And then I also remembered: two days ago, I wrote a piece about a coming tornado, touching down and wreaking havoc on the Great Plains. I’ve pasted it below. I had placed it on my FB page, but hidden it the same day because it seemed over-dramatic, and now, it seems real, too real. So here it is:

Fragment, a storm

There’s a wall of black moving in, a storm. The clouds roll down until they touch the rippling fields, the bowed trees, the sagging ply-wood houses. Nothing can escape this.

Nothing can stop the inevitable wreckage to follow, the flapping curtains that breathed lilac and honey, now soggy and buried in a swirl of burnt, creosote-soaked two-by-fours. Shreds of pink insulation float like cotton candy in the air, buoyed on by the wafting stench of sewage, unburied and unmoored and seeking its own shelter, always.

The last offering soaked into the earth, the rain and the lightning and thunder skitter down, precursors to the party, the whirl of world in the clouds, the breaking sweat that finally pours into a funnel, finally pours into our reckoning.

The plains and the petrichor and the last ones left to witness how the wind does move, how it takes everything up for itself, sweeping and sweeping and sweeping until all we have left–all we ever have left–is gone. Is clean.

(1 April 2012)

For a week in July I get to speed off to other climes for what I hope will be a rejuvenating writing experience. You can bet I’m over the moon about this one.

In other news, I had a phone interview on that same day for a dream job (aside from being a writer, this is perhaps one of the only other things I can imagine doing for the rest of my life). I don’t know how it went exactly–I lean between it went well and I destroyed my chances by babbling about it being a ‘dream job’ at the end. Sheesh. In any case, if I somehow am able to wow the forces that be and I actually get the job, it will be life changing. That’s about all I can say about it right now without freaking myself out again.

In less than three weeks now, we’re packing our bags and will be driving to Seattle. Most people reading this blog will know we decided to move, but just in case you didn’t, come Feb. 1, this girl will have evacuated the concrete land that is Dallas for a greener (literally) world. I really can’t wait. We’re leaving almost all our possessions behind and are starting over. A good friend of ours is renting us the bottom floor of her house. We’re ready to begin again, in the right place for both of us.

I’m also working on a story right now that must be finished before I go. I’d started it several weeks back, but now more than ever I have an impetus to finish it. On New Year’s Eve, a young woman who was very dear to several of my friends was murdered near her home in Austin. I didn’t really know her, but I knew who she was, and to know that violence is so close, so easy to ignore but always trembling beneath the surface, keeps working at me. So I’m writing this story, knowing she was murdered, trying to pull shards out of death and put them into some meaningful order. Very rarely can anything come of a death like this but pain and grief. I’m not sure what I expect to find in this story that says differently. The story is only trying to offer companionship to the ones who lose their lives, to ones who don’t get to speak back, who don’t get to smile or laugh and share with us again. Even if the words are only a whisper, I hope they can channel a reprieve from the chaos this loss brings.

Full site.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.” -Rumi

I have regrets. The ways my life has unfolded are both beautiful and fraught. We’re never completely one thing or another. We’re multiple, never-ending, scintillating beasts that enrapture and enrage. We frustrate, we devour, we bleed upon one another and ask for more.

I would give all of myself if I had it to give, but that’s just the way–I don’t know what all of anything is. Will never know. In each moment I change, burst into a ray of colors ill defined and misunderstood. I will be kind, as kind as I can be, and still be capable of causing pain. I could be angry, as mean as I could be, and still be capable of grace. I will love, as much as I can, and still break because love always comes in its own way. The only thing I accept about myself is contradiction.

So, yes, regrets, because the self, as far as it extends into the future, is unknowable, uncontrollable, despite our need, our desire to shape it to our current existence.

So much I want in this world, so many moments I let wrap through and around me, that make me ache for the real, the now, the forever. And in my mind worlds expand, unravel, pull me through a million scenes, both real and imagined, all saying, “You, you are multiple, full of possibility and inevitability and everything you do, forever, will bring you to one single point, always, always, and then you’ll move forward again, into a new era, a new life that is both you and not you, forever changing.”

But that only lasts so long–life ends eventually. We leave pieces of ourselves behind, scribbled on pages, hoping someone somewhere understands, who pieces together the lives we lived and did not live, discovers something hidden to ourselves, something we always wanted known but could never say. This is the writer inside, the one who is whole and broken and always a contradiction. Because this is to be human. This is to love and be loved and to give and to take and to sit inside the world with intention and with presence and to try to tell our stories however they come, ever shambling, beautifully incomplete.

And speaking of World Fantasy Con, I’ve written another post in that vein, but have decided not to publish it just yet. We’ll see. It has something to do with my reluctance to write, of fear of exposure, of letting others know too much. I never thought I’d be so self-absorbed as to worry about that problem. But it has appeared and I’ll have to overcome that issue if I want to succeed.

I have to find my way back.

Dallas is a blur. It helps that it rained and is overcast today, and that I live in a fairly lush, walkable section of an otherwise vast land of concrete and infrastructure. But I know my time here must surely take me back there. It helps that I saw friends–real friends–people who write, who think, who understand, and who take me for what I am. My group here is slowly dispersing–with lives to be lived in California, North Carolina, Michigan…yet my feet tap in the muddy puddles of Dallas and wait, wait, wait, trying to avoid the cracks that would swallow me if I stopped long enough.

Something about standing on a water taxi, the wind slashing through my hair and the waves knifing into frothy white possibility beneath us; something about hiking up a fairyland road with nothing but ferns and dripping green trees arching over my head; something about stepping off a train and stumbling into a mass protest, the dirt, the sweat, the people thronging together to demand fairness… A coffee shop on every corner, a city where vegan isn’t a dirty word, and books, oh, the sweet scent of books that carries on the air.

Seattle. I’ve left you but will find you again.

Excerpt, from Throwaways:

Lightning strikes as she closes her eyes. The bulging white light singes them, a musty smoke invading her mouth. We don’t stand close–she is suspect, dangerous. A being we cannot and will not know. Around her, rain drops freeze and shatter against the ground. The brick wall caves in and reveals bones–old bones–the lives left behind so that this world could plunder on. She unburies them. Unburies everything so that the cycle becomes clear. After a moment, with her closed eyes alight and still burning, the vision appears.

He is not dead, cannot be dead–his heart stopped, he floats in the ethers, between what is and what will not be. All her flames, lashing light that stopped his life from growing into the coming minutes, act as surrogates–the boundary between this world and that. But she does not embody death. It is only life her fingers twist and turn and touch into existence. On the other side, the realm of the in-between, he waits for permission to come back. And what he brings with him calls on the future, asks it to caress their bodies with some truth of what she is and cannot know.