In case of WOLVERINE

I love.

I love.

And it’s on nights like these that I love best, and most deeply, and most purely. George Winston’s “Autumn” is spinning languidly on the record player. I have a cup of cinnamon tea. And upstairs, Beth and Justin are talking, loving each other.

Just when I think I’m too hurt or too scared to go on, quiet moments like this come to me and I’m wrapped in a circle of unbroken love – my friends stand strong around me, my family clasps hands in a wider ring around them, and our God binds us all together. Nothing bad can happen to me. I’m safe.

And with that safety comes the beautiful freedom to love back, to give back. You can’t pry yourself open; I’ve tried. The harder you wrench at your seams, the tighter they knit themselves shut. Nothing opens them but love. You do have to try, but you try with love. Not desperation. Not fear.

It’s a weird metaphor, but I feel sometimes like the X-Men. Specifically, I feel like Rogue. I feel like a poison to everyone I want to help, to everyone I try to love. I keep people away; I want to touch them, but touching them will hurt them. Sometimes, I wonder about the creators of X-Men and how they could be so awful to create someone like Rogue. She embodies, in one way, one of our most fundamental fears – that we are our own enemy.

But, in their infinite grace, the X-Men people also created Wolverine. And Wolverine heals. He can heal himself, yes, but he can also heal Rogue.

Wolverine can heal himself and he can heal Rogue.

He can touch her. Does she hurt him? Of course. Inevitably. But he heals.

God has given me dozens of Wolverines over the years. Maybe hundreds. He put the ability to heal inside everyone. Humankind is entirely made of Wolverines and Rogues.

Sometimes we’re more one than the other. That’s our war. But we fight it and so does everyone else. Everyone. We don’t have to fight alone.

And on nights like these, I’ve been touched by a healing hand, not a poisonous one. I’m wrapped in a circle of unbroken love. I’m open. I love back.

I love. And I'm not Rogue, tonight.

In case of ALCHEMY

At six, my body is a furnace.

I stoke it out of bed and coax up a flame in my eyes.

I send myself faithfully out.

I am the quiet priest of a quiet religion,

Cloaked in flannel and milk white fog.

At seven, I turn the key in the lock, brass to brass.

I fling wide the door,

Opening, open,

Before a morning has been sung hello,

Before a plank has been lifted or a nail driven,

Before a pen has touched a page.

My body is a furnace,

Opening, open.

By eight, I’ve already served bread to the jangling gypsy band,

Tea to the king’s mysterious wife,

Dark cups of blood to the usual ghosts.

I send myself faithfully out.

At noon, the sun is roaring with his golden mouth,

Opening, open.

I am tumbling in a sphere of metal and glass.

I measure ice and potion,

Weigh metallic heaps of dust,

Pour and chop and carry.

I coax up a flame in my eyes.

At three, I am a cog in the clock of time.

I’m pulling coffee from its dark bean fists,

Separating water from earth,

Sorting moons from stars.

More visitors cluster around to watch me work,

To trade their coins for cups.

I am the quiet priest of a quiet religion.

At six, the sailors come whistling in, homebound.

Beggar children stretch out their hands for hunks of cheese.

The king stops by to ask after his wife.

I kiss them all,

And turn them back to the door.

I am tumbling in a sphere of metal and glass.

By nine, I distill the day into night.

I float through the shop like a white moth in a cave.

The lamplighter comes by, singing,

Offering me his arm.

I turn the key in the lock, brass to brass.

I am a cog in the clock of time,

Opening, open.

In case of 2007: The Very End

They stretched out, stomachs full of warm coffee.

And this, she realized, this was how it would happen. How he would finally drop anchor, cutting those telephone wire lines that connected him to Hannah. Because of this, he would call her tonight and tell her, voice breaking, that he would not be coming back to New York.

She expected this knowledge to come to her with a jolt of vicious joy, but it didn’t. She felt only relief, relief that it would all be over and that he could join himself together again. His continents would drift back together, glaciers cracking, tectonic plates rumbling in reverse, molten lava bubbling back into the earth. This was a prehistoric morning, as he rolled onto one shoulder, sand sugaring half his face. This was Pangea.

“It’s the bluest thing I’ve ever seen.” She said, nodding to the sky.

He smiled, but didn’t reach for her.

A gull squawked nearby. They listened to it and to the thunder of the Pacific and the starting-up morning sounds of the pier.

She noticed a wild-looking man, shirt off, panting as he jogged down the shore.

“Crazy man dead ahead.”

He only smiled again.

The relief began to ebb as he rolled back onto his back. She felt the rush of time come sweeping up through history, yanking landmasses apart at their seams.

He sat up and it was going.

He grabbed his phone, checked the time, said, “We need to move your car.”

And it was gone.

They stood, brushing sand off their bodies, and turned their backs on the Pacific. Their shadows stretched behind them.

And by the time he finally reached for her, she took his hand in full awareness that there was no Pangea. Not for her anyway. His hand, clasping hers tightly to help her over the dunes, was no more than an apology.

In case of 2007: Fall, Exercises

When I was seven, Jurassic Park was released into the world. Of course we weren’t allowed to watch such things. My sister was nine and even she didn’t see it until two years later. For some reason, though, the stories I’d heard about the movie haunted me. I saw clips, little clips about it on TV. I drew pictures of dinosaurs, and my older cousins terrorized us by hunting us down as raptors.

I don’t know if it was this way for everyone, but that craze seemed to last forever. It was four years later by the time I actually saw it. 1997. We were in the basement. I’d long since gotten a minute-by-minute retelling of the movie from my sister. And, even so, the film surpassed what four years of an overactive imagination could create. I don’t remember if this is true, if I said something about it right then, or if I could pinpoint that moment as being when I decided to make movies. I was already a writer. But Jurassic Park set me to fire.

*****

On Christmas Day – I was probably about 14 – my mother told my grandparents that my sister was a better writer than me. I don’t know if, even then, my dreams of writing had solidified. But I know now that writing has always been so entangled in every part of my soul. It was the way she said it, a slight incline of her head at my own false assertions. I was trying to impress upon my grandparents just how talented Lisa was. But when I said she was better, I didn’t mean it.

My mother meant it. I don’t know if I so much cared about being worse than Lisa – she was older, of course, and she was Lisa. It was just an assessment of me, by my mother, that declared me unfit to pursue my deepest longing.

*****

Three swings, all about a foot from the ground and then one baby swing, dangling by wound up rusted chains. They’re framed in yellow, garish, bright, rectangular. Someone built this playground, but they forgot the grass. Instead they’ve tried to keep the city out with chain-linked fences, drab brick, and dry mulch.

Spider-vein cracks in the greentop suggest earthquakes, past and future. In the inescapable angles of a Los Angeles sunset, towels sway on the clothesline.

No one but me knows this family has a baby. What a thing, what a beautiful chore, to roll up that last swing, raise up the baby so she can fly, suspended, tiny fists waving, all almond eyes and black bean little toes. She can sway, dancing, to the tumble of sirens.

I want that. I want this – four swings, a slide, four walls, and a city to keep at bay. And the breath of a baby in October. And a pumpkin.

I demand that, if I can never have the grass.

In case of 2007: Midnight, August

I once said that God must be a city built on the shore. I still believe that’s true. He must be cliffs, so strong and solid. He must be a roll of dark mountains, ferny and alive with unseen vegetation, the sound of crickets and the damp smell of fog.

He said a city set on a hill cannot be hidden. I still believe that, too – now more than ever in the murk of this particular Malibu evening. He is light, stronger than neon and fluorescent pollution, the clear ring of a bell against a low urban and suburban buzz.

And the Franciscans must have known, to have so well followed His example. To fortify themselves here, surrounded by the ocean – the blue and thick gray, a vast and melting nebula. At night, it’s not alive, not moving and certainly not audible above the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s inanimate, a dead thing, swirls of anesthetic and comfortless sleep.

This. Here. This is where we make our stand, toes at the edge of this. Not conceding anything but in plain sight, in piercing gold, a hiccup in the droning ocean flatline.

God’s hand will reach down from His city and plunge into the water and fish out buildings and SUVs and great fistfuls of humanity, wrench them, dripping mire, out of the abyss. He will invite them, longingly, with a searchlight beam in high, clear soprano notes, undulating, rapturous. He will speak in his booming voice and it will resonate in the chests of men and they will drag themselves up from the sucking tide and begin the climb to his city.

God is a beacon.

And it's for us to walk along the shore, pointing and saying, "Look, look!"

In case of 2007: Mid-July

Danny to me in the video store: “Why not get this one?”

I paused, biting my lip.

Danny, YOU could be biting my lip right now, I thought. Let’s go. Let’s tuck ourselves into a closet somewhere and you can kiss me as hard as you want.

But maybe it was something in the neon blue lights or the DVD he was holding. He just raised his eyebrows and waved the movie in my face.

“I don’t want to.” I said. “That one’s lame.”

“It’s funny.”

“Who wants funny?” Yes, I said it. Sarcastic and mean, just like that. But, you know, don’t get me wrong. I was in favor of funniness. I’m a funny girl. Danny was just not getting it.

He sighed and put the boring movie down.

The point was: we were young. Do you know how often you get to be young? We were young and on that particular night, we looked amazing. My hair was down, brushing my shoulders. Danny’s collar was open and I could just see his collarbone, curving beneath his skin. But it wasn’t just about making out, either.

I just wanted Danny to realize that we were young. That it was a night in July and there were crickets chirping out there in the darkness.

He was standing there, holding a romantic comedy, and probably not thinking about it. He was probably thinking about popcorn, probably about work in the morning, and, yes, probably about sex – but only in that brief, idiotic way men typically do.

He shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose. I adored those glasses. They were part of his charm.

Somewhere, someplace, there once were two young people. And they went to the beach on a July night and wrestled in the sand. She rubbed sand in his face and when they tried to kiss they knocked their heads together. And the next morning she woke up with her hair in knots and her shoes soaked in seawater. And then he wrote it or she wrote it or they told a friend of theirs who wrote it. And that’s where Danny’s lame movie came from.

Danny wanted to watch something someone else had lived. And while it might make us feel good for a while, really, it would just get lost in translation. Because probably they didn’t even really knock their heads together when they kissed, but the person who wrote it decided that nobody would believe it if they didn’t knock their heads together. Because the truth would actually seem less realistic than the cute quirkiness of people who can’t kiss right. Good kissing is so done. The time has come for bad kissing and knotted hair and shoes that smell of the sea.

To Danny, it didn’t matter what had happened to these people. It only mattered what the writer wrote and what the two beautiful actors did. To Danny, that was all there was.

And he just stood there, lanky, glasses glinting in the fluorescents. For God’s sake, I know why he wanted that movie! Because he was only halfway on the beach, had only one foot in the closet, only one arm draped (very loosely) around my shoulders.

I wanted to know if Danny and I would ever knock heads. I wanted to do something that would make a good movie later.

But, at the end of the night, Danny and I watched his lame DVD. And, five years later, I wrote something I just made up.

And Danny and his tall blonde wife thought it was great.

In case of 2007: June

I guess we’re never promised anything. Not even this: the chatter of strangers and the silent bumper car collisions of their spirits. I’m writing a paper, ironically, about the function of religion. The airport is perfect for it, seemingly so ordinary – women staving off old age with too-red lipstick, little girls in Barbie shoes, heavy bags slung over shoulders.

This is the church of travel, the sanctuary of transition, and the harried flight attendant is our priestess. This businessman takes communion in his coffee.

I wonder how many souls are as deeply entrenched in living as I. How many are as determined to consciously breathe and to know the flickering red-yellow-green-go­ of passing moments? Oh, Creator of the air in which we’re prepared to trespass, send a tremor through space. Send turbulence or déjà vu. Send words to accompany my expansive ache.

This, then, is the function of religion: to explain the boy who wears socks with sandals, the striped ties, the thick blood/glass eyes/brittle marrow of passing bodies, the answer to Eliot’s overwhelming question.

The answer (with as much precision as we’ll ever get this side of a downed 747).

I find myself in love with the most unlikely people.

Oh, painted toes, round glasses, braided hair, and rustling newspaper – know that steel and sky only imitate a deeper motion. Know that it is only love that holds you aloft. Know that we’re never promised anything.

Not even this.