This is a rant....

My emotions are currently out of control.  I tend to sit on the quiet sde of things, even if I am spinning.  I think...  "No one wants to hear this shit, and my spinning is my responsibility", so I just shut my mouth and say "I am fine, thanks".  Which translates to I want to rip my fucking hair out of my head and scream until my throat goes raw.

Okay that may be a dramatization, but these days I am actually not to clear on the what is to be discussed and what is not to be discussed.  See, that is what suppression does, it confuses you.  Thanks Jeremie, I appreciate that you were to chicken shit to discuss emotions for 4 years, I feel like this scarring will last a while.  So, That was fun.  

Okay, but let's be real.  Thanks to myself for thinking that it was okay to be in a relationship that was emotionally void.  In a relationship where we said I love you less than a handful of times in 4 years, where I had to cry and scream to get him to be in Fort Collins when my mom had just died, in a relationship where he asked me ten months later why I wasn't over her death, and that when I was getting blood tests and ultra sounds, he said shit like... you are always in chaos.  

What the fuck was wrong with me?  Why would I think that was a partner?  Clearly, I am the dillusional one, I stayed, even when I knew better.  However, as a disclaimer, he is a cool dude and we had so much fun and adventures, but if it wasn't fun, he didn't participate.  It was all on his terms.  And I let it be.  Because it takes two for that shit to happen.  

I was in a yoga class the other day and I flashed back to my mom saying "We have a bedroom set up downstairs for you and Jeremie to stay in when you visit", and Jeremie saying shit like "I don't want to stay at your parents".  I just wanted to get up and start smashing shit.  Fuck you for not participating in my life, her death, our relationship.  

This is clearly a rant.  

So the origin of this rant is that while hanging out with this cool Brazil dude, I do not know what I can talk about and what I cannot talk about.  I have been tip toeing for 4 years and now I have lost my footing and am in a puddle of limbs on the floor.  Can I's or Can't I's swirling in my head.  And he just wants me to communicate.  But I do not know what that means, or if he really wants to hear what is in my head....  

Oh the joys of relationship and communication.  Can't live with out it really.  But these heart pounding insecurities that someone might not really want to know you... well that makes me sad that I sometimes think I do not have enough to offer a person that they would want to know me.  And as usual it comes down to myself, and peace coming from within.  But I cannot help feel a little jaded at the last four years.  

So, that is it.  Thanks for listening.  All my harsh words mean nothing about who he is, it is mostly about who I let myself become.  And the end of that relationship was inevitable the moment I had to explain why he needed to come to CO for my moms funeral.  

Love has no fear and no vengeance. So go love fiercely and listen carefully to others. 

  

Coconut Fruit Bars

It was an innocent enough night, as I say in what used ot be my moms chair and ate ice cream while hanging out with dad.  He was eating a fruit bar.  And when I realized what he was eating it was like a nail to my heart, and it hasn't stopped pounding since that moment. 

I want a cigarette.  I want it to slow down.  I want to be under the stars.  I want my mom back.  I would trade the whole world for her physcial human existence again.  

The night we took her to the hospital for the last time she was in bed, the bed in which she hadn't left for about a week.  She stopped getting out of bed when she fell in the shower because her left hip would just no longer work.  It was a downhill spiral from there.  Which led to bed pans, hospice, medications, and endless silence.

I came upstairs to check on her and touch her hand and offer some food, which she had just not been interested in the past week or so.  She asked me if we had any coconut fruit bars in the freezer.  I would have flown to fuckin Egypt to get her one, lucky enough, we still had some.  I brought it up in a bowl so that she could rest it when she was too tried to hold it up.  

I sat with her and watched her struggle through.  Her left hand had quit working, or maybe it was her wrist, or maybe it was the whole arm.  Either way, she would be holding the bar and then it would just drop, hand and all, onto her chest.  Typically this sent her into a frustrated frenzy of "What is happening to me"  and "I do not understand what is going on".. but that night, she just picked it up and took nibbles while she could.  

I have never seen anyone enjoy something so much.  

Normally I would have pestered her and nagged her to drink carrot juice or have something more substantial, but I just knew, there was a peace to her eating this bar, and I was just happy to see HER so happy.  

It was both gut wrenching and joyful to see her in this process.  I knew what was coming, though nothing could have prepared me, and I seemed to be the only one in my immediate family that understood that she was leaving us.  I had known for months.  And here we were sitting together, her half aware lost in the delicacy of a coconut fruit popsicle, and me lost in the simplicity of it all.  

It was not too many hours later that she asked to go to the hospital, which became the desperate turmoil that loss like this is in those fucked up, confusing, hectic moments.  The ups and downs, the really fuckin hard conversations, the even worse decisions....  

And until now, I had forgotten about that sacred coconut fruit popsicle, not that banana coconut one, (which I had mistakenly grabbed first), but the simple, single flavor one...  over a year later and out of the blue it hit me like a bus to the chest, and now I am a mess of tears, in my room writing this recalling the depth of pain that is her loss.  

All over the memory of a popsicle.  

Regress to Progress

I want to go back to Thailand.  Shit was easy there.  And it was warm.  

And I am here now.  So really, I need to be present here.  I am evaluating, calculating, witnessing.. this is how my construction zone of a head works.  Analyze, process, act.    

Needless to say, I am in that uncomfortable stage of regression.  The stage where I want to tear off my skin and disappear into the ethers, or buy a ticket back to Thailand.  Neither of which I can really justify doing because I would just be prolonging the process of my growth.. and I am not into dragging it out.  Get in.  Get it.  And get the fuck out.  To progress, we MUST regress.  We must look at how far we have come, and process how much further we want to go.  WHO do I want to be to this world? 

Don't get me wrong, I am not in a crisis, I am just growing.  My life has crumbled around me and I still stand erect most days.  Though cigarettes, lorazepam and an occasional drink before noon do seem to be staples for this erectness some days.  Survival.  

I like to run.  When I am comfortable I like to scamper off to what is uncomfortable.  And when I am uncomfrotable I like to freak out and demand my comforts back.  Ever satisfied?  Hmmm deeply satisfied with my life, not satisfied with stagnation though.  Fuck. That. Shit.  

   

2.0.1.5.

Thank fucking god.  Though that is what I said when we rolled into 2014 as well, and I am still not sure which year was the worst.  The flames of transformation are hot as hell, licking away at me from the inside out, tormenting everything from my guts to my ethers, demanding that I do more, be different, trust, and progress.  

We all have these moments, we all experience the demands, and we all go through shitty times graced with thoughts "It couldn't possibly get any worse", only to be proven wrong.  

I do not know how I got through it, I tried to lay down and die, I really did, it didn't work. So I just picked myself back up off the floor and worked it out.  But I do not know how.  It is still a mystery.  Though I think it has to do with introducing some reckless abandonment to my interactions.  Moments of "Well, fuck it, I don't really have anything to lose".

I see people who never do this, never picking themselves back up after tragedy.  I suppose it is easy to get lost in the endless streams of emotion that you who still have your loved ones cannot imagine until they too have left.  

I am off track though so let me pull it back.  See, lost in the endless streams of emotion.  Fuck.  

I have a best friend, actually, she is more like a wife.  Actually she is a wife, we just don't get all sexual, we both like men too much.  We have conversations that I have never even had with a man, we get tattoos together, we have talked about the business we will open, the bank accounts we will get, the possibilities and the way that our lives will look 40, 50, and 60 years down the line.  We are committed to each other and each others growth and progression in life.  She came into town for Christmas, we both had twisted and demented years that tried everything in our lives but our friendship, so it only seemed appropriate that we be together to celebrate survival.    

To feel a bit better about ourselves we dressed in one of our 15 new pairs of recently purchased yoga pants, painted on electric blue eyeliner, and glitter bombed one another.. we drank some beers and headed out for whatever randomness that the night held.  African dancing.  Saisons.  Midnight yoga and meditation.  Martinis.  And an endless supply of those confetti explosion champagne bottles.  We rang it in right.  Neither hammered nor completely sober we just couldn't have given a shit less.  It was likely the best new years I have had in a long time, maybe even ever.  

The yoga class somehow seemed surreal, the things I saw... the things I felt, the way I feel now.  Somewhere between the likes of deeply wounded and iron man super hero, I feel at rest in this space.  Indifferent to effort because I know what is to come, and more importantly I know it is not going to kill me.  As long as I do not lose myself in the desperation that is the desire to be loved by friends and lovers alike, reminding myself over and over again that I will be okay.  

I feel like that is the hardest thing, to remind ourselves that we will be okay, because we always have been.  And as we jump on the boat of risk for love, work, and community, we are constantly gambling with loss, we have always been okay in the past so why would it be any different now?  The only time we are truly endangered is when we believe that we have arrived, that we know it all, or declare what we know as though it is permanent.  This is spiritual suicide, and if you don't have spirit, what do you have?  Translate spirit as you wish: god, buddha, south park, soul, nature, self, wisodm.. whatever makes you grow.  Personally I choose South Park, it doens't let me get away with thinking that anything is more sacred than another thing.  

I hope you find some humor this year as you look at whatever inspires and defeats you, that you can laugh in the face of it and know that you too will be okay.