Automatic dishwasher

(Mission in morning light was a sensory gift from times past to a wide-eyed, wild-eyed girl. Lucky me to have chemically-captured said gift.)

"To be is all that she desired."

The view from my window is exceedingly pretty today. Yellow-gold fingers of sunshine splay out against absolutely everything -- delicate bunches of leaves flaunting the last yellow-greens of summer, too-worn pavement paths that wind like autophagic snakes, untended flower gardens overrun with gorgeously-patterned weeds...and though I keep twisting my neck to see the same images, I haven't yet grown bored. There's a crow now perched just feet from the ledge; he's simply brilliant...massive, regal, inky-black and bold. He keeps cawing -- eyeing me when I move to the window to watch him and then turning to peer into the recesses of the tree he's in. I think someday I'd like to be crow -- or have a crow. Is Hitchcock a suitable name? It's the moniker that currently belongs to the human skull replica sitting next to me on the desk.

I love you, Hitchcock.

Here's the thing: I am very content. Very calm. Very...peaceful.

"I'd pray for a sign if I believed in a god."

Aren't little lyric fragments like that deliciously cryptic? 'Distorted Lullabies' has been on loop for days now, and it never ceases to wring from me contemplative thought and, on occasion, fading recollections. A room hung with Leatherface lights and warm Christmas bulbs now only makes me smile. A room empty save for a mattress and framed pictures now only stings a little. A room with blue walls, a blue blanket, and candles continues to call me home. A room wreathed in incense smoke and thought-it-was-forever essence flares dully in the furthest corner of my big-brain.

And it's okay. I'm a little melancholy, but I'm at peace. I'm a little lonely, but I'm mending. I'm a little restless, but I'm learning strength and self-esteem.

In an aching falsetto voice: "I've finally stabilized. I've finally stabilized. Everyone will see...everyone will see."

Will I ever be able to put it into the ground? After I watched the way sunshine reflected off the beautiful red-brown hair of the girl I walked behind (it was gorgeous and strange, and in that fleeting instant I was happy, too), I saw preparations being made for a funeral -- in the cemetary that sits in the middle of campus (Greenwood, how I adore thee). "Tell everyone 'don't be afraid to die'..." There was a small blue awning, a few blue chairs, and that morbidly interesting device that lowers the coffin into the grave. Though the little celebration-place of death made me smile, I wondered if I would ever be able to put the things I've experienced in the last three or four months into the loving, oft-deified, embraceable earth.

Know what?

I can't. I don't want to. I will carry the present-tense word and wonder if you think about me. I will play idly with Hitchcock, read Vonnegut and Shakespeare, and remember the wonderful and make-me-giddy-inside times we shared. I'll wish we were still making said times...but ashes to ashes, you know. Ashes to ashes, Hair-Pulling Domino Fiend. Being happy in this moment, without fear of how it will affect the future or paint the past, is turning out to be one of the most liberating discoveries you have ever pointed me towards.