Can I get a moving walking
For all this emotional baggage? I’m tired of carrying it around. Better yet, make like a real airport and lose it. Drop it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean To be pulled and plucked at by the lips of curious ocean fish. Or strap it haphazardly to the roof Of some suburban mini-van And see how far we can get. Somewhere along the curves and bends Of some lonely interstate highway I’ll smile, As it topples over the side Following the passing of an eighteen wheeler. I’m free. They’ll flutter out of the open suitcase As it lies agape by the side of the road, Like a giant face Caught in a yawn. Moments, Like shredded newspaper ads, Litter the azure sky, The road, The windshields of cars. Travelers switch their wipers to “On”, Unware of what they are brushing away. As we speed further down the road, The wrinkles of my mind ease and slacken, Spreading my memory out flat. I hold in a sigh. I let out a grin. Miles behind, Caught in between the blades of a beat-up Toyota Is the memory of us. And with a casual sweep, It is gone.
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I am in love with a sherpa.
He floats over worry with the weight of a cloud. Curling all ten toes over the razor thin cliff’s edge of life, leaning into it. In my experience, love oftentimes takes on a face that is not your own. The desire to keep falling deeper never stops. And you become less and less of yourself.
This stripping of your identity doesn’t feel terrifying at the time, which is why you let it happen. Then one day you wake up and don’t recognize the face staring back at you in the mirror. A pit forms in your stomach because you know deep down in the core of you that it doesn’t feel right. But your love is growing, so it is easier to ignore it. That pit is your intuition. Webster defines intuition as the following: in·tu·i·tion noun
A lot of people lump the description of an intuitive person in with fortune tellers, clairvoyants, and soothsayers. We tend to think of intuition as a hippy-dippy notion; spiritual capital. Why? Maybe it’s because intuition comes from a feminine place inside of us, and femininity can feel weak. Sometimes we separate the person from the intuition. “I don’t have good intuition.” That statement makes me cringe when I hear it. First of all, you don’t have to be a spiritual thinker to “have” intuition. We all have the capacity for intuition. Secondly, I think by shrugging our shoulders to intuition, it allows us to tell others (and lie to ourselves) that our bad decisions are justified. "I just don't have good intuition." Don't do that to yourself. I think where people get caught up is in the overthinking. Intuition is rooted in the autonomic systems of our body. Intuition is limbic in nature, even though we always talk about feeling intuition in a guttural sense. For most, intuition comes as a gut feeling, or as above, for me, a pit in your stomach. We can interpret intuition as our first, automatic response to a scenario. We don’t have to understand where this feeling or “hunch” comes from in our brain, it just is. And possibly, because it is an automatic response, we often dismiss it, preferring thinking over feeling, because we have been taught to analyze our thoughts and make decisions based on rationale. And because thinking is comfortable. Feeling is scary. For me I’ve recognized intuition to be a rare and beautiful break for my mind. Intuition gives my brain seventeen seconds of peace. The rest of the time my thoughts, reasoning, and logic scuffle about inside my skull, a cacophony of voices speaking over each other, shouting about which one of them is the most right. Listening to all of that all of the time is fucking exhausting. It is also perhaps why I don't sleep. Years and years of choosing logic over intuition made my brain into a prison for my thoughts. Essentially I think we need a balance between the reason and the intuition. Some days we pick the lawyer, some days we pick the monk. Some of us are born with strong intuition, an innate propensity to hear and trust our own instincts, and we spend the rest of our lives unlearning it. It’s a bit ironic, all the knowledge we dump into our brains in order to gain clarity, perhaps ultimately only serves to occlude us. Somewhere in between falling in love and heartbreak, I stopped listening to my intuition. I don’t think I ever stopped hearing it, but I definitely ignored it. I chose ignorance, but missed the memo on the bliss part. And here is what I learned about intuition and love along the way. First love throws a pillow case over your intuition’s head, pushes it into the back of a rusty minivan, and holds it hostage in an abandoned warehouse, gun to its head, for ten years. True, pure love waits patiently outside the scene of the crime with a warm blanket and a gracious, welcoming smile. True love calls your family to tell them you are okay. But it is self-love that finally pulls off that pillowcase and unties your wrists. Self-love gives you back your freedom. The terrible truth then is not that you were kidnapped, but that your captor has since long gone. It’s the realization that you had been alone the whole time, and you could have saved yourself. A scar remembers the wound. The wound remembers the pain. Once more you are crying. - Mark Strand, from “Seven Poems” For some of us, this is what we know of love. We run across the scars of love with a careful hand, feeling the familiar raises and recesses of where love has been stitched and restitched onto our hearts. “A scar remembers the wound”. Memories flood back .“The wound remembers the pain.” And once again we are thrust back into a Proustian place where the tears flow involuntarily. In supermarkets and at the dog park. In traffic on your way to work in the morning. As you clean underneath your bed or run on the treadmill of a hotel fitness center. Peeling potatoes at the sink. For you love lives only to serve as a remembrance of loss, of grief, of regret, of pain, of heartbreak. It is all those things and none of them. It’s your own personal brand of lonely. Love is a sucker punch, knocking you back into reality the instant you start to savor something pleasurable. And because this is your version of love, everyday it's a struggle to get up in the morning. Every day. Every morning you play a game with yourself; the one that always leaves you feeling like you’ve lost, even when the rules tell you that you have one. There's this sneaking suspicion that weighs in like a heavyweight, arms in the air prematurely celebrating a win. It's always there. Always two steps behind you, bobbing and weaving, ready to knock the wind out of you when you least suspect it. It's the uneasy thought that some kind of superior happiness is just beyond your reach. You think, maybe if I work harder, or do gooder, or smile more, it will tie itself into a ribbon of gold and fall into your lap. But instead, you sustain on nothing. Gain nothing. Tread air. This type of suspicion will always leave you a little dissatisfied. Never living in the now. It makes you hate waking up in the morning because that abrasive sound of the alarm always reminds you to be cautious. In between its shrill beeps you can hear it whispering, "Shhhhh... that punch in the gut is just around the corner." ~~~ How do I love thee? Let me count the ways I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight. For the ends of Being and ideal Grace I love thee to the level of everyday’s Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. I love thee freely, as men strive for right I love thee purely, as they turn from praise I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints, –I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43 from “Sonnets for the Portuguese” Perhaps though love for you is the absence of pain. It is pure and free, like the love Browning writes of above.
It picks up the spun sugar thin container of your heart with gentle, careful hands and cups it loosely, as if your very soul had hollow bones like a bird, and with an acute awareness that any moment you could fly into the world, unprotected. Some of our hearts speak the language of Mark Strand. Some, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And further, some of us are rewriting the book altogether, making noises and putting our tongue to teeth in the name of discovering a new dialect. Regardless of the words, the lesson is not in the interpretation, but in the way they make you feel along the way. Some of us take comfort in pain, preferring our own familiar sharp edges to the strange soft folds of joy. We haven’t felt love to “the depth and breadth and height” our souls can reach in years. Decades. We forget how those words sound, they have gone unused for so long that they feel foreign to us, incomprehensible. The fortunate few who feel love the way Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes it surely keep the words close at hand, a well-worn softcover reminder in our back pockets, at the ready. On days when we feel crushed by the sadness of the world, we pull it out and thumb through the pages. We are reminded. And even rarer still are the ones who seek to share. They leave poetry like post-it notes on bathroom mirrors to be discovered. They remind us of the words when we have forgotten. |