Sunburn

    With great reverence I honor the days wherein the world seems to know, in its own clever way, exactly what it is that I need. Today was a day that my heart was aching for. Fidelity pumping from my muscle mass of love, I had an inclination, a petite idea, of what it is that I was melancholy for. What a work of miracle when you get what you need and then some. Cherries on top. Cherries throughout. Using a cherry as lip stain on the beach with a woman I don't know how I met so late in my timeline. Very, very sweet. Very, very obvious that it would be this way all along. 

    By the ocean with my dear friend, looking around at all of the spirit living inside of the hidden coves and cracks within the tidepools, I saw starfish and snails. A peaceful, yet dangerous existence. Always at the mercy of the sea. Violent or serene. Unbending or forgiving. Constantly at the will of God. It reminds me of the choices I have every day. To be merciful or full of pride. 

    The starfish, in their rubber gowns, latch to the rocks and let the ocean breathe inwards and outwards. I see it as surrendering to the blue mouth of knowing. The ancient home we've lost our thread of communion with. Starfish appear to cling without worry. If they are taken away with a tide too brutish- that is the end of the sentence. I have so much to learn from the ocean. So much to learn from the bygone push and pull of God's dream. 

    And what a joy to play. To call to my sister and point at another aspect of this life and say, "look what I found!" For her to gladly indulge my wonder. This is all very captivating. A beautiful family of surfers are camped out next to our makeshift beach house, a blanket and kombuchas really. The father smiles at Ali Lou describing her dream breakfast, told to me in great detail as per my request. The mother sleeps in the shape of a ball in the sun. The daughter looks out into the ocean with a pensive look on her face and fingers through her hair. The son struggles to get his wetsuit off. The dog chews on a piece of driftwood and no one says a thing. Maybe it's better that way. 

    Many times, this day, I found myself saying, "I have to paint a picture of this ocean. These colors. I know I have to paint this." If only I had supplies with me. I could have spent the entire day listening to the stories of my friend and wrapped up in the color of the water. Maybe it had just been a long time since I have flirted with the sea in such a way. The colors are burned into my heart. The dark blue gently seeping into the crystal benevolent green. Clear as the day I meditated on the California coast and promised the water that I would create a good life for myself. 

    Years later, I can't say how much of this I've had a hand in birthing and how much of it has been constant surprises and good fortune. God has been creating this whole time and I'm playing in tidepools, blinking stupidly at the miracle of the world like a blind man kissing nirvana. My heart has a sunburn. 

I Want to Go With it

    My legs happily extended into bicycle pedals for twenty miles and suddenly I am on the cold, concrete floor outside of the grocery store waiting for my boyfriend to buy me ice cream. He finds me there, sick and fatigued, with stars floating in a circle over my head and I ask him if he will break up with me if I get sicker. From my stomach to my skittish ears, I am one beer in and it's saying bad things to me. 

    I have been sick since last summer and I haven't written about it. This glob of ache and cartoonish demon lives in my stomach and loves when I breathe its name. It being a point of mine to be truthful about my state of feeling, no matter the polite situation, has left me talking about my discomfort routinely. But I don't write about it because this is my time for myself and my heart. I'm not letting that crazy guy in this bar. This bar is awesome. It's better that he stays outside. 

    However, I was sitting in the grass a week ago and thinking very much about the infinite feedback loop that is trying to mentally diagnose myself or figure out which food is going to destroy this problem, thus saving me forever, and I began to write in an attempt to make thought travel from mind to out of mind. I wrote: 

"I was up all night watching the movie Frida and throwing up the dinner I enjoyed. I miss Anthony Bourdain. Did he know illness like this? After all that fucking food he ate? I feel that I am in the middle of a losing game. Here, in a strange bodily limbo, I consider the mystification that is the experience of being unable to speak the same language as my own body. If I had one wish it would be solve this great enigma. Why do I feel so sick every single day?"

    Only days later would I find myself outside of the grocery store with tears in my eyes and a tiredness I wouldn't even know how to begin to describe to you. My poor, gentle boyfriend walked inside to get us some ice cream after a long day of being in the sun and biking, not knowing that he would find a girl-wreck waiting for him by the bike locks. I hugged him tightly and asked him if he'd leave me if I didn't get better. 

    My sickness seems to be a component of everyday life for us now. It is always something to consider and it has cancelled many plans. My heart feels energetic, healthy. My body scolds and punishes me when I take chances or push myself. I worry that it exhausts him. Of course he loves me just the same. My aches and pains are obnoxious to me but maybe they aren't so abrasive to him. Maybe he is just patient. Loving someone makes me strong but being loved can turn me into a scared dog. 

    I asked God to take me through all the oncoming forks in the road with grace and love. I was there in the sun with date pits in my stomach and a yearning to be under the warmth of Spring with an untainted body. I wanted wind to blow and I wanted to go with it. The world is so big and beautiful. I am endlessly starving for it but do I have the stomach? 

I have learned two truths recently: 

1. Corruption has an expiration date

2. Good karma gets you rich and happy (two things corruption falsely promises)      

Anti-aging Campaign

    When I popped straight out the top of the lotus flower of birth, people were already telling me that I seemed older than I was. I receive these impressions habitually from strangers in passing and people who know me well alike. They're often concerned that they've offended me by perceiving me as older. Worried that the vain, youth-hungry image oftentimes attached to how the masses believe women view themselves is going to lead me to believe that I'm earning my wrinkles early. That I am soon to be unmarriable. I am lucky for two reasons: I happen to be excited to wrinkle, and I know this perception comes from the way I carry myself, not my appearance. 

    As far as this has gotten me in life (it has mostly served as an advantage), it has also taxed me in dumb ways. I don't always allow myself the permission of being a twenty-four-year-old girl. Others my age are worried about what Justin Bieber did at Coachella to piss everyone off and I am sitting in deep conviction over the words of Ram Dass, wondering why I had to be born again into the strenuous cycle of birth and death. Believe me, please, I know how this comes off. This sounds like I am perhaps ahead of those my age and painting them to look stupid for caring about pop culture. People my age still care about things that matter. The problem is that what I believe matters looks different sometimes. In many ways I still behave as a bright-eyed twenty-something year old.

   

    The point is that I am more often than not, taking up space as something much older. This is my nature. Something that's been around the sun for a long time. The articulation of my heart is not twenty-four and when I was only a child, that articulation was not a child. Writing this now, I do not know that this is exactly a problem that I have with myself or simply a part of my character that I should feel a healthy indifference for. The voice in my heart speaks, "There is no should and should not" while the body I am in does not get enough sleep and spends too much money on fancy oils and soaps when my health insurance bill is clawing at me. This is okay. I see no benefit in creating stories about this and yet I do. 

    In moments I will feel my age. In others, I will feel the vibration of something ancient that is only watching a version of myself be twenty-four. When I read old pages of my diary and see words of anger long diffused. When I sit in a circle of people I love and think of only the thankfulness of their being alive. When the ocean calls me and I listen. When I can pause inside of a pocket of time by my own intentionality and feel that none of this is random. That is when I feel it does not matter what age I am. It does not matter how separate I feel from others with a disposition such as my own. I lean into the silk curtain of unbridled awareness that knows that I am no age at all, and I have never been. 

At the Bar with my Girlfriends Tonight

It's women in a room and they're laughing. A cosmic seed of absurd joy shared between teeth. Hearts glowing from the center of their bodies. Each of them creating a genesis of a timeline through the moment and yet somehow, they are like every woman who's come before them.