the dreaming grounds

When the sun fell,

The sky cracked.

Not in blues and whites and storms

But like a teacup

Or glass

Or an iPhone when you drop it 6 inches above the floor.

It was immediate and definite,

the way you always know

if you've broken something irreparably.

That special pitch, the vibrations

in the air

arrowing straight for your eardrums

with certainty,

the sudden sinking surety

of a crack

We all the knew the sky had

cracked

but we washed our dishes

Did our laundry

Drank a beer

That’s how it goes when something so

Big

happens in your front yard.

What are you supposed to do?

Humans have long been defined by their ability

to adapt

despite common opinion.

We are adaptable

So adaptable it only took

4 days

for high schoolers to recreate

the third reich in their classroom

in 1967

So adaptable we live in Phoenix Arizona

with no greenery and cement walls.

The height of human hubris,

to live where the environment itself does not want us

Adaptable

But when the sun falls and the sky cracks

we say ‘oh.’

We say ‘ that’s too bad.’

We climb into our beds and cry under the covers

and we feel so very very alone

all of us, together, alone.

There’s no fixing the sky now.

The crack is always going to be there

There is no e6000 for air

There is no gorilla glue for clouds

The sky isn’t supergluable

But

we did find out

The sun?

Bounces.

He watched her through the glass, her figure small against the darkness and vastness of the forest around her. He watched her, and he worried. And he waited.

Sarah ran her hand along the row of books, humming softly and letting her fingers catch and bounce along the spines. She knew this part of the library intimately; faeries, dragons, demons, witches, they all lived in this section, bound with dull leather and bright paper alike. Her favorites were always the big tomes, sprinkled through like gems. They were invariably heavy, and dusty, and they had a particular scent when cracked open; musty, dry, and somehow comforting. They always held the best stories too; she’d first run across a beautifully illustrated version of The Hobbit when she was eight. It had been nearly half her size but she’d lugged it over to the table and lost herself for hours. Ever since, she’d been a particular fan of fairytales.

Today Sarah wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just wanting to linger in the quiet and warmth of the library before she had to head back to the bright light and noise of her own home, but she found herself eyeing each title as if for the first time again.

And there it was.

I was just randomly clicking through my livejournal and came across my messages. Like, my notifications. I don't know if I didn't have notifications on, or if this was round when the new version of LJ went live....but I found 30 old comments on my posts that I never interacted with. From 9 years ago. 

I feel SO BAD.

Like, it's been nearly a decade, I can do nothing about this, and no one who commented is likely to even remember me, much less a nice and supportive comment they left me 9 years ago. 

Just. Thank you. None of you will ever see this, probably, but thank you. Your comments mean so much to me, even retroactively. I can show them to the girl who was writing and she is just so thankful anyone was paying attention, that anyone cared enough to comment and send her some love. 

The livejournal community was, for a very long time in my life, my biggest friend group. I lived online — growing up in a rural area with no one around while the internet was gaining speed was a unique experience. I grew up with the internet, literally — we seemed to age together. Livejournal was there for all my teenage angst and fanfiction and poetry, connecting me to other people who thought like me and enjoyed the same nerdy things I did. I had such good friends on this platform. I'm really happy it's still around, even if nowadays it's more like shouting into a memory. 

Ok so we just had a conversation about — well, it was about comedy, but the subject matter is not particularly important. I was trying to explain the difference between someone trying to be funny, and someone....well, trying to be funny, but in this case succeeding. Does anyone else know what I mean? In comedy you're always told to not try to be funny — and you've seen what happens when someone does. In improv especially, it usually results in the audience cringing and looking away. It's that moment someone jumps up and adds someone completely out of left field to the scene, then looks at the audience with a big implied wink, as if to say 'see how funny I am?' 

Anyway, like I said it's not actually important. As I was trying to explain the difference, he asked me what the functional difference was. I didn't understand and asked him to clarify, and he said "people's emotions and their inner feelings don't make sense to me, but patterns of behavior do." And that kind of rocked me a little. It's not like either of us is unaware of the fact that we think very, very differently. Our brains are just fundamentally wired in opposition. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's the cause of heartache, and sometimes, like tonight, it makes me think.

A friend asked a question on facebook; 'Actor friends, why are you an actor?' 

First, I thought, well, I'm an actor because who else is going to guide you through the highs and lows of human existence? And then I thought, I'm an actor because I want to experience what life is like through other people's eyes. And then I thought, neither of those things is exactly right, though neither of them are exactly wrong, either. And THEN I thought, shit, this isn't going to fit in a facebook comment. 

What is theatre? What does it do? Is theatre inherently political — inherently anything?

There are the cut and dry answers. It illustrates for us how society 'should' work, it gives us templates for normal and aberrant behavior, it provides catharsis....Little Red Riding Hood was a fable to teach girls to not trust men, Oedipus showed how sleeping with your mother and murdering your father lead to doom, etc. It's a blueprint for how we should treat each other, it's an oral history, it's the moral of the story....

I am a master of notes

Lines scribbled on bits of paper or napkins

or receipts or cigarette cartons,

half started stories in unnamed word documents scattered across my desktop

Are they lonely, I wonder? They’re probably lonely,

gathering dust, crinkled into boxes or purses or the bottom of cars,

stuck into jacket pockets only to be forgotten and washed and destroyed.

Where others leave flowers as they step,

I trail scraps of pages behind me, swirling and fleeting and clamoring for attention,

like so many needy birds, pecking and poking and hollering.

There are so many stories to finish, thoughts left half undone

and sometimes I find them, like a paleontologist, dusting off old files and reading

Gently

Carefully

It’s time travel – every one of these pieces of story, of poem, is a direct line to another era

And like any good anthropologist I study the changes

And like any good writer

I kill my darlings

There’s something oddly comforting about hotels. The beige walls and short carpet, usually with an eye seizing design on it. The little click as the key works and the door unlocks. That particular scent, like fresh laundry, washed with a soap that is familiar but which you’ve never been able to purchase. I love walking into a hotel room. The initial bumpy moments as you get your bag inside give way to soft lighting and plush duvets. I always do a small tour before I sit down or open my suitcase. I walk into the bathroom and inspect the bath, the little toiletries, the fancy fold on the top of the toilet paper. I’ll look at my travel bedraggled self in the giant mirror, then skitter away into the bedroom, avoiding dark circles and dirty hair. The bed is always giant and inviting; big white bedsheets like clouds, pillows that don’t seem to have ever had a head rest on them, so plump and plush they are. You know when you slide into bed the sheets with crackle a little; it’s like sliding into a sleeping bag the size of a tent, but a thousand times more relaxing. I love how the hallways are always silent, how even when the hotel is full when you are walking to your room it feels like a secret, something solitary and ritualistic. You can be truly, wildly alone in a hotel room. You can walk around naked or make coffee at 2am or spend 4 hours in the bathtub; no one will mind. No one will bother you. Hotels are a kind of freedom. I’ve celebrated New Years in a hotel, I’ve filmed movies in hotels, I’ve met up for sex, I’ve spent entire days in my room and wandering the halls; I used to read Eloise books when I was a child and part of me is always looking for the type of adventure she found daily at The Plaza. I’ll go down to the pool late at night and see if anyone is there, and if there isn’t I’ll spend three hours doing laps. I’ll ride the elevators for fun a few times before hopping out to head to my room. I like to put on a big skirt and lightly run down the hallways. I’m sure the security guards get a kick out of me whenever I stay in a hotel.