| "I'm reaching, I'm reaching for you..." |
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| 07:36pm 02/07/2009 |
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mood: a state past wondering music: "thirteen", elliott smith
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All yesterday, I was searching for a word- some sense, some actual way of expressing- something stronger than Missing.
The thread-count of longing this dense; I wondered again and again, is this simply what comes when your body betrays you? When a dozen, two dozen, what feel like hundreds of voices seem lost to you; bodies you've made love to and faces you haven't even seen yet.
And then last night: You appeared in my dreams.
I want to say of course- the ache of learned spirit-history- but this dream was vastly different from nearly two decades of dreams before it. More real than it's ever felt; more vivid, visceral. Lingering and achingly solid. Ripe with details imprinted on the inner, softest layers of my skin, when I woke: Far more like being together, after the measure of two-thirds of our lives, might actually be.
Through what must be hundreds of dreams; from the breathless dreaming of grade school to bumbling adolescent kisses; from sitting with you on a hill at twenty, as you said it felt you'd not been gone long at all. To now.
Lucid enough that I was able to fight to stay in the dream- to keep talking with and even touching you- nothing I've ever experienced, it felt like our time stretched for hours. And maybe most different of all: This dream was in the Now. It held the very real moments of my recent days. You weren't a fleeting phantom or a grainy childs' face passing through my dreamspace. This was so much more that I woke into sobs so remniscent of our pre-adolescent dramas, it felt I was still asleep.
Are you some masochistic symbol- a sign-post for the lost when the lost becomes me- or is this something more, something else?
Usually you come in waves; in bunches over a month and then you seem to dip back into my subconscious like so much else. But.
Was this you? Do I do something now- though who knows what- or just keep moving in the Now where last night we seemed to kiss for the first time in half a lifetime, sat together to talk for the first time in nearly eight years?
Or was this just among the pushes I need: Caught between circumstance and desperate to rise again, afraid and alone: Was this just my answer-
The true picture of what really is More than Missing.
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| "I'm not running away from myself; it's just myself ran away from me- so I am travelling, again." |
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| 05:32pm 17/04/2009 |
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mood: cat stevens in my head; music: springtime in my heart!
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The leaves on the oldest tree in my neighbor's yard; in all its' enormity and grace; are an unspeakable, stunning scarlet. This is the kind of color that seems, almost, to have texture. To radiate light, in and of itself. Its' brilliance is the kind we find in the heart of nature, but have been trained to think of as chemical- it's interesting how the most natural things, not unlike that we find in the deepest seas, can often seem supernatural.
Spring in Northern Virginia is a masterpiece among Mother Nature's firework shows; something I've spent many lucky seasons tucked right in the center of, looking out on the forest from glass walls. And this year, for a short time more, they're my own glass walls. And you know what? While I'm antsy to get back to Portland, now that I know after so much struggle, where I really need to be, and a fair amount of why: I think that today, in the past few days, I've found peace with the time it will take.
And really: I'm glad, when I lean close to the heart of things, that I'll be here during this time. These two or three weeks, four at the outside; spent directly in the center of Spring's opening. Looking out from these glass walls; it's like having a bugs-eye view from inside a wide-flung blossom.
For reasons both obvious and spiritual; reasons which I'm still discovering in awe and gratitude: My health is harder to balance when living full-time in Alexandria. A truth on many levels; and one it took two months of exploration to feel sure of, all the way to core. Sure enough to risk moving again.
A dangerous butterfly effect takes place when you live in the suburbs, even if you have a gorgeous home in the woods and right by the city. Look closely, and you see the spoon theory working in reverse; each simple step becomes ten. So, yes- it's been a little hard to accept that there's no way to transport the numerous pieces of home I've spent the last two years gathering, to Portland - except to do it from the base of a place which demands so much of my energy. (All the shades of paint, mixed and to be mixed; the vintage furniture I spent days tracking down; the lamps I'm making, the forty some-odd pounds of glass panes and fragments; the boxes and boxes of DIY supplies...) But I have my family; which is lucky and sadly rare. Which is something my time away, in Portland, let me see more clearly than all the years they tried (amidst whatever daily chaos) to show me. And I think I've accepted it, how this move will take place, insomuch as I can.
Slowly, at first- and then in a sudden rush of Spring bursting within me: This morning. Waking early, into a feline stretch, the sun just rising. My limbs not sore, a clear throat to talk to my cats; one perched by my head, the other in a tangle of blankets by my hips. In that moment, the sun peeking through my windows as witness, I entered an unexpected grace of certainty. Often I wake into the after-effects of night terrors, but today I woke into a blessing.
I called this place home for eighteen years, with many spans and summers between. And several of my doctors will still be here; this move will be real, but I'll be in Virginia every few months. And I'm glad of that, as well. I'm glad of the balance I've been seeking for so many years, finally beginning to make its' way into not just my thoughts and hopes- but my reality. And best of all: Into the innumerable pieces of me. The fighter cells, the helper cells, the white, the red- glorious color again. Best of all in balance, best of all in this slow, certain grace; the hard-earned bounty of years of trial and treasure-hunts: Balance coming home. Into this, my body.
For millions of tiny, obvious reasons- as well as larger, spiritual ones that I don't think I could express in a sentence or two via journal- Portland breathes health into my grateful, thirsting pores. It's true, of course, that it doesn't just become effortless. But the effort can find grounding, find true result. It's also true that this move- back to Portland, back to the place I first moved for its' sense of breath and calm, its unique and quirky kindness- will be the sixteenth in ten years. (To be fair, that includes college.) Nonetheless, my body is exhausted from it all; all the false starts and half-built homes, all the people I haven't wanted to leave behind, all the doctors' whose trails took me across countries and led to nothing.
But it will also be the first in six years that I make entirely by choice. Not for a doctor, but for me. Not seeking a better plan, but with one. And not because I have no choice- but because, in the million tiny ways we take for granted, I do now. I do.
*
My neighbors' scarlet tree also reminds me of my hair. No longer pixie-short, no longer cotton-candy pink; not the occasional black curls or spikes, not shaved in frustration. It's been long and red, slightly layered, for a few months now; full and curling with Virginia humidity or Portland mist, depending. Just recently, long enough to almost kiss my shoulder-blades.
After a dozen years of pixie cuts, of perky spikes and shaved heads in summer, of hair no longer than the shortest of pigtails (aside from the two times I had black twined into color-streaked extensions) - I have what people [who aren't just me] would call long hair! A layered, scarlet surprise- months after I decided to keep letting it grow for the time being, it's still novel to look in the mirror.
I've been trying to craft the exact-right red, with my various pigments and hennas. That gleaming flesh of a fresh-cut blood orange. (A color so alive, we gave it the name of the fluid which sustains us.) A Tori Amos red, only multiplied. I almost had it once; a bright scarlet with magenta undertones, a deep orange sheen here-and-there; vibrant but just dark enough. But it faded quickly to glowing red-pinks and orange-reds that are very pretty, but not dark enough. The roots are long now; after bleaching them again and carefully trying my mix-master skills once more, I may cut a few inches off. Keep it long enough for pigtails, but short enough to not add time to this femme's dress-up routine. The point of this ramble is, really: Yes, I took pictures just yesterday- and yes, even have a few of the blonde-pink pigtail stage that came between Short and Now. I'm thinking of continuing to hone the right red, but not cutting it until I get that itchy urge again. But in case the not-unprecedented urge to chop away right away crops up: Well, at least there are photographs.
I know that not having visuals of me, of all people, has probably been weird- that my images, as much as my words, are a part of my art and my journal. And thus: my communication. I'll fix that lack of new visuals soon. I also know I'm still giving most of you more questions than answers; and apologize for any frustration! See, when able to dive into my life for the first time in years: I found myself in the midst of a joyous move before I could so much as catch you up on the basics of nearly two years. But as much as I live in the Now- I also know that history is essential to any true evolution- and I know, straight-up, that you've worried, wondered. And simply: been curious.
So I'll fix that- to the best of my ability- soon, too. I'm still here; I'm still feeling much more well than I have in years. But stay with me, yeah? Because it's wonderful to be making this move, but it's also totally unexpected- and coming right when I'm able to be back in fairly regular touch with the beautiful people of my life. There is, to say the least, a lot to balance as I find my way to balance!
But ultimately, I wouldn't expect it to be any other way. I've realized that genuine enlightenment is rarely some sudden flash. Far more often- if you reach it at all, if you have the determination and the hope often called for- it's years of overlapping labyrinths, trick bulbs, and finally- maybe- one day: A question. One that, if you dare to answer it, will help guide you. My extremely humble opinion, of course. But, as always, from the heart of this pinkest heart.
A few essential specifics: Opal and Heather, I have week-old drafts written to you, which feel somehow paltry. Masses of words which somehow don't seem enough- not considering the time, the love, the much of it all. There was so much to say, and before I knew it, so much more. If you can bear with me as you have so far, in such generosity and empathy; or if you'd rather call; please do. Alisha, Jac, and anyone else who tried to call- I won't detail the mess that occurred with my cell phone or why the numbers I offered both changed, shortly after offering. But if you use the old cell number, with 6464 at the end instead: You'll find my voice just might meet you at the end. And it will be something more than happy- something more like joyous- when it does.
A general message (crackle, static, crackle): I'm going to get a Blackberry-esque phone soon, for reasons mostly to do with dis/ability and keeping in better touch with such amazing friends/family. For now, I can only manage short text messages, without either hurting my fingers or short-circuiting my dorky need for proper grammar. But I can do phone calls, and will do my best to keep on keeping on, when it comes to letting you know my changing numbers. Now: You can trace back through a few entries to do some simple math and find my current number; or you can just write and ask. And lo, thee shall be answered! And (even more lo), I really do sometimes answer the phone now!
*
On a last and (clearly!) urgent note: JAMES MARSTERS IS IN LOVE WITH ME! Okay, well: More specifically, he's a bit heartbroken, but ultimately wants to hold me and "take me there." Also, he understands the nature of my poor, poor misunderstood soul! And even that I come from the sea!
Look, listen, be amazed. (And pretty-please don't spit on my so-called fantasy; yes, yes, I already know the supp-ooosed true story behind this song.) The sound quality doesn't really do the song justice, but the c.d. it's on is much in this vein. Full of lovely, straightforward acoustics and lots of pretty angst. And lots of references to the ocean, which- well- you know me.
I could listen to that man segue from sexy laughter into the words: "Okay, I'll give you Robin", and then into strumming, a dozen times over and still be swooning. Fine, okay, maybe even panting just a bit. I may be drawn to women more often then men, but this rare specimen of a performer and person is among the definite exceptions.
Scarlet leaves. Dancing with hair in my face, red strands tangling in lip gloss as I laugh. Moments of true and utter swoon. The glow of blue bottles lined up along a window bright with day. My cat teaching herself bird-calls. Something about the simple, defining act of applying a stamp to an addressed postcard. A crush on the sound of a beautiful girls' laughter. Executing a near-perfect high-kick, even if nobody else was there to see. The intoxicating smell of organic granola, made from scratch, just out of the oven. The sound of conga drums waking me from a nap in the sun. Ohh, life's simple, sometimes silly details- seriously- what would we do without you?!
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| "I'm in a good mood today; I'm in a good place now. I've been all the way around & I've been... |
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| 10:24am 27/02/2009 |
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mood: How Can I Tell You, by music: Cat Stevens/ No Expectations by Chris Smither
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...all the way..." ((From "Good Things", Katie Sawicki))
If there have been many questions since returning to Portland, there have only been more answers, and more. If I've had a seizure (or nearly) while here, or been struck with a rush of moon blood that would often knock me down for days:
I've been able to walk and breathe with stunning ease; even to talk, interact, be touched, questioned, laughed with, teased. Looked after by kind older men with No Agenda Beyond Being Fatherly (see: this is another entry, entirely. I think somebody sent me an Angel from Texas, to remind me again again, that family goes so very far beyond blood.) While bleeding, I've been breathing- also able to be touched by beautiful women and men, with or without agendas- obvious or not- regardless, really. Lovely people, people with my trust unless they prove themselves wrong. (Raise your hand if that makes sense to you. True yeses his will be closely followed by a kiss!) Beautiful hearts; beautiful city; so then, what of my blood? What of the Ocean and Moon? Certainly, red-wild alive, it seems still to be spilling, yet somehow
I am dancing. I am free. More at home inside my body, with each passing day, than I have been in so very many years. This is beyond surgery; beyond pill bottles; these Truths exist at deeper altitudes than Western Medicine can so much as exist.
The attitude and Hope that I so much embody, but which can be a struggle to fully live out in other places: Here, I can. My hopes for this visit have been overcome by, instead, a journey- discoveries- possibility beyond what even I dared imagine. I can find echoed Hope in others without months of search and struggle; people I meet briefly or at length. Others for an hour; for a week; for infinity- time will tell, but time is not something I tend to trust as much as I do the heart. Maybe that's a bold statement, but more importantly, it's true.
Jeffrey McDaniel has said, and written, so many wise things that I sometimes quote them offhand, almost as if part of a conversation. Because that is much of his brilliance; of many truly brilliant writers' genius. I know more than a few fellow bibliophiles are reading this, and get that. But one thing he refers to is The Infamous Last Straw- and how rarely, if ever, do we think of That (tender, essential, aching for recognition) First Straw.
But if I think of my life's daily path- often in the back of my mind, but nonetheless, often- in terms of Spoons- then it's become almost inherent that I also try to see those first or potential first straws. They're not so obvious; often they lie in wait long before you've even met the person whose Spoons and Straws, whose mind and heart, you're interacting with. But they are there; search with hands, search with your eyes closed and mind open; look closer. Those first straws; those trip-wires that can lead to losing someone who only wants you to find them; they're everywhere. They're like Jeanette Winterson's "code only visible in certain lights", her words written on bodies. Her braille of skin-stories.
There have been many questions and answers alike, since arriving here; yes, whether amidst the madness and butterfly-boomeranging effect of wallet with numerous IDs/credentials being taken. Whether curled on the sidewalk with people between homes, sharing cough drops and spare change, smiling and passing on as much warmth as I can in those moments. Yes, whether in the arms of a beautiful human (dolphin? Unicorn...?) or wide-awake and giggling-bonding-nodding with adorable pixies. (And also, for those who may wonder; wide-awake these weeks, with no fatigue meds that charge by the microgram! Instead, here and now: Bits of guarana or herba mate, a few vitamins, organic green teas. Jasmine and mint. Sparkling pomegranates, fresh lemons.)
And it's clear, if not literal in the simplicity of how this may/will play out, that the answer? The answer (among many answers) is Portland. Is my heart-home. Is where, often, I ached to be, but only my body could truly give me the way back, the most honest map. The answer holds ways to save the daily losses of my parents, when all they want is to help me, and all I want is to accept that help while also letting our family thrive. Among this larger answer is the fact (the Truth) that I can live fully, and in transition between two cities, two states. Can find wellness therein. I can do that; I can see that clearly now, rather than just wish desperately for it to be true. From this West Coast, Left Coast, deeply-pulsing place: My green eyes widen all the more, they sharpen and hone in to details.
But, and yes again, here's a question for you*: Answer however you want; with your own questions, even, as I've been doing in these entries of late, possibly frustrating some of you, I realize. But trust me, yes? Follow my words, and you'll keep finding me- as I hope, always, to keep finding you. *So, with some explanation, my question of sorts:
There's a lot of mythos surrounding Unicorns. From the bare bones of Robert Graves' studies; which read somewhat like the bibles of Greek and Roman mythology; to many lush revisionist takes. The poetry of Eliot or Plath; the lush prose of Ms. Winterson, or the delightful Margaret Atwood. Francesca Lia Block is an obvious one, as is she who brought the world into a certain ickle Potter's reach. So, then:
When you pick and choose- what do you believe? What do you like best, or find the most poetry within? If not of unicorns, feel free (JAC! MIRANDA!) to speak of mermaids, sirens, and so forth. Though right now, especially pertaining to my experiences and how I'm writing about them as they happen, it's Pegasus and Unicorns that I'm exploring most. Okay, your turn!
*
This much, among much, I know is true to my heart, and to the pieces of writing I'm working on:
Unicorns are many now, and some can also exist underwater. But their many began with one- a She, Pegasus, and winged.
Their blood is close enough to Holy to call it just that; it has the ability to heal, give life. It can be taken, at horrible cost to whomever might steal such innocence. It can be given, an enormous and precious token of trust, of love.
They should not be penned in by others, not ever- but given free rein, may often choose to settle and rest at length. To nuzzle, exhale, shimmer beside or within you. Not unlike birds of many kinds, or even cats if you do the research; a Unicorn is never domesticated- unless it has been its' own choice. You might not see the difference at first, but it's a clear one, and there.
So, then: What of a Unicorn, just being berthed- or rather, just discovering its' true nature? What of a Unicorn falling in some sort of love? What of birds, cats, Unicorns- met- even intertwined? I know I may be making some of you want answers of your own, more than give answers back; particularly those of you who speak poetry-speak and/or know me well. But as many answers as I'm discovering, and in time will share, right now I bloom over with more questions by the hour.
It's near (or just after) lunch-hour for some of you East Coasters, and early for a lot of us. But I do wonder: Maybe, even, as much as you wonder how I've been these past two years, how I've grown and where I've journied- and I promise to spill more literals soon - I do wonder, as I have often over those same months and years- What You Think.
*
"I know people are afraid of story collections- they don't get the same respect as novels- but I don't understand why. Together, these stories say much more than they would apart. How They Met refers not only to the characters in the stories, but also to the stories themselves. Here they are, meeting for the first time. In the same way that paragraphs meet, and sentences meet, and words meet.
Enjoy the intersections." ((The fabulous D. Levithan, from the intro to How They Met, and other stories))
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| "Baby, one- two- three..." "Baby, FOUR, hellooo, open those doors?!" |
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| 05:03pm 24/02/2009 |
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mood: I'm on this list called Lucky, music: whenever I'm in reach of them.
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Hi. Hug. Hugs(sss, plural.) And:
1. Cell phone insanity; the temporary cure:
My phone is now officially a different, but very similar number. Because ahh yes, These Things Happen, right?! So my slowly disintegrating phone more-or-less cracked out entirely, about half a day after giving it to you guys. Also? Fuck it. Any sleaze who wants can meet me at work; in a bar; in a tea-house of Zendom Supreme, even- any sketched-out character who wants can also see me naked, and if they have so much as a tenth of the grey matter that You Guys do: Can find my contact info. So for those of you who've called or texted my own phone (now at rest, hopefully willing to offer her innards to insert into a new phone, at a later point!) or who've been trying/wanting to call: *Just go back to the locked entry of a few days ago. The number has most of the same digits- but the last four are not 6485 right now. Instead, it's 703. *** 6464. Dig? I hope.
(Due to the above insanity and when it happened, in specific, I would love all the more to hear the sweet & much-missed voices that were coming to me in a slow rush, a few days ago. I miss you just as much, if not more, if one considers that even possible or plausible!) I hunger for your voice inntonations, ladies, gentleman, and fabulous neither/others. And (gah!) again, apologize if you thought I was pulling a disappearing act on you- or doing so not on purpose, once more. It's very much the opposite, that I can assure.
2.) Follow me to the end of this Thank You, to find where the postcards of beauty (!!) come into play. There are a lot of wonderful people who read my words here, and even who've been checking back for the better part of two years now, to check in on this one small bird. Birds, then, brings us to Nest(s)! Many of you have also contributed to my Nest, which is still ever-growing in its' looovely layers of pillows and meanings- and which has also expanded to several nests in miniature, splayed across a bed and a few velvet matresses. My gratitude for those pillows; for whatever each person put into making/giving/finding/sending; is immense. Verging on boundless, even. So whether they came so quickly, it was like faerie-dust whiplash- or were picked out slowly over two years & over-nighted to arrive by my door, during a time so difficult that my arms ached from pushing through: I'm so very, very grateful.
Right now, what I have with me (along with a few handfuls of D.I.Y. goodies), and would love to send/give in some small token of return: Are two gorgeous postcard books, by two incredible, sometimes surreal, sometimes silly, Asian artists. So if you're long-"owed" a somewhat tangible Thank You- or if you'd simply like a postcard, really- poke me with a comment, however small. Let me know that an email is coming- which takes us right to...:
3.) GMAIL, and: Big Brother Who Smothers, MUCH?! I feel like much of the time, emails come through to me, but some still get tucked into Spam, or even just *poof* to some cyber nether-realm. Then, at other times, multiple emails just don't come through to me at all. This is especially frustrating, in regards to wishing to contact specific people in this Specific Now, and actually read the emails I know have been sent! I can laugh at it, to a point; but however deeply I've been able to breathe these days, it's getting tiresome, verging on frustrating. I haven't customized my account yet, aside from adding a lovely image by a favorite artist to my so-called profile; and briefly telling the G-sters of Mail that a couple non-profits/indie businesses were definitely Not Spam. It looks like I'm going to have to go through some absurd process, however, in order to actually get all (if not, say, even most!) of the mail folks do send me. Anyone wanna hold my hand through this process? Fuck, "I just want to hear your voice- I just want to say your name"...! The internet helps so much, at times; but often where it helps most, can also harm. Fun stuff, this oxymoronic technology!
And... 4.) Hi. A lot of you wrote words that quite literally brought me to happy, healing tears, when I returned to this community~space. A lot of you send out so much caring energy that I'm not even sure I entirely deserve. But I care for many who read my words; so I'm asking again- please- my last entry wasn't Robin Playing At Cryptic Poet. It wasn't about the one person who helped me to get the words out. It was direct, direct, direct. If you care about me so much, please care about you as well- and in turn, offer what you can (opinions, poems, links, stories, name it) in response to my last entry. As answer to whatever question you saw me pondering. As anything, really.
I know sometimes my writing comes across as fragments of larger pieces that I'm writing- & sometimes people send me lovely letters in response, far more than "just" a brief comment. But what I'm looking for here, really is some sort of dialogue. Even if what I last wrote here might seem, at least sort of, like cryptic poetry- I'd really love to hear. From you. To bounce your oft-brilliant words, in and around my head. To dialogue, fragmented or not, via livejournal. Copy? Roger? Yes? Maybe?!
...Okay.
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| "I don't wanna be a vapor of heavenly light, everyone try to guess if I'm an Angel or sprite- |
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| 09:47pm 23/02/2009 |
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mood: -I don't wanna be music: Another Mystery, oh no. So if you wanna see the world with me, let's go."
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If you (know who you are) saw me now, you would likely think that I was crying because- somehow- of something you did. Or said. Or did or said wrong. Even worse, to me at least, you might rush to that gut-twisting urge to apologize. When the truth is, my most overwhelming urge would be to thank you.
Sometimes I think (often I wonder): if the song a friend of mine wrote years ago; and which has led to much laughter, tearful-smiling nods, and a general sense of utter understanding; might best serve as the anthem for the oft-unspoken hearts of "our generation." By Our Generation, I mean something more like people who are currently in their teens, to people in their mid-to-late thirties.
Said song is so simple and amusingly circular in its' name, but attach it to my above words, even to your own experiences, and the word funny definitely takes on further connotations.
The song title, and recurrent lyric? Oh, but of course!, it's I'm Sorry I Say I'm Sorry So Much. (If said writer is reading this: Hi, M. I miss spilling gossipy truths under umbrellas with you. I miss you visiting me in Portland, happier and looser in your words, lanky body language unfolding with the days. You first found Sophie with me; she misses you too.)
But this song; this potentially oh-so tragic/self-deprecating anthem: Was written; and I say this with an arched eyebrow, and another but of course!; by a lone, lovely person. A bundle of Truths tucked beneath quick wit and flaming mannerisms; a banter-bot with their tender-heart, bruised but bared, tucked so clearly (just LOOK A LITTLE CLOSER, seriously!) beneath their left arm.
It was performed in our College coffeehouse, though maybe all the more appropriately, our itsy-bitsy teahouse; the little glass building turned Legend, after housing Joseph Campbell in his many years there. Performed collectively, by a motley crue of laughing Sarah Lawrence students, tucked into their ironic thirftstore-wear and striped scarves- Casio keyboard and mandolin optional, but often included. The reedy reach of a solo vocal, high-thrown and soft.
(If you listen to a lot of what calls itself Emo, and know even a little bit about the much larger range of Indie music that came before, and continues to grow after Emo created itself: you're most likely following.)
But see, if You of recent hours past were to read this: I'm also remembering so many (too many?) other things. Words written to me only a day or three ago; songs sung to me entire continents and years ago. A brief, absurd attempt to be involved with a woman who considered herself Healed and Sane, Sign Sealed Deliver!, but couldn't see the inherent irony in making such absolute statements. And far more, yes and yes yes- yes- a dozen upon two dozen upon a dozen more: Memories of tear-tracks that I was or wasn't allowed to see. That fell hard and rich, or couldn't allow themselves to fall at all. That I kissed clean, salty-tracked and all, before kissing cheeks, noses, foreheads, lips. Tears (internal or external) that we cried together, rocking some self-discovered lullaby rhythm. Catching each other long before the fall might come- so then at once, in the midst of falling.
Because, yes: Ani, as often, you win this lyrical round: You can't fight gravity on a planet that insists/ that love is like falling/ and falling is like this. It's like This.
I'm reacting with oxygen, heart, words: To a single conversation with a unique creature, with his own stories and scars to tell, his own journies made and to make. A person whom, however deeply they may or may not imprint me in the long-turn of it all; is amazing, is Now, is at the true heart of these moments. These are words I began writing, after first sitting in front of my door; lotus-curled and breathing, flooded with the soft intensity of one persons' words. Their echoes, their footprints across my own journey- however light, however unintentional in the overlap.
Me, in front of my door: Surrounded-safe by two piles of books (new and old, bought and given.) By a bag brimming over with tea, with vegan cookies, with herbs, postcards to send and numbers to call, new journals to spill myself across in what times may follow. Me, hair some jumble of deep reds and orange-pinks, layers past my shoulders by now: Draped in deep blue satin that just hangs at my hips by some invisible thread these days; black mesh and purple cotton layered beneath. And oh, lovely: Curled like its' own soft animal beside me: A new coat of rose-pink velvet with silver-gold threaded across its' soft surface; a rare vintage find which I found before it was even on the thrifstore floor; stumbled smack into, so it seemed.
I was unfolding myself from the way that last evening evolved from our banter-littered conversations into something much more on the metaphorical flip-side. More like deep, soul-puzzle-pieced conversation, scattered with laughter and grade-school outburts, Daft Punk and brief technicolor visuals.
So when I uncurled from my (apparently unconscious lotus position;) since it's how I often- just- fall into place, but My Mother The Yoga Master calls an enviously good lotus pose: When I moved into the high-ceilinged breadth of this room, and then curled into downy pillows and blankets, white on white on pink on white, green eyes wide still:
That was when I could begin to cry. Softly at first, like some gentle instrumental build-up into the next moment. Then it was me, allowing the thick rocks of memory and overlap and Now This Now to come free. To sob my own soft animal heart free, where I hoped you couldn't see or hear. Where I knew only too well how much of your first move (if not your emotional Truth, or gut instinct) would be to apologize for yourself. And that's the opposite of what I would want- and yes, too- of what I would need to hear.
Because I remember K. and I joking about Apology Diets; her admirable attempts, my sad laughter at brilliant Hope mixing with societal infliction.
I remember Debra, my Movement Teacher, closer to me than many friends during that dark, cold Year of Boston - speaking to us of how much our bodies, themselves, apologize. How even moving out and about in the world, riding the T., interacting with others: So often, so many of us, are unconsciously apologizing for simply Taking Up Space.
And the teacher before her; who brought my vocal chords to decibels I'd previously never known; who taught theatre while also giving us social-psych studies to read. About babies throats; the screams they burst into the world with; the thousands upon thousands of subtle and un-subtle messages that cause so many voices to revert to a point where they can cover barely a tenth of the ground that a newborn child does freely. Often, even, does first. (When my Daughter's born, I'll tell her to scream, and to never stop screaming. Fucking THANK YOU, Nicole Blackman!)
I rememember recent letters, apologies tumbling over apologies- all of which felt the need to be spoken, so I'm glad they were. But nearly all, also un-needed or unnecessary; circumstantial, the twisting guts of self-blame, of guilt in reverse.
The generations of which I speak- they may get a bad rap in many ways. But they (we) don't deserve all this inherited blame and guilt- at the very least, not without more people who can help those who need to translate their shame into Truths. Their hiding into finding. Their pain into Hope.
I don't want our tragic/supposedly ironic anthem to be my friends' Apology Song; I don't want it to be Aimee Mann's lush lyrical pain about freaks who believe they can never love anyone; nor, at least please, not in entirety; do I want it to be the brilliance of Jeff Buckley's Cold and Broken Hallelujah. I want to stand fiercely by other words, other songs; by lyrics and images and people; that as helpless as they may seem, contain some certain if quiet determination. Some fierce Hope still in the mix of it all.
I know you follow where my words are taking this- too many of you, as well as (in whatever ways this reaches you) the You who helped bring these words bubbling out of me. I hate that so many of you do follow me, but I also-
find some measure of Faith, and then, yes- Hope, in the fact that so many of you follow me, but do so with self-awareness. With a caring that takes yourself into account, when considering kindness. When considering "some measure of human frailty."
I could read books, I could find thousands of quotes to speak back to me of this. But I'm asking you to respond- you, friends, lovers, you whom I trust with as much of my heart as I can. When I can. Which is stunningly often, in a rare number of instances, considering the rare beings that often find themselves at this journal.
So tell me, then- tell me your take, read me back your own quotes, tell me some story of your own that relates- Please. Why for you; why for Us- why does Love as a cold and broken Hallelujah ring so deeply true with so many people in these worlds and ages, even these specific realms of specific souls, of which I speak?
I'm asking with my hands up, child vulnerable and child-curious- so answer only if you want, only how you can. I'm asking everything, some might say- yet also, only
Why?
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| "So many signs, I quit counting; sleepless and [unabashed] about the way that I feel..." |
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| 04:46pm 21/02/2009 |
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mood: breathing you in breathing music: me in breathing this beautiful breath, our beautiful breaths
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At first, some cluster of days ago, I imagined that this entry might be a list:
A lists of signs, symbols, energies, circles and re-circling;
so many signs, from the blatantly literal, to the those that many might call "medically impossible";
seemingly all pointing me in one pure and fluid direction. Person; persons; place... energy, empathy, Me.
And now? I still want to write some sort of list here; some sort of question that already feels as if it's being answered in numerous and increasingly clear ways:
From the touch of a hand, the echoing of Jeanette Winterson quotes, time and time again- (somehow) narrowed into something like specifics. To the trust given so freely by a single father and his daughter; the stunning brevity of connection found in a Rite Aide aisle with a lovely trans woman; the overlaps that continue to overlap and overlap, ad infinitum, like some ever-growing piece of woven poetry.
The sharing of the backs of books. The giving of Trust with the bodys' back, of its' softest skins.
And this literal skin transition, marked clearly across my face: The slight furrow between my brows, at times gently massaged and whispered to by concerned lovers; this mark which is both the result of journeys through worry and stress, and through solitude and thought- at times seems almost erased here. Replaced, instead, by slight smile-lines which form and reform, so it seems, from each passing through a realm of sleep, and again into wakefulness. Whether floating and cuddling, or spinning in circles across lobby floors; the mind-body connection there seems to realign itself daily. Breath-takingly... taking me.
What started as letters and lists, so it seemed, then felt more like a piece of memoir- and now it feels like it's turning into a novella, a novel, a nameless creation- of which I'm experiencing so much-
and then in doubletime mellowed, so much again (so much synchronicity) that
not because I'm ill, but far more because of the absurdly beautiful, impossibly Possible opposite:
The drafts of this piece are now being written across my skin; on bits of napkins, dashed into and within computer fragments; Sharpie-slanted across
the backs of used envelopes. And even now, as I smile-soft and think of urgent napkin poems, I can only keep smiling- because what might elsewhere be urgency in a frightening sense-
Here
is gently, slowly, deeply inhaled. Here being, yes- both the utmost of literals
and the place, the pace, this pearl of a city; and at once, this rare and fluid solidity of Where I now find myself.
*
I want to; and probably will; post my best effort at gathering a cluster of these literal and subtle signs- these, to my heart, all translating so clearly that it might frighten me. But it's simply too stunning, too striking to scare; all, all of it.
**Because I do, really truly, want the wise-poetic take (metaphorical, literal, or an intermesh of both) that so many of you might have on this - situation?- no, just- on All Of This.
I've often felt, if never experienced to such a staggering extent: Even when the worst seems to come into play, the Butterfly Effect of chaos can lead to the most simple yet layered understanding. Can guide you, in bits and in timeless oceans of hours alike; to clarity, to goodness personified. To gut-Truths. Your core.
*
Speaking of magic- of Portlands' curiously rare brew; and of those precious Yous who read this, whether quiet or with extensive response:
Star. (Ok, fine, Stacey- but really, come now-) STAR. And Angie. Angie of SKY: I miss you; this much, I've always held out Hope to the point of Faith, you know and have known. I think at least one of you isn't in PDX right now. Regardless: I always, always knew-
-these lyrics which were kept so long (where I'd scrawled them, late for a flight, onto your wall) after a Portland visit, after my body felt it had no choice but to leave Us-
I'm quite sure that we'll find one another / in a place that's better than this / a time filled with us; [a place unimaginable then, but which feels like Now, only countless times more amazing than even I, especially then, dared dream...] /and we'll send up our shooting stars and comets..."
And so forth. Into our potential futures; the paths of those Nows we may find; the potential infinities we may even now be discovering our way into. Our ways closer to each other again, at last. And true.
Angie. Angie-Sky. Angie, tangled in your dreadlocks, but peeking out with wide-seeing eyes. Angie Sky-Watcher; You.
Even the segue from name to name is curious, is lovely; is Sky and Star, both in my hearts, both dancing free:
Star. Stargirl, whom I met when her dancing couldn't fully be captured even though we both felt it, saw it, dreamed it- Star who once called me her "spirit animal", bringing tears to my wide-blinking cat eyes. Star, whom I flew not away from, but I knew somewhere and somehow (always deep-down) would fly back to. Stargirl whom I kept always near; saw in night-skies so often, your energies in canpoies of constellations above me, soothing my missing, closing the miles even as the stars seemed to widen. To both of you; such distinctly individual and rare women; if you can, if you're able; come out, come out...
...wherever you are.
My breath (my Heart) holds long-contained messages to exhale into yours- my skin, my mind, All of Me has long kept these words in body-memory, in breath-translations- for both of you. Oh, Love; Oh, loves...
Ohh, ohhhh, oh Portland!
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| "Let your love cover me/like a pair of angels' wings- |
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| 04:06am 17/02/2009 |
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mood: for what you think is real; music: for what you think is right.
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- you are my Family.
You are my Family."
*
As is my ever-more surprising and amazing Mother. (Whom I prefer to call Super-Mum.)
Which relates to each and every one of you reading this, because she sent me this: http://www.jacquielawson.com/viewcard.asp?code=1768566764632&source=jl999
and really,
While it's meant for me, I think it's meant for each of you as well.
Cheeseball Literati, over and out,
Bird
*
"The windows of my soul
are made of one-way glass
don't bother looking into my eyes
if there's something you want to know,
just ask
I got a dead bolt stroll
where I'm going is clear
I won't wait for you to wonder
I'll just tell you why I'm here
cuz I know the biggest crime
is just to throw up your hands, say
this has nothing to do with me
I just want to live as comfortably as I can
you got to look outside your eyes
you got to think outside your brain
you got to walk outside your life
to where the neighborhood changes
...You know I think that it's absurd
that you think I am the derelict daughter
I fight fire with words
words are hotter than flames
words are wetter than water
I got friends all over this country
I got friends in other countries too
I got friends I haven't met yet
I got friends I never knew
I got lovers whose eyes
I've only seen at a glance
I got strangers for great grandchildren
I got strangers for ancestors
I was a long time coming
I'll be a long time gone
you've got your whole life to do something
and that's not very long"
...
((a. difranco))
*
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| Actual and literalist contact information! A stunning feat for me, it's true. |
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| 08:17am 16/02/2009 |
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mood: we'll cut our bodies free music: from the tethers of this scene; start a brand new colony...
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Since my words are more-or-less swingdancing across the screen, to be writing here again with all of you: And since a certain girl named Alisha should have my rushed attempt at a mini-tribute as public as possible (and alas, I lack access to billboards at the moment!):
Here's an unlocked version, slightly altered, of my entry with current contact info. If for whatever reason you can't read my locked posts, just comment here or email me for the numerical details. Cool? Cool.
Phone: 703. *** ****
(Currently with a rather effusive message of Lurve to PDX & the Love- the Yous- which it contains.)
Email: PhotoLuminesce [at] G [mail] dot [com]
Hotel/Hotel Phone: 503. ***. **** (This just looks silly; but hey, I've always loved most anything to do with stars, right?!)
Because so much of this hotel is like discovering a Francesca Lia Block realm translated into reality, most people here call me Bird. Which makes me at least quirk a slight smile, each time.
But as they're clearly not idiots, knowing me by Bird and asking for Robin Kinzer is likely the smoothest way to reach my room in a techno-sparkle of seconds.
You could also just ask for "Robin Kinzer", yet because this is Portland-beautiful-Portland, with all the more magic in the mix- it would depend on whom you're speaking with which clicked with them more quickly. Many call me Bird & have offered amazing things (from books to natural medicines), during the time I was essentially tied to their Velvetine Lobby by an umbilical cord.
**As my wallet- with both my IDs, various therapeutic/med-training credential cards, "proof" of disability (ew, that phrase), and all of my own doctor's cards (etc.) was stolen shortly after I arrived. Shortly after I first wrote here, which would be the most blatant way to explain why I bounced into technicolor presence & then seemed (keyword: seemed) to slip back through one of countless potential cracks. (That fun- by which of course, I mean insulting- contradiction to Portland's quirky grace is a long story, and a ridiculous one. But if one wonders whether the person/s who took said wallet were locals or even approximations of such, the answer would definitely be an enormous NO.)
This was mostly written a week ago (consider that a month, in regards to the typewriter who lives in my brain) so I need to post it shortly.
But there is also this, to be edited quickly, and so very essential to say:
After what's somehow been three years in physical (and on-off phone/computer) isolation from all of you, with a small handful of gorgeous and breath-giving exceptions, to be detailed later:
This little bird, formerly known to cower from cell phones: Freely (even please-pleasingly!) invites you to inundate me with your calls, your voices, your words. My hands eventually hurt from the insane attempt to text message in my own voice- which is how I write, which is who I am. Which many of you... well, know. So until I have a more hand-friendly phone, I should mostly only do short text messages, as they're eventually counter-productive in regards to the concept of time and energy.
Which so many of you get. Which is precious.
Which is also very much a rare soul called Alisha:
"My beautiful friend; you opened up your heart and let me in..." You made (no- you let) my heart soar & ache simultaneously with your overwhelming determination to make sure I was okay. That I was there, breathing laughing crying living. I'm SO (so so so) happy to the point of overboard, that you found my new email address just a bit of time before I could find you again. Read: Happy enough to unabashedly dig into my savings, and totally fly you out to this lovely hotel, particularly to hug you for hours on end. (Okay, well, maybe also to take photos of your smile and sly curves draped in glowing fabrics, dancing about you and bending close, using the most fantastic of my new light gadgets to further highlight your outer-inner-outer beauty.)
And now, I must venture into the amusingly early hour of 6:30 p.m., (in regards to downtown Portland's heavy sleep schedule) to grab some vitamins, Sharpies, and SmartWater from the nearest Rite Aide. Trust that this time, barring freak accidents that verge on the impossible, I'll be back far sooner than last. Love.
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| Portland!* Me!** |
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| 05:46pm 07/02/2009 |
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mood: I want life in every word music: to the extent that it's absurd.
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Here.
2-3 weeks, and then pretty much directly into the next stage of Chronic Lyme treatment. Which in the extreme could mean I don't (at least from this realm of consciousness) see Portland again; but in my determined, swollen, hope-pumping heart may (may may maybe) allow me to return by Spring/Summer. But details like that are for the next entry; moving on!
Location: Pretty much in the heart of Portland's humble gay district. Lovely boutique hotel which feels like something out of Francesca Lia Blocks' novels. Only (to my distinct dissapointment) with no mermaid sightings as of yet. A few blocks from The Roxy, ditto to Whole Foods.
Gorgeous photo-shoot/portraiture inspirations at every turn of the head. Wow and wow.
*On second thought, for those of you who scroll through massive amounts of journals, and have begun to theorize that I'm vaporized or hospitalized again: Let's try this: PORTLAND! PDX! BEANTOWN! CITY OF ROSES! PUDDLEVILLE! CITY THAT SLEEPS (EVEN WHEN YOU DON'T!) And we mustn't forget; WEST COAST PIN-UP GIRLS REPRESENT!
Okay (aaand exhale.) That's perhaps better, in terms of
how many people I adore that don't even know I'm here yet;
having not posted here (or essentially on all online forums) in what's leaning toward two years, with a scattering of exceptions and a month with Miranda;
and a general attempt to get Your attention in this wild, wide tangling of web.
Those are also all the nicknames I can currently think of, which people (from tourist or vintage local) sometimes use when discussing Portland. Oh- and a bonus reference to the Infamous Five Girl WEST COOOOAST!Photo-Shoot. Which it's likely only a cluster of people will fully understand. But an important cluster!)
**And to add some extra punch to my tacky bold, cap-locked text: ME! BIRD. ROBIN. MUFFIN-FLUFF. PINK...(oh wow)...-FILL-IN-THE-BLANK! PREVIOUSLY EMAILED VIA AOL [at] CARROTYUM and/or THATBIRDSNEST:
Recently (and yes; feel free to sing along with me) finally changed to PHOTOLUMINESCE [AT] G [MAIL].
Okay, honestly? This is a lovely truth; but if I list all the combinations of PINK/BIRD/ROBIN/CAT/MUFFIN/ GROBLIN/LITTLE/ICKLE-BABY-HONEY-DARLIN'-etcetera that've been sweetly attached to me by a crazy array of Beautiful Yous:
It'll defeat the entire purpose of this being the brief (turned not-quite-brief) entry, which is mostly just to let you know I'm here.
Shortly to be followed by a tiny locked post with phone numbers and such, and then an un-locked one with at least a bit of fleshing out. Especially as I know that some of you were worried I wasn't even alive anymore. Which, to say the absolute and utter least: I feel terrible about. For near-countless reasons: But all the worry, all the confusion and/or misunderstandings, and definitely all of the Missing Kissing Missing: Is enough cause for concern, again to say the least.
To the extent, even, that I'm getting a BlackBerry-esque contraption to replace my increasingly quirky cell-phone and going on a monthly payment plan for a mini-computer that'll make a million ways of getting in touch- whether for a sentence of reassurance, or to arrange a visit- much, much easier.
So, we can all now laugh a lot: Considering the above was that was the first installment of the staggeringly literary and stunningly nuanced effort which I've been trying to both logically and empathetically piece together for two weeks now. (Ahh! Actually, closer to three.)
(Picture: A Bird at her lap-top,
curled into massive antique velvet chair,
thinking about love; cuddling; healthcare; neuro-science; limitations, expectations, and amazing exceptions. And a thousand stories untold in the past two rollercoaster ride years of her life. More than half of which are actually not related to health issues. She is, has been, you name it:
Attempting, with some semblance of grace, to piece together an entry that's both empathic and logical, and includes an even semi-fluid explanation of a massive jumble of Hows and Whys.
Add to the mix two purring and attention-hungry cats, then continue:
Said Bird has been absent for eighteen months, give-or-take, from essentially all online forums- and is only just making a wary peace with cell-phone culture. (It's true! Amazing, right?)
and
Is now, finally finally finally, able to come to PDX for the first time in nearly three years
(the last time having been a total medical/personal/you-name-it mess, which we'll save for the next post)
and
This finally-breathless-finally visit could only happen if it was last-minute (or very close.)
You begin to get the idea, I'm guessing. So, right now I need a doctor-ordered rest (translation: bookworm time) and then I'll return with contact info galore. Oh- and even a handful of (gasp) non-cryptic specifics!
I know, I know! My unique prose-poetry style is just sooo impressive in this post! Delicately nuanced and just-so in terms of flow and balance! Oh wow, and just so deeply infused with sarcasm and wit, while also maintaining total logic and intelligence, right?!! I mean, as a writer; ya just know you've hit that elusive mark when you're going in for lots of bold text, a surplus of exclamation marks, etc. etc. et alia. It totally blows you away, right? Okay, wrong, and probably enough self mockery for now:
In actual fact, that was the precursor to an actual entry that I've managed to piece together, for the most part. Which has bits and bobbles of everything from really basic updates regarding my health/doctor status, ethical views and personal choices that have shifted over the past 2-3 years, and how curiously different I seem to look lately! (The rumour is true- I have been seen wearing pants. Albeit, tight vinyl pants- but still- if you've known me for even a few years, you know that's quite a change!)
So since seeing as many of You You You while here, as possible- while maintaining balance and sanity- is my goal: I will now brave the literary mockery, and face down the Obsessive Editrix inside of me. And post this.
But first (or last, depending on your take) did I mention?:
"You were with me; yeah, you were with me
All the time."
I hope that at least a handful of you felt my tumbles, surges, soulgasms, and lullabies of love-energy, radiating across the country. Whether in dreamstate or waking: I've definitely kept each of you close. And it's probably been more helpful than any herb, pill, or yoga technique I could name, when you attempt the (impossible act) of an emotional total. Thank you.
Always,
R.
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| "...and dreamed of all the different ways i had to make her glow." |
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| 07:35pm 19/10/2007 |
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mood: heart unfurling; music: i wake into this.
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I woke this morning, still half-inside of a beautiful dream world. Images of familiar faces and dancing, glittered bodies - fluttering at the edges of my consciousness. You were there – and you, and you. Stretching cat-like then curling into myself, orange blanket up to my chin – I remember this, a brief moment of near-consciousness – then my eyes falling closed again. Drifting for another twenty minutes. Oh!
Everything was actually - was truly - glittering. At edges and corners; blurs of twinkle in sync with bodies in motion. Then too, I could see emotions glowing from beneath your skin, slight but vibrant shiftings of blue, of gold, of orange.
We were in some hauntingly beautiful place without a name or fixed place in time – a twirling, singing Dancing World. And when I say you were there, I mean you were - some details lost to waking, but at each corner I turned, another face. This strange and dancing Utopia: Full of women I love, twining and writhing and leaning into one another. The women I miss; strong women, queer women, pixie women; those I long for brought to me in the rarest, sweetest gift of sleep.
Some people were just out-of-focus - so much movement and color at every turn - but the feeling of presence, your presence, was there. But some: Some of your faces, graceful and light-infused, came close enough to touch. Came close and still for a moment; or pressed close, swirling in rainbow-trails around me. (Much of this may sound sexual, but that wasn't what it felt like within the dream. Surreal and sensual, yes - but not lust so much as an embodiment of connection, of shared color and light.)
Miranda, you were there. Never more alive, moving with your feline-faerie grace. (I must have carried you with me to sleep - your letter in the mail last night, a white sprinkling of pixie dust falling from its’ folds. I fell asleep with that same letter beside my pillow; the tiny photo frames of you with purple and red hair; with sultry pout, with silly grin. Smiling as my face hit the pillows, I’d just tucked a response to you in the mail - a postcard meant for dawn’s first post, but somehow we met in the middle of those miles and dimensions.)
Two Katies were there, each from Portland. Hips and belly buttons, the flash of a pierced navel - the passing flare of warm touch as they dance with shoulders tipped back – shimmy to shimmer, laughing aloud. And if there was dancing, there was - will always be - Eve. How I've missed you. Those famous hips that know mine so well; yours a bit more narrow, mine meeting them in the hipbone press of trust, of dance. Twined in blue lights or beneath yellow parasols, lounging in red velvet as you set fire to the grey view of Seattle behind us; whatever this Dancing Dream World is, you and I have been places like it before. And now she's swaying those hips in the low-ride of vintage lingerie: I see her dancing in the corner of my eyes, traces of glitter and spark. See her happy and free as she moves - as it's always been - the movement taking her up, up, away.
Another Portland girl; a name I only whisper to myself now; she was there. (Until the countless letters traced into my skin can turn towards paper, can be more of what she deserves – I only whisper of her, step painstakingly lightly.) But she was there. All honey sass and sensuous, sun-touched, dripping her cords of gold across my cheeks.
A host of New York’s stars and satellites; the city's most stunning women, now and ever! Your bodies warm and twining around one other. I recognize the luminescent freckling of a back, the flash of caramel arms in motion; here, a necklace that I gave you; here, a tattoo that I traced into my memory. Each of you smiling at me and at each other – sly, soft - as if it's the curve of your smile that holds the world’s greatest secret.
A lithe and graceful Cricket a few steps away; spinning me closer, closer to her rays of color and hope. A Certain Sparkle of an Alexandria Girl I’ve yet to meet; her image was slightly blurred as she danced, still to be brought into full focus. But she was there with us - dancing, glowing. (Sick this week, stopped in the midst of making plans, I shied away slightly. Dream tells me not to waste time with such silly things; Dream presses at my heart, touches at the core of giddiness.) I wake again. Warm through.
P.S.: In case you recently left a message here, or called and left one: I’m just now catching up with a bundle from days recently past. I’ve been sick, not so much with "typical" symptoms, as primarily drained from a medicine shift (with a side-order of unrelated sharp pain.) I'm titrating slowly from one prescription to another - for the second time in three weeks, more slowly this time, moving with exhausting caution. My family returned just as I began this process - so there's been exhaustion, readjustment, the minor drama of major change in the making - but I’m here. And lucky just now: dreaming of you.
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| "with whom to dance, with whom to dance...?" |
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| 01:47am 10/10/2007 |
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mood: and you, you look like heaven: music: seven hundred & seventy-seven times lovelier than anything i've ever seen.
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Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment
when, for one moment, nothing happens
no what-have-I-to-do-today-list -- for maybe
half a minute, the rush of traffic stops.
The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be
slows to silence.
(( marie howe))
*
I duck between familiar stones and footholds; memory keeps half a step ahead of my bare feet. I'm looking for my cat, her unmistakable reds and whites against the dark green night. (In a burst of empathy for such mewling sunshine-hunger, I let her out today, but remembering the fox we've seen skulking past sundown. Then distracted, in a haze of research and reading, I forgot until the moon's first peek.) Just a jolt of fear, though, of guilt - she came to me, scrambling like the tiniest and greenest-eyed terrier the world has known. Sated and preening: Ready to lap at my nose, forehead, cheeks; nip at tuna treats splayed across the floor; bathe her sister's tail.
Splitting open a bag of organic carrots, miniature handfuls spilling from the bag - I watch the way their pulsating orange folds around the bruised red curves of grocery grapes. The seeming compromise as they settle into one another - almost as if making room, sheltering one to the other - vivid flashes of color and curve. Contrast.
A letter from a new address meets me in the hallway, head-on, the loop of welcoming script. Lotus position on the floor, sorting post into piles, then subsets of piles. A brilliant blue envelope, tenderly opened - looking close I can see the careful details - the vulnerable precision of details down to the placement of stamps. Maybe I dramatize - maybe it's the sun and how it streams, or the ease of my limbs this afternoon - still, it's like unwrapping those quietest layers of a mystery. It's a riddle still to be asked yet alone answered - the barely visible gleam that radiates from these packages, these letters - kissing our palms. A woman not so far from British Columbia, and the envelope truly does contain pieces of some poem or puzzle or both: A grocery receipt for hummus, tofu, Thai salad. A sliver of map where the envelope opens - I can't presume to decipher. A story she tells; images of art she chooses to share. This is just what I effuse about, you see? The presence of a story, alive and resting in your palms. Each bit of poetry, just as much a puzzle piece; personality sound-bites, a syllable or three of secret desire, or maybe just the bluntly obvious of this paragraph, of that. This is the elusive magic that I speak of - here - holding the bright blue of her envelope to my chest. Sitting quietly on the floor, feeling our wonder brush against each other somewhere between Calgary and D.C.
A package to unfold, next - coin-sized discs of color made to fit a larger palette. I run the fiercely-just-so crimson lipstick (not too red, not too brown, pure sultry in one stroke) across the back of my hand. Beside it, careful streaks of silver-sheened lilac; a shimmering moss, duo-chromed. On the pale palette of my hands alone, the colors dance, they dance.
I'm looking for somebody with whom to dance. With whom to dance, with whom to dance...
My sister and I at three a.m., on her last night at home: Halfway through the season of Buffy we were watching: K.'s flight was in a dozen hours with a long trip to the airport first. But she was firmly (if yawningly) determined to figure out at least a few more plot twists. Wide-awake and laughing one moment - and then - I giggled, but it was a moment of such perfect stillness. Looking up to mention something to her; finding her mouth slightly ajar, her face nestled into the couch pillows. My older sister: Completely zonked, face glowing faintly in the lamplight's flicker. Her sleep, once she's out, so sound and complete that she didn't hear the sudden teenage shrieks or bizarre battle cries from the screen. Didn't even jolt slightly in recognition. It's rare to catch anyone in a moment like that, but somehow, especially her. Guard down, jaw slack, each separate freckle luminous in the flush of lamplight on skin. Smiling slightly, peaceful; I can't help but wonder what she's dreaming. Although I often feel protective of her - as much maternal as the goofy little sister - she's tough in her particular way. Part defense and wit, part certainty and wisdom. She doesn't stop me from feeling protective, there's just not often room for me to really say or act it. It's amazing to watch her, vulnerable and beautiful like this, resting - her safekeeper, at least for those twenty minutes.
(I sometimes think it was Meena who, with her Southern-meets-Iranian-meets-Hippie sass, her journals listing every boy she'd ever kissed and when - and later, those half-sly, half-innocent come-hither eyes, her beauty bursting where before it bloomed - was the first Beautiful Girl (tm) to really touch my life. And that Angel was the first I could fully acknowledge as such; aloud and with touch, with teenage poetry, the necessity of angst, gravity-defying hugs in matching velvet coats on train platforms. Long-distance tears and the ecstasy of confession.
But really, it was my sister. She was the first. Whether I was six and refusing to order dinner at restaurants until she did, so I could follow in suit; or fourteen, furious and cryptic, but still she was the only one who saw enough to plead, vegetarian subs in tow, when I stopped eating. Whether we were both crash-coursing our way into adulthood, or in fact still are: There's no way around the way a story really begins. She's entirely different than what came after, but nonetheless she came before. Her beauty was the first to entirely captivate me - breathless, foolish, for the first time too entranced to care how silly I might look.)
*
Six more days now of this place to myself; the particular quiet green, the air bursting with excess oxygen. A doctor's appointment or two; a one-night sparkle-fest with my favorite muppet-minded girl. But these last days are still mostly open. The truth is that I'm happy - but I'm also lonely right now. In a way I've never completely known before. A way that so much of this year, in turn, brought to me, and also taught me to move through. I know part of this is because I'm afraid of what the treatment ahead may hold; petrified to have to disappear again when I'm so happy to be present now; here, with you, in whatever shades I'm able. But it's also stuff that was there sooner; these new angles and textures of loneliness, new twists and aches. I crave touch, sometimes so much that it hurts; crave the freedom to follow these desires more freely; wish you here with me instead. I crave the shared fullness of quiet understanding. Hours listening to music, bumping hips and maybe noses, sharing stories between songs.
And then, I crave spinning and twirling and colors; the vibrance of my kaleidoscope of images brought to life again; but new, different. Becoming. I crave, dream, reach - for people who share those shimmers and sparkles that dance through my mind - to plunge into the lights, the angles, the humanity of their translation. It's such an incredible and particular magic; bringing rainbows into form. Technicolor dreams spilled open.
I more-or-less guessed that my last-minute invitation would mean most folks couldn't actually make it here. Still, a lovely handful of you were so excited, as if dreaming with rationale might be possible. And just in case: I might not have made this clear enough, particularly since I'm someone who often doesn't like the phone at all: But I'm really not checking my email right now. At all. I'm still working my way back (slowly but slowly) into the tangled world of wide web. For now, it's post offices and real voices for me - and of course real faces, laughter reverberating through shared air, whenever possible!
Regardless: You're welcome to be here with me - you're wanted - in this last week of wood-sweet and sun-scattered sweetness. The handful of days just ahead lean into me eagerly, and I lean hopefully back - wondering, whispering - Where are you? And would you, indeed, like this dance?
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| "not so i feel like she's with me; just like always remembering that she's not." |
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| 10:54pm 02/10/2007 |
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mood: breathless music: blinding
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Sometimes
I forget.
Or maybe it's not that I forget, but that for a period of time - a week, a month, three - I become wrapped up in life's twisting turns, enough that it slips from the focus of my mind for awhile.
After all, so much of living, of pushing through, of finding those places where you can celebrate and thrive when you live with chronic illness: is, will always be, in the details. Those smallest things; slant of light, strangers' smiling eyes in passing, wind tousling hair as you lean into the sun.
And so sometimes, caught up almost by necessity - those thousand little things, details lovely and not, forming a bridge away from the black hole of this one enormous thing - I forget.
I forget how for so long, and in so many ways, what I wanted more than anything in life - on a level that's beyond and somehow to the side of anything else - was to be a mother. To have a baby, or to adopt - whether or not my body was able to give birth, or able instead to nourish in every moment after birth. Just that singular and luminous hope, even when the odds were already halfway stacked against it, took up so much space in my heart.
When something that important slips from your mind's focus, it never really stays gone too long. That would be too much like forgetting what runs through your veins, or that some vital organ or another exists in you. And when it returns, it tends to hit you flat in the face like the grill of an oncoming Mack truck.
Which is what happened tonight as I watched a story unfold on my screen. I didn't see it coming - you rarely do, not in full-focus - although it was a story about babies and birth. About illness, sacrifice. The impossible odds of certain balancing acts.
From zero to a hundred in five seconds: Sobbing so hard that I could barely breathe. (What happens to the rest of something when you smash its' heart?)
There are some things that you will simply never stop wanting. No matter how much your life, your abilities, or even your biological make-up changes.
And it's those things, those rarest and raw desires, that will continually sneak up on you when you're least expecting it - reach into your chest cavity, and temporarily squeeze your heart into a breathless and absolutely blinding pain.
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| "if you were a mermaid, you said - if you were a mermaid, i was the sea." |
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| 04:28pm 29/09/2007 |
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mood: the music was sweet music: and sad, like rain and trains and leaves in wind.
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For the next two and a half weeks - aside from a short visit from the superheroine sister - it will be just me and the kitties in the quiet grace of this house.
I'd wanted to post some sort of announcement or invitation sooner, but couldn't - which now adds up to didn't. Nonetheless, here I am now, hoping it's not altogether too late:
There are so many lovely folks that I've had plans with - hoping and halfling-plans, fledgling plans - over the past year. And though I may not be well enough now to fly across the country or take a road-trip together, I am well enough to welcome you into my home and eager arms. (So many of you are far away - but now as ever, I'll do what I can to help, if you might be able to travel on such short notice.)
I would love, so much, to see your faces. Consider yourselves, open-ended and open-armed, invited.
And yes - also as we've discussed and dreamed, as you or I have asked - for anyone who's interested, I would love to take pictures of you.
Not pictures with nudity as the focus, like much of my past work. But moving, as I've been planning to for some time, into new realms and layers of portraiture. Closer to the fantastical; to the glittering faerie worlds that people often mention sensing, seeing the peeking shadows of, in my work.
In the past year, my imagination blooming with ideas, I've dreamed and practiced, practiced and dreamed. (So often unable to see, in person, the faces that my dreamlight-limelight casts in its' leading roles.) I've carefully gathered piles and clusters, overflowing box-fulls of glimmering tools and shimmering props:
Professional make-up in brilliant shades and textures. Subtle shimmers, vibrant flashing metals. Body paints, the color of the ocean; the color of a blaze-pink sunset. Intricate and delicate brushes. A hundred, two hundred shades of color in powders and gels, glosses and mattes. Glitters more fierce than I'd ever seen, some actually made from crushed jewels. Shades that reflect in the light and split into three and four distinct colors. The purest glosses, the deepest purples, most vivid greens; pinks and reds and yellows that seem to literally pulsate with light. Palettes to mix your own colors, just as if using paint.
Wigs with soft kitten ears. With long and twining copper-purple curls. Wigs formed from plastic tubes and mesh; a spilling-over of coils like mermaid-hair. Simple, sleek black flips. Complicated twists and bursts of silver.
Vintage gowns and coats. A sea of fabrics and textures.
Of course there is time and time ahead; time beyond these 2-3 weeks to visit and take photos alike. You're welcome to come anytime that I'm able to have you. And in time, too, I'll have a studio set up, far more Capital P Professional than the stone planes and woodsy wilds of this house. But that, precisely, is why I'm so eager right now.
It's rare to have this dazzling mix of quiet and sunlight, this lovely house, so entirely to myself. Here, the wash of midday sunlight alone can make me shudder from its' absolute beauty. There are so many nooks I haven't fully explored, both in the lush green outsides and the corners within.
More than anything, I want to see your faces, hear your voices. I definitely don't want taking pictures to overshadow that. But in these next two and a half weeks; in this quiet house, with my dreams near-bursting across the sun-splayed walls; I also want to explore as much as I can. Reconnecting with the beauty of friends, while moving into these new realms of beauty I'm exploring.
Explore with me?
Be my pixie, my water nymph. Be my mermaid. Be my fair maiden, gown sweeping the edges of pond and forest. Be my fierce kitten in stripes. Be my diva of a Drag Queen or King. Be my vision in metallics, skin streaked with colors that reflect light. Be yourself, backdropped by stark color, cast in strips of morning light. By my feathered, fluttering fey in the scattered sun of six-foot tall flowers. Be your own fantastical dream, explained to me, created and captured together.
Let's sift through books, and pick the images you want to explore through your own face and body - let's sift through colors and textures, and choose those you want to see against your skin.
Hold my hand - let's enter these new dreamscapes together.
**Yes, I'm finally about to post my address and one of the too-many numbers where you can (sometimes) reach me.
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| "maybe the most that we can do is just to see each other through it." |
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| 07:12pm 27/09/2007 |
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mood: alone/ music: never alone.
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A dream, I dream...
A prologue of sorts: Once Upon A time, my mother told me about a communal apartment building of sorts, for people living with chronic health conditions. Not children without homes, not elderly folk making new homes, but people in their 20s and 30s. Just People. Intelligent and "functional" folk, who weren't so different than any group of people in a communal home, except for certain medical and emotional needs. Needs that simply living together wouldn't cease, but would, in so many ways, help to ease and abate. Help to be understood by the occupants themselves, by the world they present themselves to.
They were building a new sort of home together, and while I believe there were specific protocols in place, people to call if someone had an emergency, necessary back-up that made their structure of support all-the-more strong - it was the closest I've heard of to a group of people with life-long conditions living together. On their own terms.
Specifically, these people were dealing with depression and anxiety. Their lifestyles varied; full-time jobs, artists, part-time work with disability benefits; but they had common goals and needs.
When I first heard about this place, I was 21 or so, and tilting increasingly between the demands of what felt like two separate worlds; Wellness and Illness. In my case, this also meant Care-giving and Care-receiving. While I was already sicker than most people ever become in their early twenties, and the momentum had been building for over a decade, I was still living actively as Full-Time Student, Part-Time Therapist. I hadn't unclenched my fists yet to the inevitable - so the article, the story my mother told me, it caught me from two angles. First, as an intrigued professional-in-training, who wanted to create more safe-spaces like that, places for the countless who get caught in the cracks. Second, as someone who was herself, every day, increasingly discovering the texture and mazes of those same cracks.
It sparked something in me, either way, stayed with me. And even then, it flickered across the part of my mind that was beginning to face facts, that a place like that - but different, with a focus on the physical as much as the mental - might be a good place for me to call home. For friends of mine to live, for us to feel safe, to support one another. (It's no coincidence that, in some way or another, just about every one of us works in, or plans to work in, some sort of teaching or social work - whether through art, science, or both.)
Not so many years, several states, and innumerable states of mind later, my dream, I dream...
(It's not so big, but it feels big. Maybe because, even though I've just begun looking into the possibilities, I'm afraid it's one more thing we'd have to do - our energy diminished, our shaking hands forced to forge their own tools - entirely on our own. One more thing like fighting through sleepless nights of research, to find doctors who will take and treat us seriously. Like filling out inch-thick paperwork to apply for disability, when those same disabilities you're supposed to be recording are filling your bones with leaden ache, blurring your vision, cramping your stomach into acid. Like a million other stories you've told me and I've told you; like the embodiment of a friend's voice on the phone when she's at the end of her thousandth wire, her hundredth try, a trail of empty diagnoses, and she says that giving up is beginning to seem like a pretty good option.
But that's the fear. The unfortunately likely challenge. Not the dream itself.) And right now I choose to dream - unbound.
It starts our pretty simple: A safe and warm place. A place where all those exceptions to the ordinary don't seem strange. A place with Hope sewn into the walls and Expectations thrown, thoughtfully but unceremoniously, out the window. Somewhere that both people I love and those who are going through what we are; the chronically ill whose daily lives are permanently altered, who are learning every day to see life through new lenses; can come together.
So often, it seems the biggest danger is how Alone we sometimes feel. When we are not, we are never. We are many and we are need and we are strength. Although the practical can get in the way, I don't think it's dreaming to think we could find so much of what we need in a shared space. Together. Not away from other people who love us, nothing even remotely separatist - but in a home where so many of the languages, the specifics and subtleties, the perceived quirks, the ways of moving through the world that we learn to survive - are understood from the root. Are shared.
It's terrifying to go through a relapse of symptoms you haven't faced in years; to enter treatment for something new and possibly bigger than before; to close blurring eyes to surgery as anaesthesia kicks in; to spend six months in a wheel-chair or hooked up to an I.V., afraid you might not return to standing. And there are the million daily things, the countless things you simply learn to live with if you want to Live - waking into a full-on cold sweat, teeth shaking, heart racing. Opening your eyes each morning to nausea or bile. Having to know a dozen, two dozen, pills and vitamins by sight. Remembering to eat even when your body wants to reject every calorie. And at the root of these thousand things, the listening. Always the listening, aware of every sharp turn your body might take. The rush of a sudden fever. The shaking or tangled tongue that precede a seizure. The knife-twist of spine that means collapse, or the roar of pain in the abdomen that means sudden blood.
This single thought is amazing - to listen hard to your body, to hear - and then to speak, to gesture. No struggle to over-explain. To live in a space where you don't have to yell so that others may see what is coming. Code words are no longer code; the quirks of a lonely world are no longer yours alone.
I imagine those daily inevitables, now again, with a softer twist. With a sort of support that many of us often imagine, at least in the abstract. I don't imagine perfection or Utopia. But I know how many of us ache, not only to live more fully within the truth of illness; but to be there for and with each other. To have unspoken understanding, somehow, beside us. And I know how illness cycles; how we have learned even from afar to shift and share the weight of our struggles. How taking care of one another, and being taken care of in turn, leads to a rare and certain Peace.
To have your memory refreshed by people who don't look at you, as if your fogged thoughts mean your mind is slipping. To lay beside someone in pain from surgery that you, yourself, have ingrained into your body's memory - so you know, better than most, when to be quiet. When to hold tight, and how to avoid pressing fingers into their sorest spots. To feel unashamed when you wake from seizure or nightmare; to be reminded as you would remind - no apologies, this is not your fault.
There are the broad strokes of imagination, as well as the details - the million subtle necessities that could be shared and understood. Dream broadens for a moment; it paints the walls in soothing, vibrant shades: blues and greens, flashes of deep orange or triumphant purple. Tall windows the sun can sweep through; deep and certain curtains for when that same sun hurts someone's eyes. Shared areas with soft couches that fold around the body like velvetine arms; private bedrooms, each with their own gradations of the specific, the subtle.
A refrigerator stocked with a variety of comfort and organic foods - turns taken to pre-cut vegetables and grate cheese, to make batches of soup or mashed potatoes. To lay out the fuel ahead of time for tired, thirsting bodies. No precise chore chart would make sense - nobody's saying this would be simple but dreams rarely are - because those living there understand precision can't be expected. That, especially there, dates and times and needs will shift. And sometimes we will be the fluid ones, while sometimes we'll be the one in need of oceanic arms, fluid around our own stumbling selves.
On an emotional level, yes - but also on an entirely logical one; one that's dedicated hours and nights to research, one that will talk to her Psychiatrist (who specializes in chronic illness) tomorrow - this makes sense to me.
(There are a variety of communities, both long-term and short, both with 24-hour supervision and minimal back-up, for people living with autism, with acute manic-depression, with addiction, and so forth. These same sorts of communities don't seem to exist for people living with what are considered physical chronic conditions - unless they're all-consuming or approaching fatality. In so many ways and on so many levels, there's not yet a real understanding of the mental and emotional impact that chronic physical illness makes - of just how much those same sorts of places might help people to live and to hope. Even to heal.)
I know personally that, five years after my mother told me about this article, and two before I returned home to more-or-less full-time treatment: I struggle between the two places I stay. One where it can be hard to breathe for reasons, both obvious and layered. One which is open and lovely; which I'm so lucky to have at all; but still, it sometimes taunts me. Too big, too much space from here to there; too alone, perhaps, for where I am right now. And in different shades, with different particulars, I hear this same struggle echoed across coasts, and sometimes countries. The voices of people I love and of people I could one day love. Sick and seeking, reaching - the waves of need come crashing from all sides to form a single question. And I don't have the glorious and singular answer, but -
I have hope. And here I am dreaming; thinking hoping searching. Seeking that gentle middleground. A genuinely Safe Space - one where there's not perfection but, far better, real understanding.
Where there's no presumed answer to every problem, but a real understanding of the puzzle. Of the whole. Of home.
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| "i hate to be where she is not, when she is not. and yet i am always going, and she cannot follow." |
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| 11:23am 25/09/2007 |
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mood: ...no matter how many music: skies have fallen.
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A thought: I probably shouldn't have dove back into Livejournal-Land, with what may have seemed a misleading ferocity. Which isn't to say that I won't be posting here - more that I shouldn't (can't) be as precise, just now, about hours or days.
(I shouldn't say "tomorrow" carelessly, when tomorrow can still be such a slippery concept for me. And when I'm still learning to live with it; to get my own ten fingers around the breadth of it, without blaming myself.)
Especially since one of the main things that I realized in my absence, and am unwinding into a clear explanation over these recent entries: Is just how much online energy I'd rather dedicate to the tangible. The crinkle and fold, the sudden magic of handwritten mail. The pitch and throw of voices on phone-lines. And whenever possible; the skin, touch and smell of actual, three-dimensional life. Lingering over coffee (tea for me) until the store's hours wind down. Feeling the beats of live music beneath my feet; the energy of a thousand dancing people leaning into and around me. Curling into a two-person cocoon for peaceful, whispering hours.
So again, it's not that I won't be posting - more that I want (need) to focus on the non-online ways in which I keep in touch. I may spend my entire life grappling with, trying to fully reconcile, the fact that my body doesn't have the robust and boundless energy of my head and heart - but that doesn't mean I don't know it's true, on a basic level.
I also want be in a place where Livejournal feels more like the safe space it is, and less like some obligation I've worked up in my head. Which is to say: A place where, if I don't post for a few days - or even a few months - I don't feel uncomfortably obligated, and other people don't worry so much. And where, threading back to the points about postal stamps and coffee cups - it's not as easy to lose touch. **As for times when I potentially don't post for months at once: If I'm in treatment or the hospital, I hope to be able to let you know. With specific people, I've been working out specific plans; ties and binds and details to keep their worry radar down; hopefully I can do that here, in some larger sense.
*
The reason that I haven't posted my own address and phone numbers yet, as planned, is an exhausting and Stranger Than Fiction story. Which, essentially, adds up to a potentially dangerous person I thought I'd shaken, who recently gave me a very clear reminder of their presence. I'm okay - covering my bases - and thinking maybe I'll post different parts of my contact information in different filtered entries.
*
A Few Bulletins To You & You &...:
Jessica: I have to laugh and sigh alike, at the continual tangling of our lives' specifics and suddens. I'm sorry we've been playing Hit And Miss for so long, and I'm sorry if you worried this time. We'll plan something coherent soon, and mellow enough for us both. (It was so lovely - so soothing - hearing your voice, even for a few moments.)
Heather: How was your L.L.M.D. appointment? I've been wondering and hoping for you. (My own appointment was pushed forward a few weeks. Long story, tiring details. Part of me is incredibly frustrated that I wasn't able to make it, but part of me is able to piece all the details together in my head, and see the bigger picture.)
Angel: An answering machine-full of my words will definitely never be enough to contain my heart, let alone the stumbling and breathless sentences I try to fit in before being cut off. I went to bed early last night; I'll try you again today or tomorrow.
Lisa, Jac, Tessa (the first three to post responses to my Mail/List Game): Tell me, pretty-please, 5 things - at total random, scattered as you wish - that you adore. Or that pull at you in the shape of fascination, obsession, curiousity. As broad as authors, animals, colors; as specific as a single detail of Autumn, or an obscure culture that fascinates you. (I meant to ask this in the first place, to aid and abet in my package-making - and although I already have ideas merging into something substantial for each of you, I thought I'd go ahead now.)
EVERYONE!!: If you know me at all, you know that I'm a complete bookworm, bibliophile, it goes on. I love gathering lists of my friends' favorite books - scratched on napkins over dinner, saved from old letters. I do a slightly insane amount of reading, and there's always something I'm hungry to pore over, but I'm working on some new lists for myself right now. Whether 1 or 50, if you have time, could you dash down the names of some of your favorite books? Oh, and -
Especially funny books, right now. Intelligent, wacky, witty books that make you laugh out loud. Don't hold back from recommending the more serious, the deeply poetic, the psychological studies - the kinds of books my shelves tend to hold in majority - but please. Also funny and fantastical.
And as a specific aside, if you have a favorite Jamaica Kincaid book - might I ask, which is it?
*
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
(( d.h. lawrence ))
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| ecrivez plus de lettres d'amour! |
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| 05:17pm 13/09/2007 |
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mood: i felt i was standing in the music: middle of the world while everyone & everything was retreating farther & farther
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Below you will find (1.) a present-winning game, (2.) a list-making game, and (3.) their friendly intersection:
Generally, the only sort of "memes" that I do are the kind which I make up myself, or at least in part. Question and list games that, as you've probably noticed, I like to make interactive. These two, however, I snagged from two lovely ladies who we'll call A. and C., and then bent them together. I couldn't resist this first one, as it's so remniscent of the handwritten-mail projects/communities that I take part in. Here goes:
The first 3 people who respond to this post (with their own answers to the list, below) will receive a surprise from me in the mail. Note: If you're an eager little beaver, and would like to post something simple - such as "ME ME, SEND ME SOMETHING!" - and then enter your answers, that's fine. In fact, that would be a whole lot preferable to people rushing through their answers, since I really would like to know what you have to say/share. Further Note: I'd very much love to read your list, whether or not you're one of the first to post. **See ETA, at bottom.
Whatever I find/concoct/gather for you, I'll send within 3-6 weeks. I'm posting my address later today, so you can leave yours then, if you weren't already going to. The only requirement, so to speak, is that you - in turn - post some version of this to your own journal or website. Or, as the original writing said; that you "pay it back." (The original guidelines were more basic - they didn't involve the list below, and the person doing the sending had 365 days to send off the mail-nuggets. Feel free to use that template, my template, or to alter and stir as desired.)
*
I miss...
1. The Ocean. Verging on desperately.
2. New York City's poetry scene. My friends within it, the passion throughout it. Five bucks for a night of rhythm and emotion and that slow-building sense of Hope that has nothing whatsoever to do with the cover charge.
3. Working directly with kids, on a regular basis. Knowing that I'm helping them, even in those thousand tiny ways that add up too slowly to see while they're happening. Actually - everything about kids - from tickling them into giggles to soothing them from tears. Balancing the therapeutic and the maternal successfully, so that I might help a teenage girl to surrender the self-harm tools she had hidden, on the same day I read bed-time stories to a four year-old until my throat is sore, and she hugs me so hard that when I stand from the bedside, she's still clinging to me like a giggling, fiendishly adorable octopus.
4. Dancing beneath stars. Live music soaring up to meet those same stars. Leaning back into arms that love me.
5. Touch. Being able to let go, to trust that illness won't mean that I can't be there for someone. To lose myself in the blissful, wordless interchange of skin.
I cherish...
1. The oxygen I find in language; reading writing editing; the emotions (and a million things which, paradoxically, I doubt I'll ever quite name) that thrill through me as I write.
2. You, you with the wings. "Even when I'm at my worst, you make me feel special. How do you do that?" "Magic."
3. The intricacies of the faces and voices, the thoughts and laughter, of those who I too often live without.
4. Tenderness.
5. My bebes; the furry orange-black-white fluffball of a Diva, and the Mama's Girl sweet Siamese.
I am more than...
1. Cleavage, short skirts, fishnets, thick smears of kohl, artfully applied glitter - and all those names these cause me to be called, all the assumptions these cause people to make.
2. My limitations.
3. The sum of my illnesses/The A-Z of my symptoms.
4. The litany of ugly names I was called as a child, by an angry man who I'd done nothing more to than be a child. The echoes of those names in the physical violence of men who came later.
5. I know yet.
I would like to...
1. Live in the Grecian Isles, with someone I adore and a purring band of felines. And perhaps a couple of sugar-gliders. And maybe a bunny or two. And a raccoon. And possibly a family of turtles...
2. Publish my own writing and photography, as well as the writing and art of other fabulous folk.
3. See my body as it truly is.
4. Be well. Be well. Be well.
5. Redirect the American Government's budget more-or-less entirely - healthcare, affordable housing, education, gay marriage, medical research, fair wages, international aid, peace and sunshine, et alia - with a brilliant team of assistants to help me do the math.
I actually...
1. Miss some people so much that it physically hurts.
2. Sometimes still have a hard time saying No, occasionally to the point that I sicken myself.
3. Sometimes still dream of being a ballroom dancing star.
4. Believe in hope and humanity, Despite It All. I have to.
5. Have so much love in my heart that, at times, my entire chest aches and I feel as if I'll fall flat with the beautiful, terrible weight of it.
*
...How about you?
[ Edit To Add: Okay, okay - Change of Game Plan. I sort of knew I would do something along these lines, if I posted this. Because not only does competition make me itch and twitch, even when it's utterly innocent and in the form of a silly online game, but I'm also a big smooshball. And as soon as I saw that even 1 past the 3 "winners" posted, my heart twingey-twinged. So then; second prizes, anyone?! In general, who knows what I might eventually send to who - I have all sorts of mail creations in process as we speak, both simple and not-so-simple, finished and not-so-finished. But as relates to this particular game (and how it makes my heart all warm to read your answers, my darling muffin-fluffs): I'll send surprise packages to the first 3 folks within 3-6 weeks, as planned. But also, I'm thinking I'll need to send at least a very purdy postcard to everyone else who responds, within 8-10 weeks. Viva La Postage Stamp! Keep Mail Art Alive! ]
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| "distance shows your silhouette to be a lot like mine." |
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| 04:12pm 10/09/2007 |
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mood: from the depths of the pacific music: to the height of everest.
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It seems odd to start off with Hey or Hello - such weak and innocuous syllables - after what must have felt like a disappearance to anyone not in contact with me. (Which, due to circumstances, was almost everyone not in my [blood] family.) I have an in-depth entry written - sketched out, more like - about where and how I've been, the important specifics. Even incorporating one of my silly List Games into the equation, to ask where and how you guys have been.
But in a twist of events that were one part ironic, one part frustrating, and two parts perfectly suited to the themes I was discussing: The computer I was using took a break from functioning, just as I was beginning to comb through and bring together the details. That was a couple of weeks, and four computer screens away from now - but instead of waiting for the energy and time to bring so much story and explanation together - I thought a shorter entry would be a good idea. At least for now.
Recent phone-calls, a letter in a blue envelope, the sound of her voice - tears and laughter, warmth, my favorite lullaby - in general, people's concern, pushes me back to the computer screen now, rather than waiting to edit the stories and specifics. So:
I am, as much as someone can be when so much familial and shock-from-the-blue drama has occurred in such a short time, definitely okay. Although illness (and an ongoing search for highly-specialized care) played a part in my absence from the online world, it wasn't the main reason. Aside from a couple of anomalies, my health has been no worse - often it's been decent, steady - than usual.
My longer stories, just as those of anyone's seven month experience, couldn't all truly be told even in one entry; but I'll edit and condense as much of what's happened as I reasonably can, and post more specifics before long. About where I've been and where I'm going, both literally and not.
Also - probably sooner than I post anything of length - I'll post my phone numbers (new and old) as well as the best address to use for me. Part of what I've been doing; and intended to do with more advance notice and a focus I haven't been able to have until recently; is relying less on the internet for communication. Although my (in)famed long-time-building packages are still scattered about my room in assorted, glittered clusters, my energy has often been enough to send postcards and letters, small surprises that fit into envelopes, that sort of thing. (All of which fits into the reasoning behind my absence, but doesn't explain why it was so sudden - and then unintended, prolonged.) For now, I'll just say - reiterating slightly - that I was planning to step away from most online communication for awhile. But shortly before I could explain that here, the Real World more-or-less yanked me, gut-first, into several sequential events, mostly related to family and of some severity. Just as I'd begun to balance and soft-step my way into things - I even have a pretty new planner! - a series of events occurred, which I can only hope (with a wry laugh) are the sort of things that rarely occur in such quick and Soap Operatic succession.
So (as might be obvious) my own balancing act of health and life took a number of whip-sharp turns, most of the time requiring all of my energy, attention and then-some. I couldn't - and then, for a much shorter time, didn't want to - write until things were back to a point where I can, relatively, serve as my own compass and see-saw. Stand on solid ground, inasmuch as that exists.
All of this is pretty vague and cryptic, and I know that can be frustrating; but especially because of recent mail and calls (I've been away from email/Myspace for several months) I really wanted to let everyone know I'm okay. With more than a sentence - but all of it would be a bit much for me to record with the clarity it deserves, right now. Whether or not you know, it's likely that I'm thinking of you - that you shine in my nightmares as brief blips of peace and light, sing to me through my days, even whisper your way into my brain to talk me down from the hard places. I always, always keep you close. Know it or not - whether I've been able to tell you enough or not - so many of you, by existing, help keep me strong. In absence as much as presence, and in ways that I might not be able to articulate much better than vague, spiritual-sounding run-on sentences.
So: I'm allright. And I both apologize for, and hate thinking of, the energy put towards unfounded worry about me. There've been a lot of emotional trials in the past months, as well as some physical, but with the time I've taken and the resources I continue to find, balance has become - slowly - more of a possibility.
**I hope so much that all of you have been well - or as well and cared-for as any of your own difficult circumstances might allow. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to be a literal presence or help, for anyone who needed me. Although I'm easing in slowly, somewhat as I intended to do seven months ago, hopefully my contact information - the comfort of a long-distance postcard, a place to send and share words - will help as I do ease back in. If the local Lyme treatment I've finally found (part of the specifics to come) allows, I also hope to extend a time-specific - but heart-broad - invitation to visit, not long from now.**
I'll write more, closer to sooner than later - little bits for now, if not the whole extensive drama - and post my address shortly. I'll lock that entry; and whomever wants to post their address back, I'd love it. In what downtime I've had, I've collected some particularly lovely vintage and hand-crafted postcards.
For now - for you; for me; for us - here's just one bit of all the writing that's touched me, kept me grounded through these months:
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on,
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
((Mary Oliver))
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| A Typo Of The Very Large Sort. |
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| 11:52am 05/02/2007 |
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mood: "wait! - music: strike that, reverse it!"
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Edit, Edit, EDIT TO ADD TO PAST ENTRY:
Ack. In my last post, I rambled along the course of a really broad-ranging survey, and I talked about a few things I haven't yet discussed with many people. Thus, somehow in the discussion of the miscarriage that I experienced a bit over 18 months ago, I managed to type that I was vehemently pro-life. But of course - and hopefully, most of you know me and realized this - I meant vehemently pro-CHOICE. Which is why, of course, I was saying that despite being very much in that mindframe, I still consider a miscarriage a very real and often very painful loss.
Okay. Wow; sorry, that typo just really threw me for a loop. It's definitely a good thing that I'm such a madly fiending editrix. (I've of course changed a dozen or two dozen other things as well; I should probably never post my entries too hastily, since I have a tendency to obsess over a Livejournal Meme with the same level of care I'd give to an article for Curve magazine.) But - back to your regularly scheduled work and play days, lovebugs! (And as I said, do feel free to reply to my previous entry with rambling-scrambling survey answers of your own. I love Games of all sorts, and perhaps Question Games the very most of all!)
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| "all these pictures of you..." |
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| 09:26am 05/02/2007 |
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mood: cozy; rested/ing. music: layers of songs that doing this survey reminded me of.
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It's been weeks since I've written here - so before it becomes a full month, I thought I'd do something out of character for this journal, and post a survey. (What can I say? All the crazy kids are doing it these days.) This one's actually pretty interesting; I copy/pasted it from a certain tiger's journal, and I'd love if anyone wants to post their own answers as a comment.
(Just so you know - and this is nearly always the case - I've been composing letters to many of you in my head and heart, every time that I haven't been able to be in literal or physical contact. And whenever I'm lucky enough to avoid those raggedly recurrent nightmares, I dream of you. [A rather blissful change of pace.] It can be intensely hard to be within circumstances that feel so lonely, even to someone who enjoys solitude as much as I do. But I keep so many of your beautiful faces - most of all, the shine and emotion of your eyes, your smiles, your voices and words - in my thoughts. This goes a long way in helping to keep me sane, not to mention grateful for the love I'm given, even when I don't always feel it's deserved. I miss you guys, my chosen family, more than words will ever be able to contain. But especially when limitations too often keep me physically apart, I'll keep on keepin' on in the good fight to stretch and expand those words for every syllable and insinuation they're capable of.)
Allright then. ( Into Survey World, we dive! ) |
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| "i always knew this altogether thunder was lost in our little lives." |
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| 08:57am 18/01/2007 |
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mood: oh, oh - but music: sweetness follows.
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Earlier tonight, a friend told me that the way I live my life moves her - that she knows every moment I'm given and every word I speak matters to me. She spoke point-blank, as if stating a fact, so I'm not sure if she realized just how deeply the compliment rang through my body.
Now, happily sunk into that deepest blue of my favorite hours, I stop and think of my response: It's the divine in the details...
The clean sound of a new tube of mascara, opening; a tiny click as metal turns against metal, then the wet black of the brush emerging. Elegance in miniature.
An unexpected episode of My So-Called Life; somehow, one whose details I don't already know by heart; flickering on the television screen.
Discovering a box of Vegetarian Buffalo Wings in the freezer - more than that, having the appetite to eat them. Browning each one just-so.
Turning to the dark of the kitchen - watching the overhead light that's twice my age flicker, as if considering its' options, before lighting the room. Nights like tonight are enough to make me sing as I cook, hopping from kettle to pan to cabinet. The refrigerator is not a challenge tonight, not a puzzle to only manage at half-piecing together, not anything less fabulous than an abundance of fresh, organic food.
A bowl of tiny little grapes: red, just-ripe. Perfect. Slivers of Muster cheese delivered one after the other, onto my tongue. (If I listen closely enough, I like to imagine I can hear my bones rising to greet the calcium, my body shifting in response to the protein.)
Fresh gingerbread and sweet lemon-sauce, warm and seeping into the spicy crumblings of each piece. A new case of China Cola, be still my heart! (Way too many of you know just how much that excites me, have seen me lug four-packs up my apartment stairs, or sneak bottles into favorite restaurants, movie theatres.)
A girl who I once said was the breathing form of Poetry - poetry as pronoun - types words from her screen to mine, three thousand miles away. I wonder, but tonight it doesn't hurt quite as much to do so: Will I ever have enough words to tell her how totally I loved her, even when I couldn't - and how I still do, now that I can?
Earlier tonight I looked up from a writing/reading/writing trance, and realized that both my cats were within six inches of me. Bastien curled against the crook of my swollen ankle. Sophie rumbling from the blanket at my hips, wide green eyes closed in perfect slits of kitten joy.
A new herb I've found works better than anything else (except medicinal marijuana, of course) to curb my nausea. It doesn't return me to my appetite, but at least allows me to more easily coax it along. Also, it's called Cat's Claw, which makes me super-happy to say repeatedly and in the voice of a muppet.
Since we're talking details, we might as well discuss the fine detailing of THIS. Hellooo, dream pillow. My nest needs you.
The promise of a phone call from New York gleams, tucked beneath the eager glow of my skin - tomorrow, tomorrow. Leaning into the mirror as dawn slinks closer, my smile-lines linger noticeably on my cheeks.
If I sit just still enough, even with the television murmuring quietly, I can hear our house making the slightest creaks as the foundation shifts and settles - the engine of a car ten houses away, warming - the scratching of a chipmunk outside my bedroom window.
*
Edit to add: It's now early Thursday morning, and I'm making a list. Very possibly, an extremely long list. I want to see as many movies as possible, between now and the Academy Awards (February 25th.) Happily enough, this gives me precisely five weeks. I'll use the majority of February's "pleasure money" - except (1.) if there's a visit to make, and (2.) some must be set apart for sparkles and whatsits to make Valentines Day gifts. But of course!
I'll go to as many matinees as possible. I'll go to two movies in a row, when I can manage it. I'll go with myself, with friends, with my parents, with my quasi-adopted bisexual Muslim son, with girls who might like to hold my hand, and again with myself. The reason I sound extreme is that, if I don't make this Extremely Purposeful, I'll end up only going once a week and I probably won't make it on time for matinees. The movies I want to see are scattered all over the place - at the sticky-floored theatre where I spent nearly every Saturday during Jr. High, at the two-picture nook down the street from my apartment, at the Art House tucked into an obscure corner of Fairfax, at the semi-Art House in Arlington where pretty gay men line up outside to get tickets, and yes - at the enormous 24-plex that lurks about a mile away from, again, my apartment. The tiny "gay theatre" in Dupont will probably also be necessary, as will renting some things that won't be re-released. (ie: Movies that didn't win Golden Globes and/or aren't being nominated for Oscars.)
I already know I won't love all of the following movies, but I enjoy almost every movie I see to some degree, simply because of the experience. The act of watching a story unfold. Just the same, I'll be sure to see enough of the better lesbian films of the year (as well as enough CARTOONS!) to balance it out. Seeing as I've only recently been feeling well enough to hop out and about semi-regularly, even a start at this list will be massive. But, here goes:
Little Miss Sunshine. Loving Anabelle. Running With Scissors. (Only after re-reading the book. By which I mean, of course, re-re-reading it.) Happy Feet. Cars. Borat. Bobby. The Devil Wears Prada. Volver. Music and Lyrics. (The new movie with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore in it. It's about Eighties pop music, and involves Hugh Grant wearing funny leather pants. And, in case you didn't notice, has Drew Barrymore in it. Personally, this is all I need to know.) Babel. DreamGirls. Red Doors. For Your Consideration. Freedom Writers. (I'm reading the book that Erin Gruwell and her students of four years published in 1999, and it's very genuine, very inspiring, and very little like Dangerous Minds. As most of you know, I've experimented with Writing Therapy and hope to get my Masters in it.) Miss Potter. Thank You For Smoking. Pan's Labyrinth...
...Add to my list, won't you?!
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