Smile, breathe warm breath into me

I’ve made a decision. about my life.

TO ENJOY EVERYTHING AT EVERY MOMENT AND NOT APOLOGIZE! which is going to be very difficult since in the past I have hyperbolized shaving my femurs to represent how much I accomodate others. But there are some things that can’t be accomodated. I write so vaguely. Let’s be specific.

Today, I met my friend Elise from Seeds of Change at Art Six. She was real happy and bubbling about everything around us, how good her bagel was, a band she liked, the gift from God of writing a song… And she was sincere. As we sat and conversed, I found myself being drawn out. The image of my body as a case that I had to power into every movement, to form each word and express each tone, began to dissolve… Which is good, to get rest from those pins of existence that have (seemed to) fix me into place starting every morning, freshness drained downward (realistically, this feeling would be called anxiety, but it becomes an entire world when pervasive enough).

I felt deeply, knew as we sat there more than a cursory abstract know, that knowledge of the world can be endlessly complex, but my choice to joy is very simply accessible at all times.

“The very fact that a thought can occur,” Elise said, “And the fact that people can have the same thoughts across everything… I think that is God.” When she said those words, my heart leapt, that someone who would be identified as orthodox could think the same things as me, who feels like a leper in a Christian colony sometimes. 

And this part of my life has been put to bed for so long, but it’s inseparable.  

So what I’m putting to bed instead is the call to be an aesthete, a hipster, this forever searching nancy. Nancy, nancy, nancy. I’ve been having way too many dreams with murder in them for years, and the signs are clear. A PART OF YOURSELF IS DYING. A PART OF YOURSELF IS DYING. In the waking hours this morning, I had a dream where I was on an Arabic cruiseline with Cara. We were enjoying ourselves but had to be furtive about our identities. Then it cut to me in a car with a young woman who looked Filipino maybe. The car was moving us through a dangerous world. A man who was much larger than us stood near an overpass as we traveled, and he swung a rapier and decapitated the girl. Then the car wrecked, flames, smoke. A young man who had been the woman’s lover lurched up to the wreckage and huddled over her corpse, screaming and breathing fire onto her… She dissolved and hardened into a small piece of Venetian glass (I got the sense of the hardness as one can sense things one doesn’t immediately experience in dreams). She was a flower-like scintilla with wavy edges, a small red dash at the center with alternating blue and white waves radiating from it. I watched the lover’s outstrung grief and my face glowered down at the small, shining trinket in the soil… My visage became like a cliff cracking and falling red and my scorched voice wrung out ahhhhhhhhhhhhh… which is when I started feeling the second level of consciousness in waking that was both me in dream and me in bed contorting with empathic grief. I kept myself in dream but with growing consciousness for awhile, because I wanted to keep expressing that much emotion without inhibition, but eventually I woke up. I cuddled Waffle warmly next to me as he whimpered in his simple neediness. Another dream with murder, I noted.

I thought I could dilute myself into someone less controversial. Turns out it kills me, and that death won’t go unmarked or for that matter unstopped.