The Yaak House (Part Two)

(More spooky content for the epitome of the spooky season! Unsure how many parts this will end up being, but I have greatly enjoyed writing this thus far)

"The Yaak House" has moved to my dedicated Darker Things Blog! https://andiwritedarker.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Yaak%20House

Brother 21

Written for my brother at heart Charlie, as a birthday gift for his 21st. 

"Brother 21"

I've been blessed in this life brother, to have you at my side, if just for now in spirit; I know more will come with time.
I know you in my head, as the smell of Rosemary and the sound of laughter.
I know you in my heart brother, even born a world apart.
Your laughter is an ocean, your smile is a mountain; great and wondrous things. Your voice, your comfort, soothing to these tattered heartstrings.
You are my brother, blood or not be damned.

The Yaak House (Part One)

Yaak House has moved to my Darker Things Blog! Part One

So the initial short story I was going to write decided to out-grow the technical parameters of the label "Short Story", and I still have a yearning to share it. So I hacked it apart with a machete went through as I was proofreading, then again as I was editing, and found two good points to split it into more manageable pieces to read. Here is the first of those; the next may come as soon as Halloween or as late as whenever it decides to be done.

Brother

I was not born to have a brother in blood. My brother in blood was unborn, unbreathing, lost to the crusade of time and fate.
No, I was not born to have a brother in blood, but a brother I have.
A brother I have; in love and choice. A brother I found at my low, a brother has stood by me, before I saw him as such.
My brother lives in Sweden, and of the family I've been able to choose, I'm glad I found him.
It was no pen pal experience, no foreign exchange, it was what my collective youth is mocked for; the internet, and our humor abhorrent.
My brother's name is Charlie, though I sometimes call him Max, though that doesn't change that he is my brother, a very simple fact.
He's got eyes unlike mine, soulful and brown, warm and loving, the soil of earth's crown.
He likes wine and he likes whiskey, he's a riot if you catch him tipsy.
He can play the ukulele, Against Humanity he can play a brutal game of cards, but best of all when I'm feeling low, he picks me up by the heart.
He's my little brother, but to me it's easy to see where he has lived just a bit more of life than me. That said, I've been in more fights than he, and what a sight would be be, me part Aussie and he a Swede.
Me screaming at him across the bar "Fight me!" and his tired reply, "Andi... please."
I could see him rolling his eyes and taking a shot, then hauling me out, before someone called the cops.
He loves dogs, he loves cows, it's funny to see his reaction when I say either of them are around.
"Picture now!" He'll demand, and I'll allow, because it's family, we're pals.
He's my little brother, it's funny and plain to see. As clear as the fact that he isn't at all related to me.
I get to build my family, to deconstruct the tradition, and I get to choose the nuts that go up in this tree!

Word Versus Nerve; Action

I wish I had the courage, the words; no, the nerve.
If only to make a move in this bewildering game before me, to do more in my life than observe.
I realized not what I had invested, how attached I let myself become, how much by a smile alone I would be affected.
Has the wound in my heart healed over shape of you?
Dare I mar the view, wrest the offending thing from my chest? Create another gaping, bleeding wound on my breast, to match my panic, my soul's misplaced distress. Dare I wrench it free and feel again the familiarity of hurt?
I see the small acts, the things of which heroism is made, and still I sit afraid.
I wish not to hurt you; I wish you not to know the stinging ache I have felt.
Yet I wish not to leave you the greatest pain, alone.
Alone I have felt too keenly, and while this friendly, awkward dance done is seemly, the mere thought of putting a smile on your face... brings me such joy I fear I may be dreaming.
I will celebrate the triumphs, I will cheer through the falls, because at the sound of a voice, my heart thunders against my chest; a thousand hammer against an impenetrable wall.
I see one among the best, I see success, and it pains me so, even to imagine, that heart in distress.
I wish, with every bone in my body, every atom in my soul, little more than to surrender, even but once, into that embrace.
To weep, safe in those arms, to hear the heart in that chest, a sound to remember.
A voice intoxicated my ears, it slides in when I'm nervous and it soothes my fears.
I'm a sad kind of deprived, where even just sitting there in the silence, my world makes just a little more sense.
As though I have been broken and gentled for them, them alone.

Do Scary Things

A writer is a storyteller, a historian, a writer is anything really. A writer is a strange thing to be. The fact is old as language itself, older than documented history.
While I was puttering around online the other night, a writer I respect and admire said something ( in reality, a great many somethings) in a blog post that struck a chord in me, a note that hasn't been played in years. One line stuck with me, and struck me;
“do scary things.”
Do scary things?
I laughed a bit when I read it because he was, is, right. Those words extend so deeply into life, beyond writing.
When I was 16, I gave blood for the first time. Not solely for the sake that I am A-, a harder to find blood type, but much to the alarm of my creative writing teacher (and my mother), so I could understand what it feels like to lose that much blood.
The look on my teacher's face when I told him was both amused and concerned. Mom was mostly concerned.
I've been a blood donor ever since, whenever I can.
Scary things are everywhere in life. It took a lot of guts for me to get up on stage the first Open
Mic Night I read at. It took guts and perhaps 3 hours of getting ready at home, because if I was going to be scared, I was going to look good doing it. I was writing a character that did a lot of speaking on stage. I needed to feel that, to do it. So I did.
That was almost two years ago now… it's a strange thought.
I am the kind of person that sees everything as a scary thing, ESPECIALLY people. People are terrifying to me. I'm not entirely an introvert, not by any means an extrovert… I'm some blighted thing in the middle. I believe it might be an actor.
I am scared a majority of the time,too scared to leave my comfort zone, to do the scary things.
Life is all the scary things, and you have to do the scary things.
Every word out of my mouth is a scary thing to me, every set of eyes, every step into the light, every second on the stage, scary.
Parking? Okay, that's only kind of  scary. Walking in, saying hello, seeing the familiar faces, new faces, signing up, sitting down, scary.
I am always scared and maybe that's not the normal for most but that is normal to me.
Mess up a line onstage?
FUCK
Sheer. Terror.
Lose my place, lose my nerve, lose the steam for a piece in the middle of a reading?
FUCK
TERRIFYING.
Every beat of my heart is a shock, every breath in my lungs is a tornado, every step I take is pain.
I am always scared, even at work. Late night, rough customers, angry voices, damage control, long waits, tempers flaring, voices rising…
The catch of it all is a twisted thing; fear is good to me.
I lived with solid, abject fear for two years… fear that mom would see the awful things my boyfriend said to me in text, fear that she'd find his nasty letters, that she would see a bruise, that she would find the concealers, the cover ups, that I had begged and borrowed from girls in the locker room. Fear when I got to school that he would find me before I found my friends at breakfast, fear that he would take me to the visiting bleachers, fear that his hands would be harsh…
Fear becoming fact when people kept walking when I was screaming.
Fear being fact… when people saw it happen and then looked away.
You've gotta do scary things. Scary things like throwing the first punch to protect yourself after a year of taking it.
Scary things like giving in to the red anger for the first time and not knowing what happened for a whole half hour of your life.
Scary things like saying no, breaking up for the first time.
You have to do scary things in life, like let yourself be known.
My writing is my soul, beauty I cannot see in myself but that I feel. I am blind to myself.
Anybody who has let me rehearse my readings to them, who has given me feedback on what I have written and not yet read onstage has given that feeling in my soul something that I can see with my eyes. That something is beyond fear, beyond the scared young writer I started out as.
Everybody who has nurtured that dream… has a piece of my heart. That same thing that sends shocks through my chest, that same thing that serves as the molten core of a Phoenix… the very thing I lie and lie and lie to myself about in an attempt to guard against pain.
You have to do scary things to live.
I never wanted to drive on an icy road, I did. I almost died. Part of me did die.
Part of me, in the scream of metal and glass, expired. Part of me died and I, as I am before you, was born.
I did not want to open my eyes after the impact… but you have to do scary things.
I did not want to try to move my hands for fear they would be still, for fear that I would never again write, but I did and I do.
Scary things… if you don't do them, they will happen. Before this the only scary thing had been tame, controlled, the blood donation.
I do the scary things now. I don't let them happen, I make them happen.
Do scary things.
Perhaps the greatest words of inspiration at this stage of my life.

Any Sane Way

I don't think there is any sane way for people to understand me, so I opt toward insane and put my heart to paper. I write to explain and explore myself, I write for me as much as I write for the people I may not even know yet. I write to do things over, to take things back.
I write to do the things I can't, to cherish the people I  lost, to cherish the people I am afraid to pull in close lest I be rejected.
I write because for just a minute at a time I can live and breathe a dream, I can share that dream and let new eyes see it.
I write because I am finite and afraid; words are the closest we have to immortality. So I will admit my bare humanity through this, because my mind would live on in ink to inspire in spirit as others have done for me, and in the tapestry of literature, I will have my thread.