You Don't Understand

Have you ever had a dream about someone you didn’t know anything about, only when you woke up you felt like they were your best friend or something? That happened to me last spring. She was a year or two behind me and I didn’t know anything about her but I had always wondered. She had long black hair and I remember she walked like she knew exactly where she was going. She wrote me a poem. In the dream, I mean. It said, “I want to feel the warmth of your hand against my own I can tell that you’re that type of guy even though we’ve never talked before your eyes catch my smiles.” I don’t know if anyone’s ever written you a poem before but I thought it was the sweetest thing I had ever read and in the morning I felt like giving her a call and I would have but I didn’t know her number. And I didn’t ever get around to calling but I never forgot about her. I mean I did, of course, but not forever, so I think that’s close to the same thing. The reason I remembered now is because today was her funeral.

Sometimes when I am driving I begin to feel sad for no reason at all. All of a sudden this horrible longing will crash into me and I feel like whatever was good in my life had just slipped through my fingers and shattered all over the floor and was gone. My whole body aches and suddenly I don’t know what to do. I could be driving to my own goddamn wedding and I have to pull over lost. I get out in a convenience store parking lot and walk until the policeman grabs me and shoves me out of the road and says he has better things to do than deal with drunks who won’t take care of themselves. He’s there directing traffic because she died and that’s when I heard that she died and that’s when I remembered that I think I loved her that morning.

I was still wearing my tuxedo so I went inside and sat down in the back of the hall. The entire room was staring at me. She was lying dead in the front and suddenly I was the goddamn center of attention. I felt like throwing up. You could feel it in your skin the moment you walked in there that none of these people even cared about her. Not like I did. She never wrote a poem for any of them. The blotchy eyed man at the front of the room smiled at the room and then at me and started to speak again, his voice cracking tragically. He rambled for a few sentences - real sincere and sentimental like. “You could search all your life and never find a soul kinder than hers… making everyone feel special and… only eyes I ever… loved you all.” His eyes started to well up and he waved his hand humbly and so damn graciously and sat down again, the rubber necked bobble heads all nodding furiously.

I felt like going up to him right there and – well, I don’t know what I wanted to do. He was just one of those guys who - one of those guys who if they made a fantastic catch in football or something would say something stupid like “Well, I dropped enough of them today”, just to show how goddamn humble they were, right when everyone was congratulating them and all. I felt sick again and watching him parade around when she was lying dead not two feet! away and I felt like hurting him cutting him. Never mind that she was lying there dead in a room full of vultures and I didn’t think I could take them all on there were too many some of them would get by I couldn’t protect her from all of them needed me how did they all get in here they shouldn’t have let them in why wasn’t I called the only one why wasn’t I who cared who loved she needed me now but I better wait she knew that there were too many I had to think couldn’t possibly catch her now but she knew of course without words she knew but she wasn’t warm now

There was nothing else to say and they all started to stand and file out of the pews and I stayed in mine watching carefully ready to spring forward. They were still watching me through their beady eyes their talons sheathed in black gloves and I waited. When they were mostly gone the blotchy eyed man stood and started walking towards the back. I saw him glancing my way and smiling through his blotchy eyes. He stopped to embrace a teary elderly man in a white suit and I turned and left the hall before he caught up with me.

I walked outside into the stuffy air and the close phantasmal mist and couldn’t see anything past my own hands, practically. The others were all leaving and I remembered I had my own church to go to. The ceremony hadn’t started yet but it was on the other side of town and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it there without driving like a goddamn maniac so I decided to just not go. They wouldn’t understand why I was late anyways. I knew then it wasn’t the place for me; it was really only a fling.

Alaska - Day 3

This may be the most beautiful place I have ever seen. We are on the road again driving East towards Wrangle St. Elias. The entire road winds through the mountains, which are becoming progressively rockier and snow-capped. The trees are changing too. The hills are dotted everywhere with needle-like spruce trees. It all seems so surreal. Yesterday we hiked on our first glacier and I felt like I was in Antarctica. There are crevasses and stress lines and melt pools and waterfalls and rivers that snake and shoot across the surface like water slides, and the water is the best I have ever had. You could kneel down and lap it up like a glorious wild animal.

It is still surprisingly warm out. Nothing but sun and sandals. Seriously. The sun is out all the time. It does not get any darker until around 3 in the morning, when it starts to look like dusk. And by 5 it is back to high noon. I have lost all sense of time. I never realized how much of a drain it is always having to check a watch or know what time it is, being free of it is beautiful. We have been having dinner around 9 or 10 each night, and it is difficult to get a full nights sleep. I've taken to napping when I can at random intervals and it is fantastic. I feel like I could go forever. The mountains look like the alps now. This is a remarkable place.

Alaska - Day 2

Alaska is wonderful. It doesn't look too different from anywhere else yet, but there is a different feel about it. The campsites are quieter, the roads are slower, and it is bright all the time. My favorite part is the woods. The campsite where we stayed last night is only about an hour away from Anchorage but the mountains are everywhere so it feels like the middle of nowhere. It is the middle of nowhere.

I have never seen mountains like these before - sharp, protruding mounds the color of emeralds and granite and dirt that grow on top of each other like gnashing molars, but the most beautiful molars you have ever seen, and their bottom halves are covered with the type of evergreen forest that you wish every forest was. I think that to hike to the top of one would. I have no reason to believe in God, but being here makes me wish he exists. I'd like to think that a place this beautiful was made deliberately. I'd like to have someone to thank for it.

Today we are driving into Anchorage to pick up some last minute supplies, and then further east on our way to Wrangle St. Elias. I cannot wait to walk unobstructed into the Alaskan wilderness. The woods are really something else, I'm sorry I can't explain it better. The ranger told us there was a bear that came through our campsite the morning before we arrived, but he didn't make another appearance. I'd still like to meet one before the trip is through.

Into the Great White Northern

I'm leaving for Alaska in just about an hour now, so there won't be any new stories for a while. I'm going to try and write on the plane, and possibly in my tent at night but I don't have very high hopes for it; its very difficult for me to write well now without a computer to instantly revise. Anyways...

Here is the beginning of a story. I'm not going to finish it, but I think it would be really cool if everyone added to it and we could all see where it went. Write however much you feel and just leave it in the comments...

The sun was still just visible over the expanse of evergreens shimmering lightly in the distance, the afternoon rain casting a glistening sheet over the grassy waves of the Hillsboro Country Club. Silhouetted against the dying light and slouched beside an overturned golf cart sat three figures, their shadows a sparkling haze across the 18th green. The middle figure bobbed unsteadily and slumped across the shoulder of his leftmost companion as a small glass object slipped noiselessly from inside his palm. The rightmost figure raised his hand to his face, and nodded, as a bright flash rent the air beyond the clubhouse...

Also -

If I get eaten by a bear and don't make it back, thanks everyone for being in my life