3am.

There are only three things I would stay up late for:

A glimpse of snow.
My favorite song. 
And you.

a christmas story.

Every year around this time I decide to write a Christmas story. By January I forget all about it. But this year I am determined.

It will start with a squirrel and end with a rooster.
It will start with a night and end with a dawn. 
Saint Nicholas will make an appearance, as he must. 
All of the animals will talk.
Snow and lights. 
There may even be a love story.

And it will be a classic. Because no one writes a Christmas story without hoping that it will become a classic. It will be read to unruly grandchildren on winter nights when they wriggle in their beds for the knowledge that a stack of presents is waiting for them downstairs, if only they could go to sleep. It will smell of cinnamon and peppermint and spruce. It will be whispered in the half-darkness of shuttered windows and nightlights shaped like fairies or whales or moons. It will be murmured like a wintertime song, puzzled out and reasoned with. It will mean more than it looks like on the surface.

As the wise child said, "It will be true on the inside."

fears, part one.

The only thing I'm really afraid of is dancing in public.
I can whirl and stretch starwise in the calm and quiet of my room, my empty house, my calm and corner...but the moment someone else is watching, all you will see is a swaying, a subtle bouncing at the knees and nothing more.

I swallow back my storm, and all is stilled.

Maybe someday I will reach out and feel a strong hand in mine, and know the sweet touch of vein on vein, the pulse of heartbeats under skin, and fly unafraid and stretch and tumble. Maybe someday I will storm wild, strike and swift; maybe someday I will shout, maybe someday I will rise in rhythm, roll, round. Maybe someday I will see the watching eyes and laugh in their glistening mirrors.
Maybe someday I will dance in public.

But not yet. For now, it's the only thing I'm really afraid of.

to the boy who used to follow my instagram:

Remember me?
I'm the one who never told you all the things that you should know to love me.
That my favorite color is denim blue (it's phonebox red) and that I collect books (but I really collect ancient breath). That I toss my curls to spin the seas and that my whistle is the west wind and my blood runs in riverbeds in deserts I've never seen. That I walk as if the mountains were always ahead, that I reach for apples even when the trees are bare and leave lit lanterns where the fruit should be.

Remember me?
I shed my skin four years ago and learned the traveler's language, hopping cobbles and sleeping with peasants whose names I cannot spell.
I hang lights from my windows and the boughs of birches to welcome Mary and Joseph and mumble murmurs of contentment into the ears of the air. I am beautiful when I am not paying attention and my laugh is a rural thunderclap, and you would know me if you knew the height of a cathedral ceiling when you're lying on its floor. I drink from the skull of a stag, I surround myself with dusty pages, and I have a weakness for lighting little fires. Five owls guard my suitcase and I tread on sheepskin in the morning.

Remember me?
I am the she-bear who would defend herself with cast iron kettle, with many syllables.
I am the worsted wanderer, woollen and worryless, a cloud scudding, a dog barking, a duck in dabble. I am the street where no one lives, the one that has gone back to thistle and brier, roots eating pavement, herbs reaching to the sun, young trees thrumming in the dusk. I am the washerwoman in full voice with shirtsleeves up around my elbows, and I am the washerwoman in repose, rocking chair on the porch, summer evenings. I am camped out under the Christmas tree. I have one hand on the lion's back and the other clutches the empty boots of the man my heart will love.

These are the things my pictures never told you.
The things that you should know to love me.
Do you remember me?

advent.

Here it comes. Can you hear it?

And lo, it came to pass that there was a Black Friday sale! But Christmas was not in the sale.
And lo, after the sale there was a dazzle of commercials and ads! But Christmas was not in the commercials or the ads.
And lo, after the ads there was a flurry of carols and radio airplay and jingle bells and pageants! But Christmas was not in the carols, airplay, jingle bells, or pageants. 
And after the carols, airplay, jingle bells, pageants...one flickering candle and a still small voice crying from the midst of a desert nowhere:
Prepare ye a way for the LORD; clear a straight path for Him.

And Christmas came, but they did not recognize it, and neither do I.
Not then, and certainly not now.

Do you hear it? It is sneaking up on you. It is sneaking up on me. It is craftier than us, because it is far older than we are. Listen well, and you may yet hear its footsteps behind, before, around us. It is the intake of breath before the exhalation that worries the candles, trembles the air, fills the spaces. It will appear in the edge of our vision, in the corner we are not watching. It will descend when we have given it up, it will appear when it is least observed.

Here it comes. Can you hear it?