Still breathing

Twice I thought I was going to die last night.

I saw bright red berries captured in ice, and the slick blue-white of tundra-esque iced/snowed-over fields, and the amber glow of building windows and streetlights and moving cars from atop a hill, and my heart almost broke from the sheer beauty of everything. I thought, This is a reason to spare the world. I thought, This is the night I die, because it would be very much like a kind world to show me this kind of magic, a sort of visual last hurrah, before it snuffed me out.

And later, in my creative writing class, I almost had a panic attack because I saw the lights outside the classroom flicker out and I thought, Someone has cut the hall lights. They're going to start shooting us all up, because where else would a school shooting start if not in this building that so many desperately unhappy English majors hate, and I'm going to get a bullet between the eyes because I'm sitting directly across from the window. And I very nearly got up to stand in the corner for the rest of class, regardless of how awkward it would be, but then I saw some people walk by and realized it was only the lights of the classroom across the hall that had been turned off by the custodian.

Obviously, I didn't die, and better yet, the director of the IWP came to talk to our class and mentioned that the Facebook group I'd made for the effort to start a creative writing major here at my school was a big selling point for the administrative powers that be. This was especially heart-warming news, as that was my only lasting contribution to this campaign and the only thing I'd imagined it would achieve was to serve as an information center for interested students. Pimping it out like mad in all of my classes and likely annoying my professors served a purpose, after all.

No Chametzky sighting today. The world will only understand my glee about this man if it attends a linguistics lecture by him. He is brilliant and adorable and quite small, and he makes me think of lemurs and muffins-in-baggies whenever I see him.

Three-Nights-of-Hands-Clasped-Against-the-Cold

I wonder if, when Francis Pharcellus wrote of supernal beauty, he had a Midwestern winter in mind. Somehow I doubt it. But he could have.

Because despite the slush, the puddles, the leaky roofs, despite the persistent and inexplicable drizzle in below-freezing temps, despite the wet feet, the dripping hair, the chilled fingers, there is something beautiful about today. The word "crystalline" comes to mind. Because if you look up from the treacherous sludge through which you trudge, up from watching your jeans darken up to the knee, you can glimpse a glittering world captured in ice. It is as though Jack Frost touched down in Iowa City but only for an instant, leaving miniature stalactites suspended from slender branches themselves sheathed in nature's glass, curled brown leaves forming the cores of little ice globes dangling from the skeletal trees like frozen fruit. Eddies of steam swirled across the concrete as I walked into my building. Beautiful.

In other news, several of the university's offices have closed, employees have refused to show up for work, and I am holding out hope that the class for which I have to give a presentation will be canceled this evening.

Go back to sleep

About a week ago I woke in the dark of my dorm room to a strange sound. My sleep-muddled mind leapt immediately to the paranoid conclusion that somebody was in my room, rustling about in the mess behind my desk, despite the fact that I knew I had closed and chain-locked the door. While I was still trying to decide how best to react (feign unconsciousness? grapple for the knife I keep by my pillow? tumble out of bed and make a mad dash for the door?), a tall, thin figure in the corner of my room said gently, "That sound is just the freezing rain hitting your window screen. There's nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep."

That last bit of advice made the most sense to me at the time, so I simply closed my eyes and went out like a light. The next morning I woke to an ice storm.

This has happened to me at least once before that I recall. I was younger then, and had a beloved stuffed animal that I toted about wherever I went. It was a white dog with black ears and tail and a big black spot on its back; I was as imaginative and talented with the naming of things as a child as I am now, and I called my plush companion Spot.

One morning I awoke to find Spot missing. He was not in my bed beside me, or on the floor beside or beneath my bed. The world turned upside down. I enlisted the rest of the household to search every nook and cranny in which this dog could have conceivably found itself, to no avail. I spent the rest of the day in a persistent state of shock. Then, as my bedtime approached and I was forced back to my room, I remembered a dream I had had the previous night in which a figure had neatly tucked my dog into my sock drawer and said, "He can spend the night here. Don't worry about him. Go back to sleep."

I hurtled across the room and wrenched open my sock drawer, and there Spot was, safe and sound, snuggling my balled-up socks.

Friends who have been in the room when I fell asleep have reported that I have this unsettling habit of sitting bolt upright, looking wide-eyed around the room, and uttering a line of dialog with no discernible significance to anything else that has been said, before flopping back down unconscious. I am beginning to wonder if this has any relation to the persons? creatures? beings? that seem to accompany me in those confusing stages between wakefulness and sleep, reporting the weather and hiding my toys.

what is lost can never be saved

My dad says that if I'm looking for something to believe in, I should return to what is familiar to me: Roman Catholicism. And there are a lot of aspects of that religion that do still appeal to me, but just as many that frustrate me. I think that there may be too much anger, too many harsh words, too great a difference between us to make a full reconciliation possible. But I didn't burst into flames in the Vatican, and Jesus still smiles when we talk.