My Truths of This Moment
I am eating like shit. Forgoing breakfast in the bustle of morning activity and getting George to school and then coming home and settling in to work. Getting caught up in work and not stopping for real lunch. And then come three and I’m starving: shoving cookies in my mouth, inhaling a whole box of crackers, passing by anything with any nutritional value whatsoever and not even sitting down to eat, but standing there, in the kitchen, like I’m a cat prowling in the night, looking for my prey.
I turned in my paper today and I didn’t like what I had. I had worked so hard on it and yet it was somehow not there, not right, not it, not what I wanted it to be. And this is only one part of a long project, my thesis, so its not like it needs to be complete, done, perfect. But I hated sending in work to my advisor I didn’t like and was uncomfortable with my own responses to it, realizing how much I don’t like letting others see the incomplete parts of me, the rough drafts. My sister Cat was talking about this. About how she was considering that maybe in her conversations with people she could not always edit, but instead let her words be the rough draft, trusting that if it comes out and she hears it and it’s not what she really wanted to say, there is permission to go back and make revisions. That what matters is this moment, and saying what is there, right now, without smoothing out the rough edges. And sending my “inferior” paper in, I saw this in myself, how I am sometimes uncomfortable with the less than polished, not perfectly expressed and presented in myself. Which is a joke really. Because in truth, I am so far from refined in that way. I am, in my humanness and my nature, rough, unruly, raw, volatile, messy, unkempt, loose threads and burn marks where I went to take the roasting pan out of the oven with my bare hand.
I have not showered in three days. I need to.
Elliot brought home peaches from the grocery store Monday night and just seeing them, their fuzzy skins and perfect lusciousness, it made me so happy. They mean summer is coming, in already here. They mean night after night of peaches sliced and smothered in cream, sprinkled with sugar. They mean sitting there on my couch, with the ceiling fan whirring and late night tv, old LA Law re-runs on cable, and walking into the bedroom, bare feet padding against the hard wood floors. They mean summer is coming, is already here.
I miss sex. School, writing, it has been consuming, more than I want it to be. And so I am writing late into the night and though we connect here and there, I miss regular fucking, miss wanting him, miss feeling flirtation and wondering what I will wear that night in bed. Its like I have creative energy and it can only go so many places, give birth to so many things. And lately, it has been my writing. Which I love. But I miss feeling that energy given to Elliott, given to us. I feel it building up, growing, ready. I want to come back to him. And even writing that, I did not realize I was gone. But I have been. And I’m ready to come back.
I feel this sadness in my heart center. Almost all of the time. It is like an ache, and sometimes, often times, I am not even aware of it. But then the moment I still, feel, it is there. And it’s not in the absence of happiness. Sometimes its most intense when I am happy. It’s like the part of me that knows, even when I forget, that all things die, that what is here is not forever, and what is here is beautiful. And so I ache. My heart aches. And maybe this is what it means to be human.
And this truth, one I know without doubt or second guessing, not even for a minute: I love you, each of you. I love this space. I love coming here. I love reading the words you offer from your own lives and how they connect me to you and also feed me, nourish me. I love us, this world we weave together of radical honesty and uncensored knowing and being held here.
