Three months have crawled by slower than the garden snail

Everyday

Moment s of you bits and pieces

Lodge themselves and stir about

In this hemorrhaged heart these bruised thoughts

This infinite torturous misery

Tears come and go like the ocean tide

Cleansing the sorrow that continually ooze into this broken shell

Without you here I sit on a crumbled foundation

Cursing God for stealing you when I wasn’t looking

How can I ever put into words

The immensity and the shades of these emotions

The vast emptiness that a thousand oceans could never fill

The incessant hunger for your love and your laughter

The nagging pain from a wound that will never heal

I paint these colors knowing

There is no justice

In these strokes, in these words

Each one fails me

As I attempt to capture what cannot be captured—

Ever changing elusive too grand too overpowering

To fit into these letters

Or for the eyes to analyze alone

To begin to know is to experience

These feeble strokes

From brush to canvass, from pen to paper—

An imitation

An interpretation

A mere print of a great masterpiece

Could they ever truthfully convey

The disruption the pang the anger the sorrow the void

That has beaten me to a pulp

It rained this morning.  I didn't have an umbrella so I wore a garbage bag to Walgreens to buy an umbrella.  When I walked out of Walgreens, it stopped raining.  I was late to class.

My apartment is near Lake Mendota.  The water reminds me of the ocean in California.  The weather here sux...too humid.  Also sux that I don't have a working toilet in my apartment...I have to keep going to the library a block away.  Yea, I also don't have a phone nor a car.   Makes me feel "disabled."

So I'm here in Madison, WI learning Hmong and I've actually learned A LOT in the past 4 days.  Steve was right...there's "a lot of white people" here.  It's weird to see so few faces of color.  The campus is nice but too big for me.  Big campus=a really long walk uphill to class in humid weather.

The apartment sux...was dirty when we got here and is still sort of dirty even though we tried cleaning it.  There's like 14 floors and no one's heard of a trash chute (is that unique to L.A. or something?)  Not a lot of automatic doors here to retail stores like Walgreens (must be the snow?).  Guess I have to go half way across the country to get perspective on L.A.

The morning I arrived, I was hella tired.  I slept into the afternoon and dreamt about my mother...she walked up to me and I threw my arms around her, expressing to her how much I love her and miss her.  She hugged me but she didn't say a word.  She never speaks in my dreams of her.  I miss her so much...