A Discourse

I burnt my dumplings writing a letter for you.

"Tell him I cried a lot after reading his email," my mother demanded in a tongue I was vaguely familiar with. I had translated the latter half of a fractured relationship for her and she leaned over my shoulder as her eyes narrowed into an inane squint. "Tell him my heart is broken."

My fingers scattered across the plastic black keys in an agitated gait as they tried their best to convey crude fragments into a recognizable structure. 

"What else?" 

"Ni gah ssuh." 


You write it.

There is an exchange of words - stumbling, strained, and newborn to this kind of world. Our dialogue comes as if they had been sifted through a cultural sieve and the words left behind feed into the tension between myself and the screen. 

She wants to say more and I can sense a distant longing to make amends with a guilt ridden bloodline. But I can only imagine how heavy her mouth may feel - she struggles with the dialect of her motherland and the lingo of our mother tongue. 

You and I, we are colloquial. This letter we composed together through taut talk is vernacular.




With her standing beside me, arms akimbo, dye-stained tank top, a persistent show of her underbelly (the second child did this, she once joked), dark sweatpants always pulled up to her knees. I am sitting, crouched, hunched, I am curling over the keyboard, my despise and burden shaping my form, the clatter of a line forming, the raising of our voices, the deafening silence she offers me in reply. The silence she offers her kin to which I translate into "I miss you's". I resent you.


We are done. I sprang from the chair and retreated into my room. Hours passed with little contact between us and it isn't long before she reaches for me again. 

I heard dull thuds of ungraceful needs hitting the floor and the familiar crinkling of pages to which she draws out salvation. She is praying. I hear my name and immediately, I am drawn and forced into a dejected descent... 

But I thank you. 

Take Flight, Inspiration, Take Flight...

Why do you remain so silent?

My hand reaches and is just barely upon your shoulder,
Slender and fair you elude me time and time again.
I have seen a glimpse of your powerful thighs,
that translucent, trembling skin
Muscles beneath flexing then taking flight
so that your feet might skate upon the blank surface
And color it to your taste.

Your hair whips about your face and your appearance,
clothed in shreds of ivory and fashioned like the broken
wings of a dove,
is in a perpetual state of incognito.

Many have sought you and yet, heartless as you are,
You've abandoned them to wrestle with their frustrations
Mine own, included.

But here I am, breathless and so close that I can
feel the irregular drumming of your being,
I can hear the rustling of your thoughts and the clashing
of your limbs as you race forth.

Brute strength and force are in your gallop, yet the
rhythm of your stride is graceful but
there is
a stumble
in your
step.

Desperately I lunge towards you and we come crashing
to the floor, scraped knees and torn jeans
remind me of a distant but vividly beautiful memory
You and I grapple and we tangle and fight
The endless hours I have waited for you, the
unguided well of life I have strained so hard to
keep from slipping between my fingers and at last,
I have you and I have only heard tales of your powers and at last,
Alas,
You are but a plastic bag.

Hello, How Do You Do?

"Go, happy Paper, gently steal,

And underneath her Pillow lie;

There, in soft Dreams, my Love reveal,

That Love which I must still conceal,

And, wrapt in awful Silence, die."

-Aaron Hill, "The Messenger"

Hello and welcome to the...well, let's see, aside from the dust gathering in some corners of my mind, several notions scattered about in an untidy fashion, and the lack of a speedy hardware (I fancy the typewriter when expressing my thoughts) welcome and welcome again to my humble cognizance.

I don't blog often but it's something I'm trying to work on in order to make clear the mess of my introspection. These ramblings, rantings, and ruminations posted will be about a journey. Mostly a journey about self-discovery, God, and the Christian life. I aim to encourage, be enlightened, and well, entertained if not challenged to new concepts or perspectives I've yet to think about or come across.

The blog name was inspired by a poem I've stumbled across in a lovely book titled, Pamela by Samuel Richardson. It's a beautiful piece that stole my breath away upon first reading it and I hoped to share the magic of these words with you as well.