Babe, this is a war.

Heated, colored stars catapult and cartwheel

In the smoking July sky.

I try to remember the veterans,

But you’re there,

Eyes, dreamy and skyward.

We are alive, did you know?--

Like a damn river, 

But with tides that flip and saunter,

rolling lazily onto the shores.

Someone says that it sounds like a war.

Missiles popping and hissing, all angry. 

and Babe, this is a war.

Like a grenade, you’re

holding my heart—

The hand ever-nearing the pin. 

something something something

I want to do something great. I want to bring people together for a common purpose, a masterful goal of uniting and thriving and working together and finding a "way." I know it's vague and far from simple, but I'm a fool. And fool-hardy. However, I'm also often afraid and selfish, but I've been working on getting myself out of myself. It's true, that when searching for something...vehemently searching and wondering and wandering, you get so wrapped up in the search, darting eyes, sweaty foreheads, and your (my) impatience and looking around at everyone else and "what're they doing?" "why'd they get that?" "where are they now?" the whole thing's lost.

I have to look inward, while also paying attention. I have to absorb and learn. Be a sponge to others, while also acknowledge that I'm a sponge. I'm just a sponge and everyone's sponges. How cool is that? What a concept. We are all just knocking around and bumping into each other in this expansive yet entirely tiny planet.

It's really neat that I've spent 25 years with myself now. Am I tired of me? No. Because there's always more to learn. More to understand further. We are so infinitely complex. How divine, the crazed, pulsing neuro-circuitry. Then, we MEET someone. And we want to know all about their wiring AND all about their physicality. We accept the darkness. We even learn to love the darkness. And that's true love. 

That's more than empty passivity, an "Oh. Wow. That sucks for you."

It's, "My God. You strong and incredible thing. LOOK at you. Just look at you. Look at you." 

It's loving them more because it's honest. They're real. They know hurt and tears and want you to know their hurt and tears. They are reaching out for you to understand them more. Testing the depth of love. What can she/he endure? Will he/she love me despite my alcoholic parents? I need for he/she to know before we go further, because I cannot endure it otherwise.

muffin and coffee

I had a terrifying moment yesterday. I had lost myself. Does anyone else have these few, lost seconds, that send your mind reeling and searching for something, someone, someplace to connect to? And then hideously realizing that what you've been doing, who you are with, what you have is not at all you? It is not truth? You've been acting for so long that you don't know who you are anymore. If I'd looked at my reflection, there would have been no recognition. No connection to the physical or material world would due.

And this experience begs the question...how do I find this true self? Where does it reside? The heart, the blood, the mind, in the church, in sexual pleasure, in the connected, transient moments. Is the soul, my true self, everywhere? Is it always with me, following like a shadow or protective guardian angel? Or is the soul fleeting, appearing and disappearing when needed?

So, I'm going to spend this week reconnecting with myself. And acknowledging those false moments, when I may painfully force a laugh or a smile. I have to confront the facade of the self that I've constructed through the eyes of others. Maybe in this, I'll find who I really am and become who I'm truly meant to be.

Evening II

They lay on his coat on the moss and she felt the sticks and roots which she had not felt before as he was crashing over her. The grass by her cheek and the same as her cheek and the same as the air and all of it was part of the universe and his hand by her chin air and all of it was part of the universe and his hand by her chin and his face curved on her neck was part of it too.
Maybe I will after all.
What?
Have your baby.
He pulled her closer. I'd love that, he said. They could say anything now.
Might not be so simple, she said.
No.
With you married to someone else.
It would be ours, he said. That's how bad I am, I would like it.
But you would stay with her.
He didn't answer. She still had the conviction of his hands on her and did not yet feel the misery which she knew was coming. Misery was just outside the circle around them, waiting in the darkness. They held each other and his weight was more real than his going away.

There were things she'd not asked him and things she'd not said and she did not wonder what she knew or what she had learned but merely felt what had happened and felt what it meant. She did not need to explain it, she simply had it. He was asleep in her arms and the stars which had been spilling and spilling had stopped and were motionless and she knew that what they'd had was not enough but believe it would have it be.

Then the white ceiling opened like an eye and she saw what the ceiling might have seen, how she'd never put words to it.

All her life she'd listened to talk, life was full of talk. People said things, true and interesting and ridiculous things. Her father used to say they talked to much. There was much to say, she had said her share. How else was one to know a thing except by naming it? But words now fell so far from where life was. Words fell on a distant shore. It turned out there were other tracks on which life registered where things weren't acknowledged with words or given attention to or commented on. It might have been said, These two had a story. One might have said she'd found in him a great thing, that she'd found more than herself which was everything and found more than life. And even saying that she would not bring back what was gone. She did not know if it had been the same for him. She would never know. She only knew for herself. Nowhere did it show. Without being shared, what they knew had faded into a kind of mirage. It became One of Those Things. She could not let what passed between them matter too much afterwards so that when the memory tried to assert itself it had been pushed down by reason and habit and time, eventually becoming no more than a scruffy hidden sear on a scruffy hillside. She had worked to rub it out. That this had been forgotten once and would be forgotten again suddenly seemed worse to her than her own life ending.

Evening

It was dark around her ankles, he was braiding her hair into the wet grass. She felt hollow with a jaw of bronze. She could not sleep, the air inside her was twisting around.

They stood for a long time in the rock garden meeting each other's bodies for the first time too shy to stop standing and find the bench Ann Grant had mentioned.

They stood and each time he touched a new place she sort of fell off an edge and each time he said something she dropped deeper into herself and further into the night around them. She would have fallen over if he'd not held her up. Her hand was on his shoulder and she thought, this is his shoulder with my hand on it. He had a sort of mirthful look on his face when he'd pulled her sleeves back and looked at her shoulders with the pale line of the shirt in a scoop, but when he looked down now he was not smiling. His mouth came close and kissed her mouth.

How could that have ever stopped? How could his arms have gone? He nuzzled her neck, he was insistent at her shirt sending thrills through her and she laughed. Do you always behave this way with stranger? she said.

You are not a stranger, he said. Isn't there some place we can go?

--

A great wind blasted up clearing the smoke and she saw her feet beneath her standing at the edge of a cliff. So that was it, that was the other part. It came to her in this little shed. So this is what the night is for, she thought, this is what arms are for. This is why that window is there, why people sleep at night, why they lie beside each other, what life is. This was the point. She split out of the world with him and everything around them became something sealing off the two of them with no time in it and no endings and no loss or worry. She was full. She set herself back against him very slowly and was silent for a while then turned and touched his face like an explorer with an archeological find and kissed him and lay back again. The great thing was happening to her. She looked up and saw the white painted rafters showing up in the darkness and smelled the wet rope in the corners and saw the pointed flags hanging against the windows in the pitched roof. Her mind spread evenly over everything. Falling falling nothing had ever sounded like that falling in love.

Every defense she'd ever consciously or unconsciously taken refuge behind suddenly dropped like the buildings you saw demolished in clouds of dust and in its place a new scaffolding was thrown up, a structure upon which she could build a life. His arm was integral to this structure and with its support she felt wide and strong. There seemed to be no difference between herself outside and in. Up until then her personality had been a thing fluctuating in and out of sight like grass underwater and now it was all equally in focus. She was solid, whole. She saw through the window a spiky branch black as antlers in the moonlight.
Look, she said.
He looked. Do you love trees too?
He pulled her near, staying quiet as he did it. He did not know what he did or how everything was changed.

exist

Sometimes it just hits me, in a school cafeteria, or in class, at my desk. I suddenly feel unattached from my surroundings, look around, notice that everyone else was paying attention to the teacher, or doodling, or passing notes and whispering--and I would have my existential moment in utter loneliness and silence. I usually want to jump up and shout, "Hey, I exist!" but the fear of punishment kept me quiet. In the lunchroom, I'll say, "I'm having the funny feeling that I'm alive today." After high school, when I met a potential boyfriend, and we would be lying somewhere peaceful and sweet, I would ask him if he had ever felt himself existing. Like all time stops and everything in you become still though the rest of the universe keep moving, and there you are, just existing along, and you can do anything you want with this realization. A Buddhist might say to prolong the moment as long as possible, because it is a moment of perfect acuity and pure, a truth that cuts through the world.

The day has come.

As I once wrote on this very blog, while planning my leave of lovely Oxford,...everything must come and go, and now it's my turn to leave. I don't wanna get all melodramatic about this, because it's long, long overdue, but I'm happy and scared and excited and petrified. However, none of that matters now. So, here we go.

I can say that I've lived a very simple and easy life this year. It's been a year of solitude, punctuated with surprising bursts of great friendship and devout love. I've learned a lot about myself, internalized lessons and learned live a little more quietly. I've found beauty and comfort and so much worth in myself. When I left Oxford over a year ago, I was only just beginning to know myself, as a lone individual, as an adult, and as a woman. I was a bundle of flickering and unpredictable anxieties, and they'd spark up a wildfire at any time.

I'm glad that I can confidently say that I don't give a fuck anymore. I can only be myself. And not everyone has to love me, but I do feel, from the bottom of my heart, that as long as you're authentic and kind, no one can truly dislike you. I love who I am. Since I've found love in myself,  I can truly know love and feel love for others.

Love is in those secret, in-between moments, when you look over at that other person, during a movie, and you see that they're just smiling. You don't know why they smile. But because they are smiling and they are with you and look so happy, you have to smile too.