waiting at a bus stop on an autumn morning.

"God is in everything." --Mercedes (The Count of Monte Cristo)

Before the sun has burned away the fog in the cold morning, the naked trees cast ethereal shadows as the sun rises behind them. The dawn paints a conflagration of blazing golds and violent lashes of purple across the pale daybreak...

My eyes water with epiphany. How can people be sleeping, I wonder, while all this beauty is occurring--even though, conversely, I sometimes wish I were one of them?

I felt blessed to witness this secret beauty. It reminded me of God.

know in words that which you have always known in thought

[There is a name written on my heart.]

_

I am a writer of lists. Little memorandums of groceries, movies, playlist tracks, lexicon, errands, or boys I have lent my heart to. Footnotes tacked to my door trail across my vision as I run to school each morning and the margins of my writing tablet are riddled with notations so cryptic even I won't be able to decipher them at the end of the day.

Detergent

Amelie

Vito's Ordination Song

Inori (prayer)

Drop off resume

It occurs to me that I should save these deciduous leaflets of thought, so I paste them together in a book of other extracts from the vicissitudes of my life.

Lists of: Often unfinished chores, verse excerpts, epistles secret and unsent, options post-graduation, reasons I love my sister, lost items, umbrages I've yet to forgive, scriptures that speak to me, tangohen (vocabulary).

Maybe when I look back at the close I'll find I've recollected something else entirely.

_

[And I've scratched it out so many times there is a tear now.]

Betwixt the Sand and Foam

"I am forever walking upon these shores, Betwixt the sand and the foam, The high tide will erase my foot-prints, And the wind will blow away the foam. But the sea and the shore will remain Forever." - Gibran (Sand and Foam)

Oh, California...