I think I know a little bit about the way I am.

I was painfully shy, in middle school through high school. I would not let people take my photograph. Extreme perfectionist tendencies (every three weeks I wrote a 20 page book report, 10 point font, single spaced. Seventh grade.) Relatively smart, introspective. I was taught something, and I believed it to be truth. I looked for reasons to enforce it, and it made my perspective black and white.

Ah, see, then. I went to Uganda. I was pummeled by the sheer vastness of what it meant to be alive. I had a few of those moments where I felt like I was living and walking separate from my body.

I had my heart broken, became guarded.

I needed a way to explode, but wasn't sure how to while still living in this framework.

So I left at midnight in the middle of the week with a group of people volunteering at Katrina.

This was followed by working at Beloit, where I became angry and so hurt at what was allowed to happen in our world. The abuse, the destruction of innocence.

Particularly this one child's story simmered in me. He had a brother, he was smart, artistic, wildly funny. He and his brother had been locked in a basement and were thrown food every once in awhile. This happened for months.

He and I, we understood each other. He set fires when he could, climbed the roof, ran away. But I respected him, and he knew it.

One time he climbed the roof and I climbed up after him. I was clearly afraid he would push the ladder down, and he was carrying a large piece of board. He leaned over as I was climbing up the ladder. "Don't let her fall," he said.

When I got to the top I asked him to give me the board.

He looked at me quizzically. "Are you going to hit me with it?"

"No," I said. "No. I'm not going to hit you with it. Why don't you show me why you like it up here?"

And he did. He liked the curving of glass where you could see down. He liked the openness.

He set a room on fire two weeks later and was taken away and medicated. Hospitalized.



Then Chile, the disappeared. Then India, the burned women.

It's not that I don't love God, or don't want to. It is just that I can't trust him anymore, and it breaks my heart.

What things do you give up?

Dreams or the things that could really be?

The things you do for yourself, and

the things you do for us;

do you let, the shiny hopes settle down in the back

of the jewelry box,

sighing, quite softly;

You either know, or you don't.

I know. Should I wait on this? What could be lost(time).