on the nose

Being a writer is writing every day. The itch to do so is present but I know why I ignore the tugs towards my pen. Sometimes I am afraid of what I am going to say. I am afraid that what spills out of me may be something I am not ready for. All the more reason to write. 

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.

Can I keep it?

 There are days when I am a walking sensation. My laughter is more so cells jumping across my insides, joy bubbling over my tongue, than an equation in my mind being solved. Nothing is analyzed or technical. I am all feelings. All of the proper neurons connecting. Successful take-offs and landings. This can't be every day. On the other days-the ones across the street from those mentioned- I hardly visit my body. Everything is cognition. Child-like anger. Curiosity. Boredom. Euphoria. Whether I am feeling it all or barely anything, I know that each moment smells like a path waiting to be taken. Do good. Do wrong. Be here. Be somewhere else. Looking at things this way keeps life in my deep pockets and those mystic gates wide open. 

This weekend was what I thought it would be. Leisure was painted everywhere. Spending money. Regretting spending money but cherishing the food I ate. The things I bought. Happy to be alive no matter the cost. Happy to not be mopping floors, putting up chairs, cleaning a bagel container riddled with poppy seeds that did not make it to mouths. I love him so much I can not stop asking God if I can keep him. Instead of just loving him the best way I know how. God said the truth does not like to be held tight. I still squeeze it out of fear. 

Every day I tell myself the same thing: doing and being are two different things. I don't want to love him in terms of doing. I have got to be love for him and to him. I must be love with him. Is that holding too tight? I want to love him as naturally as nature allows me. Nurture vs nature. 

When I stepped into the visceral today, I walked a few miles. In my neighborhood I watched the cars speed by and I stopped to compare flower scents to each other. Each time I inhaled I held the mantra: I was not always here. Things were not always so serene. Be glad. A new creation in my heart are these places. The look of people. Different yet always the same. God, the artist. Repainting the same masterpiece and it never getting old. Even if they only change a nose. 

The point of life is to be living. Are you living? Are you breathing? Do you wake up every morning? You are already doing it. You are already doing what you ought to. I am alive and we live together now and it is holy. It is the way things are in this moment and I am happy. 

The Culmination

It is funny being a human being while simultaneously having the awareness that you're every other human being and have also been every human being that has come before you. Here I am stacked on the shoulder-tops of every human before me, toppling, balancing, failing, succeeding. 

It is funny. 

It is funny and it is magical. 

Yesterday my boyfriend told me that he has always been a serious person. Which led me to wonder about what kind of person I am. I can feel the eagerness drifting around my head like an eye mask; sustaining my curiosity and keeping me blind from the puzzle I am engulfed in. Have I ever been called serious? No. Not by anyone who knows me, at least. 

So what kind of person am I? Any answer I summon will alter in some mode, if not completely, by next morning. Would it be possible to begin answering this question by whatever is around me? Right now I am perched at a table in the coffeehouse where I work. My head sits politely yet secretly in front of my aged but functional laptop. What am I right now? A barista? A person who can't afford a newer model of laptop? You can't draw anything about my sentiments from a description like that. But am I my sentiments? And if I am, am I also the sentiments of every single person I have ever been? Am I the sentiments of every person in this coffeehouse if they are all me?

Am I the man who angrily subjected me to the wrath of his Honda car horn on the way here?

interpreting the complexities of self

me age seventeen:

I don't even think god is real 

I want to smoke weed all of the time

me age twenty-two:

love is the closest to god I will ever be

weed makes me scared 

letter to myself #2

You are doing so many things right. I know you worry quite often about 'being good'. What does that mean to you? What does 'being good' look like? When are you bad? Could you ever be bad if you're human? If you're just an animal? You wonder if you're very much this or much too little of that. You want to be more of something while being less of that other thing. You're funny when you bargain with your brain like this. Have you considered the fact that you have evolved from monkeys lately? Think about it some and see if the standards you reason with continue holding up. Hope that helps. You handle change well. Whether you realize it or not. Your ability to hop from situation to location back to situation is honorable but you don't notice that. You're busy wondering you'll grow out your bangs. We always have a choice over what we lean into. You lean into questionable curiosities sometimes. It's because you're strange and brilliant. It's because you're something 'good'. Life is very very very messy; a very alive thing. You step on the scale. You wonder if you reach out enough to the people you love. You wonder when you'll clean up your Spanish speaking. You wonder if you'll live through a war. You wonder if he will love you for his entire life. You wonder what is it all for. If you knew why we were here, would it change anything?

Would you still pray?