Marin Brooke

My name means water, bitter water. I should be dead in more ways than one, but I am not. I simply want to be transparent with you. I want to tell you why I'm alive. I want to invite you in...for all of the bitter, and all of the refreshing. Visit my website: http://marinbrooke.com/ Visit my facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MarinBrooke

[marinbrooke]

There is not a day that goes by Where some part of me does not whisper, I wish I knew you better. I know you like living water when I’m thirsting near death. I know you like my Savior when I’m drowning in despair. I know you like I know the unseen air I consume in laughter, breaths, and sighs. I know you like I know story, poetry, and song. I know you like a Father that holds this child’s broken heart. I know you like a rage that builds in screams until it is prayed into cries. I know you like the constance of the sunset breaking into the day with an eastern rise. I know you like a ship knows the light that will bring it from the depths of darkness to the safety of shore. I know you. There is not a day that goes by Where some part of me does not whisper, I wish I knew you better.

[marinbrooke]

In this moment, in this evening I am in, the history and the traces of your love for me feel heavy. I am waiting for the morning when your love will be light.

[marinbrooke]

In Change

Yesterday I could feel your touch in the sunlight. I could feel the light warmth of your breath in my own. I could feel your gaze in the starlight and smell your scent in the rain. But today the sun is hidden and there is a heaviness in my breath. Tonight the stars are pinpricks of light scattered in the darkness; beautiful, but distant. In this moment raindrops smell like salt wishing they were tears. Yesterday my soul felt held by the same hands that created this vast and beautiful universe. My heart felt warm and free to pulse in time with the heart of its Creator. That was yesterday. Today? Today all those things are what I know be to be true...but I don’t feel it. I feel distant. I feel broken-hearted and numb. I feel like I’m so far from you and if I’m far from you then I’ve lost myself. So...so I need you to be close, even when I’m not. I need you to stay the same. And you? You remain exactly who you are.

[marinbrooke]

Between who I am and who I could be;  Between how it is and how it should be

I often feel as though I am tossing between tears and apathy like I’m in Gethsemane. Sleep comes too easy and with swords, it is not my hand, but my tongue that is too swift to strike the ear of another.

Once, by the Sea of Tiberias, you invited your followers from the chaos to the shore.                                                                                                                      I want to be with you like that. Eating with you because you command the sea; for I have seen you feed thousands here before. Staring into your eyes because I know those eyes. Laughing with your laughter because you are my only source of joy. Learning from your wisdom because you are the Word from the beginning, the Word that is with God, the Word that is God. Challenged by your commands to follow: “Lord, to whom shall I go? You have the words of eternal life…” Feeling as loved as I know that I am, for “I have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Somewhere in between where I often feel I am and where I’d like to be there is a road we take to get there when I look for you. Though I search, my vision is blurred. Though my heart burns within me because of the words you speak, I’m grieved still. Yet, despite all of this doubt and uncertainty I find myself echoing the words of your disciples who came before me. I find myself pleading for you when you are right in front of me, “Stay with me, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.”

Inspired by Scripture

reading...Matthew 26:36-56; John 1:1, 6:1-14, 6:66-69, 21:1-19; Luke 24:13-25

listening to...Dare You To Move by Switchfoot

[marinbrooke]

The Cross in Our Love

We both know that in our relationship we have suffered. 

When people ask me about you I tell them how loved I am and how I try to love you in return. 

Sometimes people see my heart spill over when I talk about our relationship, and oh, if that was all that they saw. 

Yet, sometimes people see my heart barely beat at all when I talk about us and they wonder if I'm even happy. 

I can't always tell them that I am...I can only tell them that sometimes I am. 

Hearing that sometimes someone is happy in a relationship isn't exactly appealing. 

It's hard to explain how beautiful it can be to not yet always be happy, but to always be loved and to know love. 

It seems to me that an always happiness carries with it some air of simplistic ease. 

Our relationship is so many exquisite things, but I will never call it simple... I will never call it easy. 

We both know that in our relationship we have suffered. 

I'm not sure that I've ever been able to endure pain to the degree that I am able to react to it. 

I react quite fully for having endured so little compared to you and I doubt that will change. 

So when I cry…I cry… And I keep going to you through those tears because I have nowhere else to go. 

I find my refuge in you. 

You don’t seek a strong tower, it’s what…it’s who you are. 

I hurt while I am in love with you. 

You love while you are in hurt with me. 

It is clear that you have never needed me, but where a lack of need may weaken my love, yours it only strengthens. 

You need nothing from me at all, you lack nothing at all, but you want everything I have…everything that I am. 

Well everything worth anything that I am is only because you are in me and I am in you. 

I doubt I'll ever fully understand why you want me, but you have me. 

Love, you want me even when I can't find it in me to want myself…but, I…I need you. 

We both know that in our relationship we have suffered. 

You will forever have suffered the most for loving me. 

Though weeping lasts through so many of these nights, still, 

I will forever have gained the most for loving you. 

And for that... I will never be able to love you enough. 

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” --- Luke 9:23

Oh, to come after you like you come after me. 

To want you like I need you and to know the depths of how much you have always wanted me.

[marinbrooke]

I am sorry. I am sorry for the moments when words are all I have to give and in that same moment it is words that will never be enough. But most of all I am sorry for the silence that should be, for the silence that is missing because I feared the unfamiliar. I am sorry for fearing language without words, for the fear of speaking volumes with no sound at all.

[marinbrooke]

Longing for you is such a raw, tender, and piercing heartache. And I keep coming back for more because with you I am always thirsty and never dry.

Marin Hann

[marinbrooke]

It says I’ve posted one hundred times on this blog. This will be one hundred and one. Even all of those thousands and thousands of words I’ve written on just here alone...they could never save me, but one word from you always has.

[marinbrooke]

Those Worlds We Can Make

I hate us.

I do not hate myself.

I do not hate you.

I hate us.

I hate how we craft beautiful places together and then I get so lost in what was once affection that it too becomes a cage.

I hate that I take a comfort in us like a syringe that delivers a fix of survival and sin to a vein pumping desperately thirsty blood.

I hate that when our flavors marry together the top notes taste of poetry and the aftertaste spoils with the stench of bitter escape.

I hate us.

Because, I love myself.

And Fantasy and Fiction, I love you.

Yet, today...Right now...In this moment.

I hate us.

I wish I knew how to love us together without ever taking this farther than we should go. You're a zero to sixty lover and I'm afraid I'm a girl without a brake.

[marinbrooke]

The difference between falling in love with love and actual love has been, for me, too much like the difference between mere survival and truly living.

[marinbrooke]

Today my soul feels like a violent storm of restless tears and your love feels like an ancient cliff taking all of this salty beating.

[marinbrooke]

Today my heart feels spent and your love feels like my heart continuing to beat anyway.

[marinbrooke]

The Company of Words

The loneliness of a pen without paper and a paper without words is the kind I am choosing to dwell in right now. If I feel that loneliness then maybe it will distract me from the loneliness of a love to give and no heart to receive it. And then there is the deeply rooted fear of having a heart ready to receive, yet lonely in the absence of a love to accept. That’s the kind of loneliness that is buried under too many graves of all the others.

The loneliness of being in a crowded room. The loneliness of loud thoughts in silence. The loneliness of silence in loud thoughts. The loneliness of a forced smile. The loneliness of being misunderstood. The loneliness of the offer of advice. The loneliness of being a something and not a someone. The loneliness of being the something that someone tries to fix. The loneliness of poetry. The loneliness of the artist. The loneliness in the absence of tears and loneliness in the presence of them.

I suppose after all the digging of so many lonely graves…the pen and the paper have some company after all.

[marinbrooke]

When other people see rain, I see drought and parched throats.

But when people cry flood, I see a little rainfall.

It’s not that I’m an idealist or a cynic. It’s just that I’ve drowned before…so I know how to do it again.

[marinbrooke]

The Parchment in My Heart

My heart is full of parchment stories aged in a youth familiar with more than some.

Tea stained with sweet and salted tears; folded, crumpled, ripped; freshly crisp brushing edges with worn through the years.

Love letters resting in purposeful piles.

Gathered together like hidden pages in a living memoir;

Gently warming in a dance of light and shadows;

Keeping time with the heartbeat of this penetrating and visceral room.

I feel them breathing now and again with the relief in gentle breezes through the exceptional openings of the fragile windows to my soul;

Collecting the dust and treasuring the words from once-upon-a-times and never-weres.

And then there lives a corner of this parchment filled heart still waiting for the might-bes and yet-to-comes.

[marinbrooke]

I have been so personal with fragile from the inside out. I have penetrated fragile from the outside in as often as it has penetrated me. It seems the two have become intimate with one another and they have left me stranded in the heartache of feeling lost.

[marinbrooke]

Real tragedies demand fantastic ones. 

They demand stories of horror, magic, and fantasy. 

They demand the kind of real storytelling that some of us can barely tolerate because it’s the kind that is as real as it never happened. 

Real tragedies need fiction like fiction needs truth tellers. 

They require an in between, a state of flux, a state of peculiarity. 

And all the while it’s obvious to those on the outside; they are certain that such wild stories coming from such fragile survivors are not true. Aren’t they? It’s the real tragedies that really make sense of everything, right? 

Of course, we all find those tragedies quite believable…as long as we’ve never lived through them. 

Fantastic tragedies demand real ones.