Monday, May 10, 2010

pitcher

The words have been stuck in my fingers for months and I don't know how to get them out. I feel like my explanations are long-winded and whiny, so I abandon them after hearing jeering voices in my ears (somehow, even though he was once my most ardent supporter of my writing, he has the king's chair in my mental court; his voice is loudest above the rest).

So instead of trying to explain and present it all perfectly I am just going to tip the pitcher over. It is full of words and every drop forced more of it to seep out of the edges and go to waste. So let's waste it all.

There is a tug between what is good and bad in my life and strangely enough it exists in each object or person.

The pitcher is trying to hold the words in...I've erased my last three attempts at sentences, but I have to push it out, I need to say it...

This year has been a shitty mess and a lovely diaster.

There is no one reason for it, I am the only commonality and I feel like I change every day, pulled by the tides, set adrift at sea. I want so much but I toss my desires away like petals; they are white and float on the black surface of the deepened ocean like snowflakes, and I realize that letting go of everything I've ever had is the only way to get somewhere new.

She left me before the winter settled into the city and that was the beginning of the algidity, of the bone chilling cold that I could not shake off. She gave me so much warmth and fuel, I felt like I had never been more alive and more aware and more turned up than that. And it was so easy. The ease we shared was joyful and I was tickled by pleasure and thrilled by being known, fully known and appreciated by another human being. I ache for her presence, for her words, for her meandering verbal forests. Not a day goes by that some detail of her does not jar my whole life into a screeching halt, and then there is a sadness in remembering that she is gone.

The winter furthered my rigidness. Gone were my walks, my explorations of the park, the ambling outside just to be outside.

And then there was them, the vast array of failures and disappointments that should no longer bother me, but I still attempt to delineate the threads of what made those loves so painful, usually coming to the conclusion that it is a puzzle I can never solve.

I tried to lose myself in someone else, but naturally that only provides so fleeting an antidote. He tolerated me; in many ways he gave me things that will take a long time to unravel. His presence in my life is an enigma, one that I try hard not to destroy with words or thoughts or questions. He makes me feel not like a girl, a figure, an object, but like a woman. Strangely, I have never felt this way with any of them. I often wonder how cruel it was of the universe to deliver me a very beautiful person trapped under a mountain of insecurity and self-doubt, much as I used to be, and not have him be enough for me and not be able to be the one to save him.

And now, the Spring has finally arrived, and I am startled, absolutely startled by how enamored I am by every breath of life I encounter, each unfurling bunch of leaves on a branch, the growth of those leaves day by day, the vast array of colors they present as the air oxidizes their newness.

I don't know if it is the end of Winter or my new neighborhood, a rather quiet set of streets with the park outside my window, a vast array of landscaping that pleases my eye the way it never has before.