look again

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during my breaks in french class, i have a habit of going to the bathroom just to take pictures of myself in the long, dirty mirror.  i don't have a full length mirror at home so i rarely see my entire self all at once.  i am always broken up in to bits and pieces;  a fractured image, shattered glances.  or maybe i'm just fucking vain.  ;)

i'll admit i like looking at myself.  i like seeing which parts of my face i inherited from my mother.  though my lips aren't quite as full as hers were, i have her mouth.  i glance at my posture and can see my father standing there.  i have his calves and shoulders.  i have my mother's eyes (all her children do) crowned by my father's evil-arch eyebrows.  i have his pale skin and her freckles. 

but i return to the mirror expecting to see something different.  i'm not exactly sure what or why.  maybe i've never learned to trust my own image.  there's something the mirror lies about or simply can't reflect-  the changeability of my face.  my sister has this quality too.  we look like totally different people in different slants of light or even simply from different angles.  each side of the face is totally different from the other.  despite my absolute love for it, i have an absolute lack of symmetry.

but that isn't really it.  it's the desire for my outsides to match my insides and i'm not sure that they do.  for however open i might seem here, there is so much i keep quite and safe from the light.  there is so much i do not share.  not with anyone.  it all lands in the diary and then slowly is reworked in to drawings or poems or blog-posts or blankets.  this morning, becca and i texted back and forth about autumn's slow arrival and the call to spend long evenings in bed knitting(her) and crocheting (me).   we talked about the urge to return to sweater-making, the ritual of black wool twisted around a hook, and the knots that work together to comprise a solitary work...  a piece of clothing which one cannot buy, but only make for oneself.  there is a comfort and a loneliness contained in such an act, in such a display of patience.  the ache is belied.  and though i may wear all my secrets emblazoned on the tshirts and sweaters i make for myself, when i cry it is for an audience of One.  i have the only seat.

it's an image of me i no longer offer face to face.  i will be silent and still.  no flutter of heartache, no betrayal of need or fear.

i like the blurry photograph in the middle the best.

in progress

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i spent the majority of the day at home in bed with a cup of coffee and my crochet hook.  i listened to french phonetics and repeated the words as i stitched away and wondered about myself and the life i've been creating vs. the life i want to create...

the way you (i) need to be loved...


i rounded the corner in to my 33rd year on september 3rd and seemed to instantly smack right into a new realm of self-knowledge like a fucking brick wall.  i spent the day after my birthday mildly hungover, a bit forlorn, more than a bit worse for wear, and wearing the same dress i had worn the day before to one of my french classes.  i fared well, all things considered, and had a great time in class (maybe being a bit brain dead even helped me absorb all the new information and sounds contained in this new language) but felt the closing of an era shake within me...  or at least the need to bring an era to an end.

when i first became single a year and a half ago, i needed to live brashly.  i needed to embrace my new freedom in a fiery, even outlandish, way.  it was healing to do so and provided me with so many opportunities to see the world (and myself) in a new way, in a truer light, and without the bad habit of judgement and fear that so easily pollutes us all.  it helped me shake off the expectations and hurt left over from a long-term relationship.  that strange residue of pain, of unfulfillment and goals left to die.  sometimes the death of a dream is more painful that the actual death of a loved one.  it is hard to watch a fairytale fall in to disrepair.  it is hard to watch a fairytale turn to total shit.  it's even harder to not let the experience embitter you.  i needed to be a bit wild for a time in order to heal from the effects of drudgery and heartbreak.  i needed to reclaim something about myself that i'd given up along the way.  but now, it's beginning to feel like the things that once provided me with a sense of healing are now becoming damaging.  excessive in a way that does not lead to a greater sense of freedom and independence, but to a flippant attitude...  a callous form of casualness that i absolutely do not want to adopt.  i do not want to be Charles Bukowski, waking up to 300 hangovers a year, and wading through an endless barrage of damaged human beings and semi-meaningless experiences in an effort to combat the loneliness inherent to human existence. it is true that maybe my sense of loneliness is bigger than others, but i must learn how to bare it in a new way.  i need to return to the work of devotion and exploration.  i need to attempt to learn the difference between Bravery and Excess.  both have their values and nuances but one should not be mistaken for the other.  i have clung to beliefs and images of the world and life that perhaps i've outgrown.  i crave a new sense of balance, a new expression of freedom, a new way to achieve comfort.  i return to my hooks and books and the love i feel for bigger, better things than what i've allowed myself. 

how do i need to be loved?


if i can manage to focus on that question, 33 will be a great year.

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strange and beautiful

i rescued all of my books from my storage unit today.  10 boxes.  i have not yet unpacked them.  i need to by a bookcase.  i open each one and peer in.  a time-capsule, each and every one.  i open the cardboard flaps and read the titles: my loves! here is "A Lover's Discourse", here is "Ariel", here is "With Deer".  i paw through and find the black ceramic cups i made 2 years ago in Santa Rosa.  odd to hold them... an artifact.  in some ways, it is like holding a different person's objects...  or how one feels when one picks up a relic from one's childhood.  Childhood!!!  i have the entire collection of The Munch Bunch books!  here!  now! they are currently in my kitchen!  does anyone else have these????  these books and my white teddy bear are the only relics of my childhood i have left.  it is strange to see them.. strange to hold them...  to hold them and wonder what might have been.  what might have been if our parents were ready to be parents...  what might have been if we'd ever really been considered...

but i am not sad and don't mean to usher in a somber tone.  not at all.  i am more in a state of Wonder than anything else.  days come and go.  i look at the sky.  i write.  i take pictures.  i look at my hands.  and now, i can turn books over in my hands, smell their spines and leaf through them as if each second were an hour, as if each second were a lifetime.  bibles, all of them. 

looking at these boxes i know that i can't cart all of this into my future.  i'll have to make the hard decision (soon) to sell most of these volumes.  there's simply to way to transport such a mass in to my next phase of life.  it's a LIBRARY!  and i have no clue where to begin. 

i left picture frames on the side of the road today and they were gone within the hour.

and then dinner with my beautiful friend Trish this evening.  when she dropped me back off at my house i told her that not a single member of my mother's family called me over the holidays.  not one.  this may or may not have something to do with the fact that i swear.  rumour has it that my dropping of an F-Bomb on my sister's Facebook page caused quite an upset.  and so:  silence.  me.  my mother's eldest and without any other parent.  orphan.  and despite all that, a grown ass woman. 

well now...

guess whose religion is glaring?  not mine. 

Trish hugged me and reminded me that we can make new families.  everywhere we go.  it comforted me to know that maybe the disappointment i've known is not the entire story.  maybe there are people in the world who are capable of a deeper love than what i've experienced.  maybe there are people who mean what they say.

in 2 1/2 weeks i'll be back in my beloved New York.  i'll bring a backpack and nothing else.  a change of jeans, two t shirts, socks.  i'll have 5 days to explore the museums and galleries i've yet to enter.  i'll have 5 days to eat at good restaurants and drink in wild bars.  i'll have 5 days reprieve from giving a fuck if anyone understands me or loves me.  i'll write and walk the High Line and meander through the beautiful Bowery.  and until then, i have my wealth of books to keep me company, the greatest of which being 4 years of volumes of my diary.  geez.  what a world made entirely of ink and commitment.