The Curious Adventures of Angela Christine

I spend hours on my blue and white checkered couch everyday, supposedly reading, but mostly looking out my window perfecting my ability to be distracted. Right now, I am supposed to be reading this, but it's snowing down tiny flakes and I've got a mug of coffee, the furnace is up as high as I like, there are a few hours until class starts, and I miss this place. I miss you.

Have I told you this? The way when I was a kid I would sit in church on Sundays and take the prayer cards on the rack of the pew in front of me and I would write out prayers and drop them in the collection plate, sending them out like little magical letters headed straight for God, until my dad, who was a deacon for awhile, back when there were deacons, was asked by the prayer group to ask me what was up with all my prayers, and I had a vision of reality - of all those church adults sitting in a circle and reading my prayers and wondering what to do with them.

Last week in church, like every week, the preacher held up the cheap paper duo tang that holds the "Prayers of the People" and he prayed them out, one by one, whatever anyone had written. And when he got to the prayer that asked God to help the teenagers who are smoking to stop from smoking, his voice didn't waver at all, or cringe and turn self-conscious at the oddity of it - at the way I couldn't help but immediately hear an old grandma berating her grandson for his long hair, bad skin and SMOKING! I liked the preacher all the better for his steady voice through it and his faith in its receiver, though I squirmed in my hard pew and wondered what the visitors must think.

I've been talking and thinking and wondering here about my writing and my praying and my living. "Every poem is a prayer," was said to me, and I thought yes, but to whom? And what is a poem, never mind what is a prayer.

I write to you in my head all day long. And sometimes your name is the name of ones that I love, or of a best friend that I miss, or my family, or a teacher, but what I like, what I've always liked and only lately understood is that you are my placeholder for God. The way I write to dear you, safe you, good you, and you gather up the longing, the missing - because it is all a round longing for the fullness I can't yet hold - and in your receiving you send it like the prayer cards were meant to, like the preacher on Sunday, like so many letters freed and flying through space, into waiting hands that meant to hold them all along.