Sunday, January 15, 2012

Insomnia Is My Baby's Daddy!


This is one of many zygotes conceived in the lust of  the dream to write a novel...one day (long sigh).  The concept I envisioned was a love story with a feel like the movie "Love & Basketball" only exchanging the basketball for church.  My main character/speaker is a woman with an agnostic belief system.  I like her a lot so far but I 'm not sure if I  will have the chance to hang out with her in the future...another one to be kept in gestation until I'm ready to push.

My infatuation started when I was eight.  I would sit in a maple wood, yellow cushioned pew gazing with long affection at my cousin as she sang with innocent jubilee in the New Clinton Baptist Church choir.  They were a small bunch.  An open call banding of precious, tender eyed girls and bored, lazy lipped boys who had been coerced through biblically backed suggestion to render their reasonable service to the sunshine choir.  I adored watching all of their faces even the stone faces of the mute boys.  I envied their affiliation to something bigger than their individual selves.

I am thirty now with a hard won perspective on my previous relationships.  It is an outlook that would garner vehement disdain from most but I maintain my stance nonetheless because its mine.  My only loyalty lies in the spirit of what is true for me.  I am no saint but what I do claim to be is a god in my own right - the creator and sole proprietor over the course of my life.  This takes courage.  It is a singular practice in consistently ascending beyond the crucifixion of others expectations - a kind of violence that for most begets a kind of Stockholm effect of aligning with the captors of your true self.  It takes courage to escape.  But it is a fortitude that takes years to construct.  It is definitely a work – building brick by red brick.

I met him in college.  He was the affectionate jock in my English 101 class.  He moved from classmate to classmate with ease in the anxious minutes before the tolling bell of the professor’s voice initiated the clamor of ball point pens buzzing in between red margins and blue lines.  And when class ended he managed to delightfully reconcile every conversation he began in the eve minutes of class.  In this he exuded a methodical amiableness.  A personable character motivated by the foreknowledge of how small talk now makes for big connections post grad.  But what most people saw was a jock which equals simpleton in the stereotype ravaged minds of most.  But what I suspected was that he was a clandestine savant.  A trickster posing as the unassuming scarecrow who all along had a brain.  But this notion rested on the fence of maybe, possibly.  I too held loose thoughts of how he would flunk out when his body or eligibility no longer served the agenda of the club.  He shamed the doubting Thomas in me with our first conversation…

"And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry."
~Habakkuk 2: 2-3