Strawberry Swing

Love: l,l,l and then an “uh,” then that soft v resting on your lips and then you’ve said it; but what have you said? My love for each and every thing deserves its own name. I love him like a mumble or a stutter or a stumble when I want to be loving him like a force of nature or a pair of wings. But really it's a selfish need, to burrow under his skin and steal his heartbeat.

Sometimes I am at peace on a highway at sunset listening to a song say “goodbye” and suddenly I’m open and he lies gentle in my heart, not tugging, and that I think is when I truly love him.

ode to the perpetually untidy room

What if I'm meant to write but have nothing to say? I should sit down every morning and put down two pages, but I'm afraid I'll be sucked dry. What's the worst that could happen, really? I'm boring? What else is new? My spectacularly ordinary life is devoted to what the less enlightened deem dull. I enjoy little things, small comforts, and best of all I shall never run out of those. If I force myself to sit down with a pen daily, I'll become a better and better translator of the petite beauty that strikes me daily.

I love my cluttered room, for example, my tumultuous sanctuary. True I hate not being able to find things, but I wonder if there isn't comfort in having some chaos of my very own. I am like God, master of a mess that seems without purpose. In daily life I am ordered and in control (or so it would seem), but without the freedom to sprawl and clutter sans reproach I chafe and then wither. I do value simplicity and every time I tidy I purge. But to me perfect cleanliness, the obsessive kind that comforts some people, is just a pristine lie. Nothing will stay that way. What's the point? To feel efficient for a few days but not remember where anything is? Probably also to a degree because I'm lazy, I'll admit. There are all different species of people in the world, however, and the ones who think me lazy I find neurotic. I'd say I'm casual, easily satisfied, someone who doesn't buy into the frantic and ambitious. My room is dirty and I am content.

I Don't Know How to Love Him

Him. The best friend, the only boy I’ve ever loved. My feelings for him are knotted. I honestly adore him, though he is not perfect. He loves me too, though I don’t know that he can love me in the way I love him. What if he had never met her? Would there have been an us? Potentiality gnaws at me. I wonder about the margins of love, the borders and restrictions and definitions. I wish that the English language had more synonyms for the word, so he could know exactly how I love him. I love how he smiles when he sees me, and I him. I love how comfortable we are despite the past. Most of all I love the moments. The time when we were driving home and he pulled over because a spider attacked me. When we watched “Monty Python” while layered on my couch. And the night when he offered to lead me home even though I knew I could find my own way. He dutifully drove 55 in the slow lane, calling me whenever a car got between us or we merged onto another freeway. This from the boy who usually flies down the highway at 80, this from the boy who had work in the morning, but added a half hour to his trip just so he knew I’d get home.

I love his floppy hair (sometimes). I love his long musician fingers. I love his strong arms, goofy smile and mismatched nose. I love how tall he is. I love his stupid band t-shirts and baseball caps that make him look like he's 12. I love how he laughs. I love his insecurity and how easy it is for him to show affection. I love his old person car. I love how good his heart is and how innocent and fragile he is in so many ways. I love that he loves his family, and his dog. I love how he softly and earnestly sings along to songs in the car. I love how good he looks in blue and I love his mustache. I love our philosophical conversations and dirty jokes and even the awkward silences. I love when he teases me. I love how common his name sounds. I love the way he stands with his hands in his pockets. I love that he can dance but he never does. Maybe someday someone will convince him to waltz under streetlights with them.

I wish I knew one thing he loved about me.

Damn the noisy, extroverted arbiters of well-being

Some of us just want to live quaint little lives, magnificently plain and of no great consequence. Is that so much to ask, to not be required to aspire to matter? Constantly I condemn myself for my lack of ambition. Is there something so wrong with being still, being simple, being satisfied? I suppose for some there is. A life without frantic going is no life at all to them. A pulse proves your aliveness, but I feel such an exquisite, subtle rhythm in the quiet places. I don't need power, don't need fame or success. I will never be cool or hip or important and that is a blessed thing. My greatest gift is my shabby sincerity. I am that I am and I fail utterly when I try otherwise. Why strive for different? A better me is a worthy aim to be sure, but life will hone me if I am open and do my best. This I must always remember, for the loud, the clamorous, the eternally dynamic who demand that I shape myself into their image are in fact unknowingly in pursuit of my own happiness.

Today I Feel as Fragile as Character from a Virginia Woolf Novel

Today I spent scouring a house. I was atoning for something, trying to scrub away my uselessness and the reasons why I’m so ultimately flawed and non-essential. But I am still so lonely. I take shelter in my claustrophobic, unkempt room and pray that no one will invade its easy space and judge me. That’s why I cleaned today, maniacally wiping away every speck from everything for hours, like I never do. I was trying not to be discarded, trying to abrade myself into a safe, clean oblivion. I haven’t spoken to anyone today, except for the terrible, critical phone call that woke me up and started this whole thing, and the tiny angry words that I had sought to avoid, that drove me in here so that no trace of me would be left out there. If I disappear, they cannot take hold of me, cannot disapprove or reproach. Even if it is cold and terrible, alone and forgotten, I am safe in here; I can comprehend myself. No one will ever know me really, and no one will ever love me because I am not the kind of person that people are accustomed to loving. I am not glorious in any way, I am not assured or talented, my flaws are not commendable (I am inert and timid and too sensitive). The world has no place for me and so I must make do in being untouched and alone, with only my observations and longings for company. I will watch others dance through life, moving without the self-consciousness that so paralyzes me. I will feel as if, for a second, I could be one of them, productive and valuable, but ultimately I will fight myself to do anything and I will wish for sleep, where in dreams I am dynamic and free.

Farewell Teenagerhood

It’s that time of year again, time to reevaluate. This year has been rather quiet. Last birthday I peered out over the next year and hoped that something spectacular was waiting. Instead my life has slowly, patiently been gestating. There is a time for everything, and my 20th year was one for contemplation, wondering, unfolding. I’m learning, and the most important thing I’ve learned is acceptance. I might never be patient, but if I can be gentle and kind to myself I can find the courage to become.

So this year I’ll still wish for excitement and romance and happiness. I’ll hope that this will be the year, but I’ll also pray for the grace to do what it’ll take to make this year the year.

May I enjoy a whimsical, tender, vibrant, spontaneous, daring 21st year full of fulfilling projects, good friends, simple pleasures and adventures worth recounting to my future children.

Home Sickness

Nobody lives here anymore. This is what feels like sitting in my pristine room, taking in the boxes and the nervous feeling I get when I leave home for a long time. It's like acknowledging I belong elsewhere now and it leaves my heart as empty as the desk, the shelves, the bed. I'm here watching myself already gone, forgotten.

[insert clever quote here]

I love the act of writing, the way the pen loops across the page or the words appear on the screen. I love the way the world pulses when my eyes and words come together and render it remarkably alive.

I have this burning need to be a writer. They say you should choose an occupation that engages your skills and passions. If I were left to my own devices I would read, watch, think, discuss, investigate and record. Isn't that what writers do? But then there is this fear in me that stems from my love of both the world and the work that describes it: what if I am not skilled enough? What if I don't do its beauty justice? I know eventually hard work and error will polish me, experience wearing down the terror of my imperfection. And in the meanwhile I have my quirky observations and beloved words to gode me on.

"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination."

Wanting. Isn't life always wanting? But maybe the wanting is wise, always hurtling us towards a vision of ourselves that we could never hope to fathom. The wanting will always be there, urging us as we stumble towards the only happiness there ever is: the unexpected, the serendipitous, the accidental. Wanting hurts, but it's a growing pain and without it we would cease. As for my wants...I want vibrancy, tenderness, ache. I want my heart to brim with wonder, my eyes and fingers grateful for everything they touch. I want simple contentedness, like a dear song or a delicious book or a real laugh, as much as possible. I want to love and not worry or try too hard. I want to be able to hear my heart always, to stay in the beautiful present and never be scared; to be filled with the effortless music of the cosmos, its peace and chaos and energy and hope. I want to trust and never forget to trust, ever, because there is a golden light that never leaves us. I want to be an empty shell all replete with thou, someone whose actions are graceful and sure. I want to consecrate and celebrate, to dance and feel life, to be where I’m supposed to be and know it. I think I’m cluttering this longing with words that mean nothing, but my words are how I struggle to make sense, to build myself and my world, to feel real. I want to learn to write better, to translate and transcribe the poetry I experience every day, to make every fiber of your being sing with my joy and poignancy. Sometimes I’m stranded and can’t feel or express anything. Sometimes I feel dull, insignificant, inferior and isolated. Sometimes I betray myself and I don’t know what to do with the fear. Helplessness slays me, turns my soul into a cold, heavy, static thing that refuses to move, to live, to hope or grasp or try. I get tired and all I see is darkness and hardship and never-ending failure. But underneath it all I find something throbbing, humming with something essential: love, home, Tao, God. Maybe nothingness. Maybe everything.

An Ode to Home

San Bernardino. My home. Not a glamorous place, but beautiful in a way. And who can help but love their home? No matter what we say, we take the place we were born in our bones and leave a bit of our heart. San Bernardino. A blip on the map, due east of Los Angeles. One if its main virtues is being near everything interesting: an hour or two from the desert, the river, the beach, the mountains, the forest, Mexico; four hours to Las Vegas; eight to San Fran. In other words, a perfect place to escape from. Many parts of the city are poor, ghetto and dangerous. The parts that aren't are dilapidated, dusty and dull. But San Bernardino has a funny way of making you miss it when you leave, even if you're living across the street from the beach or in an Alpine villa.

My favorite part is the hills. They surround you, they orient you; you know those mountains point north and that way to the beach. There's an art to all the crags and crevices in the face of the foothills, especially during the brief spring when it's green with wildflowers and you can almost imagine you're in Ireland or the wilderness. Hills that God himself pinched and shaped out of the plain, smoothing out a valley below for us to nestle in. And the sunsets! I'd always watch them in my backyard, the sun dropping behind the mountains and the city lights coming out. The sunlight plays hide and go seek with the shadows, the big houses gleam with gold and the smog turns the sky such colors.

The seasons, too, I love. Our calendar is a peculiar thing. My mother mourns the lack of New England autumns and white Christmases, but this is all I've ever known. Summer lasts from mid-April to October and sometimes rears its head in December. Above 90 is the norm then, often 100, and it's dry like an oven. Mid-day you sleep or take refuge in a theatre or mall and at dusk emerge to swim or run through sprinklers or go the drive-in or do other summer things. I prefer leaving in July or August because the heat does funny things to me, but I love summer nights just about anywhere. September still swelters, but by the end of the month the Santa Anas come, the strong off-shore winds that suck the moisture our of everything and start fires. This is our fall, like summer only noisier. You can still swim until November and I've surfed on Thanksgiving. But then, usually around December, our winter comes. It's the strange bastard season that we don't know quite what to do with. The leaves start changing and quickly fall off. It gets cooler, down in the 60s. Sometimes it gets icy and one time it snowed, but usually it's cool and clear or it rains. Rain here is different than elsewhere. It's scarce and welcome, an excuse to wear a coat and boots or to stay home and pretend you're snowed in. Of course it snows in the mountains, so after a storm, as the wind blows again, you can enjoy the white majesty from afar. This is also when the hills turn, from brown to green. At some point in March there comes a storm you know will be the last and suddenly summer's racing back. Spring is nice, all three weeks of it, and everyone dons their California uniform of shorts, sandals and tanktops.

I never particularly liked sun or summery weather, and this is why, because I was surrounded by it half the year. And I will always be a valley-dweller, missing the comforting contours when I'm living in the flatland. Who I am was shaped by this here, and if I had grown up elsewhere I might very well not be me.