Because of You.

Floating in something less than spacious and singing Britney Spears songs at 9 in the morning, I am more in love with my happiness than I ever have been comfortable with before. Not all things are reconciled, but I am reconciled with that fact of my life. I am not seeking out a finite peace, but I am at peace and in love with the chaos within me. Though this is often the source of my lows, or something like that, it is not something that bothers me--- it is something of me that I have grown to love and not feel consumes or drowns me, but inspires and awakens me. I am tolerant of this mechanism, long limbs reaching out like sun through pines behind my house back in Georgia to wrap around and hold me until I am aware of my exact darkness. I am walking with God through the places  I have been and telling Him what I can remember of those places, and trying to express my side of the story without explaining myself too much. He laughs at the way I say certain words like "you" and "fear" but we are already ten steps ahead of anyone who wouldn't want to understand anyway. Don't worry. It's not a big deal.

(This is the part where we just have a conversation, and learn not to tell anyone else about it. People sometimes wait for you to say something they can judge. Some people...)

 I am just like you sometimes. I see this in blue and brown and green eyes all around me and I can't seem to explain to anyone else that there is something so dear to me as the way somebody looks at you when they see you for the first time, really.

Pretend we've never met our demons, just in case they come to dinner.

I am 6 feet tall hiding in a doll house, dressed like Barbie's hooker cousin and missing how much you never missed a beat, small and my head bent sideways wondering how you could let me go and now bent sideways wondering what is missing here. There's a stuffed dog and a picture colored in from the back of a cereal box and Let Down by Radiohead is pouring from my ears like I am the stereo. I still believe you can hear me when I talk to myself. I wish I knew where that went. But I'm tired now, tired of remembering how much I wish I could make you love me harder and I worry about mixing paints because too many blues and one brown will make ugly. I remember asking myself with lipstick on why we never fell in love, only because he asked me sitting in that chair and I didn't really have a reasonable explanation. That's worth thinking about, maybe.

//

there was red wine that i wouldn't drink and people doing illegal things on top of tupac's face and we were rhyming breaths without knowing each other's middle names but i knew we were meant to be best friends forever or at least something more than nothing particular or that feeling you get when salespeople ask you if you're looking for something in "particular" because you're looking but you know it's not in this store or in any store, but hopefully just in store, coming soon. but more to the point i remember the way i couldn't tell the difference between light rain and tears even though I don't remember crying. i remember nikki singing the judy garland song in a whisper with her arms holding amber and me and her crying but not knowing why. i remember the way your voice was collected pieces of things you have read by other older people and a handful of black artists like maybe tupac and maybe one or two of your really good friends. i'm not grateful for a loss but i'm grateful that if things don't work out, i can hold onto this untainted memory when possibility was the thing, was the only thing, is the only thing, is the, the, only is, is only, only one.

//

Don't tell me what to do about a broken heart because I know it will never be good again in the same way and that's why I don't care. It will never be the same again even when I am happy again, even when I am not covered in darkness. I am not the type to sit and pitch fits but it feels like now I am clawing my way out of my rib cage because I remember the way you talked to me and don't you remember how at first you were the cold one? I think sometimes we forget where we are. I think sometimes we forget how we are. We remember me being the cold one because it's easier than reminding you that you don't know what you're talking about. I am realizing how cold I am feeling and every inch of me hurts with desperation for something specifically vague, something more than just feeling small in a good way, but more like that way you are next to him, holding back tears because you can't figure out what to be upset about.

How to Love You

Never good at doing things anyone else's way particularly, always needing to come around in my own good time, never sure when to speak up and when to let people just read my mind, never certain if snapping at hurt feelings is okay or just kind of inappropriate. I'm not one to care much when people go, more set on the moment than the missing, but I do feel it when things are breaking, when the sunlight is falling behind tree's calling arms--- I can't feel it when they go, but I always feel it as they are going-- and the footsteps you leave behind, trampling poems I've written for you in the grainy sand, it's not something I need you to ask about but I wish you had noticed, had taken a moment to pray for me as I screamed out for desperate salvation. There I go again, I'm thinking, begging people to read my mind and love me and leave me alone all at the same time. 

Aquarian blood

Sun drops falling like how raindrops would if this were anywhere but this exact place in northern California and I am drowning myself in things I wrote but never said to people I should have just said things to. It's this thing attached to my wrist, says "courage," says try harder, says make an effort, says stop making promises, says stop making yourself so sad or so sorry or so and so's hardest memory. Stop starting things you never finish or finish the things you start thinking about starting but don't let anyone tell you to start or stop doing things you feel like starting or stopping like hand making clusterstuffed pillows with amanda poss as a career. If there's a place I can see myself, it is standing next to you in the pouring rain on a sort of sunny kind of day in the Marina, holding hands, dressed in rented skin and original content. There, and being 37 and running a successful pillow stitching company with Amanda, and knowing you like being around her for a lot of reasons like her sense of humor and knowing she liked your more recent blog posts. Sometimes I struggle finding myself in words I have written and boys I have loved. Hank told me we are cold by nature, Aquarians, piled in this triangle of shoes and stories on and on and how do we even know each other? He told me the only important thing in the world is to learn how to love, how to love is the only important thing in the entire world and I am standing in that shoe department with this person who is somehow a stranger and somehow a friend and I want to leave just because I feel a little bit like crying. The thing about heartbreak is that when you don't talk about it, you have to deal with it and even when you are over things, you still have these little cracks in your heart. I am having these conversations and thinking about how sweet you were in the pouring rain and how when you threw your head off all I wanted was to kiss you with the rain falling on our faces like how my mascara ran down mine the first time I heard/watched somewhere in the bottom of the rain. Water is different, but I wonder if I ever will be, if I ever will be always warm, and if I can learn to love, if i can ever be something more than a hollow chocolate bunny on my favorite day of the year...

angels in the outfield or in hell or anywhere but where you would expect to see them

The frustrations of normal people getting to me, wondering when things got to be so overwhelming without me noticing, me noticing things have generally always overwhelmed me and not knowing what to do about it, it being something or some things or most things that I happen to catch on to faster than most people but not having anything to do with things that I necessarily want to have anything to do with. It's just ideas, and things happening, and hoping that the things I think about are going okay but I feel like it's easy to forget how heavy boots are when you aren't the one who wears them and maybe you weren't even there when I picked them up and maybe it's me forgetting how easy I have it or maybe I still feel those weights no matter the problem. I don't know how better to express myself than clouded verse and tears of anxiety and a lack of clarity. When I look in the mirror, I am staring down the ugly cousin of self awareness and a sense of inability or inactivity or institutionalized misunderstanding. I am staring myself down until the glass starts cracking, until I break my knuckle bones from the thought alone, blood or something less gruesome spreading like silk against melted sand. I know you don't know what I mean and I know I shouldn't be complaining. I think it would be a lot easier if I either just let go or said something but it gets so hard to disappoint people when you don't know who would be willing to celebrate you for doing exactly nothing. I speak in tongues because it takes away some of the pain when you are misunderstood if you don't say what you mean in the first place. It's not anyone's fault but my own if there's anyone to blame at all. I just feel like it's anything now, anything pushing me and I know my job is so small here but why do I feel like that angel, the one who had to pour the fire over the people on the book of Revelations and he/she/it didn't even get a NAME in the book. He didn't ask for that job, just happened to be strong enough to carry a really huge ass bowl. I think they forgot to put the part in about how the angel was crying, crying so hard he believed he could put the fire out that he was pouring over the sinful people, because he didn't want to hurt anyone, and it wasn't his fault, and he didn't know how to just tell God he didn't know if this was maybe the very best plan to make things better. I don't know if that's exactly what I mean, only that sometimes the best way is being the best for something and other times this is the most difficult thing if those things you are brilliant at feel like fire against your own fingertips, burning your face by distance and default, leaving you to look in the mirror with a face you can no longer look at without remembering the screaming of all those people you didn't want to scorch, remembering yourself how you were when wrinkles were still for grandmothers and you, alone, were at least worthy of the quiet.

Millermania

 "Some will say they do not wish to dream their lives away.  As if life itself were not a dream, a very real dream from which there is no awakening! We pass from one state of dream to another: from the dream of sleep to the dream of waking, from the dream of life to the dream of death. Whoever has enjoyed a good dream never complains of having wasted his time. On the contrary, he is delighted to have partaken of a reality which serves to heighten and enhance the reality of everyday."

Henry Miller from Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch

bigger things.

The thing killing me most and slowly is judgment, a painful intolerance for the imaginary, the complete misunderstanding of some definition or another, ready to pounce when somebody is sure something someone has done or somewhere they have been makes them something or another. What do you know anyway? Mentally incapable of dealing with the ordinaries or traditionals because they make you sick doesn't make you insane. Emotionally inequipped for dealing with people who don't ever know how to get to the bottom of it, who aren't willing to dig within themselves to discover, recover, reinvent, reimagine, reanything. I'm sick of it. Insanely. I should be put away. Put me away. I just want to eat this smoken salmon onion bagel and read about Jewish mysticism and not talk to anyone about how many choices they believe I or you or any of us should be making. We are the children of stardust and we have no time for definitions. Or if we do, we have time only for those sculpted from imaginings birthed between something authentic, something completely unable to be articulated, we are searching and growing and developing and waiting for God or someone close enough to just hold us in His ladylike hands and we are more than speech and we are alone because we are too many. We are alone because we are too strong. We are alone because we like to cry, to bury ourselves in silence and discomfort and the promise of honesty, somewhere over or under or beside the rainbow, laying naked in grassy fields, completely uncovered and sometimes sad. It's not a problem. It's a gift. It's just a gift we don't understand yet. But when you are crying in the night, completely stripped and alone, too overwhelmed for blankets or physical company, hold out your left hand and I will hold out my right, reach for you in darkness and tears, and I will promise to come back to some version of you, and I will forgive you, and I will let you know, like you let me know, that crazy is just a word like foot or empty. You are a gift. You are a child. You are bigger. You are significant.

Success in the form of rain drops--- no, a hail storm, like magic or the overwhelming desire to eat once you realized how long you have holed up in your room hoping that tomorrow you will not wake up in tears or maybe just to wake up and remember you can feel someone else's shoulder, and that's a really good feeling. A lot of feelings are good and even the ones that feel bad are still good feelings. I was pouring through spanish journals and crying over darknesses and missed opportunities in Germany with the sun crying on my face, insisting that I cheer the frick up, and I just kept reading, deep into the story I wrote about the time Adrian had to be taken to the hospital during the 311 concert and how I realized how I trap these men into missing me instead of letting them miss me and how many postcards I kept to not write on and notes on American literary masters and on and on and on into the depths of the colorful version of me. In the back were trapped notes about the time you went to the hospital in an ambulance you never should have taken and how they called you by a name that is only partially yours and the tears that poured were from surprise mostly, forgetting that I felt like that reading someone's open heart and especially yours at the time. Disconnections are funny in a particular way, like how somebody smells after they get to your house and you know that they thought too much about something small the whole drive over and you don't want to talk about it, or don't know how to bring it up. Something beautiful happened in the lines you didn't write, that I would come to fill in over time, and that is how darkness is a song between two broken hearts and that you taught me how to tell the truth. There is nothing sad or lonesome right now and nothing to complain about or cry over. Sometimes I just do those things because I can't handle too many highs, feeling like traps, or trapped into feeling guilty just because I'm not over the top happy to match all those times that I am. It's not something people are sure of or can do anything about, like how I can't describe the pain running along the back of my thighs because I finally ran as far as I possibly could while laying down. The thing about me is that I am afraid when I'm not moving that I will not end up anywhere else even though I know I am doing just fine. I can't continue to share everytime people are thought of because of something i see because I am like Julie's Stephen, and I am the boy in Santa Cruz, and I am holding onto hearts because I am cruel. And I am apologizing to God and I am running in circles, drawing infinity, sweat dripping from a dog's hot tongue, tied up in something inexplicable but not NOT comprehensible. I am softer somedays, when I am wrapped up quietly in you. I am soft in your shoulder, soft waking up to the sound of your ambition, forward and older and singing lullabies with you.

Waking up with nothing to do and feeling like that's all right. These are the gifts of my life.

Something less than impressive.

Shame on them if they can't understand ya, or if they bother trying too hard when everybody smart knows that's never been the real point. Real silence is sometimes most favorable in uncomfortable climates. Broken down about three blocks from here, I raised my hands to the sky and laughed at these ugly birds flying in a V shape because I remember being small on a wooden playground doing the same thing at the same ugly birds and that phrase "flying V" because that is simply what was going on. Now, going on, I am rolling along like I would on train tracks if I were a train or like after breadcrumbs if I were those kids in that story or maybe desperate enough as a regular person in their twenties like anyone else. It's not easy, you know. I have been trying to tell people this. Being in my twenties doesn't make me feel much different from being in my anythingelses. I just want to wake up and do things and not think about things that need to be done later- it's not in my nature to plan my life. It's in my nature to love life, to love it for what it is and as I see it, naked and glorious and primal and sensitive and moving... but I'm about as sure now as I was five or fifteen years ago what I want to be when I grow up because I still think I pretty much like my life as it is, I'll take it as it comes or pull away when I don't like it. I feel like I am doing all right. I feel like I am tired of questions, of certain brands of people who are against my truth's encouragement because I just want to do these things I like to do and not feel too much like there is much more I need to do. I would like to write and have nobody bother me about it. I would like to believe in God and not feel like anybody needs me to go to church to prove it. I want to sit on my butt and do my laundry and sing along to bad music and cry when I'm sad or just overwhelmed and feel like this is enough or at least kind of enough or at least kind of something more or less less than too much to handle. I am sitting here feeling better because at least you know this is how I feel, even if you can't understand it or respect it but at least I told you or tried to. I don't know what I was trying to say. Just that I feel better for saying something. I don't know. Give me a break, all right? I'm just letting you know.