life as a whirlwind

so many great and overwhelming things are happening (publication! first postgrad job! graduation in 2 weeks! other stuff!) that it’s sorta giving me ulcers and i walk around trying to dispel this confused haze floating around my head so i can get back to reality and go for that last push. the truth is i’m trying so hard to trust this process, this process that makes you spend almost your entire life in a crawl and suddenly you’re in a convertible speeding down the highway, watching the scenery blur by in just one breath.

while my friends talk about new homes
new routes into foreign places like ants
burrowing into new places in the soil
i feel my eyes glaze over as i watch
my future kill my own ambition
graying over and wilting and thinking
did i ever have a chance at it? was it all
some master joke? to have dreamed so hard
and to graduate with not a shout
but a slow dying whimper while i
bury my hands into the ground,
wishing someone could tell me,
you could still be something,
if only i remembered that.

i wish i could mimic the hope
in the unseen supposedly flowering
opportunities of a world teetering on edge
truth is i smile frozenly all the while i
can already feel myself being
devoured alive, inch by inch. i can
already feel myself passing —

i clung so hard to my passion
i forgot how cruel the world can be
to people who love something the most.

some nights i go to bed
wishing not that i would wake
prettier,
smarter,
or more talented,
but simply:
braver

as if the courage
i never had
would solve it all

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tonight i learned
how i got to be so good
at waiting, at how peculiar
it can be that patience
has long decorated my
bones

tonight, i know
i inherited it from
my mother, whose
patience has eaten
her bones brittle
and worn her heart
skeletal, smoking,
in an empty room.

signed, sealed, delivered

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me, myself, and the virgin mary

yesterday was my friend’s wedding, and it was the first time in a very long time that I’d stepped into a Catholic church, which was an interesting experience.  there was a brown Jesus statue that I very much approved of.  so gone are my Catholic roots that I didn’t even remember how to do the sign of the cross (yet interestingly enough, that residual Catholic guilt still remains).

but what I wanted to talk about was my moment with Mary.  let me preface this with a little known fact: i have always been intrigued by the Virgin Mary — who she is, her story, her significance within certain cultures, etc.  granted, when i was younger, the term “virgin” was not as clear as it is now, but once it was it was like opening up a can of worms that would never ever be closed.  especially as a female growing up in religious surroundings, the virgin mary gets to inhabit this sacred symbolism and even paradigm of what the perfect woman/girl should be.  pure and feminine and as virgin as the day is long that she was “chosen” by God.  which makes me wonder what the application process would’ve been like, if there had been one.  but i digress. 

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when you get there

I had my first meeting with my mentor last week about my projects and the two p-words (possibilities! publishing!) as part of my Independent Study with her.  I have been trying all weekend to talk about this, to get it down in blog-form, but something about it keeps turning me off.  It sort of feels like psychological indigestion.  Writing about it makes me nervous and confused.  Even talking about it to my roommates took me awhile.

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serenity

do you ever just think, I wish I could bottle up this moment, and things could be exactly this way — at least in this bottle, even if nowhere else — forever?  And nobody would get any older, or wiser, or sadder, or angrier.  And that version of ourselves would always just be there, not just a memory, but a real physical relic of a time when you wanted nothing more than where you already were, at that moment, and who you were already with. And you realize how rare that is, to realize you are not only content with what you have, but are incredibly, amazingly full as if that one, puny moment has given you an entire feast’s satisfaction.  And you just want to keep it that way, for as long as you can.  You want to stop time, because if you did that, it meant nothing would change.  Nobody’s hair would fall out, nobody’s laugh would end, nobody would have to say goodbye to that moment, because when people do that, they don’t know they’re doing it for forever. That’s the thing they don’t tell you.  You don’t realize that when you leave, you’ll never get it back — at least, not in the exact same way.  Everything will have changed.  You will get different versions of that moment, but never the same moment twice.  You will try to restage that moment, but you will always fail. 

And that when you leave home, they never tell you everything will still be there the way you left it.  That’s because they know better.  The world turns and dust covers everything you love and every day you get older and farther away from that person that you loved, that person that you used to be.  That person that you so desperately miss.

But it was so good the first time, you’d think.  It was just perfect back then.  For once, you could think of nothing about it you’d wanted to change.  And it was like the best dream, because all of it was actually real.

the J-word

I’d like to say that I live in a constant state of self-analysis. I’m an analytical person, okay — I overanalyze, and I’ve been told this by friends as both a bad thing and, well, just a me thing. Once my BFF Ann said, “If you stopped overanalyzing, you’d stop being you.”  Which can be taken in any way, but it’s just as well, because I don’t know how to stop it.  But what I can do is point it inwards, and use it to be more aware of myself and all of the junk going on in there.

Last night a few friends and I had some coffee at Starbucks after dinner.  We like to have coffee and gab to each other.  We’re girls. We talk.  About anything and everything.  But something that has been a point of contention amongst us is stuff like marriage and IF there is “The One” and relationships.  It’s in these conversations that I can track the changes that have been happening to and inside me. 

I still remember the very first REAL conversation I had with two of my friends now.  We were out on a morning walk (that’s right - we’re old ladies) and they told me they didn’t believe in romantic love.  And I was like, but why not! There’s a reason for all of those love songs! Not all things crash and burn!  Some really Hallmark bullshit.  But it was genuine, guys.  This stuff, me going on about how love can be great, how being with someone can make you grow and learn about yourself, I really believed that love, despite all of the gold bangle million dollar wedding shit people lay on, is pure and good and amazing if you really saw it without the make-up.  Like a really beautiful girl, love is even more amazing when it isn’t dressed up and caked with superficial ornaments.  And I thought, if only people could see that like I could.  I could have easily been jaded, too.  I saw my parents and I didn’t see the love that pretend people like Cinderella and Prince Charming did.  It would have been so easy for me to have said just because I didn’t see it there, that it didn’t exist.  Maybe a little even too easy.

I’d gone on that spiel plenty of times, including to this guy a few years ago.  He was a good looking cat but he was young, from a broken home, and was jaded.  I asked him if had ever been in love, and he said that no, he hadn’t, but that the fact was irrelevant.  “I don’t have to have ever been in love to know that it’s all bullshit,” he said.  I said, “Call me when you fall in love so that I can personally come over and watch you stick your giant-ass foot in your mouth.”

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the tides

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