I am not used to this

I know how to love like I know the hands on the edges of my arms. Like I know jam and butter and how much they love each other. I know how to love like I know breathlessness after a deep dive into the ocean. Surfacing through burning salt. Every molecule of water wrapping around me. Cells in love. Atoms enamored. Is science loving?

Do you find that you tend to hold back your love? Or worry that you'll drown someone if you were show it like it really is? Do you have fantasies of being stoic and removed so that people could see you as less tender? Tenderness is both the answer to everything and a navigation toward destruction in false hands. Don't be a false prophet to me. I'm looking for answers here.

The train blares in the distance. I can hear it from my apartment. I'm imagining that it's screaming for me. only me. 

I've been thinking about a lyric,

Do you think that because I sing that I have a light heart? 

I'm loving like this not because it's what I'm used to but because it is what I have always ached for. 

Hungry Hands

  

     I used to reach with hungry hands towards books that promised to point me in the direction of God. Like a woman with no ground to stand on, without feet earthen enough to bear gruff weight, I searched for a literary substance that could teach me to be good. How can I learn to forgive when I am still furious? How can I say only what is true? How can I destroy the illusion of 'other' and 'self'? How can I dissolve this adamant, feminine rage that has nowhere to go? I read and read and reached and reached. I want to be good. I want to be good.                          Be good.

    Now I toil with books such as these. I wonder if it is similar to cheating in having the answers spread out for me, written by those who only gained their knowing through sacred experience. A life spent locked away in a blank, solitary room, having only books to read can teach a person many things. But a life where you feel hurt, where you watch love take hold of you as if you have no choice over the progression of what is next, a life where you see the ocean, taste the salt, see how it burns you after too much time spent interlaced with it...never to read a page. Which life has learned more?

    These days I have an appetite for books that tell real stories. Books of pain, of pleasure. Books that renounce both. Maybe what most appeals to me is to be shown the answers through a very thin veil. The secrets never fully divulged to me so that I may have a part in it. I don't know that a guidebook on shattering ego will be successful for me in a way that reading the story of a woman deep in her own truth, completely intimate with the aliveness of her own life can show me how possible this is. My taste waxes and wanes. Preferences shift when we expand. The hardest part to learn, I find, is to listen.