Truly Touched

I fell in love with the concept of a blog when I met Mary Forrest. I found her site by googling "fonts" of all things on the web, and she had a list of places to go to find freeware (fonts that you can download and use for free). I started reading her blog some time in probably 2002. I wrote to her, and she quickly responded, and it was like I had gotten an email from God, herself. I was captivated by her language, her wit, and her creative talents. A lot of what she writes goes far beyond my head, but I have never gotten the sense that she is arrogant with her knowledge, but it is obvious that she was a precocious child.

I don't read a ton of blogs because I am not usually charmed by them. I get the sense that a lot of people just want to be "known," and I kind of find that writing to be empty. I don't necessarily want to read someone's online diary just so they can be famous. When I started my blog, I didn't tell a soul for probably a few years. I kept it just like a diary, with the slight fear that someone could still be reading what I wrote. I have always had countless journals, and then hung my head in shame because I wouldn't continue to write in them. I struggled with this process over and over again. If you are at all a perfectionist, you can possibly understand that writing can be cumbersome. There is no cutting and pasting, no delete button, or backspace key. Your errors are kind of frozen on the page, and even with the help of Liquid Paper®, the mistake is still noticeable.

All this to say, there aren't too many blogs that I follow religiously, but Mary Forrest is one of them. She wrote this post the other day:

"I have this faint memory of a phone call and a sinking feeling. Of suspicion and fear. And impatience and resentment. I remember arguing about bottles of wine and who they belonged to. I remember not really being angry about the wine. The wine was a scapegoat. It lives out in the desert now. Never to return.

You come into a person's life where you come in. There's no changing it. You know them when you know them, where they are and when they are. You know what there is. And when more is added, and when more is stripped away, you continue to know the shadow of what was there. Paper doll fashions leave their silhouettes. You learn the absence of the image better than the presence of it. The absence persists.

Even longing begets focus. Even the kind that promotes flailing and frenzy. But this other thing. It's like a problem with my eyes. I can't seem to just look at one thing for even a second. I am everywhere and all over the place. And all the while, I'm nowhere. I ceased to exist some time ago. No matter how much space I take up.

Died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came."

So, so beautiful, I just couldn't help but put it here.