cantaloupe

dear diary, i feel innocent. 

three years ago today: i was miserable at a university in a town where not one person learned who i was (this includes me). how on earth was that three long and grueling years ago? in that time, i was angry often. i wish the old me could see how long my fuse is now. three years fasting forward. i really was just bummed. flat out and unapologetically. i needed to be that to be this. you know how it goes.

i am happy that it is three years into the future. today was like a pie in the windowsill. 

any day that i get to wake up next to the one i love- i just don't know how i wouldn't bask in it. 

everything was connected seamlessly today. we went to a diner in his part of town and that black coffee turns my stomach inside out and sends it places i can't fathom but i drink it because that is what you do. 

we talked for a long time. like we do.

the rest of the day was foggy and floaty. he showed me a bookstore and i used the restroom at a restaurant i did not eat at (which made me feel rude). 

the workers smiled at me, anyway. i would smile at the same thing.

i feel really loved in this time of my life. 

i was uninformed that being seen for what you are pivots everything so genuinely.

he doesn't hate me even though i seem to throw up each time we go out drinking.

i find this sort of silly. today was perfect even with a hangover starting it off. 

i am young and days feel like this. it is perfect.

in town today, an old man lit his pipe and smiled so truthfully at us.

he was the happiest person i have seen in so, so long.

there is so much freedom and care in the orb of things i keep close to me. 

there is newness now, too. risk and uncertainty. maybe those can be ingredients in perfection's cookbook. 

today, i laughed so hard that i slipped back into adolescence. that feeling flees so far when you grow up.

but i love someone who brings that all back to me. 

it is a foreign feeling to be with someone but feel completely at home with myself. 

you cut us the best cantaloupe i have ever had. the juice got all over.

i love you.

today is the greatest day i've ever known. 

the stars are so big 

the earth is so small

Loose

 with every wretched tear I expelled in the past few days, i was making room in my mind, in my heart, for all the new and shiny love waiting for me in each waking moment. sometimes it shows up loudly with fists and a demanding persona. other times, in a passing wink of my coworker during a rush. there was a very aggressive frailty to me recently. the weight of my hurt was making me topple over. melt under pressure. fumbling all things carried. so. much. crying. floor crying. car crying. bent over the bathroom sink sobbing. in my boyfriend's bed with dinner on the stove crying. tonight, i was talking with the strangers coming in and out of the restaurant. making them laugh and smile. learning microscopic bits about who these people are. what do they mean to me? why have we met? many were loosened up by wine and merry company. drunk and exchanging joy with me. i thought about how i cried on my front porch to my dear friend just a few nights ago. dwindling away over how mad i am about my childhood. about this and that and the other shit. tonight i am bent over laughing with the woman visiting from Colombia. she is so incredibly drunk and happy to be arguing over who is paying the bill and somehow i am in the midst of this. and i am happy again. and no pain is forever. and a past pain should never be granted the permission to capture my present. everything will ebb and flow like it always has. 

repaving

the sentiment i find around me lately

stings previously swollen and lumpy sections of my heart

sections i recall to have been scarred over

rubber-like

so sturdy you could drive over them

this love is foreign 

wrestling with subsections of my brain 

wrapping my logic around twisting highways 

in abandoned wells

sometimes a present love 

is a reminder of where it has always been missing

i drink in this joy and count it mine

i bathe in baths of it and serve it to you

i don't watch sports

in a football stadium yesterday i saw a feather float across the air and wondered:

God?

i have thoughts that everyone else has

but that felt solitary 

God seen is both solitary and collective

love is an internal experience in an external system of moving parts

faith is like hope but hope is not synonymous with faith

 I have been looking at my face more now that someone else loves it, too.

Figs Sweat Kissing

My brain is scrambled eggs after meditating and flopping forth and back to decipher just how it is I can start my entry today. Today was a perfect day (if I have to give today a name). It started how I dreamed future days would start. In bed with the person I love. The sun hadn't fully opened his eyes yet. He snoozed longer but we didn't. In my kitchen, without pants on, (how I spend most of my days recently) I realized that today was the first of the month. August went to bed with us and hardly said goodnight. I'll have to wait around an entire year until she comes back around and shines her end of summer glimmer on whatever I'm going through. I'm always going through something. Not in a negative way, well... not always in a positive way either. In the way that everyone is going through something. Sonder. I noticed that August seems to be one of the most discussed months for poets. Something is birthed into the month of August that beckons us to write about it. I felt a little love sick in my poorly-lit kitchen this morning at the thought of the month closing. If there is one thing I will shrivel without, it is a proper goodbye. August gave me a lot. And I used to feel violently ill towards it. It meant summer was ending. It wasn't June or July. Both of my fathers were born in August. They make me feel like an orphan sometimes. I haven't heard from one of them in over a month, the other, maybe a year. Things have changed for me. Luck put its silken voice to my ear and said, "I've got something good waiting for you." How many times did luck sneak that message to me? How many instances did I deflect it? August told me my job would end, but then I got to spend more time in my underwear. How can I be mad in my underwear? I met someone special and spent August with him. I want to tell the whole world about him. This August would stick out in a room full of every other August I've met. 

September started like this:

A kiss in the morning. An omelet. A nap on the couch in which I dreamt of a very nice haircut and that my love had left work early to come and kiss me on my porch. A few calls to my sister. A sip of a sweet drink. A smoke. A trip to the market to buy figs, sticky rice, and a block of goat cheese (not to be eaten in unison). A drive to the river to read and bake in the sun. A dip in the water to see if the mermaids had anything to say. They didn't today. A cold shower back home. A lunch in the nook. A scroll through one of my favorite blogs. A burrito. A candle burning on the shelf. A prayer to Krishna. A warm blanket. Yoga. A moment alone to write this. Well wishes for the remaining twenty-nine days. 

Amen. I am bowing to you, whoever you are. I think about you all of the time.