My House on the Sea

    One day I will have a home by the ocean. I will know sailors and they will drunkenly tell me mermaid stories and speak of the biggest fish they've ever seen with their own eyes and how God fuck damn it-it got away. Their biceps not yet prepared for the duty of capturing (and keeping) a creature quite so vast. 

On Wednesday mornings I won't work until three pm. The local morning market begins at seven am and no matter how many Tuesday nights I lie in bed and swear to myself, "tomorrow you'll get there right at seven" I will arrive at eight because that is just as well. I won't be mad at myself for always being an hour later than I promised because by the time I have this home on the sea, I will be much too old to be at odds with myself. Assuming all goes according to plan, I will stop being my own enemy somewhere in my early thirties (wishful thinking is saying late twenties). 

Fridays will be my workdays, but I will begin them on the sand saying prayers and holding my hands over my heart. Touching sea foam and believing in magic before I do a lick of work. Once I arrive here on the great timeline of my life, I will have learned that my best output of work conjures only after feeding the hungry child in me who needs the ocean-who needs hope- who needs drunk sailors. 

And then I will write. I will write for hours, and it will feel like seconds. I will work until my fingers twitch and rattle from endless typing, scribbling, crumpling sheets of paper. Later, I will unravel the crumpled piles and think, ''No- I can use this. Why did I give up on this thought?" Then I will crumple it back up and throw it away. I give myself second chances later on. 

When I have my home on the ocean, I will have my garden, too. I will have rugs that I love and possibly many material items I hold close to me. It will have taken my whole life to acquire each thing, and I will truly love every memory they evoke. These things will not reflect anything about me. They will just be my things, and I will likely never let a guest leave without taking something of mine home with them. What I will truly treasure will be exclusively internal. The love I have carried each year. The mosaic of emotional treasure.

Everyone will be my guru, and every step will lead me to the continued path of present delight. I will grow old, and I will give away all of my things. It will just be me and the sea and only the sea will remain. You can leave me somewhere in it. 

Door

When you love people they light up.
When you give them the pencil and say, "write whatever you want", you can see something morph and expand. You can see something grow. Something inspirit.
It's not simple being as you are with one thousand monstrous eyes constructing deluded ideas from the little they see. 

Those eyes don't see you in all your fruitful aloneness.

They don't see what you do when you get the world to yourself for a quick but bountiful moment.

So many people in my life have loved me like crazy.

They have loved me out of loathing myself. 

Those noble many have forced me into the honest to God truth about my nature.

Took my blinders off, whatever. They loved on me no matter the state I was in and 

so very many of them continue to do so.

When I was younger than the young I am now, I knew about the gaps in my life.

I knew where love was supposed to be felt and I could so assuredly feel that gaping space.

Wide open like a horrible, bottomless door. 

Creaky and damp. Like some radical but dormant love was there but waiting.

Always watching the clock and waiting for love to visit me, too.

Obsessively thinking love was busy braiding everyone else's hair.

I never expected anyone to find that omitted door and choose to walk in.

Choose to light a match. Decide that what's beyond that door isn't so vile. 

The people who love me are gurus in my eyes.

My teachers.

They do what I, at times, can not.

Forever shedding successful light on untouched lagoons of long gone clarity.

Cutting back the overgrown grass of self doubt and watering the good I've got.

The door in me gleams out toward skies, people, places. 

That is the way it is now for me.

People have the capacity to love you into the genuine truth. 

The truth that you are good. That you are nothing more than a simple human.

People have taught me that my nature can be simple if I get out of the way.