Angel in a Saloon

     An angel that knew me when I was twelve graced my city this week. She fluttered about her long, linen-like wings and blew kisses over the heads of every person out walking. I got a free mattress from a historically beautiful woman who makes stained glass art and has renaissance moles on her face. We folded the thing into a taco and shoved it in my trunk. No one wanted to drive behind me. 

    In the saloon, one sweaty and warm night, we danced crazy in cowgirl boots to the punky country music. An old hick found me later, smacking his gruff hand against the back of my shoulder saying, "I wish you'd lend me sum that energy, girl!" The linen-winged angel laughed, two beers deep. 

    I've been thinking about how painful it can be to love somebody so much. It's the curse of the earnestly tender and if you're reading this, I hope you and this ache are well affiliated. I wonder if I will die young. I keep telling myself that I've made it this far. I'm sure I can keep this thing rolling. Sleeping for less than five hours is bad math and I'm learning not to do this. I've been thinking a lot because I can smell fall. There's so many warning signs. 

    For the first time in my life, I have an ear infection and it's reminding me of the fact that I can still experience new things. I was sad at the clinic when the doctor pulled up the anatomy of an ear and basically laid it on out that mine was fucked. That's having a body. I could combust at any moment but instead an angel is gracing my city this week. I'll put up with everything sounding like it is underwater for even a glimmer of that. Everyone is showering her in love and beaming because of her and there's so much to sing about. Sometimes there's too much. 

Anything Could Happen

 Anything could happen and it could be right now. The choice is yours to make it worth while. 

    I remember the first time I heard The Clean's song entitled "Anything Could Happen'', off their 1985 album Compilation, I was sitting in a friend's car parked at a spot we frequented in Fullerton, California. The spot was private, moody, and near the woods. We would sit in the car, sometimes for hours, listening to music and talking about our favorite philosophers. This song stuck out like a sore thumb then and now as I board my plane to England. 

    Sitting impatiently in the isle seat, the song acts as a mantra to keep my mind off of the feeling of being held captive on the plane as well as a centering reminder that every journey I take is up to me. The way I feel in new places. Just how open am I going to be? Anything could happen. I spent all ten and a half hours in the air wondering what I'd feel like on the return flight. 

    Laying in my light blue night gown( the one with the flower embroidered neck), my dear friend is beside me sound asleep. After three years, we have found our way back in the saddle together and it is grandma's pie. This country is hilly, green, and Eden-esque, We walked through a two hundred year old library that had been bombed during WWII. You could see the damage on the books that remained. It made me think about the undeniable fragility of our objects and how these items, if lucky enough, can endure the damage of war. Some people are like that as well. 

    Being far away from home feels unusual inside of my heart. I love where I live and in this moment, in this full-sized bed, it feels really uncomfortable being away from what I know. My city is like a stone in my hand that I must occasionally cast unto still waters for my chance at experience in exchange. The first time that I left my city after only living there for a handful of months, I visited New York and I was absolutely desperate to come back after a wimpy seven days. What a beautiful feeling of confirmation that you're in the nest you feel warmest in. What luck. It's a good thing I like dancing with the girl that brought me. 

    This night in particular, we grabbed drinks with a group of friends that my friend had met while living there. They were Polish, direct, and beautiful in the way that everyone is beautiful when you live on different sides of the planet. Where I live, people tend to be passive so meeting them was like a rooster at dawn. Shocking me out of my sleep, out of what I'm accustomed to. Thank God. No one should be too comfortable while being alive. Death is our well-promised nap before folding back into the jitter of humanity. One of the girls was very touchy and sassy. I took a liking to her after she told me my tattoo was "cliche". When we parted, she rubbed her cheek against my own three times and made me promise to see her again before going back to America. And I did. The goodbye was hard then, too. I don't know if I ever really meet a stranger. 

    My friend is a special girl. Very bright, adventurous, and open-hearted. All the things I like in a person. We met at a party when we were teenagers. She was the only other girl there amongst the beer kegs and devil-marked high school boys. There she was like the virgin Mary. My saving grace in the sea of frat. I respect her because she will never stay in a situation that doesn't seem right to her. She doesn't look to me like one of those people that gets 'stuck'. She's so poised yet comedic. I wonder if she sees herself this way. If she sees the stark dignity I see. I wonder if she sees the extent of the unadulterated goodness inside of her own heart. She'd be very smart but very blind if she didn't. 

    Whenever I travel, I often will meditate on what the child in me makes of it all. When I was a little girl, I did not dream of traveling, or getting married, or going off to college because I couldn't see a bright future for myself. The farthest out I could see was the end of the week. Anything further than that and my adolescent mind would go blank. The future that my young brain could not fathom now contains both worldly and spiritual delights. Delicious foods, markets to lose yourself in, and the dazzling faces of people going about their destinies. It's all so absurd so I just try to live joyfully. 

    The discomfort of travel makes arriving juicy and worth the effort. My first choice of location would never be in a flying ship thousands of miles into the air but I do what I do because I love this world. We're living in alien times. I'm here praying and wishing largely. In the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge I sobbed with great devotion at all of the paintings of Mary and baby Jesus. I don't know if that's normal. On the plane ride returning home I sobbed. The people next to me thought that the turbulence was getting to me but I'm just in love with God and where I live. That's between me and the ether, though. 

Vena Debajo de Todo

   I am not surprised at my dropping back into my awe again. It always happens this way. Like a microwave's inner table spinning in cyclical bliss until the timer reaches zero. Until it all plateaus once again. The food must be heated later on. There is no need to overthink it. Your heart must resurrect. A time and a place and a time and a place and

    God is so good. Hearing people say things like this used to turn my insides out. Used to grant me judgement and often resulted in strange assumptions about what they mean when they say this. I wonder what others think when I say I love God. It could mean anything and to me, it truly does mean anything. How could there be a dogmatic approach to something so vast and unnamable? I think God is the Hindu deity Hanuman as much as I think God is my meanest customer of the day. I think God is the song I can't stop going on runs to as much as I think it is what is staring back at me above the bathroom counter. There's a lot of fun to be had in this I think. 

    Whenever God decides a hiatus is due and the aliveness of things doesn't quite catch the same weight- that's when I think about myself. A lot. That's when the convenience of duality kicks in and I decide that the mean customer crawled out of a pit of tar just to drag me down with them like we aren't the same thing. Like I'm not covered in tar, too. When God returns I laugh about this. In times like these I think I am someone. I think I am beautiful, promising, slightly aloof, kind, unsure. But I am not. 

    It takes one bird in the pond or one old man on a motorcycle smiling all big at me (with all the teeth in the world) or one pivotal book or anything so crucial in the way that it touches me- to slam me right back into my heart and suddenly God is everything in front of me. Sometimes if I can't find God I stare at my hands until they don't look like mine. I can't explain this further. All of that commotion and then God is back and I have access to the big throbbing hunker of a heart in me that gets me by. And the remembrance that I am nothing- that I am the ocean, or my little sister brushing her hair before bed, or the lipstick residue on someone's mug before work, or the bush dry grass on a desert lawn- is enormous. 

    The only reason I'm ever someone is because I love God. I love God and I am a disciple to the love that I know is the pulsing vein underneath all this walking around with eyes shut. People always bumping into each other unsure of who's really seeing things the way things are. I don't know and you don't either but I do know I love you. 

 

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?