On Distraction. and God?

Do you ever get that feeling like you gotta, you gotta say something? Like um, um,

I-I-I-I feel . . . . a thousand things and am thinking about them all right now and they fit, like all the thoughts are connected, I think, I just can’t figure out what it is all the thoughts mean–what they’re pointing to and if only, if only I could just freaking say it, somehow I would be liberated from whatever this thought (and heart) constipation is.

I probably shouldn’t have used a poop image there. Or should I say, lack of poop image . . . but it’s been a while since I’ve used the word butt or something related in one of my posts. Remember when you searched the term “butt” on this blog and found so many butt posts? Do it again, just for kicks. Butt kicks.

Perhaps to have a distracted mind or a mind with a lot of thoughts about what is being said and about what is not being said means I’m smart. But I don’t buy this. In fact, I know for a fact, that I’m actually not that smart. But then again, this is because smart is relative and relative to other people, I am smart and unsmart–I am unsmart with an 87% on a paper, unless everyone else gets 80s or 70s or 60s. (I know the paper I still have yet to get back will be a C. As a previously straight A writer, this is a good wake up for me. A challenge–that I hate.)

One time I wrote Ryan when he was in the MTC. I said, “But if you were alone in a room, with nobody around you, how would you know you were bad at Spanish?” And what does it mean if you weren’t alone in a room, but actually in a room with God–just you and Him? What does it mean to say, “But that’s different”?

Last night I had Cub Scouts. After I cut my hair again and highlighted it (because yesterday is when I got my 87% and I was already low and annoyed–so annoyed (Birth Control)), I went straight to KC’s mobile home to pick him up and then drove over to Marleni’s where we were gonna make bird feeders. Then I dropped him off. Then I made chicken gnocchi soup with extra butter (Ryan picked up some french bread) and ate it with him across the table, then watched a glitchy presidential debate (for what took two hours) while eating a Fat Boy sandwich and when Ryan fell asleep, I snuck up into my own little study room and read my scriptures and kind of studied them (I have this manual, but lately I can’t remember what I read while I read).

But what I want to talk about are the moments between Cub Scouts and no Cub Scouts, when I asked KC, who seemed so weirdly quiet, if he was alright. He said he was shy. I said that was weird, since last week he wasn’t. Then he put on his shoes and said he was bummed about moving before Christmas–and of course I got angry at him and said, “BUT HOW CAN YOU MOVE WHEN YOU’RE MY FAVORITE BEAR CUB?!” You see, I’m the Mama Bear and I hate it when my cubs leave me.

On the way home we talked a little bit about how I moved and switched schools THREE times before I got to the fourth grade. One time I was walking around the playground during recess–this was right after I moved in third grade (“WEIRD, I was your age”)–just walking on the beams (what do you call them? those wood things in the ground around the swings) all by myself. I don’t know why I’ve always remembered this. It’s like a three second long memory. But I remember looking at kids playing up on the turf (“Back when you were actually allowed to run on grass”), on the basketball court near the fence, on the slides and the monkey bars. I remember looking and knowing that I was by myself.

And that’s the memory. Just walking by myself and knowing it. I didn’t even think it was bad. I didn’t even think it was okay. I was just, well, walking and knowing about it.

But I didn’t tell KC that part. I said, “Yeah, I was by myself for a couple of weeks. Sometimes it’s good to just learn those kinds of things. But then I made two of my best friends that I kept all through grade school and even into middle school. Sometimes it’s fun to make new friends.” I told him about Evelyn Salcedo, the tiny little girl who made me laugh harder than my dad.

I feel like I have to say that he stayed a little bit, even after I parked next to his place with the For Sale sign. I feel like I have to say it because after he finally got out, unbuckled his seat belt, after I reminded him not to forget his scout book, that he looked back at me more than once and I noticed because I needed to.

How can a nine-year-old kid with a shaved head and two piercings in his ear have eyes like early morning sea?

–

When God told us later that there was light, me and you and KC, before we wrote papers and pierced our ears, how could we not see the waves of the sea and how they fell upon the earth like prayers, like bowed heads, over and over again, not out of familiarity or habit but out of necessity to be pulled forward?

There are times when I feel like there’s something of so many things that I want to say. Not to say it to say it, but to see it and understand that I need to say it:

Like how our stories are gifts and the glances in between them give meaning to them.