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? 

No salt

I desire not the destiny of Lot's wife 

My path will not lead me to an eternity of salt

for gazing at what is behind me

I always consider what my bare feet carry me away from

but I do not visit to pages turned 

My future is spilling over with water 

Freshwater

New life 

No salt 

No salt 

No salt 

Atargatis

 

 من فمك لباب السما ياختي

from your lips to God's ears