("Missing You" by John Cruz)

"You just have to give a guy the idea that one day he will wake up next to you, and you are in."

This is what a friend told me tonight while talking about my complete lack of luck in the department of romance. And I just kept thinking, how do you find the one who will want to wake up next to you? Or rather, be enticed by the thought? There is just something so completely sweet and charming and romantic about that idea and about the fact that this is the thing a guy would tell me about 'getting a man.' And I'm actually not defective or unappealing... but rather, all I have to do is give a guy this idea.

Maybe there are a few gentlemen still out there after all. Because it has to say something when it's the act of looking at the person you're lying next to, knowing you get to wake up next to them in the morning, and wanting that simple fact to remain true. It has to say something when that thought alone can pull a man into your world.

And here we go again...

"Fall Apart Today" (Schuyler Fisk)

It's back:
The insomnia...
The all too familiar evenings finding their beginning and end nestled under tousled sheets, counting the fluorescent stars that once upon a time, lived on the ceiling of this room.
It's back.
And I suppose I should have anticipated or perhaps expected that it would be here, now. Now that my life seems to have truly come full circle. Now that I once again am a completely stressed out, manic, overly cerebral and tragically emotional mess. Welcome back, Insomnia. Welcome back.

And so it goes, that as the countless thoughts about life and relationships and my necessity for toothpaste flutter about inside this ticking mind, I try my best to distract, entertain, and seek out productivity. Only it's in these early hours of the morning when it seems like productive tasks are anything but. And so it goes: I will once again reorganize my sock drawer, I will write material for the book I will most likely never publish, I will re read my favorite passages from Pride and Prejudice and e.e. cummings poems, I will facebook stalk, catch up on e-mails (which actually is productive) and I will furnish my imaginary future home at Pottery Barn and Anthropologie online.
I will also most likely consume about 8 clementines and enter into Vitamin C overload. This also may actually be productive, or rather... another completely disturbed habit.

I've got problems.

But that full circle moment. I felt it tonight sitting in this practically empty room, feeling like I did nearly a year ago as I spent my last nights in my college apartment. The fact that we're selling this house in which I now live, the house in which I grew up, kind of feels bizarre. Fresh paint prohibits me from any sort of decoration and I am surrounded by bare white walls. The echo is unreal- my voice seems larger than life inside these walls only I feel completely tiny and insignificant simultaneously. This room, once filled with color and light and unique memory, slowly feels stripped bare, and I feel dwarfed inside its smallness.

It's funny how transitions in life are marked by such transparent and concrete moments. The physical lack of material things marks this complete lack of stability... the complete uncertainty of where I'm headed or where I'll even be living 4 months from now- and what that space will look like. Yet there's something exciting about starting fresh... I'm so tempted to rid myself of so much of what I already have and begin anew, a sort of metaphor for this next phase of my life. Only it's scary as hell. No one prepares you for this whole grown up thing. I really hate it. Gosh, that does sound completely childish, huh? Well...

Being a grown up is overrated.

And leaving this room, even though I've left it before, just feels insane. I feel like I'm giving up a piece of myself that I'll never completely get back. Maybe it's because the idea of home is so at the core of all I believe in, and all that provides comfort and peace of mind. You up root your home and where are you then? Back in the midst? Back in the freakin' limbo of life like this entire past year has been? Perhaps I need to just get used to the likes of the nomad existence... maybe then I'll be at peace knowing I'll never completely be at home in the world.

It's like Jim Lambie once said:

"Right now I want to go further inside, deep inside. And I'm taking the outside with me, I'm taking it all with me...all the titles, all your gloves, all your mirrors, all your record collections, the lot. And when it comes back out into the real world, your world, it'll feel familiar, but it won't be."

...feeling something like that.

more to come.

only the illusion of an endless whole

I'm not quite sure the weight of its contents.
It's something more than nothing but it's nothing precious.
Objectively speaking.

What is the density of interlacing liquid threads?

This has been a test. She said.

This is only the illusion of an endless whole and we're all striving for maximum legibility.

I'm not quite sure what that means. It's like he said: We create these things to give emotional texture to our lives.
I create to awaken the senses, to find an awareness stemming so deeply beyond the crux of the moment in a dream when you reach true lucidity.

We're fumbling. Falling through reality. Through space and time, and broken hearts. Broken clocks. Repaired frames and re framed pairings of ourselves and others.
Through fiction. Through the moment when you wake up in the morning and still wish you were sleeping.
Because it's within the solace of sleep you tread the purest stream of conscience.

This story unravels between our human bodies. Between our fallible, complicated, tragically beautiful little lives. And all you have to do is listen.

Listen to the moment when the reel stops feeding through, and the fiction lifts itself up. And the lines marking where this begins and that ends are blurred.
Transitions do exist.

Yet more often than not they are colored in grey hues. And muddy tones cloud over the vibrancy of life and light that are supposed to radiate…

Extreme choices.
Tiny fragments.
Where does the never-ending end?

They say a tangent is a digression. A digression, an aside, or more so, a parenthesis. And isn't the parenthesis the most significant accumulation?

This is where we’re supposed to focus.
Because within these tiny brackets we believe the deeper meaning rests…

This is about the work.
And the work is a parenthesis.
And this life… has been a test.

.........................................
It's been nearly a year since I wrote that. Since I wrote those words upon which I once found myself so completely fixated. Apparently that's one of my weaknesses, being fixed that is. But I just can't believe how quickly time seems to have evaporated... passed through my hands like sugary sand. I still feel like all this, this life, has been a test. I still feel like this never ending string of words and phrases and punctuation marks all being chased by some giant set of parenthesis... seeking a definition for all of this.

It's been nearly a year since I graduated college and each morning I wake up thinking, "what have I been doing with my life?" And then I step in the shower and I hum an Ingrid Michaelson song, and I sip a few cups of coffee and realize that I am simply in the midst. I am in the midst of the wondrous, complex, utterly terrible mess. And for a brief moment I am at peace. I am caught somewhere amidst those muddy tones and blurred demarcations... and that is all okay.

This has been a test. She said.

kitchen table talk

There is something about about sitting around an all too familiar table looking into the eyes of faces you've known for years. These faces may have changed or altered slightly over time, but they remain familiar, comforting pillars, seemingly unchanged in a number of ways. The other night, like so many evenings these days, I found myself seated at one such table, surrounded by such faces, discussing the delicate intricacies of our complicated little lives... the heartaches of romance, the frustrations of text messaging, plans of travel and adventure, the all too quick passage of time, and the never ending battle against growing up and living life. I found myself in the midst of heart felt, in depth conversation with individuals of varying gender and generation, table talking over birthday cake, red wine, and an array of Trader Joe's chocolates.

And it was there, at the kitchen table, where we let down our guards and opened our mouths to talk, to share, to gain insight and seek sage advice. We sat down at the kitchen table to get a better grasp on our lives.

Five hours later I went home, and the next afternoon the kitchen table became a patio table... new faces, new topics of conversation, yet the edifice practically the same. And so it seems the image continues shifting as I find myself sitting at kitchen counters, breakfast nooks, park benches, squares of stone overlooking the water, front porch steps and stoops, car seats, check out lines, break rooms, dance studios, warehouse work benches... with the sense of coming together and looking at one another in the eye as we talk to think or think to talk in hopes of expressing thought and gaining insight.

Maybe it's a simple notion, this realization of the countless moments throughout any given day or week I find myself kitchen table talking... regardless of what the "table" looks like or the topics of conversation, or the folks I'm forcing to listen to me. But there's got to be something to that, right? Something about our human nature? Something about our need to share and work through our problems or theories or jokes amidst the company of others? Throw in some good food, good drink, and maybe some groovy tunes and then you're really in business.

But there is nothing like the feeling of sitting around a familiar table, with familiar faces, feeling like as you work through their problems, you're working out your own.

I'm a spark, you're a wire.

"Everyone has their own mending time," he said to me during our picnic overwhelmed by clementines.

He said to me as I tried not imagining the feel of his hand on mine.

As I tried not feeling anything at all.

But it was nearly impossible.

Everyone has their own mending time. And what of the capacity of the human spirit to truly love another?

Four clementines later.

I think I've fallen.
And I'm swimming in Vitamin C.

All you have to do is write one true sentence

"You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason."

-Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast