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

 

Never Without Bleeding

    I am back home and just like I thought, this city had open arms for me. Just waiting for my return. All of my favorite faces met my own today, eager to hear about the last six days of my life. When the journey matters to them really, you'll see it in their eagerness and it'll touch you every time. When the the plane clumsily nudged through impervious clouds to uncover views of the city lights, I was met with a confirmative feeling I've felt before. A feeling that this is my home. How special that I got to choose it. 

    For fun sometimes, I imagine visions of the future in which I no longer reside here and I reflect on the memories behind me. The layout, the gluttony of flowers in Spring, the feeling feeling feeling. When I do this bit, I often experience genuine, visceral homesickness. All from a daydream. That's how I know this place is my own. 

    When I embarked on my morning walk to work today, the aloneness of my life here gushed against my face, paralleling the brisk wind that got there first. I took it all back in. Like I had been gone for much longer. The trip was emotional and compact. This felt like the initial inkling of coming home to myself. I meditated...

    Parts of my trip were precious, unforgettable. Etched forever into corners of remembrance. Moments like my mother and I sitting on the kitchen counters, feet hanging, talking until midnight. I felt an intense love for my mother that I have never truly felt before. For the entirety of my life, it seemed that she was invisible to me. Seeing her now was like seeing her for the first time. She appeared aged and confident. Comfortable in who she was. Like a spiritual seasoning had taken place. She's dorky and generous. She loves me so much I think it pains her deeply that I am not five years old playing with horses on my bedroom carpet anymore (if only she knew how close I am to that version of myself these days). 

    My mother told me countless times during my stay how proud she was of me. I have never heard her say this to me so often. Seeing my dad was healing in its own way. My relationship with him was a monster of its own back then and now it has morphed into something very casual but real. I can see how much he also deeply cares for our family. How hard he tries to be good and provide. He's a good man and I'm a good man's daughter.

    It makes me want to cry just thinking about all the alchemy that's gone on. Some things time heals, other things require intention. I wish I could tell past angrier versions of myself to not have my mind made up so concretely. To leave room for more empathy. It was never hard for me to grant strangers immediate compassion but this wasn't the case with my family. I'm starting to really witness the humanity in them. They exist as people, inside and outside of being my parents. They're just someone's coworker or customer in the grocery checkout. If only that cashier knew. 

    My brother. He is so intelligent. He reads often and has a general distaste for letting his phone distract him. When he speaks casually he uses words I do not understand. I want to ask him to pause his story and explain the meanings of all the words drawing blanks in my mind, words I want to comprehend on my own accord but can't. I hold my tongue instead of inquiring because sometimes I struggle with pride. And he isn't afraid to just be funny and do strange things for the sake of making people laugh. When a joke doesn't land, he often admits the defeat retroactively which then leads me to laugh anyway. So he wins regardless. I found that I missed him. We are so different and always have been. It didn't stand in the way of us enjoying each other this time. 

    He sees me as something very sensitive and strong but will openly chalk me up to being a "liberal eclectic barista". I know he actually sees me though. He looks like a good husband to his wife. That's always nice to see. 

    Seeing everyone was so up and down. It felt like I went to another planet and blinked, transporting me home; not knowing if all of it happened or not. It's a fogged up review mirror. It was the first time in a while that I felt like I was apart of that kind of family collective dynamic thing. I am the middle child and I live in the most contrasting environment compared to my family. I am broke and young and feeling excruciatingly confused and yet everyone is telling me how grown up I seem. I suppose it feels that way for me, too (not because I was recently interested in a fifty-one year old English/guitar teacher) (he looked much younger than he was) (and had very good taste in books so I don't know what to tell you). 

    The feeling now, after all that traveling and fitting into a box that's never quite felt so suited to me... I get to be home now. 

    When I returned, I flipped my place upside down, put all of my energy back into it, and now am writing in my self-fashioned lump of space. Writing here is what shifts it from a studio apartment to a wizard's mountain. This year was the most eventful year of my life. I mean it this time. It started with me moving in with someone I loved (love) and it is concluding with me living alone with someone I love (me). 

Bliss and Pain.

    I am a few pages shy of finishing Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart and if I had one genie's wish, it would be to never see the end of it. For it to go on infinitely so that I could steep into the yearning for eons. I will leave this entry with the sentence that has settled substantially into the part of my heart that exhales in knowing...

You'll never forget this...

    Sumire is in love with Miu and is falling apart keeping it all to herself. She knows she must confess no matter the outcome. Whether it be all hopes manifest or destruction in the face of transparency. 

"DID YOU EVER SEE ANYONE SHOT BY A GUN WITHOUT BLEEDING?"

    That's what I'm asking myself after a hurricane of a year, after a cyclone of love. Did you think you'd feel all that love and not bleed, too? I'm left applying the bandages and proper treatment, in agony but smiling. You know how it goes. 

whipped cream

    The timing of the gifts in life are completely and utterly out of my hands. It isn't up to me anymore. It never was. Is this not God's plan? Remember that silky, undeniable magic. Remember magic people. Keep them around. The sea will hold me if no one else can right now. The clouds will cradle me with God's signature on everything. I will get so high on the love inside of me. So high. It's hard work creating someone inside myself who knows but I'm going to be around anyway. Might as well.

    I don't know what trickster spirit implanted the lie in everyone's minds that this life was gonna be a free ride. No, I don't expect things to be whipped cream in every moment but I also don't anticipate constant flat tires. When the density makes a clearing, I look it up and down and let it walk with me. When the sky opens up and God themselves say to me, "You're my favorite", I bow in acknowledgment and keep going down the line. Heart as open as ever. That's what I do.

    The real work lately has been owning my miracles in a humble way. Where's the good in blessings that aren't trusted in their entirety? 

    What's more, my brain has the inflation and wiggle room of one thousand puffer fish so you can be sure that I'll mull things over for quite some immodest time. That gets tiresome, though. It doesn't sound much like whipped cream. So no more thinking. No more mulling it over. I am trusting it all so deeply. I'm destined for miracles. Flat tires, too. You know?