Making eye contact in public

    A subjective matter. You could see this as that. Believing that humans have a magnet placed neatly under their ribcage. Your magnet searches for something to pull to. A heart yearning. Similar to a child's hands reaching. An innate call out for desire. To be familiarized with mystique. Where does your magnet go? What is that feeling and do you think it grossly watered down to reduce this feeling of attraction to words? Humans have natural inclinations. We are animalistic. Not much has evolved when it comes to love. We are just as habitual, fascinated, and with all the same imprudence. 

    When I saw you, I wanted to know your story. To digest your genesis. To sit and hold it with you. In my palms, where I have held the magnets of others. My ribcage drawn to yours. Entwined in the bother of absolutely knowing nothing of a person you now, more than ever, are desperate to know. Then there is the bother of introducing yourself. The possibility of making a fool. Rather, the probability. Thinking of things to talk about. A huge hassle when souls speak such eloquent language. Absent of vowels and consonants! How it should be. 

    Seeing you and wondering: what would your soul say to mine? The ribs ache in ignorance. Heaven's only wishful glance across the room. Doesn't the mind pursue such hopeful insights into the future when someone special catches your eye? They could be the person of your year. Your very best decision. Your most memorable mistake. There exists so much potential in one glance. Humans are particularly dreamy in these tunnels they fall down. Dreams of friendship, romance, lust, intrigue, wonder, all from meeting the eyes of a stranger. Do you have this magnet that I feel? 

some things last a long time

Grapes

Today was genuinely one of the best days of my life.

I woke up and there existed no hurry to make a grand exit out of my bed. Twisting through thick covers and hearing the sound of my dog snooze just as gracefully beside me, we spent time in the mid-morning fog that you feel especially present on Thursdays. When all drowsiness subsided, I took a very long walk around town. I've been enjoying leaving the house first thing in the morning, rather than shimmying into household routine (or worse, technology). This gives me an inside scoop on how every other human is spending their mornings (I love this because I am nosy). Two things that I noticed while on the walk was that there are grapes growing in the park and that the most beautiful way to see my neighborhood is when she is freshly covered in a post-rain blanket. 

When I arrived back home, I did a sun salutation yoga flow and worked out. For people like me, always in the clouds, remembering that I have feet and a body that I should hang out in sometimes makes yogic practices an ally of mine. My breakfast was wonderful and I took many deep breaths before consuming it. I sort of just danced through the remainder of my morning. Listened to a video my dear friend sent me while showering, dolled up my face and made a video, myself. I felt smiley and light-hearted. Untouchable. My housemate and I laughed in the kitchen and I've noticed that the kitchen has acted as a kind of black hole for us recently. If we find ourselves in the kitchen at the same time, we fall into long conversations and forget what we are doing (It is secretly my favorite thing). The first time we ever did this, ee were sharing stories of how awful it is to get too stoned. I think I'll remember these conversations forever and hold them in specially marked file cabinets in my heart. 

My walk to work was sublime. I listened to my favorite song by: Phantogram and I felt like I was the subject of their music video. How nice it is to feel like the muse of your own favorite song. Work was especially sweet today. My coworkers are so witty and flexible. So generous and interesting to me. Each of them has their own story and I feel so lucky to catch chapters here and there. One of them is SO special. When they are in the room, it feels like the sun just walked in. They sing in a choir and love tie dye. My other coworker is very kind and easy-going. They have a cool mustache and used to live in Salt Lake City. The three of us listened to Heart and 70s funk and I forgot I was even working. My most notable customers were two ladies, one with pink hair, one with dark blue. They got tipsy and kept telling us how good the food tasted. They must've called me "sweet" four or five times in the span of an hour. I just feel like they were the kind of friends that have been friends for so long that there is no sweat about hanging out. There was so much comfort radiating off of them. I wanted in on the little world they shared. The infinite knowledge they must hold together.

Finally, I floated home. I love how late in the day the sun sets here. The days stretch out like a cat on a warm front porch. My sister and I chatted on the phone for a while and she thrifted twenty-four cds today. She was ecstatic. I wish my sister knew how much I love her. I wish I showed it to its utmost degree. She is going to be this incredible walking spectacle. Already, she's a true artist and she might not even know it. When I was her age, life felt so particular and raw. So jagged and true. It was cinematic and heartbreaking. Talking to her tonight made me reminisce on those times. Maybe I'll look back on this time in my life with that same heart. 

Don't let the perfect days pass you by. When they tap on your shoulder, braid your hair, and put glimmer in every set of eyes you meet, say Thank You. The incentive for them to reappear multiplies when you pause to thank them. 

Now I am laying here. Unable to halt my typing because once this post ends, once I lay down to sleep, my perfect day will just just another page in the book I'll write one day. I'll stop at nothing to prolong a goodbye. 

But ending it with a Thank You feels appropriate. 

Thank you. 

Jitterbug Perfume

This was in another lifetime, but for the sake of actuality, this was a couple months ago.

At a concert, I met a man. By accident, maybe...

Probably on purpose. Ask God, not me. 

He was an English teacher, and he was very handsome (they usually are).

There I was, on a concert balcony, talking it up with this entrancing guy. I wanted to know all about him and more importantly: what he liked to read. There is nothing I will judge a person on more. Literature is my compass on which morality is based and if you find that shallow, you must not read much of anything that I like. 

I shared with him the fact that I would be up and moving in a matter of weeks to a new city. I was at the tail-end of my California-coloured diary entries, towards stranger crowds and shades of blues that have not yet kissed my supple palms. The man told me to read a Tom Robbins novel to pilot me through this new phase of life I'm reaching out for. I did as I was suggested to do. I bought Jitterbug Perfume. I started a new life for myself, fingering through that sacred three-hundred-and-forty-page spiritual guidebook every day or so. I think I lost myself. I'm glad to rid the parts of myself that wanted me to stay the same. The flower bud was getting too cramped. Blossoming seemed the natural course of action.

In honor of the boundlessness of this novel and all that it has provided my morphing spirit; I will share some of my favorite lines that I underlined over and over and over until I went inkless. 

Enjoy. 

"Magic things are fond of deceptions." pg. 18

"But I am seized with desire to be something more. Something whose echo can drown out the rattle of death." pg.24 

"I may be mad, he thought, but I prefer the shit of this world to whatever sweet ambrosias the next might offer." pg. 29 

"They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning." pg. 34

"The eclipse made me do it. Wasn't it derealizing? Didn't it give you shivers? Didn't it transport you to another plane? Didn't it make your brown eyes blue?" pg. 69

"Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable. Tell me, then, Alobar, in order to achieve immortality, should you emulate water or stone? Should you trust your flesh or your bones?" pg. 79

"The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought." pg. 85

"My own foolishness could use some company." pg. 90

"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being." pg.131

"Gods have ears for irony." pg. 132

"Physical immortality is not an end result, a condition to be arrived at in the future, but an ongoing discipline, an attitude, a way of life to be practiced in the present, day by day." pg. 136

"Kudra gave him a look that you could spread on a bun. Her words, however, pricked him like the knife that does the spreading." pg. 159

"A couple's first quarrel is Cupid's laxative." 162

"Ricki the bartender has defined the Four Elements as cocaine, champagne, pussy, and chocolate." pg. 176

"Death hath more than one way to defeat a man, it seems. Death bests thee even while thou liveth." pg. 193

"And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play-more than piety, more than charity or vigilance-was what allowed human beings to transcend evil."

"The spirit of one individual can supersede and dismiss the entire clockworks of history."

"Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who batter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route." (all pg. 197...HELL OF A PAGE)

"Perhaps it is noteworthy, she thought, that the performance of a young man in bed is roughly the same length as a rock song on AM radio." pg. 242

"The universe does not have flaws. It has habits. And habits can be broken." 251

"Wiggs contended that longing for the future was as antilife as dwelling in the past. Nostalgia and hope stand equally in the way of authentic experience." pg. 299

"All in all, it wasn't enough to get a young woman in love through a lingering funk such as February." pg. 304

"He moved through the world as if he was intimate with it, as if he belonged in it, as if there was not the remotest chance that he would fall down in it and break a hip." pg. 306

"And I cannot help you understand. In the realm of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. Remember that, when you return to Your Side. Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received." pg. 338

My heart is full. What a proper recommendation this book turned out to be. Very fitting for all the questions, I seem to be nagging the sky with these days. 

And to you, English teacher from the concert, (since you were wondering) I think I do know which stretch of highway I morphed from caterpillar to butterfly on. You'll have to meet me in another strange place again to hear that answer. 

Blue toenail polish

 Let it be known: few aspects of me remain constant. Movement is a friend to me and it has proven it time and time again. There was one thing about me that never changed: I liked my toenails painted. No matter the season, no matter the color. I liked my toenails painted. One evening, I took a bath, post-removing the remnants of nail polish from my feet. Staring across the miles of legs I've managed to grow (almost reluctantly), there they were. My bare naked feet. They appeared stripped. Obscene. Unknown. Dormant. Ghostly. Hardly, did I even identify with the sight of them. No, those weren't mine. But- this feeling disturbed me. How can I only admire a part of myself when it has been altered? Can I even say these feet belong to me when they've got some chemically-compounded, fluorescent bullshit smeared across them? I'm just a customer to some drug-store bottle, with this crud perfectly pedicured on top of me. How can adding ten strokes of a brush to every toe I've got make me love myself so much more than the latter option? There I sat. The water was lukewarm now. I decided that I would not paint my toenails again until I learned to adore the sight of my colorless feet. My toes would not see color until I looked down and smiled at my two pillars of salt. And that was that. 

You have to force yourself to face yourself. Even with something as stupid as this. Really, it is no big fuss that I only enjoyed looking at my toes when they've got a nice blue coat on. But I wasn't born that way. I've always thought myself to be a natural woman. Put some black around my eyes and I will look heavenly but I won't feel like the woman I woke up as. That bugs. That digs at me. For whatever reason. I don't have the energy to unpack that just yet...

That bathtub resolution was birthed many moons ago.

In the evenings lately, I've been practicing yoga. I figure it is good for me to live in my body since I have one. When I stretch, I like to take my socks off so my feet can really plant into the ground when necessary. Today, in ragdoll pose, I gazed down at my feet. And I thought, "I really like you guys. Thanks for everything you do. I go everywhere because of you. I love you." and then I realized that I learned to love them as they were delivered to me. As they are. 

This entire weirdly stubborn toenail polish fiasco made me curious about the nature of love. I don't believe it necessary to love everything only when it comes as it is born. I believe I love myself despite the fact that I've morphed into many things. I love my hair but I also change it quite a bit. I love my friends even when they move away and grow into different, more progressed versions of themselves. I love my car even when it breaks. I love my eyes even when they are crying. And I love my feet now, without nail polish. When you love something, especially in its purest, most original state, that is true love. But loving something, even after it has changed, undergone metamorphosis, maybe that is a heightened version of love. Maybe all love is equal. Maybe one day someone will love me just as I come and with each round of change I flow through. That will be real.

I painted my toenails blue today. For the first time in months. The color of my ache. The color of change. My favorite jeans. My best sweater. My first memory. What it's like to hear me speak. What it's like to kiss me. It lingers in a blue hue and always will. And if my color changes, I'll still love myself. That is what I've been trying to say this whole time. 

Nowhere Near

living by myself downtown felt like nowhere near by yo la tengo. it felt like sleeping next to strangers and wondering where i'd be eating next. it felt like anger and freedom. it felt primitive and all too far away

i remember looking out over the river and drinking beer

crying because no one around me knew me like the people back home so entirely did and i didn't feel at home with these people i was just some random eighteen year old girl. that is all i was. i could be reduced to that. 

and sometimes i look back at her and i think she just needed a real friend, someone to hold her in bed

to not touch her, to leave her body be

to take her out for ice cream and to braid her hair out of the shower

she needed to be held so desperately 

i wish i could hug her now

i would sing yo la tengo to her and i would tell her to just stay in bed today because that was really what she would've needed

she was spent

falling asleep in church, sweating in the breakroom at the job she worked, snoring over her half-written essays. it didn't didn't feel easy, did it?

for a short time there, i believe i was in love or in love with being far away

i was so so so far away 

there was something beautiful about this time for me

i was on fire with independence i was so upright in what i deemed for me

the grass at the park sang for me and i, for it

my favorite food place knew me and i, them 

i was setting down some real, yet strange roots there

and in small moments: in sips of coffee, yoga in the lounge, in smoking weed with my roommate, in running into the ocean, in crying so hard in the hall i did not care who heard, 

i was building something

you don't know how important it is to be an angry woman. 

I am a scientist

when my pear tastes like lying in a hammock feels

when the inside of my stomach is twisted like a highway from laughing with you 

when my only thought in the morning is to lay in the sun my porch so willingly provides

when the raindrop hits my cheek in the right place

must I wonder why?

how nonsensical to boil down life's sensations to questions

should there exist a reason that we feel love? or is feeling it the very heart of why it exists? feelings and warmth and unfamiliarity these days. you must know how very young I feel here. sometimes I miss my Nana playing the piano on the other end of the brick house. that was long ago. 

I am a curious woman. I wonder about every ounce. I am in constant pursuit of a ripe explanation. 

I am a scientist. 

In periods such as these

In trees this tall

In mug's this hot

In spice stores

In warm company

In pain

In hope

In confusion 

Love

Joy

Ache

In quietness 

need I ask why?

Thank you, Lou

What does it take to accept feelings of neutrality? I'd like to know.

I found that today was neutral, even the day before. The one before that, now that was nice. 

Lou Reed is whispering into my ear, making me wanna cry in my bed. Ugly cry. Not very neutral. 

Don't you know it's silly to go against the grain?

To push against the tide. Can't you let cruel nature take her course? She's gonna do it anyway. 

Might as well lay back into the ocean. Place your heart up high. Lose your footing.

The grain here is the inevitable growing pain. Glory of love. Pain only amounts to the glory of love.

I've gotta see it through. 

Thank you, Lou.