i don’t think the ultimatum exists. You can choose both. New branches and deeper roots.
i have been learning how to not take life so seriously. i make eye contact, i impulse buy fur coats, i walk the dog and take pictures of the sun drowning in its own ichor. i imagine mountains spanning out in front of me with gorgeous valleys full of wildflowers, i imagine myself older, shorter hair, stretched, weathered skin.
i have returned to my altar, having been thrown to the floor; i hide beneath the pews watching dust swarm and dance through the sunlit air. i wait in that church for god to show himself, he does in thousands of ways, but the supposed signs are malleable and i have to shape them into meaning anything. i’ve been praying for softer hands, hands that can kiss hymns up his sides, mouth worship and psalms across goose skin. i review my bibles, the messages are all the same; the endings are also beginnings. Which seems simple and obnoxiously obvious. Unfortunately, obviousness does not equate to the ease of things.
i talk a lot about existence and love and centres of universe and religious contexts. i talk through the grit of my teeth, i force out wiseness and tales of stepping back from my place inside my own head and viewing the entire thing. i feel fraudulent and small, re reading my old work and feeling that fire i harbored fizzle into roaring red embers. Desire is an ugly, ribby mule, it carries its packs, dragging laminitis too, idiopathic and incurable, it will take its path forward until it crumbles to dust.
i tell her that its easy to talk about, easy to put into words, but it is difficult to understand.
i remind myself, writing in ink on the barren walls, ‘the end of the melody is not its goal’. Mellow sun slips over the lip of the windowsill and glides across my chest, i can feel its outline define itself on my skin. i have been searching for something for as long as i can remember, the secret, the formula, the idea, the concept that will finalize my peace, i find little bits of everyone i’ve ever loved instead. i find him in striations of muscled waters, the stream tugging at the riverside, ziplock baggies on gravel, i find her in the silvery fish, i find them in the 1000 blossoms of a lantana flower, i tear them from the stem and toss them into the air like confetti, like i did when i was a kid. i find him in beetles with holographic shells, i find her in sunbleached bones and fur snagged on edges and thorns. i obsess over how much time i have wasted, i became passive, i don’t create, i manage, i’m getting back to myself. i wade through thick ocean waters on spectacular summer evenings, i crawl through undergrowth and feel the flecks of shadow on my back, i am making my way back to myself, i am expansive, i contain multitudes, what’s inside me never dies. A sparrow flits down from the canopy to tell me that i will last out, that i always do.
i have always been the kind of girl to reach outward toward the monstrous, risking the wounds, to try and bend blatant brutality, i think its maybe a way to observe just how much i can handle, sanctity begins at home, it takes a long time to understand the fluidity of your own life, holy wisdom is not light and formless, it is viscous and dark like blood or something else organic. Revisiting with hindsight makes my palms sweat because i know what comes next and i know the answers to the questions i asked, nothing is ever straight forward and everything can embarrass you if you let it. i leave the burning chapel, i set the totem alight, i turn to ask if it misses me like i miss it. i ask if it will wonder how i’ve turned out. There is a gap between 18 and 23 where your life destroys and reinvents itself in more ways than you can bare. There is a void, a blindspot that i can’t seem to fill out. Maybe i have finally run out of stupid vague metaphors to describe the same 6 emotions i rotate between.
Peace and love and god and warmth and home and familiarity and creativity and curiosity are all the same thing. meditation, quiet contemplation, outspoken revolutions, late-night pixel confessions, warm synthetic glow, flickering LED candles, burying your fingers into warm sand and feeling it shift to make room for you, meat melting in your mouth, toothpaste dripping over your chin, when you notice your childhood dog has grey hairs, home videos, licorice, a letter from that friend you don’t speak to anymore, a Polaroid you took when you thought you were tougher than sin, firepits and burned ends of sticks, almost unbearable heat on your shins, the first bottle of strawberry wine you finished alone, the camping trip you went on, the apologies that followed, the unanswered calls, full answering machine, dancing between lasers and smoke, dodging incriminating questions, lying to investigators, labelling every wicked ladybeetle as a sign to stay on that cancerous path.
i would give myself to anyone who had the stomach to take it. Sometimes i stretch myself as far as i possibly can, really thin like a film, covering as far as i can manage, i snap back into shape having collected nothing. i’ve come very close to having everything i’ve ever wanted, the years that are gone sing out in historic melodies, potentials and newness shimmers its scales and taunts its fragility, the underbelly of a great fish. Maybe the question was too much to ask, leaned on the hinge of a public bathroom posing for the divinity on the other side of the screen. i forget about it for a second, for one moment i forget it all happened. i can’t seem to communicate when its important, i have all the breath in the world when noone is there to hear it, but ask me a serious question and i will be totally stunned, i forget i am as much a person as anyone, i forget that i am not transparent, that i have to verbalise. i have never before wanted to say so much, but said so little, paralyzed by intention and ideals of Fridays. June melts into July, the frosts kill off the sweetgrasses, i’m not actually cool or mysterious, really i’m just trying to be impressive, if i can’t find the right words i just won’t talk. i have found it takes strength to endure and be kind, it takes strength to recognize when your hands are more blade than flesh. i have to carve in the cave walls, it is not collapsing, i am just growing. i repeat the things you said to me in my head until i believe they are truths and i walk very softly through the gravel and my hands get so cold i can barely text him back. In soft light and eyeline romances, i want to tell him i love him but i caress titanium instead of his jaw. i wish i was as shameless as i paint myself as, i love him; everything i know about him i love, everything i learn about him. i’m terrified. i’m not lying for effect and dreaminess, i do think about you all the time, i do miss you, formless light, i don’t know how to hold you.
You reenter and then dissolve every proof of yourself on a Sunday at noon. i saw it i saw it i saw it before it was gone. i tattoo ultraviolence, i tattoo born to die. i defy moral i defy the moon and stars and every wavering sheet between myself and you that drips with squid ink cautions, one after the other; ‘are you sure, are you sure, are you sure’. i build myself a life just to tear it apart, nothing is serious to me, i have blind faith in everything working itself out, i feel most alert when there is something awful to focus on, so i continue to put myself in uncomfortable situations. At baseline i operate best when i am looking out for something, when i have to survive something. i think about the people i don’t talk to anymore. i am hopelessly sentimental. i explain that i love objectively bad songs because they have memories attached to them, good or bad, i explain it’s the same with people, with places, with bits and pieces, a torn corner of a ferry ticket, a stamp.
i need to understand that it was difficult to maintain a level head, a moral compass when i was trying to keep afloat. i did think it might have ended up killed me. In 6 months or ten years, i really think it would have ended up killing me. i saw an opportunity, i took it. There is no room for courage and righteousness in that context. i’m sorry i betrayed you like i did. i had to choose between suffering parallel to you, or suffering the exposed nerve of openness to the world around me. i try to explain the mindfuck of feeling absolutely armored, protected from anything and everything, but simultaneously having to be constantly on the lookout for signs that i might have to slip out of the side door again, call them again. i became something i never thought i would.
i was born with a lust for life and an appetite for growth, it often feels like grief. The burden of prophetic dreams and feeling like less than what you could have been, there is always more time i promise you. You are complex and dark like undergrowth hideouts and rivers bickering over stones, beautiful and low. You are nostalgia and proofs of crucifixions and divine resurrections. i can only console him. Nothing more. Two oceans, two seashells on the same shore, two sun-bleached leather couch cushions. i memorise my skyline donning your waistband. In separate times there is a magnolia tree we planted when we moved into our first house and as the girls get older they swing from its branches and bring us the blossoms. i see you when it rains. You come back, as a shadow, as a dream, as the absence itself. i sit across from you in our demolished house, i lean against the fireplace that remains, i raise my glass to your deadpan face, there was warmth here once, no amount of prayer could have saved us, i know you asked. i know you turned upward and clasped your palms. You dilate this closing wound with every breath i hear you take.
i met someone new. i am careful with what i say. i am truthful, i don’t pretend. i am trying to let things flow instead of confronting everything i observe, evil seems to surpass good but i am at a loss, there is sadness where my anger should be. The worst part of it is that all i want is for you to be okay. There is always a last frost of the year. i have no thoughts of malice, maybe one. i only wish that every time you introduce yourself you see flashes of me in your passenger seat, you see me on the stool at the welder’s dog, you see me first. Do you remember how i held you after you cried for my blues and purples.
Sparks fly off the edges of my pathology, if tomorrow comes and you are covered in me would you still want me to call? i am my bare bones and far from home.
i am driving home and wiping my eyes, talking aloud about everything. i feel stupid and small. i try to explain that they can’t understand what it’s like until they’re in it. No matter how hard i try my fingers won’t uncross themselves, wishing for your redemption, an apology, an explanation, an understanding. there is always a destination to run from and towards, there is always a place to go. i learn to let go of what you took from me. Torment and rejoicing is what i shift between and i am in love with every second of it. i don’t regret it, but i hope that you do.
i scream for juliet, the dice were loaded from the start, i think of blonded men i haven’t spoken of for years. i still hate the dire straits. Love is supposed to feel good and easy i think.
i sit assailant. i am prisoner to my own prophetics. Of lakes and pine forests and cannibalized oranges and wet skin. i assure myself i exist in body as well as mind. i am more than dust i shall return to more than dust. Even dust is more than dust.
My idiot faith and idiot hope will lure me to a cliffs edge. If the moon told me through its brow that the rocks at the bottom wouldn’t hurt, i’d believe her.
i kiss the big doe eyes of my lover just like the song. i pretend my hips aren’t sore from the two small bed. He glows with a promise of youth and shelter, maybe i am naive, i feel heavy in his arms, soft on the underside, the belly of a fish, unscathed and silvery.
After a week in my regrettable home town, i am so in love with the world again, the whole damn world. Skies open up and refractions of light are proofs of divinity, time seems endless, and joy is formless, i have so much within me i can feel it all seeping out from my pores and into the universe. i am three years old, i am sixty, i am 12 twirling in grasses and plucking wildflowers from their vertebrae’s. Dawn is my hour.
i miss you!