so yes you will ask what happened to her because what you interpret as craze behind her eyes is actually aliveness in a world in a society in a motherfucking system that demands a woman betray herself and calls her insane the moment she refuses yes existence is IT what else even matters and it liberates me to just say no to you to what you want to the fact that you think your desire and comfort should supersede my own nothing makes me hotter than a woman saying NO

we do not even have a solid grasp on what time is and still we think we have the space to be anything other than here anything other than awake anything other than love and if i am honest i am afraid of what i will do when i am alone and out of pain because pain has always given me something to press against and so i surround myself with people in nearly all that i do and if that is not community in its simplest most animal form then i do not know what is

maybe that makes me a fraud but i am honest and i think when we are honest our grimy little truths stop being fraudulent and start becoming openings little blood-warm invitations to be seen and maybe even loved and if we can be seen and loved at the same time then we have a fighting chance at healing so there you have it help me heal watch me kneel here fighting for peace with both hands dirty because i would rather you see the truth than mistake my composure for wholeness

i am not the kind of girl who wears the unbroken-in cowgirl boots no mine are creased and scuffed and have trudged through the muck of me and they look like art because they have carried something throbbing through this world without ever asking it to go lighter or cleaner or quieter or any direction other than onward and they negotiate my body’s relationship with gravity they are the very thing beneath me saying yes you belong to the earth yes you are still here yes you may keep going and every time my heel meets the ground i am damning myself to a place of yes

let me remind you of something your body is an antenna and god is a frequency i know that sentence will make some people shift in their seat good let them i am not committing blasphemy by believing the divine lives close enough to be felt beneath my own skin we are made to receive we are made to transmit inhale life exhale death over and over and over until you realize neither one is the enemy they are dance partners they have always been

sometimes a bright and honest spirit steals the air from someone else’s lungs not because it is too much but because they have forgotten what breathing deeply feels like and then through real connection through presence through the quiet miracle of being witnessed they remember their own breath again they remember themselves again and is that not what love has always done not rescue not fix not possess but remind

oh the beauty of dying before you die the tiny deaths and tiny funerals we hold for old identities the burials of self-betrayed warping certainty perfection proving and the impossible births that follow i have receipts baby receipts a holy little scrapbook filled with every version of me that had to come undone so another one could arrive every grief every liberation every skin shed every impossible becoming and what a staggering privilege to have lived enough lives inside this one lifetime to know with absolute certainty that death has never once had the final word

i hope you die today

and do i love you or do i love how you love me or is it no baby neither i love that somewhere in the middle of your eyes i remembered i was worth looking at i love that for one suspended impossible second i caught my own reflection without reaching for a knife to carve pieces off of it you did not make me lovable you simply interrupted the lie that i told myseld that i wasnt

and what are we all chasing anyway another forever another heartbeat another pair of hands to place the weight into because if i can hand you the ache then maybe i dont have to admit it was always mine maybe we dont want love nearly as much as we want a witness maybe we just want someone standing close enough to swear they saw us trying

should we be burning holes through the atmosphere should we be all combustion and singed eyebrows and smoke collected as soot in the creases of your knuckles in the ridges of the prints casting across your palms and soles of your feet or should we preserve ourselves so carefully we mistake numbness for wisdom i dont know i have lived as both wildfire and museum exhibit and neither one could kiss me back to life

lately i keep catching myself biting down so hard my jaw feels like it spreads my teeth puzzle piece themselves together like they are trying to become one unbreakable thing and i think about cats the way they press their spines into impossible shapes as if bone was merely a suggestion where does that come from what ancient remembering lives beneath their skin and do i have that too is there some forgotten muscle buried inside me waiting for permission instead of protection

im learning my body has languages i was never taught theres one that wakes up when you say bailey girl ive been thinking about you yes you keep bubbling up in my brains theres another that blooms low beneath my belly and stretches warm between my hips not lust exactly not even longing just aliveness just blood remembering it was always meant to move

life will break you yes it will split you clean down the grain and leave your spirit looking like wet earth after rain but bodies are miraculous little mechanics they stretch they tear they knit themselves back together with muddy hands and stubborn devotion they cradle what shattered they grow around what never healed they whisper oh no baby i know this feels like the end but look at me look how i am still carrying you look how i keep choosing one more step one more laugh one more morning together before they are all awake too and more ridiculous little conversation with the moon one more nod from the trees as they remind you in the language only living things know that you better damned be here

the shirts come off the shoes come off the chests and toes are out and i swear something ancient happens then did you know reflexologists believe the toes are little maps of the future tiny scouts reaching the earth before the rest of us arrives i dont know if i believe it but i want to because there is something comforting about imagining the smallest parts of ourselves already negotiating tomorrows terrain while the rest of us is still inventing problems that havent happened yet everyone starts shaking eventually the ceo the artist the recovering alcoholic the mother the professor the twenty year old the sixty year old its almost disappointing how similar we become everyone bargaining with one more breath everyone wondering if this is where they stop or where they finally begin and i keep thinking consciousness is such a strange little gift they say the mind is unimaginably powerful and still i spend mine remembering the smell of wet cedar after rain wondering whether fish ever get lonely imagining what color my blood would be if joy had its way with it what a misuse what a miracle what luck to be given a mind capable of inventing sorrow and symphonies in the very same afternoon

sometimes i think we mistake thinking for living sometimes i think the body has known the answer long before the mind arrives panting trying to explain it maybe thats why we breathe before we speak maybe thats why babies know how to cry before they know language maybe thats why grief lands in the chest instead of the forehead maybe wisdom has always lived below the neck and maybe thats why twenty five strangers can lie beside one another breathing into the same room and leave feeling less alone than they did walking in what if thats all we were ever trying to remember that beneath the titles and histories and opinions and little polished biographies we hand each other we are just warm blood searching for somewhere safe enough to cool down and i press my forehead back into the stream because suddenly i dont know where the shower ends and i begin and maybe that has always been the point to dissolve a little to come back softer to leave some version of yourself circling the drain while another steps out into the morning still dripping still wondering still impossibly alive

you owe zero loyalty to a version of yourself that keeps you miserable

i keep coming back to that because i think somewhere along the line we confused loyalty with morality as if abandoning ourselves in the name of consistency is somehow noble as if staying exactly the same deserves a standing ovation meanwhile your body has been filing complaints for years your shoulders know before your mouth does your jaw knows before your planner does your stomach has been writing essays while your brain is still making spreadsheets trying to justify another yes you never wanted to give in fact that you need not give

integrity is in the journey not the destination

alas destinations don’t ask much of us they simply wait but journeys god they scrape they ask for knees skinned up on gravel and pods of peas eaten standing barefoot over the sink because you forgot lunch again they ask for embarrassing apologies and changing your mind and saying actually i don’t think that’s true anymore and discovering your own voice sounds different when it isn’t echoing inside someone else’s expectations

patriotism is rooted in love and civic duty not supremacy not dominance not power and yes i think you should become a patriot for your own heart too because what else are we doing here if not building little democracies inside ourselves where every frightened part gets a vote but none of them gets to become dictator

love and safety that’s the whole thing isn’t it

that’s why we become constellations of knifes edges

people always act like sharpness is the problem but sharpness is survival that doesn’t have somewhere soft to land

we get betrayed and rejected and abandoned and suddenly our nervous systems become little border collies herding every possible threat into one tiny fenced pasture because maybe if i can keep everything over there then nothing can surprise me again but healing has never asked me to become less sensitive it has only ever asked me to become safer

safe enough to walk a full circle around the thing that hurt me

safe enough to notice i don’t have to become its edges

i can become the velvet around it

the sweet cream space between what happened and who i decide to become because language only grows where there is room to breathe and i have never once met a person screaming at themselves into transformation

everything is a big deal if it feels like a big deal

i don’t care if someone else survived worse i don’t care if your neighbor or sister of husband would have handled it differently grief is not the olympics there are no medals for minimizing yourself

and i have been thinking so much about care because so much of my work lives inside the places where other people come to care for themselves except yoga is payroll and coaching people toward peace is not the same thing as giving it to myself so then what

what counts

i think investment counts

slow oil on warm skin counts

washing my face like i’m cleaning something sacred instead of fixing something broken counts

telling you how i like to be touched counts

the conversations that build tomorrow’s home instead of merely surviving today’s fire count

maybe we have been looking for a cure from ourselves when the whole time we were supposed to be learning how to stay with ourselves

i love to hear you well

i don’t mean your voice i mean your aliveness

i mean i love hearing someone whose laugh finally belongs to them again

whose no sounds like no because it isn’t apologizing on the way out

whose yes isn’t trying to earn citizenship inside someone else’s life

that’s the sound i love

well

what a gorgeous sound

it’s a blessing to be this soft now

and life didn’t become softer

but i stopped making a religion out of surviving it

survivor isn’t my identity anymore

divorcee isn’t either

someone else’s strife doesn’t get to be my biography

someone else’s inability to love me well doesn’t become my personality

and maybe that’s why i don’t need to use because i know coping isn’t the assignment and living is

do you know who steals the light from behind my eyes

fucking no one

there is devastation in realizing you’ve been gone for years while your body kept clocking into work showing up for dinner paying bills answering texts smiling in photographs and then one ordinary tuesday you stumble into yourself like finding a childhood jacket in the back of a closet and somehow it still fits

that’s the homecoming nobody prepared me for

not becoming someone new

finally meeting the woman who never actually left she was just waiting patiently underneath all the people pleasing and proving and panic underneath all the flags i kept raising for countries that were never mine

and god

i love to hear her well

yours

lover of a nipple tweak and curated meat feast

what is a dream

a dream is the thing that survives your skepticism

a dream is the strange little pulse that keeps insisting on itself after every sensible version of you has already gone home

dreamy dreamy dreamy

dreamy is a way of moving through the world as though delight has equal authority to productivity

dreamy is running toward the horizon with absolutely no concern for how ridiculous your body looks in motion because there are some destinations dignity cannot carry you to

dreamy is letting the wind have its way with you letting it rearrange your hair your plans your posture your certainty and discovering you looked more like yourself afterward anyway

dreamy is collecting moments instead of evidence

dreamy is discovering that enoughness is not earned through exhaustion

dreamy is waking up seven days removed from the rituals i once confused for freedom and realizing my own nervous system had been trying to sing to me the whole time i had simply been drowning it out with louder things

dreamy is candlelight softening every hard edge until faces become less like objects and more like prayers until your eyes catch mine across the room and for one suspended impossible second nothing needs fixing nothing needs proving nothing needs to become content later

only this

this astonishing accident of being here at the exact same time

sometimes i think we misunderstand dreams because we’ve been taught they belong in the future when really they’re always asking us a question about the present

can you feel this while it’s happening

can you recognize beauty before it’s memory

can you stop reaching for the next thing long enough to realize your hands are already full

i hope so

because i have spent enough years mistaking urgency for aliveness and ambition for intimacy and now i would rather become someone who notices

someone who notices the air changing before the rain arrives

someone who notices the way silence stretches differently between two people who trust one another

someone who notices that joy is almost always standing in the corner waiting to see if anyone invites it to dance

it’s a dream it’s a dream it’s a dreamy

not because life has become easier

because i finally stopped demanding that wonder justify itself before i let it inside

and you

beneath the same impossible sky that has watched every human being love badly and beautifully before us

you

you are my favorite on this planet.

lace it through my hair lace it through my skin leak it into the lining of my bags and my car seats and my bedsheets in that uncleanable way perfume does when it decides it belongs to you more than you belong to yourself let it haunt me i am tired of things that leave easily i am tired of clean exits and neat endings and lessons wrapped up with a little bow at the bottom tell me instead about the things that linger tell me about the scent that survives the washing machine tell me about the person you loved three years ago who still lives in the back room of your nervous system paying no rent whatsoever tell me about the songs you can’t listen to without becoming a version of yourself you thought had died

it feels like golden days from here on out at least for a little while and maybe that is the trick maybe every summer arrives disguised as forever and every fall arrives to remind you that nothing has ever belonged to you at all but still i fall for it every single year i hand myself over willingly i become another idiot at the altar of green leaves and late sunsets and farmers markets and bodies with less clothing and more stories and if you need me for the next few months you will likely find me in the woods somewhere collecting evidence that life is worth the trouble the neighborwood where time is measured by what and how much has gone into our mouths and out our asses where dinner is an event and coffee is a ritual and desire is still allowed to roam around off leash

and if not then take my soul take my sacrifice take this strange little jewel of a life i have managed to keep alive despite myself take my glossy thing my wet looking thing my peculiar thing my heart still somehow holding shape after all these years of throwing itself at people and places and ideas with absolutely no regard for its own safety pecking around for scraps of dopamine and wonder and tenderness and meaning like a feral little bird who has never once learned its lesson

young dreamer don’t do what i have done except maybe do because i couldn’t have won and i couldn’t have lost either i tried to run from every ache every longing every ridiculous hope and all it did was circle back around and find me sitting exactly where i started only older only wiser only with better playlists and a stronger stomach for disappointment so i’ve just gotta tell you goodbye to the version of me that thought she could think her way out of wanting goodbye to the version of me that thought desire was a problem to solve instead of a thing to bow to

and SHE’S BACK

she always comes back

the girl with the playlists and no explanations the girl who drops a song into your lap like a breadcrumb and vanishes before you can ask what she meant by it the girl who loves sideways and crooked and through metaphors and recommendation lists and half finished sentences the girl who leaves and leaves and leaves and somehow still remains the girl who understands that sometimes the closest thing we have to saying i love you is handing someone a song and hoping they hear what you couldn’t bring yourself to say out loud

go ahead taste the sugar if you want it bite into the fruit let it run down your chin let it ruin your shirt let it make a mess of you you’ll lose your teeth eventually anyway and so will i every sweet thing asks for something in return every beautiful thing eventually collects its debt but christ what a bargain what a privilege what a stupid gorgeous thing it is to be alive enough to want it

and the sticky thing is i already have three finished drafts sitting there. finished in the way roadkill is finished. finished in the way flowers are finished when somebody forgets to change the water. finished and lifeless and staring back at me from the corner of the room where i dragged them after declaring them unworthy of resurrection. and that is usually where things start getting dangerous. not the sadness. not the grief. not even the anger. the danger arrives the second i start asking what is the point. because that question sounds philosophical until you realize it is carrying bolt cutters. the second i ask what is the point i can feel the trapdoor unlatch somewhere beneath me.

all my points of access start hanging little closed signs in the windows. the lights flicker. the machinery groans. everything begins to seize and squelch and leak. conviction dripping through my fingers like dishwater. and i can see it happening while it is happening which somehow makes it worse because lately i have spent more time relating to my life than feeling it. standing outside of it with a clipboard. taking notes. drawing conclusions. building theories. trying to understand every bruise instead of letting the bruise bloom. trying to explain every ache instead of crawling inside it long enough to learn its name. always translating. always interpreting. always standing one room away from the thing itself.

and then i found myself in a valley surrounded by women carrying their own small apocalypses and something inside me cracked like ice in spring. quiet at first. then all at once. before i knew it i was knee deep in my own sediment. my own anger. my own grief. my own shame. all the things i had spent months politely escorting toward the exit as if pain might appreciate good manners. delete. delete. delete. reroute. optimize. make meaning of. move on. turn suffering into content. turn heartbreak into wisdom. turn loss into something useful. because god forbid anything simply hurt.

and there she was. still heartbroken as hell. still sitting exactly where i left her. legs crossed. arms folded. looking at me like a woman waiting for a ride that was eight months late. and what a strange thing to discover. that the body will be damned before it lets you forget something that mattered. the body is stubborn that way. the body is a hoarder. it keeps the receipts stuffed into every drawer. it keeps the scent trapped inside old sweatshirts. it keeps fingerprints on the glass. it keeps entire cemeteries tucked behind your sternum long after the mind has built a compelling powerpoint presentation explaining why none of it should matter anymore.

the body does not care about your logic. the body does not care about your timeline. the body is deeply unimpressed by your productivity. it does not give a single shit how elegantly you have explained your pain away. and maybe that is mercy. maybe that is the mercy of being alive. that some part of us remains unwilling to abandon what mattered even when the rest of us is desperate to move on.

and here i am finally with something to say which is strange because i spend so much time talking about where i came from. the religion. the patriarchy. the slow steady erosion that happens when you are taught to distrust your own knowing and hand the keys to somebody else’s certainty. and yes there was grief there. yes there was pain there. yes there was a particular kind of violence in learning that belonging required the repeated abandonment of self. but i am losing interest in good and bad. right and wrong. victim and villain. those words feel too clean. too pressed and folded. too sterile for something still breathing.

what happened was catastrophically misaligned and necessary. both can be true. they often are. and i do not carry much blame anymore because eventually you realize everybody is wandering around carrying maps they did not draw. griefs they did not order. inheritances they never consented to receive. stories passed hand to hand like family heirlooms nobody remembers purchasing.

and i do not tell you any of this because i need you to care about my story. truthfully i hope you don’t. at least not very much. because i am not the point. the point is whether somewhere in these words you stumble into yourself. whether you catch sight of the relationship you have been sleeping inside of. whether you see the dream you keep starving in the corner because somebody convinced you it was irresponsible. or unrealistic. or selfish. or my personal favorite. not respectable.

respectable. god. what a strange little word. it always sounds to me like a sweater vest with bad opinions. respectable according to who. who is handing out the ribbons. who built the measuring stick. who made them king. and why are so many of us still kneeling at the altar of people who cannot possibly live our lives for us.

because at the end of it all it is you with you. that is the whole thing. that is the joke and the tragedy and the miracle. you are the one who has to live inside your skin. you are the one who has to negotiate with your own conscience at two in the morning when the house goes quiet and there is nowhere left to hide. you are the one who has to carry your choices home.

and one day when this whole strange gorgeous heartbreaking mess folds itself back into the earth it will be you there too. just you. and i don’t find that lonely anymore. i find it clarifying. like cold water. like a church bell. like finally hearing your own name spoken correctly after years of introductions.

which means your peace is paramount. your honor is paramount. the truth of your own life is paramount. and there is no prize waiting at the finish line for the person who spent the most years disappearing themselves so everybody else could remain comfortable. there is no trophy for self abandonment. no ribbon for hushed suffering. no standing ovation for becoming smaller than the life that was trying to claim you all along.

i was never the runaway kid, not once, and it had nothing to do with balls, i was the one always running to keep up, half a step behind something, someone, some version of life that felt like it was happening just over there, just out of reach, and i kept pace the best i could, breath a little shallow, eyes forward, not asking too many questions about where i was actually trying to get to. maybe that’s why this feels like such a return now, or maybe not a return at all but a collapse of distance, like i finally stopped chasing long enough to feel what was already here, already waiting, already mine.

palms to the earth now and she presses back like oh you thought this was one sided, no baby, and i laugh because of course she does, of course it isn’t, i flirt with her under the pads of my fingertips, massage her slow, then press all of my weight up and away like a tease, we play coy like that, me and this ground, a quiet little love affair that no one asked for but somehow feels necessary, like oxygen or a good song you didn’t know you needed until it found you. i hum, i whew, somewhere between breath and rhythm and the low hum of being alive, and Gladys Knight slips in like she does because she knows something about devotion, about staying, about not rushing past the good part.

and my mind wanders because it always does, pips and pipsqueaks and how language gets born, how meaning stretches and shrinks depending on who’s holding it, and what you’d have to deal with if you chose me, if you stayed long enough to see the full range of it, the tangents and the tenderness and the places i refuse to flatten myself to be easier to digest. because it all starts as function, body as machine, movement as task, but i refuse to stop there, my sexy has to feel higher than my function, it has to mean something, it has to breathe, so i taper it back, back, back, slow it down until living feels intentional, until it feels like something i am choosing instead of something i am keeping up with.

orange wine in the glass, incense curling through the air like a question with no urgency of being answered, floral stems tucked into the corners of my life like small declarations, sunset light casting that orangey pink glow across the walls like a dense and oozy translucent sauce, and i sit in it, all of it, this body, this breath, this strange electric aliveness that i used to outrun and now let catch me. no longer chasing, no longer reaching for something just out of frame, just here, and i think why wouldn’t i enjoy this, why wouldn’t i stay here as me, fully, endlessly, barefaced and breathing here.

you reach in thinking you are in control that is the joke that is always the joke she does not chase you she does not lunge she does not need theatrics she lets you do the leaning in the brushing past the casual intimacy of not paying attention and then she stays with you under the skin under the decision under the idea that you could separate action from consequence cleanly

and when she gets you she gets you not loud not immediate but later in heat and rise and itch in the slow burning insistence that your body is no longer fully yours to ignore it is sensual in the most inconvenient way like memory you cannot stop touching like a signal that keeps arriving long after you swore you moved on you scratch and it answers you soothe and it shifts you try to outrun it and find it already rewriting where away even is

you can wage war on her if you want cut spray strip the ground down to apology and ash you can call it maintenance call it control call it necessary correction but she knows how to come back through what you did not see underground a network of persistence humming under everything you tried to make sterile she returns not as the same body but as something that learned you

and everyone calls her the problem the invasive one the wrong one as if wrongness is enough of a reason to justify eradication as if anything that resists your neatness must be sentenced but she does not argue morality she only answers contact she only proves that removal is not the same as resolution

and there is something disquietingly intimate about that about being forced into care you did not schedule into attention you did not negotiate she makes you tend to yourself urgently medically undeniably she interrupts the fantasy that you can stay untouched in a world that is always already touching you back

and still still you are left with the question that sits under all of it why does control feel like virtue when it is really just fear wearing clean clothes why does everything alive that resists us get translated into something we are allowed to destroy

because she is not only an enemy she is also a form of insistence a reminder that some things do not ask permission to persist that presence is not always obedience to your comfort

and maybe that is what makes her unbearable not that she harms but that she refuses to agree with your version of order

but it only takes one thread, just one, to start seeping into the others and the others and the others until suddenly the whole fabric is stained, wet, sopping with your own pulsing truth, and you’ll stand there with it in your hands wondering how was it ever dry, how did i ever call this living when now it is so undeniably alive, so juicy, so potent, the pigment of your own sauce impossible to ignore, impossible to wash out, impossible to hand back to anyone who told you to be less

wield this - this audacity, this willingness to let yourself be seen mid-unravel, mid-exhume, pulling old selves and stories up from the grave not to re-bury them but to look at them, to name them, to thank them for keeping you alive when you didn’t know how, and then to release them without ceremony because what a quiet tragedy it would be to wait another decade, two even, waiting for some imagined arrival, some cougar puberty, some permission slip written by time itself before you let yourself step out, before you let yourself be drenched in your own becoming

all that life, all that well-slept, loose-limbed, jointed, laughing, reckless goodness -missed because you were still negotiating with ghosts and listen we must, at all costs, find a way to operate with honor inside of this to remember that we are not owners here, not of our gifts, not of our bodies, not of the very breath that moves through us, we are trustees, temporary stewards of something that chose us as its vessel for a moment in time

these things we cling to and call mine - my talent, my voice, my beauty, my edge -they are not ours, they move through us, they animate us, they ask to be expressed, not possessed and nothing about your access negates someone else’s, nothing about your fullness requires another’s depletion, this is not a marketplace of scarcity, it is a field of receivers

all you need is the antenna and the willingness to believe what you’re picking up is meant for you and hear this clearly - if you cannot release it, it is not a possession

it is the possessor

and tender, so unbearably tender, is the one who clutches so tightly around the thing they believe makes them special, afraid that if they loosen their grip even slightly they will disappear entirely

but you won’t

you won’t disappear

you’ll be HERE

i called my dad at 4:45 in the morning the day i found out about the affairs voice shaking body buzzing with that kind of anxiety that makes everything feel like it’s collapsing all at once like the floor is gone what do i do what do i do what do i do and he said the one thing i didn’t want to hear simple flat steady like he had already walked through fire and didn’t need to dramatize it this will never go away this will always be a part of you and i remember hating that answer because i wanted relief i wanted a way out i wanted him to tell me how to fix it or outrun it or make it disappear but he wasn’t speaking as my dad in that moment he was speaking as a man who had already met that version of himself and knew there was no shortcut through it only through it

and still when i tried to outrun it outwork it negotiate my way back into some version of sanity when it was hard to even sit next to me and the truth i was carrying when i wasn’t easy to be around when i was sharp and scattered and grieving something i couldn’t even fully name yet he showed up he took a week off work and painted my house ripped down wallpaper like if he could just give me one clean wall one small space of order inside the chaos maybe i could breathe again he beat everyone to the hospital for both of my labors including me always early consistently there like presence was the only language he trusted himself to speak consistently the show up game was strong when i was brave enough to ask again

and still we weren’t the kind of people who talked all the time calls every month or two sometimes longer sometimes six months once two full years passed like entire seasons of our lives unfolding without direct contact and yet something started shifting ten years ago small bids and offerings no attachment to whether they would be met just reaching and i’m learning now there was shame underneath that distance shame in the way things unfolded shame in the ways he pulled away and what he needed wasn’t to be perfect or to rewrite the past he just needed to know he was still wanted that there was still a place for him and if there is he will come he will show up fully purely without performance without trying to be anything other than what he actually is now

two years ago open heart surgery and i stayed not because anyone asked not because we planned it but because something in my body said this is where you’re supposed to be i slept on the bench in his room every night set his tray up exactly how he liked it two ocd freaks finding comfort in the same small rituals the same need for order when everything else feels out of control and we didn’t talk constantly but when we did it was different it was regret it was truth it was the words deemed for the actions of things he hadn’t said before what alcohol led to why he really pulled away how he actually felt giving up weekends the ways he advocated for me that i never saw the ways he did show up inside the limitations of his own mind and pain and something in me softened because i am him not in the ways that broke things but in the ways that feel too much the ways that retreat the ways that try to cope and sometimes get it wrong i forgive him because i understand him i see the i am in him and he’s beautiful

and i’ve wondered about my parents if watching me live out of alignment hurt them in ways i couldn’t understand then if what i interpreted as distance was actually grief them watching me become something they knew wasn’t fully me them not knowing how to reach me without losing me and now he texts me every week asks how i’m doing sends those juicy heart emojis and i cry because he’s thinking of me because he’s interested because he’s here and then there’s this ache that something so small can move me this deeply that it has the power to spin my whole emotional world and then right behind it there’s this gratitude that it still can that i didn’t shut that part of me down that we’re building something again slowly carefully honestly something alive

not repaired not returned not what it was

but new

save yourself and you might just save your neighbor show them how you breathe and maybe they remember how to fill their own lungs again and by saving yourself you give them permission to do the same i have infinity to give i feel it but even the smallest celebration the smallest honoring of what you receive from me it keeps the loop alive it keeps us all moving

you found this to save yourself and when you do that and then you amplify it AMPLIFY what is working what is opening what is healing you save more than just you you ripple it outward we become love we become healed we start to remember that we were never separate to begin with

and notice the difference between being with someone and giving yourself to someone one is connection one is real and good and needed but the other is transcendence the other is dissolution the other is stepping fully into it

but you can’t give yourself like that until you’ve learned to feel yourself first until you’ve learned to sound yourself out until you’ve lerned to moan for your fucking self until you’ve learned to meet yourself fully in your own body in your own truth

and i run i run i run because when i’m moving i can almost outrun it i can gather things and moments and laughter and conversations i can fill my hands with evidence that i am alive that this life is happening to me in bright loud color but the second i slow it all catches up like a shadow that was never behind me just waiting and i feel it all at once and it’s too much and i think what is the point of any of this if i can barely hold myself inside of it

and then something cracks open just enough for a thought to slip through maybe this is it maybe this is the thread that ties me to everyone else this whisper of unbearable knowing that living here in this world asks something of us that we don’t always know how to give

and still the sun had the audacity to love us so fully just days ago wrapping everything in that soft golden warmth like a promise like see this is yours this is how it can feel and then gone just like that tucked behind a duvet clouds thick and unmoving and today even the wind feels wrong like it forgot how to be gentle my wind chimes still sing but it’s sharp now it lands wrong its shrill it presses right above my left eyebrow like a noise i can’t escape and everything feels edged everything feels like too much

yesterday i was laughing to myself soft and low at the chaos of my kids’ rooms the little piles and scattered pieces of their lives oh silly kids living like they do bopping and plopping and building worlds that make perfect sense to them their own sacred little sanctuaries and i loved them for it i loved the evidence of them everywhere

but today i stand in the hallway caught between doorways looking into those same rooms and they feel hollow like something has been lifted out of them and i can’t stop thinking about their faces right now wherever they are what their eyes look like what they’re holding what they’re trying to understand and do they feel it too that small empty corner at the bottom of their hearts inside do they notice the shift the absence the way a space can be full one moment and aching the next

it’s not how it’s supposed to be or maybe it is and that’s the part i can’t quite make peace with

because when i slow down i remember i remember how deep this sadness runs how low it can pull me how heavy it is to be here sometimes and still there’s this knowing underneath it that the slowness is where we meet each other that this is the place where joy and pain hold hands where both things are true at once always have been always will be

and even when it feels like i’m standing alone like i want to disappear from anything that feels this real i’m not alone i’m just in it i’m just in the part that doesn’t tuck itself away or make itself easy to carry

and maybe the depth of this sadness isn’t separate from the joy at all maybe it’s the same stretch of feeling the same wide open range because i know what it feels like when the sun comes back when the air softens when their warm faces press into me when their chests rise and fall against mine and for a moment everything lands exactly where it belongs and i think oh this this is why i stay this is why i keep going even when slowing down breaks me open again and again

and i am not some privileged white man on the inside but i do be telling you the audacity i carry feels just as rolling like i am holding something that is mine to wield mine to move with and i am sitting here being exactly who i am a porch person because there is a difference there is a real difference patio is hard patio is cold it can be beautiful but it is exposed it does not hold you the same way the energy moves but it escapes too fast

the porch though the porch holds you wooden beams under you around you containing the goodness while still letting you breathe still letting the breeze pass through it softens things when something hits the ground it does not clink and startle it lands with depth with resonance it travels into the body instead of bouncing off of it and i want that i want to be of that i want to be shaped by what i surround myself with

and maybe there is a place for me in all of that in the way i feel things in the way i register the world not sharp but deep not loud but full

where was i oh right you

i am dismantling the patriarchy and capitalism with my fitsy little fists from this porch from this held contained breathing space perched here calling it bai watch and may i never feel reined in

his elbows knobby jutting out in every direction like his body couldn’t quite contain itself and those hands god those hands how small a book looked in them and how they could carry themselves across the country from and every single day i’d come home from school plop down in front of the tabletop electronic desk box dial up the internet listen to that screeching song of connection just to email him about everything and nothing and i’d wake up to his 2 am responses like clockwork like i could almost taste the dr pepper and peanut m&ms he was chewing on while he wrote tapping out words in the dark ‘if there’s ever a war then i’m on your side'

and how do you hold that how do you understand someone who could be so cutting and also just hurt just scared just wanting to know that love would come back to him that it wasn’t going anywhere

that’s why we were different i think that’s why he wrote those books with characters that were a bit of me twinkle toeing through the pages hiding out on rooftops like there was always somewhere else to go somewhere just out of reach that’s why he handed me paul simon and eddie rabbit like little keys to something bigger than both of us

we had two fists of iron but going nowhere and i’d drive the golf cart while he cursed everything under the sun for 18 holes and i’d sit there reading poetry between swings learning diligence in the reapplication of spf 100 learning the miracle of grass shards sticking to your skin in the texas heat learning how to exist in the in between

and as much as he didn’t understand me didn’t understand the way i moved through the world the edges of me that didn’t fit into anything he could name i do think he had a hand in shaping them in rooting them deeper whether he meant to or not

and if he could see me now if he knew what i know now i think he’d look at me with that same sideways grin and say it plain as anything

see you on down the road jack

crappy kitchen no counter space fluorescent lighting and cabinets that don’t click and a bathtub that won’t plug yes crappy apartment he said you feel the need to get away from me so badly it’s worth moving into something like this and i remember thinking you don’t understand and maybe you never will

because that was the first place i felt joy like real joy not pretending not borrowed not something i had to earn but something i could just exist inside of like i finally met myself there the version of me i had been fighting to become

and sure it was sticky a little dingy if you didn’t know how to look at it but it wasn’t that it was lived in it was held it had a hundred years of breath and heartbreak and laughter pressed into its bones the hardwood floors marked and etched by lives that came before us grit and soft landings layered into every inch of it

and then we loved it and it became something else entirely the way the sun would spill through those windows the strange soft curve of the kitchen ceiling like it was bending toward you i painted the wall orange hung that rainbow light catcher from caroline and watched color move across the room like it had somewhere to be i built a wooden top for the stove because there was no counter space and suddenly there was and i changed the cabinet knobs to these mismatched ceramic pieces like tiny offerings

and there was no dishwasher so i stood there every day hands in warm soapy water letting it slow me down letting it bring me back to myself and no microwave either which meant you had to be with your food with your body with the act of feeding yourself nothing rushed nothing numbed just presence just participation

plants everywhere books stacked textures velvet and coze every corner asking you to stay a little longer to soften a little more

and it was the first place i could fall asleep in the middle of the day on the couch doors and windows wide open breeze moving through like it knew me like it was allowed to touch me and i felt safe in that i felt held in that like a part of me that had always been braced finally unclenched

dancing in hazy incense clouds fresh stems every sunday any excuse to bring more life into the space like we were tending something sacred like we were building a home that could actually hold us

and here is the thing he will still say what he will say and it will have so little to do with me and my life and my choices and everything to do with the fact that i chose not to be attached to his strings not to be pulled not to be shaped not to be contained

and i stand here two feet firmly planted in what i know to be true my truth not as a sentiment not as something i say to make myself feel better but as something i live something i breathe something i choose over and over again

i control how i live my life

i am responsible for my own peace

i am doing beautifully

i’m getting better

i am getting happier

i am getting calmer

i am getting smarter

i am getting stronger

i am getting rich

life is always giving me what i want

i’m always getting what i want because what i want is a feeling

and i have sovereignty over my inner state

and i don’t owe you a single morsel of it

and that is not rebellion

that is the goddamn truth