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| hey there
hit me up on facebook or myspace.com/jage11
check out some songs i've been writing at myspace.com/nowandnotyetmusic
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| the stage show was awesome last night. thanks for coming if you came, and if you didn't, you should have. it was a good time. lots of great acts. it was a ton of fun. great memories. oh, if you have any pics of the 2 acts i was in, could you email them to me? (guitarguy88@comcast.net) thanks
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| if you don't have anything to do on saturday, you should come to south christian high's stage show at 7:30pm. It costs $5 each, and it's for a fundraiser. it'd be a cheap and very entertaining date. i'll be there, and you should too
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| TO WRITE LOVE ON HER ARMS by Jamie Tworkowski
Pedro the Lion is loud in the speakers, and the city waits just outside
our open windows. She sits and sings, legs crossed in the passenger
seat, her pretty voice hiding in the volume. Music is a safe place and
Pedro is her favorite. It hits me that she won't see this skyline for
several weeks, and we will be without her. I lean forward, knowing this
will be written, and I ask what she'd say if her story had an audience.
She smiles. "Tell them to look up. Tell them to remember the stars."
I would rather write her a song, because songs don't wait to resolve,
and because songs mean so much to her. Stories wait for endings, but
songs are brave things bold enough to sing when all they know is
darkness. These words, like most words, will be written next to
midnight, between hurricane and harbor, as both claim to save her.
Renee is 19. When I meet her, cocaine is fresh in her system. She
hasn't slept in 36 hours and she won't for another 24. It is a familiar
blur of coke, pot, pills and alcohol. She has agreed to meet us, to
listen and to let us pray. We ask Renee to come with us, to leave this
broken night. She says she'll go to rehab tomorrow, but she isn't ready
now. It is too great a change. We pray and say goodbye and it is hard
to leave without her.
She has known such great pain; haunted dreams as a child, the
near-constant presence of evil ever since. She has felt the touch of
awful naked men, battled depression and addiction, and attempted
suicide. Her arms remember razor blades, fifty scars that speak of
self-inflicted wounds. Six hours after I meet her, she is feeling
trapped, two groups of "friends" offering opposite ideas. Everyone is
asleep. The sun is rising. She drinks long from a bottle of liquor,
takes a razor blade from the table and locks herself in the bathroom.
She cuts herself, using the blade to write "FUCK UP" large across her
left forearm.
The nurse at the treatment center finds the wound several
hours later. The center has no detox, names her too great a risk, and
does not accept her. For the next five days, she is ours to love. We
become her hospital and the possibility of healing fills our living
room with life. It is unspoken and there are only a few of us, but we
will be her church, the body of Christ coming alive to meet her needs,
to write love on her arms.
She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone
I've known, like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star. She owns
attitude and humor beyond her 19 years, and when she tells me her
story, she is humble and quiet and kind, shaped by the pain of a
hundred lifetimes. I sit privileged but breaking as she shares. Her
life has been so dark yet there is some soft hope in her words, and on
consecutive evenings, I watch the prettiest girls in the room tell her
that she's beautiful. I think it's God reminding her.
I've never walked this road, but I decide that if we're going
to run a five-day rehab, it is going to be the coolest in the country.
It is going to be rock and roll. We start with the basics; lots of fun,
too much Starbucks and way too many cigarettes.
Thursday night she is in the balcony for Band Marino, Orlando's finest.
They are indie-folk-fabulous, a movement disguised as a circus. She
loves them and she smiles when I point out the A&R man from
Atlantic Europe, in town from London just to catch this show.
She is in good seats when the Magic beat the Sonics the next
night, screaming like a lifelong fan with every Dwight Howard dunk. On
the way home, we stop for more coffee and books, Blue Like Jazz and
(Anne Lamott's) Travelling Mercies.
On Saturday, the Taste of Chaos tour is in town and I'm not
even sure we can get in, but doors do open and minutes after parking,
we are on stage for Thrice, one of her favorite bands. She stands ten
feet from the drummer, smiling constantly. It is a bright moment there
in the music, as light and rain collide above the stage. It feels like
healing. It is certainly hope.
Sunday night is church and many gather after the service to
pray for Renee, this her last night before entering rehab. Some are
strangers but all are friends tonight. The prayers move from broken to
bold, all encouraging. We're talking to God but I think as much, we're
talking to her, telling her she's loved, saying she does not go alone.
One among us knows her best. Ryan sits in the corner strumming an
acoustic guitar, singing songs she's inspired.
After church our house fills with friends, there for a few more moments
before goodbye. Everyone has some gift for her, some note or hug or
piece of encouragement. She pulls me aside and tells me she would like
to give me something. I smile surprised, wondering what it could be. We
walk through the crowded living room, to the garage and her stuff.
She hands me her last razor blade, tells me it is the one she used to
cut her arm and her last lines of cocaine five nights before. She's had
it with her ever since, shares that tonight will be the hardest night
and she shouldn't have it. I hold it carefully, thank her and know
instantly that this moment, this gift, will stay with me. It hits me to
wonder if this great feeling is what Christ knows when we surrender our
broken hearts, when we trade death for life.
As we arrive at the treatment center, she finishes: "The stars are
always there but we miss them in the dirt and clouds. We miss them in
the storms. Tell them to remember hope. We have hope."
I have watched life come back to her, and it has been a
privilege. When our time with her began, someone suggested shifts but
that is the language of business. Love is something better. I have been
challenged and changed, reminded that love is that simple answer to so
many of our hardest questions. Don Miller says we're called to hold our
hands against the wounds of a broken world, to stop the bleeding. I
agree so greatly.
We often ask God to show up. We pray prayers of rescue. Perhaps God
would ask us to be that rescue, to be His body, to move for things that
matter. He is not invisible when we come alive. I might be simple but
more and more, I believe God works in love, speaks in love, is revealed
in our love. I have seen that this week and honestly, it has been
simple: Take a broken girl, treat her like a famous princess, give her
the best seats in the house. Buy her coffee and cigarettes for the
coming down, books and bathroom things for the days ahead. Tell her
something true when all she's known are lies. Tell her God loves her.
Tell her about forgiveness, the possibility of freedom, tell her she
was made to dance in white dresses. All these things are true.
We are only asked to love, to offer hope to the many hopeless.
We don't get to choose all the endings, but we are asked to play the
rescuers. We won't solve all mysteries and our hearts will certainly
break in such a vulnerable life, but it is the best way. We were made
to be lovers bold in broken places, pouring ourselves out again and
again until we're called home.
I have learned so much in one week with one brave girl. She is alive
now, in the patience and safety of rehab, covered in marks of madness
but choosing to believe that God makes things new, that He meant hope
and healing in the stars. She would ask you to remember. | | |
| yeah i definitely have the first 12 lines memorized (soon to be all 18) for english lit. Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke | | |
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