CXLI.

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,

For they in thee a thousand errors note;

But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,

Who in despite of view is pleased to dote;

Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted,

Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone,

Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited

To any sensual feast with thee alone:

But my five wits nor my five senses can

Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,

Who leaves unsway'd the likeness of a man,

Thy proud hearts slave and vassal wretch to be:

Only my plague thus far I count my gain,

That she that makes me sin awards me pain.

Think--!
Imagine what it must have been like to have existence
in the days when life was sliding whirlwinds, blue hot weights,
in the days called chaos, which left us rocks, and gems!
Think that the sapphire is only alumina, like kitchen pans
crushed utterly, and breathed through and through
with fiery weight and wild life, and coming out
clear and flowery blue!
~D. H. Lawrence

Lucifer
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
But tell me, tell me, how do you know
he lost any of his brightness in the falling?
In the dark-blue depths, under layers and layers of darkness,
I see him move like a ruby, a gleam from within
of his own magnificence,
coming like a ruby in the invisible dark, glowing
with his own annunciation, towards us.
~D. H. Lawrence

Well, it's almost that time again. No, I don't mean exams, or prom, though both of those have been very much on my mind these days. The day I'm thinking of occurs right in the middle of April, the 'ides of April', if you will. This year will mark the anniversary of two things, one just a little more important than the other. The superficial anniversary commemorates last year's trip to Spain, and my subsequent meeting of a young lad named Manuel. The more serious one is the two year anniversary of my father's death, though it seems alternately like ages or instants to me. Time is always relative. Whenever I'm happy and content and proud of what I'm doing, it seems like those days, and the girl I was, are so very far away; yet when I'm sad or alone or thinking of him, it hurts so much that it feels as though he died a month ago.
This is something that I wrote late last night. Thinking of my dad almost always makes me write, and though most of what comes out of that can never be shown to anyone, I have written a few of my best-loved poems off of those feelings.

One sunny Saturday morning in April a few years ago, I got up from bed rather grumpily, since I had an orthodontist’s appointment, and proceeded to go about my daily toilette. I was a perfectly normal fourteen-year old girl; I had acne and braces and not a whole lot of self-esteem. That night, I went to sleep—if indeed I slept at all, because I truly can’t remember—not understanding why God had taken away one of the most important people in my life. I have never been the same since.
While my father lay unconscious in my parents’ bedroom, and the paramedics were working feverishly, sending thousands of tiny particles of energy whizzing through his body in a vain attempt to make his heart start beating again, I left my house and walked rather aimlessly around my front yard. I couldn’t see where I was going because I was crying so hard. I was promising God everything in the world if only he would let my father live. I had done this once or twice before, when I had a serious fear that someone in my family might not be coming home that night, but never had I been faced with the hard truth—truth that lay prostrate, not breathing, inside my home—that I could lose my own father. I promised and I begged and I prayed and I meant every word, because at that moment I would have given up everything I loved and every one of my friends to put life back into his body.
Then they took him away, carrying him out on a flat yellow board that I had seen before on TV. They put him in the ambulance, no sirens, like all victims of heart attacks, and sped him to the hospital. After we arrived and they took us to the little room where the doctor could tell us there had been nothing they could do, my sister and mother broke down and I eventually fled. While I was walking some strange corridor I noticed several things; first the nondescript industrial carpeting, red with a green border; and second that I was walking by the offices for breast cancer treatment. I don’t know why I recall these things, but it was about here that I began to talk aloud to my father as though he were standing beside me listening. I told him that I would make it, and that I would take care of my mom and sister for him, and that we would all be ok. I tried to force myself right there, in the place where he had died, to come to terms with something I may never truly be at peace with.
In the time that has passed between those grief-stricken days and now, much has changed. A few things have not. Often I look in the mirror and wonder if he would recognize me the way I am now. I cried when I got a 4.0 for the first time, and my first straight As, because he would have been so proud. It makes me sad when I struggle with a physics problem to know that he would have understood it immediately, and been so willing to help me learn. I write letters and emails that I can never send, full of remorse and memories, more for my sake than his.
Why do I write this now? Perhaps because it’s a week away from the two-year anniversary of his death. Perhaps to remind myself that, no matter how far I think I’ve come from the desperation of that day, I have not and will never really recover. Most importantly, I believe, I write these words now, as I have written in other poems and stories and will probably continue to write about for years, especially in April, so that I will never forget. I want the events and feelings of those days branded so deeply into my mind that nothing will ever tear them away. Is this a total recounting of what happened on that day that my world, for a short while, ceased turning and stood completely still? No. Every time I write about it I recollect different, tiny pieces of what happened, weaving them all into a tapestry that becomes more detailed in certain areas every time. Someday, far from now, when memory of those day is no longer fresh in my mind, I may have only these to make it all real again.

Writing about things really does help me so much. I don't know how I would express all of what goes through my mind if I didn't write about it.
A week or so ago, I came across a bunch of stuff in a file cabinet downstairs. This is the drawer that contains everything from my father's funeral; the signing sheet where I went back and saw some of my friends' and teachers' names, the little cross from the chapel, the paperwork, and the cards, literally hundreds of them, that we recieved. So many of them were for masses in his name that my sister and i counted, and came of with over two thousand, with nine perpetual masses. Of course we didn't get two thousand cards, but some of them were for nine or forty masses. we got a lot of the single masses, mostly due to the fact that my mom kind of works in a convent. A lot of nuns.
Anyway so I was poking around in here because Iwanted to move this crap and put my stuff in there, when I found a huge bunch of cards that I myself had made, a long time ago. Back when I obviously thought I was some kind of artist, judging from all the awkward marker creations. All the cards are addressed to "World's Best Dad" and "#1 Daddy!"; they're all really badly done and cheesy, but what struck me was that he saved all of them. These were just quick things that I folded a piece of paper in quarters and scribbled "Love Michelle" on, but he kept them all. That made me really happy to find them. They're now safely ensconces amid my treasure trove of keepsake papers and miscellania, which are contained now in eight big manila envelopes and eleven or so shoeboxes.

But enough of this! I have a movie script to 'block', whatever that means, and I must be off.