waiting on wings

Alabaster Jar

Jessica Juwono — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 05:50:56 +0000

This alabaster jar, is all I have of worth. I break it at your feet, Lord. It’s less than you deserve.

You’re far more beautiful, more precious than the oil. The sum of my desires, and the fullness of my joy.

Death

Jessica Juwono — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 01:49:11 +0000

I feel like a lamb waiting to be slaughtered.

I don’t think I have ever felt more threatened in my life. Something that is completely and utterly beyond my control, the feeling that at any moment something terrible will happen and I will have to give up the plans that I have for the rest of my life, the taste of death.

I wonder how it will feel like. I wonder how it will feel like afterwards.

Truly there is no better way, than to trust in God. Because only he knows if I will die tomorrow. And if he wants me to die tomorrow, it will be for the best.

Trust in God.

Truth

Jessica Juwono — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 17:21:41 +0000

My God died for me.

Moments

Jessica Juwono — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:18:58 +0000

Yesterday was the happiest day in a long time.

There weren’t a million rainbows and shooting stars didn’t fall out from the sky. I didn’t get a new computer, or phone, or camera. I got home exhausted with a million things to do, undone. And yet.

My family went to the arcade, and we played and laughed and shot basketballs into moving hoops.

I got up this morning and it felt like a dream.

Commitment

Jessica Juwono — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:52:47 +0000

There are a lot of reasons I stopped writing, but it seems as though they are almost too painful to talk about. I will save these for another time, for when my words will all tumble out perfectly, along with all of the pain that has been suffocating me, to make sense of all the things that currently do not.

It is very difficult for commitment to carry through, and perhaps I shall start to grow up. I’ll be committed to being committed.

Submission

Jessica Juwono — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:41:21 +0000

How amazing it must feel, to lay all your insecurities, your weaknesses, your flaws and shortcomings, all that you are, no more, no less, no weaving of anything extraordinary, for the sake of your better face. Lay them all bare, at the feet of someone who accepts, forgives, and carries you through it all.
Please, God. Make me learn how.

War

Jessica Juwono — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 17:13:16 +0000

War isn’t just on the battlefields of Iraq, in the lives of tortured civilians, or in the chambers of the White House.

War isn’t some faraway notion of bombs, of clouds of dust in barren lands, or underground hiding caves. It isn’t something only the army has experienced, isn’t a stranger to men in the comfort of their shattered homes, isn’t an intruding fool in the lives of abated housewives and beaten children. War is not all politics, is no one-up game, has no clear cut defining moment at which the end is declared. It is not clean, not good, not righteous, not moral.

And yet we still engage in it. Countries still unleash armies and tanks upon each other’s land, territory, civilians, traditions. Races and ethnicities still clash and discriminate, cultures still collide and take over empty minds and heritage-less souls. Families still feud and hate. People still are hurt, are wounded, still die. Minds tortured and used.

Hearts flogged and broken.

Prayer

Jessica Juwono — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:14:05 +0000

Some nights it’s all I can do to wrap my arms around myself, withdrawing from the fact that my heart hasn’t been cradled in the longest time.

It feels like I’m in a continuous battle to be happy, to feel content, to feel a kind of peace that doesn’t shatter with the slightest of disturbances. It feels like I’m on an empty field fighting with my own spirit, with my own mind – my common sense on one side, my insecurities and neediness on the other. The result is chaos, earthquakes, and a scar right through the ground into which I fall and fall, and fall.

A lot of these nights, I call out to God. My prayer is always one first of thanks, for all that He has blessed me with, for all that he has given me. And then it is a plea for Him to make me better, to set my sights on Him and not anything else in the world. It is a plea for Him to heal my soul and to fill my heart back up to the brim, with what belonged there once that has been tried and taken away and tortured and flogged.

Some nights, sleep doesn’t come. I pretend that you are there beside me warming up what I have turned into – a cold, lifeless mass of flesh hating itself. I pretend that I am held by someone who understands what all this is, who feels the scars raw on his skin, who has been flogged and tortured. I pretend that empathy is holding me up.

But it isn’t. Because as I drift off to the place where my consciousness disappears into, something jerks me back into reality. And I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, praying all over again to be unconscious.

Peace

Jessica Juwono — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:52:51 +0000

This morning I got up to a cold, dark room at 10 in the morning and found myself under the sheets, with no-slip grip curls in my hair and the window shades drawn. And despite the setting and the darkness of it all, I felt a very peculiar sense of stillness, of everythingness and yet nothingness… of a feeling I knew before the world started to fall apart, and then lost along the way.

And yet it was back. It also made me stay in my bed staring at the ceiling for the next hour or so.

I remember asking my heart, “Why this sudden transformation? Hadn’t you always felt like you were being split into a million little pieces, hadn’t you always felt like a volcano just waiting to erupt and self-destruct, hadn’t you always wanted to just disappear with the setting of every sun, and made me come with you?”

To which I found, not ironically, no answer. All I got from the one who knows me best – the one who has ached for my pain, who has carried it all on itself, who has hidden the parts that hurt and stung, who has been through the days telling me that it will be okay, and then the nights that made me believe that it won’t – was plain, still, quiet peace.

And I sort of liked it. Because it sort of feels good that you don’t have to think and leave your body to go in them and feel the physical pain afterwards. Because it sort of feels good that you don’t want yourself to disappear. Because it sort of feels good that life makes sense again, that your mind is just calm savannahs and preyless grasslands. Because it sort of feels good that you are back to the way you were.

And if you were wondering, why would you have no-slip-grip curls in your hair??? I would tell you, why… I don’t need any other reason to curl my bloody hair except for the fact that maybe, just maybe, it brings me a sort of pleasure that makes me feel like I am happy again.

Demands

Jessica Juwono — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:25:41 +0000

All you’ve ever done to me is to demand. You demand time for you, you demand good grades, you demand good universities and you demand respect. You demand intelligence, hardworkingness, obedience, submission. You demand me to meet your expectations even when they’re not what I want. You demand me to do all that you want me to do.

But it doesn’t work that way, love and respect. It’s a two-way road. And it’s so hard to give you mine when you are so oblivious to the fact that all my life you have done nothing but demand so much from me and from other people, but nothing of yourself. And that, I tell you honestly, I cannot respect.