dress coat, and, Oh, my God.


“Hey, you,” he grinned.


I started to laugh at the familiar face, and shook my head in disbelief.


Jeremy.


My crazy, wonderful cousin Jeremy, who can make me laugh and remind me that life is good no matter what’s going on.


I don’t know how long we talked in the snow, though I gave him a quick update on all the various twists and turns in my life, all of which made him laugh hysterically at the ridiculousness of it all.  That, and he reminded me that there is nothing that he, Dave, and the Honda of Love with the Russian machine gun mounted on top cannot fix.


“How did you know it was me?” I asked.
“Well, I saw the red blazer,” he said. “And then I saw the flowered seats, so I was looking for a dent–oh, there it is.”


And then, later on, I called George to tell him about how God sent me an angel named Jeremy(“I’m waiting for the punchline,” George said.), and he said, “Sara, seriously, you are the most alive person I know. Don’t ever lose that.”


I understand then the fundamental problem.  It is not a lack of vitamins or red blood cells, or a lack of sleep, or any of the other things I keep using as excuses.  The problem is that I keep sacrificing the best for the good.  I keep seeing something–like Americorps–that looks good, and doing that, instead of focusing on the best–which, for me, is what makes me come alive, and that is writing, and theater, and radio, and laughter, and hope.


I will finish my education program and get my certificate, but I’m going to do what I know I should do, and that is focus on English and theater.  And I’m going to find myself a stage someplace, and I’m going to come alive again.


And just in case I forget again, I’m posting some of my favorite quotes, so I can come back and back and back, if need be, to this post, and find myself here.


 


Do not ask yourself what the world needs.  Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and do that, for what the world needs most is people who have come alive. ~~Gil Bairre


Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
James Truslow Adams


Look, I don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive you’ve got to flap your arms and legs, you’ve got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you’re not alive.
Mel Brooks





 

I had Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus, Take The Wheel” song up, but, quite honestly, it’s just too overused right now for me to play…


So…


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You can press “stop” if you don’t want to tie up your phone lines(I do realize not everyone is blessed with high-speed internet) and it will stop. Or if you just don’t want it too play.
Off to school.

Righty-o.  As you can tell, my homework isn’t doing that marvelous.  Actually, I went home and fell asleep.


My mom and sisters are at yet another bridal shower.  Last night, at the shower at my grandmother’s, someone who will, mercifully, remain unnamed, smiled at me sweetly and said, “So, how does it feel to have no one want you?”

Ouch.


I smiled back and replied, “Like a core of steel.”

No matter how cruel the comment, there was a lot of truth there.  No one does want me.  I am not particularly charming, talented, useful, or easy to be with.  There is no one out there in the world thinking, “If only I had Sara…”

Yet there was a lot of truth in my comment, too.  I may be unwanted.  I may be exhausted.  I may have everything in my life going wrong right now, but I am strong.  When everything else is stripped away, everything I hold dear, everything I take for granted, I am left with nothing but myself.


And I am enough.


Also, I am going to Wal-Mart and then to bed until sometime tomorrow night.


Sara–out.

I am doing homework.


Really.


My dad gave me my office keys back yesterday.  Actually, they were never my keys to begin with, but he changed the locks and never gave me new keys.  Until yesterday, when I really needed to come down here and work, and had no keys.


I feel like a complete person again.


In all honesty, being here in the quietness of the office building on a Sunday, is odd. I’m using my laptop at Jeremy’s old desk(my dad told me this was the best hookup. I thought of sitting on Jeremy’s chair, and asked dubiouslly, “I’m not going to catch anything, right?”), and if I lean back for a second, if I am quiet and close my eyes, I can hear them.  See them. Feel them.


The vistages remain.  Yellow post-it notes still litter Jeremy’s desk; my cousin, like me, doodles excessively on post-it notes and leaves them lying around.  One of them, dated 09/02/04, is even in my handwriting…


When your education x-ray cannot see under my skin,
I won’t tell you a damn thing that I could not tell my friends.
Now roaming through this darkness,
I’m alive but I’m alone,
Part of me is fighting this but part of me is gone


I don’t remember the date, or what happened, or why I was sitting at Jeremy’s desk, but I remember that emotion.  Dave’s coffee cup still sits on the table in this room, next to the microwave my dad stole from me. A message for Jeremy hangs on the wall next to me, right under the New York Employment Rights Act poster.  A calender sits still at October 2005.  Across the room from me hangs a white out board, listing phone numbers for Guy, Phil, Kathy, me, and BoneHead(Jeremy, apparently).  Neither Guy or I have worked here in a year and a half, but our imprints remain.  Under my number is written Sara’s number. You know you miss her.   A Mountain Dew bottle still sits on Dave’s desk, though I think it was Phil’s.  The ping-pong wooden gun lies on Phil’s old desk, and, I suspect, if I were to go into the other room, to my old desk that Kathy now uses, and riffle through it, I would find traces of myself.


So this is what gets left behind.  Coffee cups, wooden toys, and post-it notes.  On a whim, I leap up and head into the other room, rooting through my old desk.  Even though Kathy uses it, there are word documents still on the computer, a stray post-it note, a hair tie, a book I thought I lost, a list I made once.  Things that say, Sara was here once.


I left home that winter angry and searching for myself.  I was running away from a painful situation, one that is still yet unresolved and that keep creeping back into my life in dramatic ways.  Instead of turning around and facing it, I ran away, graciously and kindly, but still and all, running instead of working through it.  Time away was good. Staying away was not. 
It was just fear, I realize. Fear of being known, fear of being surrounded by people who could see right through me.


Fear that made me run, and I have run for one year, seven months, and five days.


The four block walk exhausts me.  It will be weeks before I regain strength.  My doctor even told me that had I not come in when I did, that my oxygen levels were so low, that any physical exertion last week would have killed me.  My already oxygen-depleted red blood cells would not have been able to survive physical anything last week, and I would have essesntially suffocated myself by something as mere as practicing martial arts with Rebekah,  a revelation that astounds me almost as much as it scares me. 


They’re sitting on couches in the front room, watching the big screen television while sitting on the new leather.  Ladies and gentlemen, your tax dollars at work.


Silence descends as they look up at me. 
It has been nineteen months since I last darkened these doors. And I am simply too tired to have pride left.


I found the application in the bottom drawer of my old desk.  I changed some dates, but the rest is still the same.  We stare at each other for a long moment.  Finally, Patrick stands up and takes the papers from my fingers.


“Sara, I–“

I know what he’s going to say, the same words we’ve said a thousand times, the same thoughts we’ve thought.


I shrug. “I’m not playing this game,” I say quietly, with what I hope is dignity.  “You have no reason not to accept that application from me.”
“Oh, yeah, we do,” Jim says. “Severe anemia, for starters.  The very last thing I need is you collapsing on scene, and then I have to deal with the victim and you.”
And nothing has changed here, either, because it is still a fishbowl.  I wonder who told them, what phone calls have been exchanged, who has sat in what office discussing the fact that Sara’s sick.  And then I realize that I don’t really want to know.


I level my gaze.   “Read the application over,” I reply quietly. “My phone number’s on there.”  I glance back at Patrick.
“I’ll be at Pizza Hut,” I continue, and then glance at the brand new bay door and grin. “Don’t drive there.”

It’s a long walk to Pizza Hut, and it’s a walk I shouldn’t make.  But I know this town, my town, my people, and I know, somehow, instinctively, they need to know I’m here, and I’m staying.  I know, as I walk past these houses, that there are people inside who are watching me walk.


I’m collapsing by the time I get into Pizza Hut. This is home, and there are good memories here. Those were happy days.


The waitress, like everyone else, knows me. She hands me my Diet.
“Just one?”
I glance up at the door, and in walks Patrick. He doesn’t walk as slow as I do these days.
“Two.” He says, and slips into the booth seat across from me. I can barely hide a grin, and he matches it.


“What made you do that?” he asks.


I shrug. “I was at the office.  Started noticing all the things left behind, and suddenly started wondering if all I had left was a book and a word document and a hair tie.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m more than that.  I ran away so fast nineteen months ago that I left only physical things behind.  But what about laughter? And hope? And joy?  I didn’t leave that behind, Patrick.  When you walk into that office, do you think of the laughter I left behind, the good memories, or just the books on the table?”
“So you’ve come back.”
“You knew I would.”

He laughs. “You know, you really had Jimmy going with that application.  You know he’d have to deny it.”
I laugh, too. “He must think I’m an idiot if I’d really go back now.”
Patrick shakes his head and smiles warmly. I smile back.
He slides the application back at me, and I glance at the date at the top.


June 01, 2006.


“Come on,” he says, “I’ll drive you back to the office.  You shouldn’t be walking, you should be sleeping.”
“I should be doing homework,” I say.


“Well, then,” he says. “Let’s go.”
And we do.


 


 

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