What have I learned about lovers. That they have all been fragmented versions of what I wanted, projected shards of myself. That I needed external to go internal, that to belong to them meant that I could be free, that their admiration meant my own self love.

What I have learned is this, that love is a trick, its a thief in the night that takes all your belongings and leaves you naked. And in this nakedness you feel the cold on your skin and remember you are in the world, remember the temperature of tears and the ache of your head as you squint your eyes and contort your face to wonder why.

We may never know why, why we loved the several in a row who were all wrong for us. We may never know why someone was kind, and took us in on that rainy Saturday afternoon to feed us white bread sandwiches that stuck to the roofs of our mouth. Imagining it now, trying to say thank you with the sticky mass ballooning about. Whys are not important. Why's will get you nowhere.

Now reason is closely related to why but it has a dual meaning, and I was determined to sort myself out. Life after all was a collection of moments, flesh fading into phantom before your eyes. I needed to become a believer in this and nothing else, I was far too old for fairy stories.

I rang him that day as I said I would, the start of the conversation littered with silence and small talk, neither of us giving much energy to pick up the others mess. In the end we decided it was best to proverbially wash our hands and walk our separate ways. No expectations just a clean break from the push and pull we'd been playing at. Tomorrow it would have been a year. A year is always too long. Love is a history on repeat, and I should know this by now.

Now I have decided to fill myself with more amusing things, take long walks in the park and spy on dogs I wish I could steal. Indulge in hot baths that create a fog over the carpet plains as steam escapes the passageway underneath the door. Devour libraries full of books, page by page like a literary glutton. Ahh I can see it now, a disheveled pile of spine and page strewn about, pulpy mass of creamed paper stuck to my lips. And of course I'll have plenty of time for writing. A literacy program even. I could go back to Paris and live in the basement of the Shakespeare and Company Bookstore. I could eat cheese and drink wine and take up the lover I have in waiting. Maybe a few... after all that is the Parisian way of life.

I'm even pondering how lovely it would be to take up yoga and do a cleanse, firm up new friendships, join the gym, become a vegetarian again.

Relationships are entirely parasitic. Therapists like to say that that is only unhealthy relationships and deem the disease codependency, but then again most of them believe in the DSM. It's much easier to classify and characterize as other than to live life. Dance like fools to your oblivion. What is it to love your reflection and that which is untouchable, not even seen by the other, and then sacrifice yourself in a completely destructive way in order to give that evidence? What is it I ask? It's every relationship I've been in and my way of going about it. Therapists love me.

I will eat only kale. I will eat only kale. I will run three miles a day. I will stretch every day. I will drink only water, and swim farther and faster than a fish.

Fuck I wish I could run. If I could run I'd run so fast and so long you wouldn't be able to find me. Maybe it's time to risk it on a bike.

What does it mean to feel so little. After a year of waiting and wanting, of intertwined bodies and minds that knew flow. Were we only tv show programming and the delights of flesh. Were we only the taste of our tongues and the warmth of nights spent together. I wanted to make meaning... but I always want to make meaning. To compare a river to a complex diagram of your circulatory system. To imagine the way a door mouse might see things, what the walls of a three story house hear in separate. You cant find meaning in this though can you. You can prescribe the regulars which is this. That you didn't respect him, that you wanted more for yourself than this easy little life where you would play wife. How do I turn from what I've grown up believing all my life, that I needed someone to do it for me. Somehow stuck in some infantile state, the deaths in body are apparent. Whether they were family members, friends, lovers or orgasms, they were deaths of the flesh. The energy sapped the moments passed, the mind on repeat. What a cycle to be thrown into.  Thrown like a bundle of wood into a fire and wait, wait to burn. We all like the light of the flames and how they wave about. How they truly do dance as they destroy.

Clarity and articulation

why cant you see yourself with a man, I dont know I have never been able to feel balance and be mirrored by a man... I feel like I am too intense and they cant hold that and I dont like gender roles

where does that come from... honestly I think it comes from my father, I think that I was molded into being a perfect little girl or wife in a very fifties way, devoted and loyal like a dog but without opinion or self awareness, or the concept of a self really. In a lot of ways I wasnt alowed to think of myself or dare be selfish.

I dont feel strong with a man because I regress to being a girl, to in acting and being triggered by my dynamic with my father where I could neither win his approval or love and resented him... and only tried to get out of him the care that I needed or felt I deserved via things... my father showed me love with things, like buying me food for example if a man doesnt buy me food, at the least, I automatically feel less for him and am not attracted by him. Its that base.

Could you see yourself being sexual with a man

sure of course, but I dont really see myself in a relationship with one. The idea that I want to be with women, that I cant imagine not being able to be inside a woman, to be able to be with a woman, but with a man I dont feel the same way. I like the way I feel with them, but I don't feel like I've worked through issues with men in a way, I dont know how to feel satisfied with only men on a physical level, and on an emotional/energetic level I dont know how to not fall into a princess role or a submissive role. I just dont like who I am with men. This doesnt mean that I dont desire men or find them attractive or want to sleep with them. A nice go with a man is amazing. Men are so different their energy is lovely and there can be quite a harmony there. Its hard to explain, its nuance, it depends on the person yes, but I have more hope for being with a woman or female bodied individual in the future than a man.

With men I can feel held and really nurtured in a way I dont with a woman, but again I think that protected feeling is one that feels really childlike. With a woman I can feel cared for but not in that same way. I mourn this with women sometimes, but I like the fact that I can feel a variety of emotions on the spectrum that I can shift my energy to be not only more dominant if I want but more feminine or masculine, that being submissive can feel like being vulnerable and not some deep seeded power struggle that occurs within gender. With women there is more of a feeling of equality. I dont know how to really put it other than that.

I dont know how anyone can love me the way that I love. I dont know if its possible. I want a great love, im too idealistic sure. But more than anything I'm difficult because I want everything.

He told me I cant be satisfied...maybe hes right

I often wonder what it means to be vulnerable in reverse, not to be invulnerable, let me rephrase this, what it means to hold someones vulnerability. I wonder what it means for the other person, I wonder if I do it well, if I really see them through all of it, if I can reciprocate in kind. And then I realize I do just fine, Im always trying to see someone, and in terms of reciprocation one can only give of themselves what feels right. Its not about prostrating yourself or giving more than you feel comfortable with. Its not a match game.

It all feels like a game of chase doesnt it. Shes still in love with him, she idolizes him in every way, no man, or woman could ever live up to their relationship, no one matches her the way he did in a way that was lasting and kind, in a way that held her. I think thats what we are all seeking for arent we, to be held. Here in this big city I have barely navigated or explored in this 37 days, 37 days the amount of time she lived in diagnosis.

I have found my ear to be the most shifty as I hone in to learn. My body has been restless as it always is and my being is a new kind of hollow. I talk to serina on the phone, the conversations with her are always harmonious, they always flow with an ease, its like talking to the best part of myself. I always listen to her advice, I never buck it. I think thats because I really respect and admire her, and yet we are equals, its not like im a child swallowing everything she feeds me or nodding yes without thinking. I need that. I need to be met in that way... to be held.

Tim writes me about wanting a muse, he asks me if I will share something with him, that my mere few sentences the other day ignited in him a kind of warmth and happiness he hasnt known for awhile. I am touched by his words in kind. I begin to understand more of what I mean to him, though its blatant it is disguised in niceties and therefore still enigmatic. He tells me he rereads the meager bits of work I have sent his way over the course of the past three years that weve known eachother. He rereads them. As if he was hungry for my words. As if he longed for me.

What is it about distance that makes people long for you. What is it about being lonely that beckons to the rest. Lonley loves company and here we all are, in our separate stations, our rooms barricaded, our thoughts all our own.

I went to the white castle gallery the other day with dario. Inside there was an exhibit that really took me. It was a like watching a photograph that only slightly moved, that breathed like a sick man in bed, and you could hear the wind churning about, and the machinery in various forms clanking out of view, stewing the imagination as hidden sound does. The most striking of the images was a woman wrapped in bright orange and red standing in a powder robins egg blue painted room. The paint was peeled and worn so that it looked like white clouds were peeking through...and the light. The light was epic. Her voice a repetitive motion incited her fears about her son who hadnt been found, who had been pushed out of the country, who she had no contact with and mourned.

What is it about mourning.It isn't a time everyday set aside to make note of, to schedule plans to label things. It is a blank space you stare at with a kind of envy for it's emptiness, and a kind of greed to be just as bare. Mourning doesn't dress itself in black and stay inside the way you think. It superscedes all this. It seeps into your pores as you are sleeping and swims in your bloodstream, it shapes your spine into a deformed hanger, that you bend just enough to lift your head as a gesture. Mourning moves like tides move, circular and with irate calculations, the decending diameter swirling about shifty like metro looks, but far more devestating. Soon swept up kelp and creature know their fate, and their tiny vessels surge with an adreniline like substance as they find themselves somewhere else, somehow still alive. 

Maybe it was guilt that I was still alive and they weren't. I often set my death like the Mayan Calender telling myself that these would be my last days. I created pie charts of time and marked off days with blue pen, giant crosses, so as to be more peaceful than red. I would accept the cars that cut me off, my heart racing at those that seemed to veer and threaten wiping mine out, as if it were a game, and when I crashed, all I would think was GAME OVER. Every plane trip became a goodbye with a thank you for this life kind of prayer said at take off. 

I have known the vast space of mourning. It has clutched me like a promise, for my own demise is certain. As I tell him laying in the park, whenever I get a bit upset about the future, I just remember we are all going to die. He laughs and says there is always that. I smile and think, yes there is. 

A single prophet makes her way into the chair of kings. She will beckon her crowd of multiple personalities, voices she has harvested over the years that match up to every story. Every criticism and word from every person shes ever cared about made a solid soldier in the gathering of her very own mankind. She knows that her fate is her creation and like the rest who walk, the reminder of home looms. yet something that keeps her royalty at the banquet, and martyr in the battlefield, is really knowing there is an implanted device within each of us, a compass that in no way needs reading in order to get us home. Pass the tree with the carving, the rocks set in a blaze, you can seek signs, but you will always get there. There is always the end. There is always end. 

I tell him to hope for oneness, to believe in it, flashing back to the email I was sent a month ago from a guru in India who interpreted my vedic chart. All of it seemed like western bullshit, I wondered if it was a scam to get me to travel there and become an asctetic like him. You will follow religion, you will be a very religious person. What is my religion but these starchy beliefs that I allow to sweep over me? I am in no way a believer of what is outside, and in every way a believer of my internal bullshit. But I like my own makebelieve, and I take it like a passionate holy roller and a sunday skeptic visited by jehovahs witnesses. No I will not claim my holy day saturday, and I do not mind that christmas is a coca cola holiday. I want presents, and I don't regard myself as holy, as much as whole. 

But was I whole now, no not so much, but whole enough, for the pockets and piercings that had made space as reminders. They had taught me that something else can always distract from the pain. Modern day man makes evidence of his life through his body. Wears it like a cloak of ink and the expansive boom of the cosmos. We are all black holes turned inside out, written in stars and scared with story. We have nothing to wish for but this, to be seen, and not 8 minutes later, but now. and not light years from now, but now. and not the now that is then, the end of destination, the final chapter of enlightenment, the second verse of the witness, no the first uttered sound of the witness, right now.