The Church of that Kid with the Always Sticky Fingers

Forkergirl's Limited Fork Theory maintains that nothing is maintainable.





Entropy
The second law of thermodynamics says:

there are no sheets on my bed and there
ought not to be hair on

my head because I do
not have enough
energy to keep either
properly made.

Every day I work to keep my teeth from falling out
and my skin from wrinkling away but
Part of me has no desire to be an übermensch
Part of me loves dilapidated sofas and didactic
TVs and the idea of fading into them until there aren’t any
parts of me at all and the couch and tv and bed are comfortably
put to rest in a landfill

Everything has been moving outward from the first interaction. Everything has been branching further and further away from where it started. In class, forkergirl gave us each a piece of paper from the same journal and asked us to mark it. I traced hand prints onto the page. She asked us to fold the paper in some way. I crinkled the page from flat into a wrinkly mess. She had us unfold it and pass the paper on to another classmate to make something else. Though our pages all looked the same when we began none of them ended that way. Like the bread that multiplied for the son of the Christian god and became something different for everyone who ate it over each generation, our papers were not the same. Some people had folded their paper into airplanes or flowers. Some cut theirs into pieces. Others made messes like mine. Interaction had made each piece different. But their origins were oh so similar.

An Email from Me to Nick in the Aftermath of that Class:

Here I am up late again trying to figure everything out, which all of college has taught me is impossible but heh. A week ago, I returned to Owen and talked for an hour to some random guy chilling in our kitchen about the universe. Yesterday, that man, Kyle Holton, died in a car crash. Even though I don't really know him particularly well, we had a moment over peanut butter toast and it's strange to know he is no longer out there in the world putting only peanut butter on his bread and never jelly. I guess this is one of those times that folks starting asking a lot of whys but somehow I am feeling a little more stable than usual.

Sitting here watching the movie--the Big Chill--seeing this group of close friends try to figure things out in the aftermath of death, I realize the thing they have been missing since college is each other. Brought together over death they see the importance of the connections they had once worked to make and nearly forgotten about. We sit up all night trying to find enough footing to face the world--enough certainty to make any kind of decision. But maybe we can gain that certainty through the friends we spend our nights discussing shit with... we can trust each other enough to learn to trust ourselves--believe in the me that believes in you or something. Without a God or overarching belief system, we don't have a way to understand the macrocosm of it all, but I know that having Claire or Aaron or any of these folks to spend nights and days with is something.

Maybe instead of looking at the whole and trying to find ways to simplify it enough to interact with the world, maybe it is possible to use our relationships as the footing on which we stand to face the world. I don't ever want to forget how important ya'll are to me or even to forget that short conversation with Mr. Holton over a sandwich. I may not have a god to turn to in the uncertainty of death and life, but there is a stability in friendship I've never found in other things I've tried to grab onto. Though we might not understand the macrocosm of it all or maybe there isn't a macrocosm to be understood, I feel most stable with friendship like the one our group of friends has been building. Being connected to ya'll reminds me of my responsibility to everything else.

Though I only spoke to Kyle for a bit, he isn't made past tense by death because my interaction with him will influence other interactions and his interactions with others continue doing the same. Here I am typing at 2am in part because of my interaction with Kyle. Like those papers we folded and traded and marked in class, we are made different by interaction, but maybe it is more than that. Instead of just continuing on with the markings of the people that we have met, we can use our connections to people as a way to feel more grounded--roots that keep growing as we keep moving outward so even though we don't understand it all we can find good in our starting point. Something continuous in it all even when things change--a handhold tangible enough to grab in the chaos. Like the relationship of Moss and her mother grounded the Glory Prelude, from friendship we can try to create and maintain other relationships with the universe.