We're Coming Home...[So Far Removed]

We are coming home.  We are throwing our belongings into backpacks, and the backs of cars, starting engines in cold empty towns and driving somewhere new, or old.  We buy coffee at gas stations and pick up courage where we can find it.  Because it is time to go back to that place we are from.  It is time to allow nostalgia, sparked by forgotten wild places and beautiful things, to find our hearts and nestle itself into secret corners that we didn't know (or forgot) existed.

I have a room here still.  Or at least there is a room in my house that I sleep in when I am here.  There are signs of a life that once was.  You can see the stickers on my door, and the blue paint on the walls only kind of peels in hidden places.  The desk looks much like the one I have in Fort Collins: papers scattered everywhere, old words written by what was supposedly an old soul.  Or so I thought.  Many of my old books lie on the shelves in the corner where I left them.  High School yearbooks, Harry Potter, Catcher in The Rye, Catch-22, 1984.  These are things that I have left behind.  They lie there under a layer of dust, as if waiting for something to wake them up.  Waiting for their stories to be told.  There are soccer jerseys in the closet: Ajax, Germany, Manchester United.  A football helmet is on one shelf and a box of trophies and medals is on the floor.  This room doesn't even smell as if it was ever lived in.  It has been cast aside and filled with forgotten objects.

And that seems to be the way we do things.  We have all of these memories and these past events that sit and do not sit well with us.  Some curl up in the dark corners and some glow with some effervescent longing for attention and love.  But don't we all.  That is why we come home.  We still have something to bring back to the table.  We have memories and we want to share them with those that can share likewise.  When i peel open these year books I realize that memories die just the same as people.  These are words and faces that I have forgotten.  It happens, sometimes, with slow precision and, sometimes, with sudden vehemence.  We begin to experience revelation in these moments.  Nostalgia rages beneath our skin, through our veins, and up our spine, shaking and quivering, breathing in startled gasps, and forgotten fingerprints.  Sometimes these memories feel sad and furious and completely unwarranted.  Sometimes they feel happy and complicated with a tinge of regret.  Then sometimes there is nothing except what should have been remembered, and revelation is lost.  What should have been remembered takes a long time.  It reveals itself to us slowly and quietly, and we want to avoid it as long as possible.

But still we come home.  We always come home.  At this moment I sit in a room full of memories, and they come back like addiction, fading as soon as i leave.  We come home and we begin to believe in the things we used to know: young love, restless guilt, not-so-scary-empty-forever nights, the rising sun, fading sunsets, breathless rendezvous' at 2 A.M in parks where kids ran hours ago, cold quiet-breath floats to the stars- nights spent on rooftops, shivering silence of broken down friendships, powerful moments of nervous lust, too scared to be real with our hearts-running from these empty streets-until we felt alive, and finally beginning to believe in our most powerful potentiality, and moving on.

Welcome home friends.  Indulge in the memories while you can.  Find the people that you once cared about and do what you can to understand where we come from.  Trouble yourself with nostalgia and revel in the chances we have given ourselves and been given.  Revel in the improbability of loss, the immovable force of nature, and the limitless possibility of this next morning.  Break down, sing loud, reveal everything to those who need to hear it, and don't forget where you came from.  Though this place may no longer feel like home, it is where you came from.  Stay here, breathe deep.  Everything is perfect.

He knows it's Scary to be Us...

He knows it's scary to be us.  He put himself in our place.  Once upon a time he stooped, lowered, sacrificed , broke, and ripped open the veil to become one of us.  He knows it's scary.  He rearranged pebbles under foot.  He walked paths between great cities, great histories, great leaders, small towns, and small stories.  He walked these paths as sure as I write these words.  He looked at stars that he has known since their birth, and he recognized the light of a distant past, and yet, it was not so distant to him, and even more so, it was truly real.

He spoke.  He cried: lips salty with tears, knees bent, hands trembling, and thoughts racing.  He prayed:  desperate prayers, angry prayers, prayers of hope and compassion exhaled into the night.  Prayers of a madman.  Because he would have to be mad.  Anyone would have to be mad to die for all of us.  But what is this madness?

This madness is one that knows no bounds.  It burrows into the heart and soul of all humanity, and it lies in wait.  This madness grows and festers, and we squash it out.  We seal it in mason jars, lids screwed on tight, and throw it to the back of that dark cupboard below the kitchen sink.  Then we hope, at first, that it will grow into something madly beautiful while we ignore it and pursue the mundane activity of breathing for the sake of breathing.

So we return to the madness.  We return to this life believing that something beautiful is growing underneath the kitchen sink.  We return to this madness, but it is of a different breed.  We return to busy days, sunrise to sunset.  We return to the challenge of breathing for the sake of staying alive.  We return to a desk, a computer screen, and hours of work.  We count the seconds as they inch their way off the clock, dripping to the floor in a slow motion march to the end of another day.  We never write our own story.  We read the page, and flip to the next page when we are told to do so.

Place problems here.

Walk this way.

Don't mind her.

Don't mind him.

We march onward.

And the madness becomes real.  It becomes intoxicating.  It draws us close and tangles itself with our bodies like nostalgia.  It comes in those quiet moments, and refuses to leave.  It moves under our skin, like veins warm with blood, pumping something like life.

See, like him, I have found myself on my knees.  I have found myself uttering prayers of hope and joy.  I have found myself shouting prayers of desperation, anger, and some form of compassion.  I have found myself simply speaking.  But see, I have not known the suffering of a King humbled, stripped bare and left to carry a cross for all nations.  I have not known the suffering of a father who asks his son to make a sacrifice, incomprehensible.   See, like the thieves who suffered with him I do not understand.  I know why I am here, and I know what I have done, and I have the same questions.  I have the same disbelief at sacrifice for the unknown.

Because some days I am afraid to die, and some days I am afraid to live.

But that is this madness of love that we have left in the mason jar, and he knows.  He knows that it sits in the cold and dark, dying.  He knows.  He knows its there.  He knows that we fear this madness.  So yes, he knows that it's scary to be us.  He knows because he lived to the full potential that we left in the cupboard.  The madness of love and sacrifice.  The madness of Grace.  The madness of the event.

See, we do not know what it's like to be him, and that is what scares us...