Not With My Mouth

    I don't hate this city. Even when it is all consuming and the water starts to fill over the edges of my brain- there's no way I could hate it. When the winter is bitter and moldy maybe I curse the pothole'd paths but I never ever hate it. Just because something is harsh and ugly a few months out of the year doesn't mean it's all bad. I have my volcanic eruptions but I'm a nice girl. This city deserves some slack. The sun is out and I get to leave it for a day. There are worse grounds to size up. 

    I love this city and I love to leave it. The ocean wailed like a mourning mother, reaching blindly for her baby. The pull of the sea air and the yearning toward the most silent beckon. I needed to get out and I needed it to be with someone who's so good that I'd pick their company over running naked to the coast alone. We ran together. It was better that way and I knew it'd be.

    I write about love so much because I'm just in it. There's no perverted morphing of my experience into anything other than what it is. When I am in love it is all love. The ocean singing for a pair louder than for a stand alone woman. All the starfish in the world have told me so. I've got my autonomy, my solitary visions, but I'm glad to have someone so good witnessing it, too. Saying that I'm a good way to be. Believing it. 

    I stood at the gaping mouth of the water and let the liquid run through my shoes. My breath felt wiser. Time tells me everything. I know I know nothing but love. Love of God and how they're there dancing in every drop. Love of Self even though that's nothing much. Nothing but something to lose. I love leaving the city and I love leaving myself. I'm not tethered to anything but an unitchable hunch that I've got something to say. Not with my mouth. 

Blackberries

    Blackberries are my symbol for spring. Freshly washed and atop my dollop of yogurt at eight in the morning. I'm shining and you're shining, too. The window is open. Exposed brick reflects the timid sun. The sun. Its dreary hiatus never lasts but on solemn, grey days, I wonder if this year will be a special case. But no, here it is and this same beam grew our blackberries. I'm smiling and you're smiling, too. 

    Our breakfast table seats are scooted up close together because we want to touch. Last night you played me the guitar for the first time. You wrote a song about taking a shower in a water fountain in San Diego. Tears streamed down my blushing face as I asked God, "How'd he end up here in front of me after all this?" God laughs and reminds me of the good I deserve. Reminds me to make room for miracles while I take my own hiatuses. I know and God's knowing, too.

    So I reluctantly leave the immortal feeling of a morning. It takes us a long time to depart from each other. There always seems to be one last joke to make. One last fleeting thought or look of adoration. It's spring. There are blackberries. I'm in love again. My bike is extra blue and especially heavy as I heave it along the apartment building stairs down to the street. Although the sun is out, my hands freeze in place on the handles. I'm too lit up from the morning to crease my brow about the weather today.

    The day that follows is really just a day. Biking, reading, working, pushing, pulling. Mechanical things. Redundant, not depressing. I carry out my day in graceful motion even if the most exciting thing was waking up. The morning is the divot of time where things are as they are. Later into the hours, I make calls and pretend to be older than I am. But the mornings lately are melting like goop over everything. It's because I'm happy. I really just am. Blackberries are growing. I'm growing, too. 

Eggs

    Not many people at my work enjoy the task of making eggs. You're cramped in a back room; it's hot, solitary. Highly repetitive. If you're at odds with your mind that day, you won't have much fun performing this task. There's too much time to meander over it all and I always end up dropping an egg on the floor. Always one. 

    Today was not an unenjoyable egg day. I rode my blue and recently tuned-up bike to work and the sun casted a spell on the entire city. The trees were singing, the bushes were moaning and bursting with baby pink blossoms. The sky was dancing and swiping clouded creations across the dome of the Earth. I flew through the street and felt as though not even making eggs today would pour gasoline on my spirit.

    I stood in the back and performed my duty absent of any seriousness. The holy thing about egg making on such days is that you can play your music as loud as you wish. I chose to sing and take dance breaks. There was so much joy in that back room today because the sun is a crazy thing when she takes her hiatus and then returns. While dancing and gleaming and working, I had a flashback to a time I stood in the same place with a very different sentiment.

    Months ago, I made eggs with heavy tears rolling down my face. I remember seeing the tears fall into the yolk of an egg beneath me. It mixed in with the mucosa and laid still. For an immeasurable amount of time I watched my sadness float into the egg. In my mind, the entire egg was consumed by my confusion, my hopelessness. The egg and then the room and then the universe. It was entirely riddled with the bleakness of my insides. This was one of the worst days of my life.

    Time wiped egg covered destruction away and the sun came out. Meditating on this memory today while standing in the exact same place, I felt stupidly lucky. My favorite feeling. The worst of times, of heartache, the worst of anything will fade. I held that memory of my sadness in my pockets for the remainder of the day. Thanked God in all the sweet happenings that served as a contrast to that season of my life that has finished out. 

    What an exhausted piece of advice that pain passes and that nothing lasts. I don't always find in helpful in the thick of dogshit but when it all came full circle for me today- I could not help but return to the lesson within such phrases. The water has settled on my wounds. The salt has been flushed out and the rain has left me with the cleanest pool of knowing. To know peace right now, to have answers! God, I could just make eggs like this forever. 

    What are you cooking these days? 

I hope you see me like this, too.

There seems to be more to experience and less to say these days. I've been sleeping well and calling my sister. Two telltale signs of goodness in my life. There's been pozole and kissing, too. 

At the same time every evening, the crows on my street scream for exactly one hour in unison. Do you know how much better we'd all feel if we allowed ourselves the same conjoined release? Sometimes I long to join them. Today in particular. The last two days were sunshine, joy, and lipstick. Today feels like the part of winter where you watch the clock and dream of swimming naked. Yearning like a lion with fresh meat on a platter outside the cage.

I went out dancing the other night and I felt like a wild animal. Touching the floor, clawing at the air, screaming the lyrics. It didn't matter that I had a life outside of the dancefloor. Really it never does. Both inside and out of my dreams I've been feeling very primitive. I never used to pay attention to my instincts in the way I have these last few months. Just how much of being a proper citizen is abiding by rules and how much of that is laying like bricks on my crazy free bird heart? I want to be good but I more than that, I need to be free. 

When I close my eyes and imagine myself- there's a horse running through a desert. It's fast, phantom-like, and with love in it's eyes. I hope you see me like this, too. 

Loving would be pitifully easy absent of a brain.

I'd be so brave unaccompanied by a mind. 

A dusty candle ignites upstairs and I countlessly make the trek to arrive

inhale

and do away with the fire. 

I had a dream that I screamed, lungs full of passion and lethargy. 

In that liminal happening

Boiled down to a wild animal, wounded and brave.

Why can't I scream in waking life?

Do I secretly yearn to?

Are the trees waiting?

Living has been a constant process of unclenching. 

Can I be a love that just is? 

Is a scream brewing?

Ready

 

Today was a day in my young life.

Today I felt exhausted. I woke up next to someone very very good. We rubbed our cheeks together and I forgot about the nightmare I had. The bus ride home was hazy and two men on the street hit on me. 

I wore tighter pants than I normally wear. For a large part of my day, I thought about my cat and wondered whether or not he feels sad while I am away. Am I old enough to be caring for something so alive?

I am so alive and I care for myself relentlessly but sometimes I feel like a cat inside an empty house. Wondering when someone will stop in and caress me.

Today I biked home in the dark. My legs told me they hated me and that it would have been more enjoyable to bus home. I could have sat in the very back. I could have watched everyone's backs move in and out, up and down, breathing without thinking. Automatic living. Are they tired, too? I think everyone I have ever seen on a bus looks tired. 

Everyone is so alive and it's freaking me out. I am so alive and it's freaking me out. 

I am getting looked at with love again and it's turning me into water. 

Today I wondered if I am a snail or a slug. At first I thought snail because I have the ability to revert deep into a shell, deep within myself, and take stock of all the ever internal happenings. I realized after more thinking that I am a slug. 

I'm meant to be in this world naked. Vulnerable. Ready. 

They found me in one of these at birth