The Third-Floor Bedroom Window

 
It all began
When some old man
Let some sunshine in
Left the window open
It was only stale air
Running through his gray hair
He wanted to feel
Something fresh, something real
So he flung back the curtain
He was never more certain
Today was the beginning
Of a the battle he'd be winning
He would suppress all of the pain
Firm grip on the window pane
His pride his only ally
His hardened heart would live by
A rule that he would be happy alone
He'd forget how he had once called her his own
And how much their love had blossomed and grown
And how the restless days would drone and moan
In love again he'd like to be
But his heart had died and so had she
It all began when some young guy
Noticed an open window and decided to spy
Now he was old and angry in his doom
Standing where he first saw her, in her third-floor bedroom
"It all began when someone left the window open..."

The House On Maple Street

Shaun laid still and stiff as a soldier under his Spiderman sheets. He listened harder, but he couldn't make out words, only shouting. His parents had been going at it for nearly an hour already, it was their third fight this week. A silent tear streamed down the small boy's cheek, he tried to swallow the stinging lump in his throat. He closed his wide green eyes and imagined days where his family was happily united; going to the park to walk Sadie, their beagle, or just sitting on the couch all snuggled up watching a Disney movie with warm, buttery popcorn.
He remembered the feeling of togetherness, the soft sweet words spoken between them. The would say, "I love you!" as if it were the first realization of it, and smash their lips into each other right in front of him, and Shaun would say, "Ewe! Mom!" What he would give now to get those sloppy slurpy kisses back.
Suddenly, everything went silent. He was trembling, but then he opened his eyes and realized that his bed was the thing trembling. In fact, his whole room was shaking and rattling. He swung his feet to the floor and darted over to the window to find that his house was glowing! He sprinted out the door and down the stairs, doing his best to keep balanced in the house which had seemingly come to life.
In the living room stood his parents, with their arms around each other, beaming.
"Mom?! Dad?! The house is shaking!" They did not look at him. He tried again a little louder, "Guys I'm scared!" His mother laughed and pushed her auburn hair behind her ear. "Don't worry Shaun, we're going on a trip." He had never been more confused! Before he had time to ask anymore questions, he was thrown to the floor by the most violent shake yet.
"Might want to hold onto something there, sport." His father chuckled. Shaun's belly turned, like the feeling he got when riding in an elevator. He glanced out the huge family room window and did a double take-were those the tops of the trees in the neighbor's yard? Shaun gasped, "The house is flying?!" Both his parents giggled. "Of course son!" His father assured him. "We're going to the moon!" His mother pressed her lips against her husband's stubbly cheek to give him a peck. "It was the perfect lift off." She sighed. "You're the perfect one!" His father cooed at her.
Shaun didn't know if he should be relieved that his parents had stopped arguing, or concerned that his house was supposedly a rocket ship. It was an awful lot for a ten year old to take in all in one night. Especially because he was afraid of heights. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his tiny fists, wishing he was back on the glorious ground!
Silence again.
Hesitantly, he opened his eyes, and let go of the blanket he was clenching onto. He sat up in bed and stared in disbelief at the golden glow engulfing his room.
He had been fast asleep.

Puzzles

I am an analytical person. It is evident in everything I do, and not only that, I tend to seek out problems to fix. I can get so caught up in a game of Sudoku or a crossword puzzle, I just forget everything around me and focus on my mind's strength. I love challenging my mind, I never take the easy way out of things because I think we appreciate things most when we have worked hard for them, and that things worth having are worth working for. I'm definitely the person to call on whenever you have a tangled cord of some kind, I will devour the intricate twists and turns in attempting to unwind it. I wolf down delicious mysteries, whether in books, movies, or on television. I love puzzles! I love finding new ways to work puzzles, should you go forward to back, or back to front? As it turns out, participating in problem solving at least once a day is proven to prevent Alzheimer's in the elderly years. My memory will always be spot on! Puzzles also just improve general intellect, you discover how to maneuver through puzzles and your brain will respond more efficiently to real life puzzles and problems. It is a healthy and magnificent thing to learn new things and find new paths to try, to stop looking at the big picture and just focus on one piece at a time, to stop thinking too hard and simply free your mind and imagination. Puzzles are all around us, time to start solving.

Memorable Passages

No matter who you are and how much you love or hate to read, everyone at some point in their lives comes across a passage in a book that touches them, grabs hold of their core, opens their eyes and shows them reality, takes them to a place they're not particularly fond of but needed to be revealed and acknowledged. The book that did this for me was F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Not just one, not two or three quotes, but this entire novel was discovery after discovery from cover to cover, I didn't just turn the pages I would fling them in desperation of finding out what would happen next. The ending in particular was simply outstanding, though. It tells the cold hard truth, the astonishing realization of how self centered people in this world really are. One of the ending quotes reads:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
I related to this because I have dealt with careless people who's ignorant decisions affected my life, and I alone was forced to figure out how to handle it. This really just reminds me of how some people refuse to grow up and take responsibility, and it's disgusting.
Daisy even aspires for her young daughter to become oblivious and careless, although I believe it is to protect her innocence from people like herself.

The Beginning

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. Women and the ocean are very much the same, you see, always changing their minds; sometimes calm, content, and peaceful, other times in an uproar with unpredictable crashing waves. In either circumstance, their beauty remains. I swear, women and the ocean are the two more mysterious spectacles in the entire world. No one can completely understand their capabilities or patterns; no one has ever been to their darkest depths to witness how deep they can possibly be.

They met in likeliest of places for a romance to begin: a coffee shop. Oh the cliché coffee shop story. In the beginning, she was sort of terrifying with her ruby lips and hard eyes, and she glittered, everything about her seemed to reflect light in some way. Her voice was loud, but not terribly loud, just the kind of voice that grabs people's attention. She spoke with great articulation and a specific, demanding tone, as though she knew exactly what she was doing at all times.

Ironically, in this moment, she had no idea as to what to do because of the mere fact that she could not make up her mind on what to order. However, she was important enough, of course, that everyone else would have the decency to wait for her, so she thought. One delicate, manicured hand on her skinny hip, head tilted, her made up eyes squinted at the menu.

"Okay, okay, okay, I've got it now."

The line could hardly contain their enthusiasm.

"I will have the white mocha." she paused. "With peppermint." another beat. "Oh and make it a double. Oh, and sir, no whipped cream, please." She quickly flashed the poor barista an apologetic smile which he left unacknowledged; he could not bring his self to say anything in reply, but nodded his head in false forgiveness.

"With soy milk!" she shouted abruptly. "I almost forgot." she smiled to herself, proud of her ability to make decisions as a strong, independent individual.

Those two words were like the gun shot to begin a race, their acquaintanceship was on the starting line. Admittedly, he had checked her out once or twice in the ten minute duration that he had stood behind her, but he had by no means been admiring her, there was too much to stress about. He happened to be running extremely late for a job he hated at a company he hated for a boss he hated, while doing something he hated: waiting. But when he heard her last minute request for soy, his eyes darted up from his impatient tapping feet to her glossy auburn hair. A smirk slowly crawled across his face, and a short laugh broke free of his tightly pursed lips before he could think twice about it.
The long skinny body pivoted to face him, and ice blue eyes pierced into his own, daring him to explain himself.

He averted his eyes, but she did not break her gaze and he soon became quite uncomfortable and regretted his apparently offensive snort. He swallowed a large breath before telling her, "It's just funny, ya know, these frou-frou coffee drinks are already filled with sugary crap and then you throw in soy milk...as if that will make a difference?" The man who normally stood at 5'10'' was slowly shrinking beneath her bullet-like eyes.

"Oh," she readied her rebuttal, in a tone unheard from her that morning, deeper and darker. She looked him up and down like he was a meal, "you mean like, having bad posture, a crooked nose, messy hair, a sloppily shaved chin, and then putting a suit on? Like that will make a difference?"

That low blow of an insult ignited something in him, and right then and there, he fell into a strange state of confusion, despair, and delight, which we call love, and she smiled her sly crimson smile, because she knew. 

"What's the name on that soy mocha?" the tremendously flustered barista piped in.

"Amanda." she said with a sudden curiosity in her voice, wondering to herself if each syllable spoken to each other from then on would be more meaningful than the last.  It was as if there was a gravitational shift in the world the moment he knew her name, the magnetic pull between their souls was stronger than they even realized. She was the flame to his dynamite.

I told you before; women are like the ocean, pulling you off your feet in the least expected of times; it’s not every day when you’re just trying to be on time for once so you can keep your heinous job because at least it’s a pay check that you encounter the love of your life to-be She was inadvertantly luring him in to come on a journey with her, on a road to discovery, and he was soon borne away by the billowing waves, and lost in the ocean that was Amanda.

Famous Lines From Famous Books

Famous first line:
"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women." -Charles Johnson (1948-present)
Middle Passage (1990) Follows the story of a freed slave on the run from a man who claims he owes money to, set in 1830, and deals with illegal slave trading.
Also known for The Color Purple and Dreamer

Famous last line:
"He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance."
-Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
Frankenstein (1818) A scientist creates a grotesque creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment.
Also known for The Last Man and Perkin Warbeck

Writer's as Readers

The end product of a writer may be completely original and witty, but it's hard to say that at least some part of every story is derived from another story. In this way, all writing is sort of linked together in this big chain of knowledge and passion and mystery and everything that makes a good story great. I am an advocate of reading everything you can get your hands on, I think it affects us in more ways than we realize; broadening our vocabulary and general understanding/learning abilities, sparking our imaginations, tugging at our souls and emotions, and tucking away ideas subconsciously for things we will write, or even do in the future.
The first books I remember reading were the Junie B. Jones series. This loud mouthed elementary aged girl has made many appearances in my writing throughout the years in subtle ways. I am a bit infatuated with the name Jamie, which is very similar to Junie, and is the name of the main character in the first book I ever wrote. Junie always speaks her mind, and as it turns out so do all of my characters. I try to implicate a lot of observance of the worlds around my characters, I put myself in their shoes so I can truly portray their feelings about things as simple as how the weather feels outside, or what shoes they are wearing that day. Despite how long ago it was, Junie B. still lives in me and that breathtaking childlike wonder and discoveries are things that I will never let go of, they will continue to live in my writing as well.
Some people may say they prefer to write instead of read, but reading is a key factor when it comes to writing. If you have not been published, it's good to study the structure of other writer's works, the do's and do not's of book writing. Notice what the public did and didn't enjoy about their work, not so that you can copy them, but expand off of them. Books are like mirrors all facing each other in a row, each reflecting off of each other in some way; they are all different and hold their own colors, but once upon a time each book was just a person staring at a blank page about to invent something based off of their own experiences, including things that they have read. Maybe one writer won't pick out something from the plot of another book to insert into their own, but there could be a word you have never heard before that fits somewhere perfectly in your story. I love reading for many reasons, but mostly for new vocabulary. It just makes me feel so intellectual.

I most likely am enthralled by new vocabulary because I drool over descriptive details, I like to be able to envision what I am reading, I want the story to leap off the page and for it to feel like it's actually happening to me, like I'm having a telepathic conversation with the book, like it's alive with a pulse and a rhythm. One book that really spoke to me in this way was Before I Fall. It was a 2011 Gateway book that made it to the top ten of it's year. It's about a rich, popular girl who cares little about anything else other than herself, but is taught a lesson when she dies in a horrific car accident, but wakes up the next day, and the next, and the next. She relives the same nightmare for a solid week until her eyes are opened to the reality that the world does not revolve around her. I get chills just thinking about it, I could not stop reading this I was addicted. I was not, however, happy with the ending in the least, but it was so suspenseful I couldn't wait to put all of the puzzle pieces together. Books that can keep you on the edge of your seat like that, that can take you on a journey with surprises around every bend, that make you feel as though you've known the main character all of your life, those are the kind of books that make literate distinguished and exciting. That's the kind of book that I am striving to write.
As I mentioned before, I did write a book, in the fifth or sixth grade actually. It was fairly short at only ten chapters and a little over 100 pages. It is titled The Voice of Jamie Stewart, and it follows Jamie through her second year of middle school as she struggles to find true friends, a passion for music and for God, and even an infatuation with a boy. I began writing a sequel, but it never quite came together. I would like to eventually go back to my middle school level of writing and edit it so that maybe it could live on a shelf in a bookstore someday. I would also really just like to start fresh and write a novel, if I ever had the time and dedication to sit down and put my whole self into this novel. At present, I am really into writing song lyrics and poetry, I can write a song within an hour or less and have it perfected to my liking in a day or two. My mind is all over the place, so when I write something, I want to finish it right then. I know that with a novel, this would not be the possible. It would take years, or in my case just one year depending on my patience. I typically will get an idea that I'm very attached to and begin writing, but I will get in a few chapters and then lose interest. I assume that when that award winning idea swims into my head I will never get bored of it. I am anxiously awaiting for that day when some light is shed on that perfect story that I am destined to write, but until then I cannot seem to finish anything. I suppose that is ok though, because how can anyone else stay interested in what I have written if I, the inspired writer, cannot? My book will be written in due time. Until then, my brainstorming process is restless and bottomless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Writer's Dreaming

"And then there are terrifying dreams when the work is going really badly. I don't even want to talk about them. It gives them too much power." -Maya Angelou
I think everyone can relate to this incredibly intelligent woman as she speaks of how dreams have affected her life in all aspects; but she chooses an optimistic view as she indicates her belief that you can decide to let bad ones affect you, or not.
We have all experienced nightmares of sorts, and I am in full agreement of Angelou: the more you succumb to them, the harder they are to shake off. All of this reminds me of scary movies, and how certain people allow themselves to be sucked into the  thrill of the story and others only see actors. It's the same movie throughout, but the level of excitement is not based on how well it was directed, it is dependent on the willingness of the audience to be terrified. You see a dark alley on the screen where nothing has even appeared yet, and suddenly you're imagining all of the horrible things that could likely jump out. Here, you are giving the power to the movie, the same way you can give power over to your own dreams or even real life situations.
Dwelling on things that make you uncomfortable or unsure of yourself will instill a burden like a bag of bricks on your shoulders. This is how Angelou became so successful despite her bad dreams, she found courage within herself to shoo those unwanted thoughts away; and I don't use courage lightly, it does take courage to be self motivated. It is so easy to let yourself drown in a sea of confusion and negativity, it is much harder to jump out of the water and continue down a better path.

Dreams, good and bad, are all powerful and impact us in ways we don't even realize us. We can choose to ignore the bad ones, but Angelou writes that dreams are truthful. She said she would have pleasant dreams when the work was going well for her and vice versa. Do dreams hold any truth? Or are they merely fantasies, figures of our imaginations, concoctions of our minds, subconcious thoughts and observations taken to major heights, our brains' way of coping with things we are incapable of dealing with while we are awake?
Perhaps it's a bit of both. Even the most simple minded person can have the wildest imagination. Yes, our brains can create outrageously unrealistic dreams, but burried deep within them is some sort of message, a missing puzzle piece; nothing you didn't know, just something you didn't happen to think of until it was realized through a dream. A dream is a realm where your subconcious can just play with no boundaries, whereas your concious brain puts up barriers while you are awake to protect you from unbearable thoughts and feelings, to protect your sanity.
Indeed, dreams are truthful to us. Our minds can fool us into seeing things that are not there, but our subconcious shows us things that were there that we did not see.

Now, let's not forget the difference between what is the truth and what is factual. It sounds like a moot point, they are basically synonyms, right? Angelou doesn't think so, and she has convinced me otherwise as well. A fact is black and white, this is what is and there is no disputing it. The truth looks at a fact as a blank canvas and bleeds all over it with an abundance of actuality and life, perspective and color. The facts may be that something occured, but the truth is why it happened and the events that led up to it and how it made everyone involved feel. Perspective is the key word, the facts are set in stone, but the truth can vary for different people.
She was explaining this to, as an autobiographer, let the reader know that she would give the facts of her life, but that there may be gaps and loopholes where the truth would need to be set free, so that in the process of writing about what happened on a specific date in her life, she can be released from some cage she was still shut up in until she was able to breathe that heavy sigh of relief that is the truth.

 

Coffee with Cream and French Toast: A Haiku

 

 

 

 

 

A stretch and a yawn...

 

The smell of cinnamon calls...

 

Good morning coffee.

Inviting Warmth and Your Heart of Gold

You invite me and offer bluer skies
You invite me in with those big brown eyes
You invite me and offer your hand to hold
You invite me and offer your heart of gold

Who am I to wander under bluer skies?
What have I to offer with my almost blue eyes?
Who am I to deserve your hand to take?
Who am I to believe that your heart is not fake?

You assure me to follow you to where happiness lies
You lure me in with your big brown eyes
I'm taken aback by your purity
Now that I'm with you, the same, I'll never be

Walk in the Woods

Deep in the woods as the nigh draws near
As the sun goes down and the moon gives a sneer
There are many curious things that may perk up your ear
Deliberately digging down to your deepest fear

Perhaps you're not a fan of arachnids
And you're feeling the sensation of legs on your back
Unless of course that's only the brush of poisonous twigs
Or the gust of wind of wings of giant hairy bats

Deep in the woods as the nigh draws close
You may encounter an entity or ghost
You want to watch your step when your soul's at stake
Or the gooey scaly claws will grab and drag you in the lake

Deep in the woods as the morning starts
The light of day embraces your frantic beating heart
Now you wish that you had stayed put in your bed
But be thankful that at least you didn't lose your head

Recurring Dreams

For almost as long as I can remember, I would constantly have nightmares, particularly the kind where I die or am about to die right before I wake up. In these dreams I would be killed in the most awful ways I could imagine, such as falling from a high place-I have a fear of heights; or I would be locked underneath a pool and drown-I've had a fear of water since I almost drowned at eight years old. I had no idea why these dreams were happening, I would have no way of getting help or control in them. I have come to realize though that these dreams would occur at the most stressful times in my life, and maybe they symbolized that lack of control I felt I had in the situations happening in reality.
Fortunately, I haven't had any falling off a cliff dreams in a while, but I have continued to have nightmares since a very young age. I've never been able to easily fall asleep, and I believe that lack of sleep can pertain to some crazy dreams. However, throughout the past couple of months, the nightmares have somewhat ceased. I honestly think it's because my faithful boyfriend talks to me every night until I go to sleep and tells me sweet things and makes me feel safe. We also have adopted this cute little routine where he kisses the tops of my eye lids to insure I will have good dreams. It's probably all psychological, but it works nonetheless.
I have good dreams too, don't get me wrong, I'm not afraid of everything. Sometimes I just have plain nonsensical dreams involving people I haven't even spoken to for ages, or people I do speak to saying things they would never say in everyday life. I firmly believe that dreams have a purpose though, they are a part of our subconscious mind, a part of the mind that picks up on things we are unaware of until we get tiny snippets in our dreams.