Eighth

When I was fourteen I ran away from home,

because my mom and I had an argument in the living room,

in front of the rest of my family.

When I ran out the front door and slammed it behind me,

Hurrying from the porch I used to sweep in first grade,

Running down the driveway where I learned to ride a bike,

Traipsing on the street I wandered day and night,

Taking distorted pictures of street lamps on school nights,

I turned the corners I sometimes rode my bike around on the way to the library,

Stopping to stand in the grass on the corner, next to the stop sign,

Crying, shouting, barefoot and mad,

Dragging my heels through the leaves and grass,

My fingers grazing the ivy of the wall.

I turned the corner again onto the highway,

and coming down the road on the sidewalk,

a police car pulled over, red lights blaring,

and I pretended not to notice,

but the policeman talked to me,

asked me where I was going and where I lived,

and I answered, terrified, until he stopped.

I continued on the sidewalk, cut grass, deciduous trees, 

bougainvillea running along the high wall

of the oldest country club in the Coachella Valley.

When it happens I am surrounded by trees, and the ground is dark.

I see the sidewalk in my memory, pockmarked and pale,

and lying there is the four of diamonds,

one scale from some lost deck of cards.

I look down at the card,

its sharp parallelograms and mirrored 4s dark in the night,

and having recently come home from China,

remember that the number means death there.

It's silly, but at fourteen, that was why I turned around.

At home, Dad had said, "Should we go after her?"

And my only little brother, a lump in his throat, wailed,

"Well, do you want her?"

By the time I turned around,

they were cruising slowly through our neighborhood,

our huge white Suburban moving like a mythical whale in the dark.

After some college boys harassed me about the police harassing me,

After I was walking back, playing card in hand,

My dad rolled the window down and said something funny,

something about coming home.

Six years later, I went for a walk here in London,

maybe just to feel the comfort of being warm when it's cold,

of wearing a coat and breathing out clouds.

I intended to walk down just one street, and at the end of it, to turn around.

I intended to stop when the line of trees stopped, and then to follow them home again.

But I continued into Kensington, and past Hyde Park, and through Hyde Park, and on,

And you're not going to believe me,

But after I passed a bus stop I looked down at the pavement,

Lit by yellow street lamps and crowded by trees and high buildings,

and I saw one card, an eight of clubs, lying alone on the sidewalk,

and again, I don't care what that card means to technical numerology or to the occult, 

but eight is my favorite number, 

and 8 is an infinity symbol turned on its side,

and eight is the number of steps to Nirvana,

and eight is a perfect cube,

and eight is a perfect octave.

I didn't stop and gape at the card on the ground; I picked it up and kept walking,

Carrying the omen with me,

Realizing that my life was, and had been, metaphors and foreshadowing,

building off of each other,

And that I need to start believing the whispers I hear in my mind,

things like "This will be finite, so end it,"

and "you'll be friends with this person,"

and the worst, after days of a strange fever:

"if you get close to him,

he has the power to remove you from what you love."

And because this needs a denouement, my dad is coming to England,

to carry me home, on a silver plane, like a bright fish in the sky,

And home isn't an escape, but a destination.

Home is a refuge and a celebration,

home is a place to hug three sisters and two brothers,

parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins.

Home is a place to make fresh orange juice on Christmas,

a place to play ping-pong with my sister

in the backyard in rolled jeans and sunglasses.

Home isn't a living room or a dark street.

Home isn't someone's sternum and clavicle,

or the touch of his hair on my forehead.

Home is my mom trying to say "I love you," more,

Home is my dad driving me back from the airport in our white suburban,

through the thousand windmills at the base of the San Jacinto mountains.

Home is arriving to the fourteen arms

of the seven people who love me most,

and it is knowing that my brother will always want me back

to be the fifteenth and the sixteenth, 

and the eighth.

Maren, Holding On

I watched my sister take one step over Skype the other day.

I've been talking to my mother obsessively,

and she sits in front of the screen,

glowing in the bright Californian sun and holding the baby.

I'm somewhere in London, where it's dark at four and cloudy all day,

And I'm in my pajamas until something pulls me out of the house.

So I call her and sit alone in the hall, wearing boxers and a T-shirt,

and she asks me whether I've eaten yet that day.

My sister is ten months old, a smiling miracle.

No, really.

She sits in my mom's lap, mostly wriggling around,

and if I say her name in a high pitch and smile,

She remembers me, (maybe only as the girl in the computer)

And she hits the keys with that one arm she's always waving around,

And she smiles as big as I'm smiling,

Our Scandinavian eyes winking with joy.

She can't smile big enough, so she opens her mouth and laughs.

My mom sometimes walks around the room as she talks to me.

She's warming oatmeal and mixing in applesauce,

coaxing my sister into every biteful of solid food.

She was sitting in a chair a few meters away when my sister took a step.

I think my dad was talking with me at the time,

and he cranked the camera toward my sister.

"She took a step!" said my mom, and I looked at her again.

She was holding my sister under her tiny arms,

where she had just fallen into my mothers' hands and knees.

Maren is afraid of falling.

When my mom walks her around,

(her fists wrapped around my mother's index fingers)

she's started carrying herself on her own,

but when my mom lets go of her, she stops, afraid of falling.

She doesn't know she can do it alone.

She doesn't realize that walking is an act of continuous falling,

That each step is a forward fall being caught by the next foot, and the next,

alternating fall after fall, catch after catch.

What she doesn't realize is that life is a great fall,

a great fall, and a catch,

And every moment after she learns to walk will be about falling and hitting the ground,

hopefully always on her feet.

And this poem wasn't actually going to be about me specifically,

but I fell on my face the other day,

After this boy I was in love with proved he wasn't what I thought he was,

and broke me,

Me who was finally, really in love, for the first time,

Finally there, my face pressed to the concrete, dry heaving on the ground,

Finally realizing why it is that some people are so wary of falling in love,

because falling in love,

is, 

most certainly,

falling.

And having hit, 

like Maren topples on the kitchen tile sometimes,

I'm terrified and shocked.

I don't want to get up again.

Wouldn't I rather reach, wailing and tearful,

For my mother's arms, safe from everything and anyone?

Wouldn't I rather stay here in bed, down, asleep,

Rocked slowly by the temporal turning of the world?

But what Maren doesn't realize is that life is a fall and a catch,

and what I hadn't realized is that much of what I catch, I eventually get over.

And what my mother knew is that the trick is to let us fall first,

until we learn to stop before head-over-heels hitting ground,

until we learn to catch ourselves with our feet.

Catching up...

I am home now, as you must have deduced, so I will just finish up my trip stuff and have done with it. :)

The next day in Paris we visited Saint Chapelle, which is a beautiful church with exquisite floor to ceiling stained glass windows and jeweled light bouncing off of everything. I liked the Basilica best of all of them, but I think this one came in second. After we left the church, we took the subway to the Rodin gardens, which were more coifed than Monet's, but beautiful and gold and green in the summer. Madelyn and I ran around taking pictures and stuff and then we went home in a taxi. That night, I stayed up really late talking to our family and then went to bed.

The next day, we got up and got ready and went to church!!!! On the way though, something scary happened: we were walking down the stairs to the metro and there was this shirtless, grimy hobo hanging around. As I went down the stairs, he blew in my face, said something about pretty French girls (which is ironic) and slapped me, HARD, on the arm! Madelyn even heard the sound! After that, we hurried off to the subway and then we eventually found church. It was so nice to be in a familiar environment! We went to an English sunday school session and then the meeting was afterward. We could only get one set of headphones, so Madelyn and I switched off for the different talks. After church, we rode the subway to the Tuileries and ate a picnic on a bench there. Madelyn spilled the chips, so we fed them to the pigeons, which was fun. :) After we ate, we went back home and slept and Skyped and stuff. I was up really late talking to our family, and after that, packing. Madelyn took all these funny pictures of me that I didn't see until the next day, when I downloaded my camera pictures onto the laptop.

The next morning, we got up around 5:30 and got ready and then Madelyn, Grandma and I walked to the Austerlitz Bridge for a last look at the city. It was cool; we could see Notre Dame from there. After that, we went back to the hotel and had breakfast. Madelyn and I went shopping one last time at the train station stores, and then we came back and met the taxi, which took us to the airport.

You've all been on planes, so I won't go into the flight, but after 20 hours or so, we were back in Newport Beach and then the next morning, we drove home to Rancho Mirage! Once we were home, we gave our family the presents we got them. Shortly after, we were packing for a trip to Brian Head, which I returned from last night.

At last.

Friday- leaving on a jet plane... (and briefly Saturday and Sunday)

On Friday we woke up freakishly early, got everything together and in the car, and hauled ourselves to the airport(we'd said goodbye the night before). We dropped off the car in the designated parking lot and its keys at the kiosk thingy of the rental company. Then we took a plane from Finland to Heathrow Airport in London. I had a window seat for the first time on this trip. It was cool to see the landmarks we'd already visited from the plane. It seemed kind of surreal, knowing that we'd been there. I wanted to go back (But, then I always do.). :)
We waited at Heathrow for an hour or two, and later we boarded the plane home. On the plane, my movie screen broke, so we used the headphone splitter and I shared screens with Mom and watched The Other Boleyn Girl, which was kind of cool. Later I watched Doctor Who with Dad and then we watched Be Kind, Rewind, which was funny, but kind of lame. They fed us a few times on the plane; the food was better than normal. After ten long hours, we got to LAX, and got off the plane. I called Leslie for about five seconds, but then Mom wanted me to get off the phone. We went through customs, picked up our luggage, got the car, and drove home, with everyone falling asleep in the car.
When we got home, I got my bag out of the car, and promptly went to bed. It was five o'clock.
The next morning, I woke up at two in the morning, suffering from jet lag. A little later, Spencer came in, then Melissa, and hardly later, we were playing Spencer's new board game, Dread Pirate. Mom woke up next, and came in, then Madelyn, Dad, and finally Collin. By five thirty in the morning, Madelyn, Spencer, Melissa and I were all swimming and splashing in the pool. I got out and put my pajamas on and went back to sleep for about two more hours. When I got up, it was only ten and I felt like it was twelve.
Later that day, around five, we saw Wall-E, which was really cute. I worked on this online Math class I'm doing for a while at eightish, when Leslie called and we talked until Mom wanted me to get off and do my work. I went to bed at about nine PM.
Today I woke up at two again, so I stubbornly told my internal clock to shut up and laid in my bed until fourish, when Melissa woke up and asked me to go the the bathroom with her. So I did. We were talking by five thirty.
These are the dangerous effects of jet lag.

Now it's 8:37 and I'm all ready for church! It's good to be home.

I just hope I don't fall asleep during the meeting.