[MUSE]ic in me

He comes to me in the darkness;
With inspiration to drive this artist
The lyrics to the song I'm singing
My breath of life-
my reason for living.
Faded by logic and
fueled by illusion,
peeking out from my mind's confusion.
Pointing me in the right direction,
steering away from perfection.
In the shape of a man
with eyes like the sky,
my harshest critic,
my closest ally.
The spark that lights the creative flame
My body, my heart:
He bears the claim.
Completion is never the object.
Only expression, only content.

.:~o*'Kaylyn'*o~:.

Moments

I wish I could steal a moment like this:
A moment captured in your kiss
A moment spent in your embrace
A moment just staring at your face
A moment with your hand in mine
A moment where our fingers are intertwined
A moment having you near me
A moment being where I want to be

.:~o*'Kaylyn'*~o:.

Seriously?

Want me to grab you by your neck
I can tell it make you wet
Ooh, girl
It ain’t working unless you sweatin now
…
We on the mantel,
Shorty dismantled
Hit it from the side
Show you how to love handle

Apparently, this is what passes for a romantic song nowadays. Ugh.

.:~o*'Kaylyn'*o~:.

WWZ

I'm beginning to scare myself. Not that I work better under pressure, nor am I enjoying the tremendous amounts of stress I'm putting myself through. But I do find that with heightened importance and impending deadlines, I spit out some rather clever work. Here's an example: [This is a paper I literally wrote in just over an hour. 946 words. It's meant to be a response to WWZ. She did say "have fun with this paper"...]

“It’s the end of the world!” my grandmother announced, quite assured of herself, as she swept through the living room with her arms failing about. My sister and I tried not to laugh as we were sure her heightened eccentricity was a result of her missed prescription dosage and inherent senility. We focused our attentions on the matter at hand: our Uno game which had come to a complete stand-still there on the living room floor. I had called “uno” two hands ago, but had yet to deliver the final blue four blow. My sister’s shaky hand reached for the deck in hopes of finding salvation in the form of a wild card. Draw two. I laughed as we both conceded to a draw at the smell of our mom’s cooking slowly filling the air.

Everything changed that day.

The numbers soared every day. It seemed newscasters were having an inter-channel competition as to who could deliver the worst news. “Turn that crap off,” my grandmother would spit from her seat in the corner before returning to muttering the rosary again and again, shaking her prayer beads in earnest. I turned down the volume, but my eyes were glued. They told us what not to do. Stay indoors. Quarantine the infected. Call the authorities. But no one seemed to tell us what to do. Should we run? Were we safe?

One thing was for sure, though: We were staying together.

That was our first mistake.

My hometown of Lake Charles, just an hour’s drive away from Lafayette—a “Blue Zone,” as they called it now, was a crappy place to live. Lake Charles was at best a blip on any radar. A town you drove through, not to. But here we were, huddled inside my childhood home like some twisted scene from The Diary of Anne Frank. Only we weren’t afraid of Nazis. We were afraid of the “infected;” the zombies.

Zombies!

In the quiet moments when Momma would attend to our grandmother, my sister and I had lengthy conversations on the subject. “I can’t believe this is happening! It’s unbelievable. I can’t believe this. Who would believe this?” she ranted.

I shrugged.

Days ago, my biggest concern was an upcoming test or graded assignment. Now? Now I worried about whether or not I was going to live to see tomorrow. I worried about my feeble grandmother outrunning the monsters should they break in one night in an attempt to eat our brains, or whatever they were supposed to do. I worried about my mom who, up until this point, had maintained to keep a firm grip on the household after the loss of her husband and father in the same year. I worried about my sister. And once we had said our prayers for the night and vainly set the alarm, when the house was absolutely silent, I worried about myself.

Everyone was in a panic. A Great Panic.

The one thing seeming to keep us sane was my grandmother’s unwavering faith in God, although the rest of us had given up hope that anything existed in the sky other than smoke and debris. The church had been shut down as people weren’t “advised” to venture outdoors. At first, my sister and I were elated. No more dressing up in itchy, constricting dresses that were only worn to pacify our grandmother’s old-fashioned sense of style. As the days dragged on, though, we found that with the absence of church, our joy began to fade as well. There was no longer anything to look forward to after death. Should the inhuman creatures get us, there was no assured paradise waiting for us. We knew we would rot in the ground. Or have our bodies burned to eradicate the spread of germs.

But nothing could deter my grandmother. She prayed every day, multiple times a day. She thanked, begged God, and cursed God all in the same breath. I began to wonder if anyone else’s prayers were getting through. One days when she was particularly pious, my mother would pull my sister and I from our computers and televisions to pray with our grandmother. And we’d sit there, in the living room, the four us, and prayed. At first, my sister and I remained silent, keeping our heads respectfully bowed until our grandmother finished. But then, one night, after it had been discovered our neighbor was infected, an amazing thing happened… I began to pray.

Now that I realized how close the threat was, I thanked God that He passed us over. I exulted Him for protecting my family, for protecting me. Soon, I began to pray more often; twice a week, three times. It wasn’t long before my grandmother and I were reading from her old tattered Bible together. “She that, baby?” she’d ask after reading from Revelations, “God puts the world through these trials and tribulations as a test of faith. Stand strong and He will reward us for our faith in Him. You just watch.”

And I watched. I watched as the world around us wasted away. I watched as our friends and neighbors fled far from home and each other in attempt to save themselves. I watched as some unknown, unnamed force seemed to protect us from it all. It was as if the War were passing us over.

“What do you think they’ll write about us? You know, in the history books?” my sister asked me dreamily as she looked out her bedroom window at the ghost town that had become of our neighborhood.

I thought for a moment, and then I smiled. “They’ll say that we prayed. And that we survived.”

.:~o*'Kaylyn'*o~:.