novels

Sena Naslund is unbelievable with her words.. her language is so lyrical, alluring, and wise... I thought I'd share some passages i've recently come across:

          O Sunny Day, O golden sand, O loving breeze -- I would lounge and loaf forever, my spirit basking in your clear goodness, if I could. From how far away does the sunlight come to fall upon this one glittering grain I hold between my forefinger and my thumb? This grain is square as a quilt block, its edges straight as any carpenter cuts wood or glazier scores glass. Perhaps it is glass, or salt-- a crystal left by the water. I put it on the tip of my tongue and taste nothing salty. I push it sideways with my tongue and it is grit between my molars. I take it out again, all wet from my mouth. My stubborn sand grain lies drowned on the whorls of my forefinger. It can tell its fellows that it has been in a strange place. A wet, pink cave.

          Perhaps the mind as well as the mouth is a glistening, pink cave. As a child that image was available to me, for my mother read aloud how Plato likened his mind to a cave. But his was dark instead of pink. With this writing I wish to enter that opalescence and inhabit the pearly chamber of memory. Hindsight, retrospective wisdom, I leave, to the extent I can, at the threshold. But as a child, I was given much of the language of adults, and I continue to use it, even to describe my youth. I court the freshness, the immediacy, and all the resources of language that make the past tense strangely shine as though it were the present. 

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The home where I first found my body, my feet not so much being pulled into this sandy beach as seeking downward, toes better than roots; then my mind, built not to chart this blue swell of heaving ocean, but the night sky, where the stars themselves, I do believe, heave and float and spin in fiery passions of their own..

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I ceased looking through the window in order to contemplate the wavy glass itself. What was a window but a machine for making the opaque transparent? Then I regarded the window framing, which divided the four small lights by a slender, equal-armed cross between the panes..

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I sat on my mother's knee and listened to a bird sing. Mine was a darting mind, and it darted after the bird and its world, while I partly talked with my mother. With its song of Pretty, Pretty, Pretty, I imagined its crested red among the high green leaves of the tulip poplar, and then again diverted, imagined the way light shone through leaf so that you can see compartments and veins within the thin flatness.

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With the closing of the door, her image was lost to me again, but I pictured her by sound. When she straightened her arms, the wood rolled down to the hearth, and the rumble of the pieces jouncing each other, bruising and kissing the bark of their fellows and tumbling onto the hearthstones, was as pleasant and promising as any sound I know.

Beautiful. 

ghost

comfort was hard to find when you're a child who can't sleep.

For some reason I always found myself tracing my little fingers

along the wood design of your door

wondering if it would be okay to let myself knock.
wondering if maybe I could walk into your life and it would be okay,

It would be better.

I could usually see the light on, when I was younger.

you always seemed so much older than I was.

but even still, I was infatuated by the way you distanced yourself

the farther away you became the more I wanted to know you

but I didn't know how.
I still don't know how.

I followed you everywhere. We joke about it you know,

but I really wanted to be near you all the time.

I saved everything you made me, and the nights we fought over

silly childish things, I would cry with such strong conviction,

even so young I could feel that separation, so unsettling.

you. were ALWAYS. right.

no matter what, you knew the secrets of the universe, and I believed it

for so long. I became bitter soon after I realized it was kind of impossible

to be indulged in your world. I don't think you meant it,

but I will never forget the times you wanted to be left alone

and all I wanted to do was be anything for you.

anything.

Soon I just detached myself. Growing up for me was realizing that

you aren't really a hero.

It pains me to say it because I don't want you to think you've disappointed me

I don't want you to think that I look down on you, because I could never feel that way.

I still want that love from you, so much sometimes that I can't get past it

I get so angry.

I just want to know why, why don't you call me?

Why didn't you ever tell me you loved me, why can't we hug and talk about our lives?

no, not talk about our fucking lives but talk about who you are

and who I am

and what we really think and feel and want from these layers of life

I'm so sick of it, i'm so mad, i'm so hurt seeing your brokenness and just watching you

growing up for me was when I figured out what you need and what I need and

they're the same, we're the same.
and you don't see it, knowledge isn't everything, this is something I learned on my own

a man who is hurt will make himself an expert, but if you can't recognize that

than I don't know how to reach you and i've been looking for ways

but I've come to find its not so easy.

So I guess its like this: I'm still waiting at the door wondering

in case you're waiting on the other side and wondering..

I love you.

You should know,

You taught me how to love people.

It's hard to believe really, the way you made Jesus so real to me. I hardly knew you when we first talked about the beauty of our minds.. but seeing you weep because of it told me everything
and I never really let you go. It was a gradual thing, the way you seeped into my heart. Right down to the core of who I was - you saw all of the ugliness inside of me, and you bore every pain with silent listening. I really believed the things we lived for then, in the most pure way that I think I could.. in the most selfless way that I think I ever could.

you showed me how to forget myself.

you challenged my spirit! My settled, sleeping bones weren't satisfied with the ways of the world, all because of the way you let Jesus live inside of you. The way that He touched people through you.. the sweet nostalgia and the painful attempt to get to know my heart,

you told me that everyone wants to be known.

and you knew me because I let you in.. I let you into the brokenness around me when it wasn't even fair. Maybe I let you too close.. but I saw Jesus so close to me in the most real way. I saw Him so early in the morning that the horizon was still pink, I saw Him in the dead of the afternoon in a familiar coffee shop, I saw Him in the middle of the night in a chocolate chip waffle.. You taught me what fellowship meant. It was the painful growing that got me there. You assured me that it was okay to let my mind wander and skitter away, and you never thought that my thoughts were too 'out there'... so for the first time in my life I didn't feel alone.

And then I let you go.

a little at a time, and I saw it draining by..at first the sting was too much to feel, so I just suppressed it all and became so recluse and eventually I choked it all down. I continued to live day by day, week by week, month by month...I see you sometimes and your eyes are like glass. No more late night words. It always hurt me to see you hurting, but I never felt like I deserved to give you anything.. because I always took more than I gave and some nights I couldn't sleep because of it -but other nights I couldn't sleep because of the joy in my heart. I never knew I could be so happy that I physically could not sleep. Someone once told me that you'll always know those people that make such a strong impact in your life that they aren't made to stay in your life..and I always knew you'd leave. Like that night in the car. Like smoke in the trees.
So I just want to say thank you,
you're heart is so big that it breaks for everyone,
your heart is so big that I couldn't help but be changed by you and what is inside of you
I couldn't help but be changed by the Holy Spirit, so please know that Your prayer that you always pray has been answered in more ways than one:
He uses you, He used you in my life and I will always be thankful.
<3

conversation

i'd rather stay quiet and not let it be said, i'd rather let it be floating around me where it's still beautiful and limitless than let it be stale and familiarized. I can't understand the way it feels sometimes, and I know they can't either. Its too painful and exhausting to try and make everyone understand, it just reinforces loneliness. We sit around in circles and begin to talk, we talk about things we want to talk about and things we don't, we talk about adventures of the heart, we talk about sadness and joy and enthusiastic moments, fears and laughter, and when the layers unravel we share memories that have faded and aren't so significant to the outside, but mean so much at the same time. We remember things that no one else can relate to even if they wanted to, but there is comfort in their willingness to listen anyway, to see our painted images the best that they can and to smile at our stories that are absurd but sometimes beautifully simple.

It's a peaceful energy, its selflessness, its love. It connects us to intricate thoughts that we may never remember again, and how funny it is that something in our lives once meant so much and now struggles to be forgotten. There is something mesmerizing about the state of childhood, and everyone loses themselves in trying to get back to that place. The place when you were a child where you first connected the feeling of sadness with something sad, and your emotional maturity was so outside of yourself that it shocked you, because you were able to put something solid with a feeling. What was it that made your eyes stream with innocence and sadness? Its something beautiful and selfless, what was it that made you cry that wasn't about yourself at all but purely out of love for someone else? It is the fall of man that brings loneliness and confusion, an inability to be fully in fellowship with another, an isolation due to the illusions we create, materialistic walls and masks, taught to be composed and rhythmically in tune with the world, and enslavement to our own fears and society boundaries.

But in the brokenness of those moments isn't it so beautiful that we see God is so good, isn't it God that shows me, the desire of man is to be pure in Love, one in Spirit and community, because we weep for others, because we feel that tug on our hearts in the darkness even as children that are alien to such real concepts?! So we spend the rest of our lives in circles with each other, sometimes at functions or events, around bonfires, at park benches or looking up at the stars, we spend our lives searching the depths of each other with an aching to know one another the way that the God of the Universe knows us, and to see into the windows of our souls what little moments broke us and then made us whole again, how significant they really are...

theres something so real about it all that i almost don't want to make it known, just let it float above our heads like the memories we will soon forget, the emotions we are soon to feel, and the interwoven love that we are soon to pass on..

Astaire the Tree

The flowers on Astaire are not really pink at all, they just appear to be pink as the buds are, but the petals are white as milk, only tinted by their tiny centers. Climbing a tree was the best advice I have ever gotten, it was one of those moments that kind of resonate in your mind and seem to make everything flow together. I was told life looks different from up there, and those little pink buds reminded me of that so clearly. Her trunk is twisted and old, the little flowers seemed to snow on the ground as the branches draped over like a mother holding her baby. She cradled me in the crevice of her heart, tangled limbs above me, the dirt below. The saddest admiration I may ever know was the way she still carried empty homes in her hands and her hair, three or more little nests. They were hollow shells of once nestled sticks and feathers, and she held the nests like crusts of the earth, beautiful and forgotten. Astaire, with her milky eyes and steady heart sings a song so pure and lonely that no one can hear but the pink and the wind. But as I sat and remembered, I drank in the pink air and instantly loved her like an old friend. She is the center that I long to come back to, my sweet and divine origin

bird by bird

I am water. Am I anything I was before?
the moon was so sweet when we saw our little hands
for what they really were
God made them fly, such little hands, like paper planes that soar
quiet ripples of clouds resound in my mind
I am water, nothing more.
Your petals have crinkled beautifully, delicate and dry
they've withered so flat in the summer grass that
my hands won't hold the sky
i've been mistaken for someone else, someone never found
I sit in a bucket seat, been called your type
I laugh a hollow sound
Well here it is, is it ever endless when the water cuts so deep?
we sit in our planets and count our good roses and
such tiny hands we'll keep
bird by bird i'll make it through
at least thats what he told me

home

I literally stared at the wall for 10 minutes, it was just this naked white. just completely bare. I felt so embarrassed for it, like all of its secrets were stripped and revealed. Not just white walls but all of the furniture is gone but a few tables and beds. Its gone, its like a hollow shell of some part of me that I can never come back to. I sat there and felt the sting, it was like a heartache that shocks you every time it comes, I was myself years ago with a crush on a boy. I was myself years ago when a loved one died. I was myself staring at the wooden door frame that has been slammed shut numerous times because of family fights. I couldn't possibly dive into the pool of memories that were swimming around me, there were so many brilliant moments, so many painful ones. There were so many images coming to my mind that I haven't remembered in years, and how sorry I was for it. How sorry I am for these white walls that were washed clean of their life. I felt so old. I looked down at my hands and saw myself as nineteen. Where did it go? My childhood? Its in a box in the garage. That is the thing about time, it gradually moves who you are with who you will be, and soon you forget it all behind you. I am a ghost in this empty house, I am an outsider in this little town. If those walls could talk of the conversations they held, of the laughter they witnessed, the tears... I will never know. And soon my quiet window will be nailed shut and the roof will be just like an unfamiliar face. 

You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone. 
You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for you kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place. 

- garden state