India

I’m leaving for India in six short days. My heart has spent the majority of the past few weeks in either building excitement for finally getting on the plane or feeling overwhelmed at the size of my to-do list. It has surprised me how many more life details there are to arrange when you leave the country for 6 months instead of just 3 weeks. It probably didn’t help that I have also been trying to put together graduate school applications. Note to self: if possible to avoid in the future, do not try to apply to graduate school from overseas; it makes an already detailed, tedious process twice as stressful. However, the process is almost done. In six days I’ll be on a plane. It will no longer matter if I forgot to do something or didn’t pack something else into my suitcase. At that point it just won’t get done. I’ll deal. I love that moment.

I’m looking forward to India. It’s a season that is both completely defined and undefined. Everything else is my life has been set aside to focus on one thing, one place. But at the same time, I have no idea what India looks like, what my hands and feet will find to do and go. I’m not looking forward to any specific tasks…because I don’t know what they are. But I can tell you what I am looking forward to.

I’m looking forward to a culture based on relationships and just being together. Washing my underwear by hand in a bucket. Leaving pantyhose and high heels in my closet back home. Walking on some of the most dusty and dirty streets of the world and yet discovering more of what it means to be feminine. Wearing a sari. Relinquishing choice over what I eat. Touching the faces of children who have been told they are untouchable. Finding stories. Wearing my hair down my back in one long braid. Learning what it means to be Indian. Being shown what the church can look like outside of a neat Western box. Curry. Traffic jams. Sitting up on the roof. Sounding like a fool when I try to speak in Hindi.

I have this theory that no one is every really ready to move on from one season and find the next. At least I’m not. But the seasons come all the same. So I try to take them when they come, be in the moment as much as possible, leave goodbye till the last minute and then dive straight ahead. My heart hasn’t been dwelling in India all summer because I’ve still been here at home. But now, I’m almost ready. I can feel my heart starting to pulse with the unknown rhythm of India. I’m bracing for the goodbye. And it’s time… just about. To step on the plane. To land in a foreign world. To discover another whole way to live.

Passing Judgment

I haven’t written in a long time. And I don’t just mean here on this blog. I haven’t written at all. It’s been almost two months since graduation and there hasn’t been a single story, a single paragraph, sentence, or phrase.

Writing is one of the biggest ways I find myself. Finding things to say let’s me know I’m still alive, that I’m still breathing and feeling, listening and watching.

I haven’t been able to write this summer because I’ve lost a huge part of myself. Pieces of my heart have been locked away, hiding, scared to come out. So there have been no words. And no tears. How does one move back across the country, say goodbye to four years of life and relationships and not cry? I’ve waited for months to be able to cry.

It all started last fall. I found myself in a situation that was wrong. It was painful. It felt unsafe. It made my heart feel unwelcome. It wasn’t really my fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. And then there was no way out. I was stuck for the next eight months. At first I fought to keep my heart right, to find the truth in the haze of lies and cling to it. But it was hard. And no one was fighting with me. It became too easy to let my heart go.

So I decided to play God. Not consciously. But that’s what I did. I stepped into judgment. I started to criticize a man’s heart, his actions, his motives. I questioned his faith. I accepted the role of the victim and sided with Eve in the garden. God said look at your heart, and I passed the blame.

I say this now with such clarity, but it’s taken me weeks and months to pick it all out. But I know now that when I picked up that judgment it allowed something evil to come in and steal a piece of my heart. It’s easy to pass the blame, to see the wrong in someone else’s life instead of dealing with your own. And it’s true. They may very well be wrong. Painfully wrong. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still responsible for my own heart. And while it seems easier to pass the blame, it’s a lot harder to carry the grudge. My heart has been so heavy. For weeks I’ve asked myself why I’m so tired. It didn’t make sense. But as my heart grew heavier my body grew weaker.

I’m starting to find myself again. I know because of these words I’m writing. I wish I could say I had a heart full of glowing feelings towards this person I judged. I don’t. But I’m starting with a choice to forgive and trusting God to heal and bring my heart along in the process. I’m trusting that tomorrow when I get up, he’ll give me the strength to choose to forgive again. I’m trusting that the day after tomorrow he’ll help me pick another splinter out. All I know is I don’t have any more time to waste… and I miss having myself.

Transitioning

When saying goodbye is painful, it means that we’ve done something right while we were together. It makes the pain seem more purposeful, but not less intense. It still hurts like open-heart surgery minus the anesthesia.

I’ve said goodbye so many times within the last couple weeks, I think my heart has shut down until it can find time to process them all. I’ve hardly been able to cry. I suspect there are tears buried inside that need to find their way to the surface one of these days in the near future.

I didn’t expect saying goodbye to Lee to be so hard. There were more than a few moments over the last four years when I didn’t want to be there. But looking back, I am grateful for each of those broken and beautiful moments. God gave me what I did not know to ask for. My experiences at Lee have shaped who I am, peeled back the layers of who am not. They have been years of formation, laying foundations, establishing myself within the Father’s heart. Learning to trust Him has enabled me to embrace my own heart with all its messy spots and insecurities and allow God to show me what I love and give me the confidence to live within it.

Being so far from the comfort of home has forced me to find God in new ways, to recognize that His love and character stay the same even when circumstances and worship environments feel strange and unfamiliar. I’ve learned that God was never small enough to fit inside my boxes. He loves so many different things, and there are infinite ways to approach and find Him.

But the strongest thing I unlocked during my time at Lee is my love for words. There I became a writer. And the voices and faces of my peers and professors in my writing community will be forever etched into my heart and will bleed out in my words. I found people who believe in me, who were willing to invest in my life and my stories. Stacey, my writing professor, lost sleep and sacrificed her own writing time to aid her students to succeed, and she cried as she talked to my parents at graduation and hugged me goodbye. That was the moment when I knew God had given me something beautiful.

Right now, I’m relishing in the beauty of these gifts and simultaneously mourning the loss of them. They are not gone, because I carry them inside me, etched into my identity and my stories. But they are no longer with me the same way they have been—the reason I need to cry, to adjust, to allow God to carry me on to seasons next.

Judgment Day

The following is an excerpt from a fiction piece I worked on this semester for my senior writing project. It's 32 pages long, so I will not be posting it all here, but if you're interested I'll email the draft to anyone that asks, with the understanding that it's still a work in progress. The premise is based off a true event that happened in Norfolk last December.

Doris stared upwards. The smoke hid the sun, but the day was bright. The sky was cheerful, almost welcoming the column of blackness creeping ever upwards, unaware of how the murky cloud blotted its complexion. Tendrils of smoke were curling towards her, like the gnarled fingers of an old witchy hag, but they couldn’t reach her yet. She estimated she still had at least a couple of hours.

The flames were roiling across the field underneath a 30,000-gallon propane tank, slowly cooking the gas inside like a burner heats a teakettle, only this one didn’t have any way to let off steam. If the gases built up enough pressure, the whole tank would explode. That’s what the radio announcer said anyways. Normally she wouldn’t trust what some quack on the radio said, but since she was staring at the flames herself, she figured at least most of it had to be true.

Doris hadn’t been this close to a fire since before she was married to Melvin. She’d been working as a secretary for Mr. Lory, a bank executive at Tyson and Loan, and living in Mrs. Halloway’s boarding house. One of the boarders on the first floor had too many drinks and forgot to put out his cigarette before falling into bed. The unfortunate man went up in flames along with the rest of the house. Doris thought she was destined to burn alive as well. She was sleeping in her attic room when she woke to the sound of muffled yelling. The floor felt hot when her feet touched it. Mrs. Halloway was down in the yard with the neighbors, gesturing frantically. The air was laden with smoke and it crept into her lungs every time she took a breath. She turned to flee, but a blast of heat knocked her over when she opened the bedroom door. The stairwell was in flames. She broke the window open with a book off her nightstand, but there was no way down, so she turned and sat with her back to the window, curling her knees up to her face while she stared at the flames. They were crackling, cackling, laughing at her fate. They knew she deserved to feel this heat after what happened to her family, that God was finally calling her to judgment.
But Melvin had other ideas. He was a new fireman recruit at the time and saw his chance to prove himself and become the hero. Climbed a ladder to her bedroom window and carried her to safety. They’d married the following summer. Doris never viewed him as her savior, but she had accepted his strong arms that snatched her away just as the flames began to lick at her feet. When she’d finished hacking up smoke and breathed in gulps of clean air, it felt like God released his grip around her throat. She supposed as long as Melvin was alive, it was God’s way of saying he’d deal with her later.

They’d had twenty-six semi-peaceful years of marriage, born one son and two stillborn daughters. All three of her children were pieces of herself—some alive, and some frozen in time. It was as close to happy as Doris ever aspired to be. Then one morning Melvin just up and quit. She woke up with a dead body in the bed and knew God was free to strike whenever he wanted from then on. Every morning she wondered if that day would be the day of judgment, like her own personal coming of the great and glorious day of the returning of Lord. So far he’d let her wonder for twenty-three more years. Secretly she’d felt when the day came it would be a fire—one to finish what the other didn’t. As Doris stared at the new flames across from her house, she knew the hour of reckoning had finally come. She wouldn’t let herself be snatched from this one and forced to wait another twenty-some years. Looking at the flames, she could almost feel the heat of the fire from the boarding house, the smoke piling up in her room. It would only be a matter of time until these flames were licking at her skin too. She coughed just remembering, but maybe it wasn’t memory. The air was thickening, a haze settling into the yard.

The radio said there was an evacuation. Everyone within a mile of the fire was supposed to leave. She could see small lines of cars on the roads across the field from where she sat. People panicked so easily. But this situation was grave. Even the firemen were scared enough to leave. Earlier they’d been running around the blaze this way and that. From where she sat they’d looked like kids who tried to dress up as construction cones for Halloween, bright red and yellow blobs covered in strips of reflector lights. She’d watched them work over her breakfast. But now the field was empty from every living thing, excepting the fire that lurched and devoured as if it were alive. It was odd the firemen had come and then left. Either the situation was really that hopeless, or God had somehow told them to leave to ensure Doris would face him alone when he brought her judgment. There was a steady stream of water shooting through the air and pouring onto the tank, but it was operating mechanically and didn’t seem to be doing much good. The flames weren’t subsiding. This wasn’t going to end pretty. Devastation, the radio called it. An explosion would steal a whole portion of the city and leave devastation. Doris gritted her teeth. It didn’t matter.

To be continued...

Transience

Today I am struck by the transience of this world. As I begin to face goodbyes, I realize there are people who come into our lives, rub against us, nestle up to us, and then disappear, perhaps never to be seen again. I have friendships from college that I know will never end. But there are other faces I have come to love—professors that have mentored and invested in who I am, fellow writers I have sat next to in class for at least four semesters—and once I leave this campus I don’t know if I will ever see them again. Some of them will move from my life and I will hardly blink. But others, I feel this stab of loss, sense the desire to linger a little longer.

I don’t believe the human heart was ever created for separation. We don’t have a place in our brain to process the gaps completely. We just learn to cope, move on. Train our hearts to steel themselves and take another step.

I never fully understand what I have until it’s gone. I’ve seen these faces every week for years and taken them for granted. But now, I want to touch them, remember their faces. I want to acknowledge that they have touched me. And I wonder just how much our fingerprints will linger on each other’s souls. I wonder what God had in mind when he sent us all to be in the same place at the same time. I wonder about transience, and if it will all have a point someday.

And as I wonder, I mourn. I’ll be saying goodbye to someone or something nearly every day for the next twelve days. It’s hard. I want to just skip the end, jump in my car and leave it all behind. But I don’t think I can. I’ll carry it with me, in form or another. So I have to stay to finish and say farewell and hope for see you later. I have to experience the pain, and then let God heal my heart to carry me on to something new. I have to know that I am changed.

The Rollercoaster

Yesterday, I strapped myself in for the final rollercoaster ride of the semester and my undergraduate career. If I go a little insane over the next three weeks here is why:

I am writing a fiction manuscript about a cantankerous older woman in Nebraska who refuses to evacuate during the threat of a propane explosion. She is convinced that this fire is God’s judgment coming for her, and somehow it is my responsibility to convince her otherwise (through the use of another character of course), without making the whole situation sound cheesy, ill-written, melodramatic, or unbelievable.

Secondly, I just signed my life away to Fringe Fest. Next Thursday and Friday my playwriting class will all be producing the ten-minute plays we’ve been writing this semester. There are nineteen of us. So in the course of the next week I will be rewriting and producing my own play about an abused woman and her sister. I’ll be directing my classmate’s play about friendship and the perils of miscommunication. And I’ll be acting in another classmate’s play, taking on the role of a fairly wild woman who has dumped her illegitimate daughter into her older and more responsible sister’s care. But of course, we are all rewriting our plays through this process, so who knows where we’ll all be in seven days.

So if you try to call me in the near future, I might not answer. Mostly because I won’t be able to hear you over the multitudes of characters living, breathing, and talking inside my head. Some people think being a writer is a boring life, but it only appears that way to those who don’t know any better.

I’ll also be finishing a literature course, studying Chinese, mailing out graduation invitations, researching grad schools, writing a curriculum vitae, planning a menu for an open house, saying goodbye to friends, and packing to move. And we’re off.

India

I bought my plane ticket for India today. In exactly four months from yesterday, I will be setting foot on Indian soil for the first time. I’ll dawn a sari and pull my hair back into one long braid. I’ll strap on my sandals and hopefully find paths to walk through the streets and the slums, into the hearts of the Indian people and the God who loves us both so strongly. I expect the unexpected. To be shocked, riveted, captured, enthralled. To weep and laugh, dance and rage. To be faced with questions, injustice, and a God who’s bigger than them all. I expect to be awed into silence and to crawl my way out with words. It gives me goose bumps to think about it, because I’ve got a receipt in my inbox that says I’m actually going.