It all caught up.

It all just caught up.

Everything.

Everything that I've been pushing away.

Everything I've been making excuses for and justifying with optimism and karma and determination and perserverance and Tomorrow and it will be betters and This is just temporary and everything, everything, everything just caught up with me this very moment. Out of nowhere. I just looked up and when I breathed out, I broke.

I've been sad all week. Maybe even longer. Today I buckled.

Sorry for this moment of weakness. It's over now.

Back to the upward climb.

Bone Soup

I am very unhappy with my life right now. But I am not depressed, nor defeated; every time a part of me wants to complain, my heart softens. I've either become a huge pussy, or I've learned to be thankful of everything -- even the worst.

The sagging figures in my bank account make me so unbelievably weary. The numbers I owe -- cheerfully decorating my planner with highlighted due dates and urgent asterisks -- heat my spine with tears. Once I felt like I was so close to easing the weight of last year's financial baggage, life happened.

I had big changes planned this year. I'm talking about breaking completely from the direction I was going, and taking big risks that made my heart swell with anticipation. I had begun to put things into place that gave me fuel for optimism. Now I have to rearrange my dreams, defer sleep. Again.

But how can I possibly be unhappy? How can I be anything but grateful that a bad situation unapologetically catapoulted me back into my childhood apartment, under the looming shadows -- or, depending on perspective, the cooling shade -- of my parents and sibling? My family?

Every time I forfeit authority, I bite my tongue. I turn over the resentment that comes with my overdeveloped sense of entitlement and accept my situation for what it is. It is a godsend. It is my cradle. It is my HOME.

This house -- in all its volatile, unstable, and emotionally damaging glory -- is a safe haven. We are a family that never understood boundaries, consideration and respect. We only know how to take, fight and avenge. We love, but none of us know how to show it properly. We've all hurt each other too much with Misunderstanding. In defense, it made us stubborn.

I walked back into these walls a much different person from when I first walked out. There is a sudden stillness in me that allows me to think and act with clarity, and I think my newfound quests for solitude (prior to this, I had a huge need for company at all times) helped me understand my own strengths and boundaries.

When I learned of how much money I had to rid myself of this year, I mentioned it to my mother. I remember when I thought she was heartless, selfish, and completely clueless to the things a daughter needed. I remember when I used to blink at her with a breaking heart, flabberghasted and tearing at her coldness. I remember when I first realized that she would never help me without an intent. I forgot how much she loved me, and only remembered how much she resented me. It broke our whole family apart. It made me afraid to ask for help. It made us unwilling to bend towards each other.

She began packing me lunches to take to work.
She began setting food aside and quietly sneaking into my room to place the lunch kits upon my purse.

In the beginning, I stared at the bundles, unsure of how to feel. I was incredibly overwhelmed. I was thrown back to my fondest and earliest memory of our relationship: Elementary school. Her love letters, wispy korean characters penciled onto paper towels. I read them under the table as I ate my sandwhiches. I pursed my lips and stared into the early-morning darkness for a long time. She had already left, to work her minimum wage job in Bushwick. I called her later that day to thank her, and her voice rose a few octaves in the way Korean women do when they smile. It changed everything.

I am so blessed that I was reminded of my family's humanity. I am so happy I was given the opportunity to rid myself of the resentment I had created with all my monsterizing. Most of all, I am so happy to be going through this humbling ass reconstruction NOW -- not earlier when I was alone,unprepared, and insistant; not later when I would have hardened from transition.

There is so much gratitude in my heart that there is no room for sadness. No bitterness. Nothing is unjust here. It is all consequence to my past, and it is all preparation for my future.

This may not be the support I once so desperately needed from them, but this is the most that they can possibly give me. THIS is THEIR 100%, and though I cannot deny the flares of frustration I still suppress (though not always successfully), I now know what I have, and I am delirious with joy. I am stabilized enough to take leaps. I can forgive them their shortcomings and calmly readjust my disappointments.

They are struggling so hard to give that support to me -- not because they don't want to, but because they are completely unfamiliar. That struggle in itself lets me know how absoltuely real it is. Thank you.

Things may be really difficult, but I've never looked forward to the future in the midst of things like I do today. It's much easier to jump off cliffs when you understand that if you fall with people waiting to catch you, it's simply another form of flying.

I Still Love

Sunday mornings.

I Love

The way real butter smells when it hits the frying pan.
The smell of breakfast in general.

I still do NOT love
Certain breakfast foods,
and how the ones I DO love taste when syrup runs into them.

Erase, erase, erase.

I found myself out through conversations this weekend. Now, I've always been bad at inciting social banter, and I can't carry a conversation for the life of me -- err. Wait. No. Let me rephrase that.

(Erase, erase.)

I can catch, stretch and carry a conversation easy, but I've always failed at the art of picking one up when it falls. Because of this, I've been starting to pay more attention to the things I say, paying more attention to the responses, and generally slowing down so that I may know where to start. I learned a lot about myself this way, if purely by accident.

At a drawing party this Friday (Yes! There was free wine, five nude porn stars to model and interesting rock mashups that fit the mood perfectly) I was leaning back on the floor seats, beautifully at peace with the large newsprint sagging around my lap. I occupied one side of the open pad, while my girl BJ sketched on the other. She was using markers, making delicate outlines, ultimately deciding placements and proportions, while I screamed my bright colored pastels all over the surface of my pages, throwing in defining trails of dark and highlighting blocks of white. Whenever I made mistakes in proportion -- inevitable in almost every session (the minute my eyes zeroed in on details, the entire image would expand in my head) -- I simply ran my palms over them to blur the chalky errors. At the same time, my left hand would be selecting a different color to begin that failed section over, eyes squinting harder now, darting around the negative to relate better in comparison.

At one point during the four hour drawathon, I glanced down at my stained fingers, giggling at the muted piles of pastel dust that had settled around my crossed knees. I dug into her bag of Prismacolor markers and started sketching a different pose. I was thoroughly frustrated after five minutes.

She was observing my quick, flat strokes, my attempts at shading in the back and shoulder blades, my struggle with dimensions and perspective. After two figures, both too large to fit the page, I ripped out the sheet and shook my head. "I can't do this marker thing." She looked over. I picked up a blunted pastel stick and began to slash lines and curves mirroring the models, using the long flat side to indicate reality, shade.

"You have to do the outline first when you're using the marker, it's different," she said. She explained that when she took her first life drawing class, she was taught how to gaze at the models and within the first 30 seconds, asses the whole image before placing lines onto paper. I never learned that, I only knew how to dive in with my eyes, to absorb and to immediately reflect with my fingers.

"I can't," I said. "I need the shadows to tell me where the outlines go."

"Really?" She blinked. "I use the outlines to figure out where the shadows go."

Hm.

All throughout high school, our styles were vastly different -- her drawings were extremely clean cut, not a single detail out of place, complex but excruciatingly simple. All my drawings were scribbled in, highlighted, instant -- the mistakes were glaringly obvious, for they all left imprints behind. The outlines, cemented towards the end, would be carved in and definite. Yet the finished product bore those mistakes proudly, somehow managing to integrate them into the outcome.

"Can't use markers," I repeated. My hands followed my eyes. "Was never able to. They don't leave room for error." Twitch. My ears caught.

She's been using pen and ink on her art for a long time now, and though it would have been easy to shrug off her immense talent as the result of years of practice, I knew it was something bigger than that. The way BJ and I drew reflected our own personalities. The way we expressed art was the way we lived our lives. She rarely made a superfluous move, everything was planned out and assessed; when she did something wrong she would never make that same mistake again. I, on the other hand, flung myself into phases, made a mess out of things by living through experience. I could only grow by learning, burning and shedding skins. I always, always left a mess behind, wherever I went. I look upon my past as a series of permanent, beautiful mistakes, and I see my future the same way.

Just made me wonder -- and the metaphors still stand -- was I supposed to be sharpening my artistic style, slowly fading the errors out over time, learning to avoid them in the future so that my drawings could come out cleaner?

Or, should I just embrace this fully as my style, and continue to let these mistakes form art?

I remember saying once, in defense to my peers' frustration to the way I was living my life: "This is how I've always been. And this is what I'll continue to do, until I know better -- or everything, whichever comes first." I'm not sure my art will continue to be my art if I learned how to carefully avoid stray lines. They are all a part of my expression.

I looked down at the newsprint, now exploding with greens and reds and lips and eyes, and I grinned. This was the best work I've created in a long, long time. Mistakes or not, I was absolutely thrilled at the completed pieces. Two of the porn stars ran over to me, still naked, smiles big. "I saw you drawing me out of the corner of my eye, can I see it??"

"Sure!" I lit back, and unrolled the large, loud sheets. I'd taken a break from the body to make huge, larger than life close-ups of these girls' faces. On impulse, I gave the drawings away to the models that inspired them. Nicole, the cute (my favorite) olive skinned girl with cartoonish eyes and a cheek piercing, large black ringlets falling over her breasts. She had the curly defined mouth of a doll, thin drawn-on eyebrows, and the most adorable lips that tucked in at the corners. Jessie, the sharp scarlet redhead, with pale cream skin and industrial eyeliner. Her perfectly regal lips were stained darker in the corners, her nose seemed carved out of limestone, her eyes were a thin gray-green. She had tattoos stapled to her heart.

I didn't regret giving the drawings away until much later, when I was sitting in a bar nearby, flipping through the artwork to show a friend we had run into there. Unfortunately, I'd given away my best pieces. The rest, what I was left with, were practice, scribbles, worthless. Seeing his disinterested eyes, hearing his flat-toned compliments, looking down and grimacing at the rough-edged vaginas I fanned out before him, I realized that this is how most people really remember me: for my sketches, for my errors -- rarely for my triumphs.

Can I blame them, when I have no proof?

Perhaps none of that is important. After all, the ones who really matter are the ones there for the process -- to observe the creation, to see the outcome, and to receive the best I can possibly give.

Thank you for that.

I need to stop glorifying her LOL

But she keeps doing this:

"Layla Liar says something excrutiatingly suspect, and you know in your bones that she's attempting to fit a pre-conceived notion of what she thinks you want to hear. She's mired in insecurity and doesn't want to take the chance of your personalities not meshing. She "knows" very well that she isn't the kind of person you'd like to associate with - most likely because of pre-conceived opposing viewpoints - or maybe she is going through a transitional phase and doesn't know who she is."
-solipsism

I love it when people can make the most universal and dissonant simple with that perfect selection of words.

*Happy sigh*

The things that fall out of her fingertips, yo. Bouquets.

I love

I'm starting a category called "I Love," in response to the post below.

It's a list of all the things I'm recently coming to realize I love. It may become a part of who I am. It may fade into a phase. I've never been given the opportunity to explore this part of myself before -- or rather, allowed myself the opportunity -- so here I am. This is also a way for me to keep track, and to remember, these parts of my identity.

I Now Love:
Candleholders.
Handmade soaps. The kinds with corners.
Reading inside large patches of sunlight.
Being by myself.
Walking and looking up.
Yoga To The People.
the sound of the cello.
spinach.

I No Longer Love:
Tall white mochas
High fructose corn syrup
jolly ranchers
casual relationships
My sunglasses
earrings
bangs
general tso's chicken
too much company
vulgarity

I Still Love:
Sunlight.
Union square.
hats.
poetry.
reading.
eating.
plaid.
blunts.

I think I'm developing an stronger affinity for:
Movie musicals.
The color white.
Black hickory floors.
Drinking things out of wineglasses.
Showering as soon as I get home.
black leggings.
diamonds.
french tips and sneakers.
kerchiefs.

Apologies

"What is your favorite ____?"

lol.

I am currently under renovation. Everything is being removed, changed, upgraded, and cemented.

Check back later. Maybe then I'll have some answers.

Love,
Me

Freedom

Another one of those tired, subway rides home...

She talks about her ex boyfriend slash current boyfriend slash lover slash enemy slash friend. It's a standard tale of turbulence and insecurity and emotions, the youngest and most inexperienced of loves; of course, it is also the hardest to let go, and the most unforgettable.

"I think..." she begins. She looks down, a battle flickering across her skin. When her eyes touch mine again they are clearer, stronger, and hot with impossible hope. "I think that you're not truly happy until you learn to stop caring." And that's what I need to do, she said. I need to just stop caring.

Damn. My heart.

I suddenly understood the hope I saw in her eyes. She wanted to know that it was possible, that the heart was capable of shutting off emotion, that maybe this was what growing up was all about. She saw me, and she saw my indignance. She saw how abruptly I cut off her self-accusatory questions and insisted on self-respect. She remembered my reputation, my walk, my hard edges and careless shrugs. This was actually the first time we spoke on some deeper shit, and I guess she needed to believe that her image of me was real, that this was a reaction to being hardened by life and experience, therefore utterly attainable.

I shook my head.

"No," I said, grinning at her mild surprise. "It's human nature to care, you can't stop yourself from doing that. You wouldn't be happy, ever, if you forced yourself to never care. It conflicts with what you're built to do."

We pondered. "You're close, though. Maybe you're just seeing it the wrong way? Happiness comes from not..." I cocked my head. What did freedom feel like?

It was so there. My tongue twitched with recognition. You have to care, that I know. Freedom, the refreshing kind, the permanent kind, settles in when you stop... Then my shoulders relaxed. I smiled.

"...Needing."

That in itself was a recent revelation for me. Up until now, I had been defined by my addictions, my vices, my kryptonites. I dived into them passionately, for addictions -- way before I was aware of this -- carried a heady kind of romance in my dictionary. I was a smoker, it's who I was, I couldn't relax without it. Sunlight instantly triggered images of sunglasses, silk scarves and outdoor cafes with winding vines of happiness and lipstick. Always, always a cigarette perched in my hand. Sex defined my very essence. It was threaded into my clothing. It pulsed through my walk. It made my eyelids heavy, my sneer inviting. Sex trickled into my bloodstream and made my speech vulgar, my sympathy little, my respect impossible to uphold. I wore it like a windsor knot.

I had recently allowed my toe to be taken by love, and I jumped into the pool giddy with the prospect of learning to swim -- but the water was too cold, and I gained nothing. I lost, instead, a whole bunch of time and patience. I pushed, and flailed, and insisted that I'd be able to stay afloat... until one day, something in me just clicked. I stood up, exhausted, and pulled myself out of the water.

I'd suddenly learned to know when to give up. Usually when I see passion or potential, I'd stretch it and push at it with all my might. Or, I'd throw up my hands at the smallest buckle in progress. In both these situations, I'd never fully understood how important time -- and silence -- was to growth. I know now.

When I first quit smoking, I entertained the ideas of quitting everything else. I struggled with celibacy. I pushed away weed. I mulled over the non-animal choices on the menu. (Admittedly, within two weeks of this newfound will I pulled everything back into my world hungrily, spitefully, overhwlemingly. LOL)

It wasn't until I ambled out of the water that I realized how... content I was. My steps got lighter as I walked away from the pool. I stopped needing the person I fell in love with to give me consistant signs in return. I stopped relying on him to show me my place in his life, in mine. I had come to a point where I liked myself better than I liked him; he steadily proved that this wasn't a person I wanted to be involved with, and though the surface of my heart will always melt a little at the smallest thought or sight of him, I know that I would be better off without. I got the tiniest bit stronger. It tipped the scales.

Since then, I've lost interest in sex. Or rather, I let go of the hold that sex had over me. And I didn't realize how strong of a hold it was, until it was gone. Isn't that how life always works? Lying in bed with him, wanting him to turn over and sear heat down my neck, wanting him to need me, feeling his hands tentatively question my unresponsiveness -- I suddenly wanted him to deserve it. In that very moment, I grew up. I became the reward I should have been, and not the gift I was giving away. I put on my coat, and I went home. We've barely spoken since.

This is the happiest I've been in my life so far. I've learned to let so many things go -- really go. Not bury, not suppress, not smother into the subconscious. I let them go. I've learned to stop needing. And this freedom is intensely liberating.

I looked at her that night on the train, and I smiled. She had so much potential. There was a lot of hunger in her eyes. She wanted to break from this cycle, but didn't know how. As selfish as it was, at that very moment I felt blessed to classify myself as a writer -- or, rather, a wordsmith. To be able to distinguish the difference between Not Caring and Not Needing... to be able to know what makes a gift, and what makes a reward... I feel like I helped her, guided her a little bit, prevented someone else from denying herself love and contentment, allowing it to follow into womanhood. I don't want her to go through what I went through, not to that extent.

Now knowing what love was like -- and how weak it can make you -- helped me understand where she was. Normally I would have barreled ahead of her words, cut her off, frustrated that she couldn't see herself the way I saw her. Normally, I wouldnt have had the patience to find the vulnerable in her point of view. I'd thought once that love was something you could smooth over with determination. I know better now.

I told her she'd have much more to go through before she gets fed up, and that after the first time it will get much easier. I told her that I hope she stops monkeybarring her way through relationships long enough to form a sense of identity outside of the context of other people. I said it resolutely, because I knew she would. I gave her faith. Sometimes, that's all people need.

"Your life is going to get so much worse as you get older," I laughed. "This is childs balls. There are so many bigger things to worry about, to cry about, to fight your way through. There will be much bigger heartbreaks. Don't waste all your tears now.

"I know that makes it sound really bleak, but it's not. This is supposed to make you stronger, so that by the time the bigger shit comes along, you'd be able to face it."

"I know," she said. We grinned at each other. Her desperate hope had gradually settled into a calmer understanding. An awakening.

Good luck, honey. I'm learning right there with you.

I don't miss you.

I don't want you.
I don't want to give you anything.
I don't want to give you myself.
You still irk me, and I'd never want to date you -- not again. That part of my heart is so closed off.

BUT.

I do miss:

smiling with you
laughing really hard at your jokes
smoking weed together
resting my head on your shoulder
companionable silence

witty one liners
witty four liners
hell, witty conversations, almost like battles
teasing you mercilessly
jabbing at each other verbally

and then kissing you on the cheek to let you know I didn't mean it

I miss when the air between us wasn't so full of unanswered questions and tension.

I miss not looking for answers or thoughts or reflections when I caught your eyes. I miss just seeing them, absorbing them, and never having to worry.

I miss not feeling awkward.

I miss just vibing with you, kid

But if I tell you that, you'd get the wrong idea. It's really not like that. I don't want you back, yo, I just miss having you in my life.

So, I guess I won't say a damn thing at all.

Pity.

Ugh.

I'm so turned off by everything.

Perhaps I've returned to that transitional point in my life where I reevaluate my passions and tastes. I'm in this suspended state of ...blah, to put it best, where I'm releasing previous anchors and swinging towards the next. I've got no context right now, I just know that I am not in the mood to be coerced into doing anything I don't want to do --including making out, dancing, drinking, spending, fucking. It's a shame, how deeply sexuality seems embedded into my pores. I swear that my words and my eyes give the opposite signals my body does, thus they cut back harsher. I don't mean to dead everyone I'm not feeling, but I'm still inexperienced with this whole concept of the "gray area."

My moods should define my calendar. Not the people around me. I'm surrounded by too many strong personalities to be able recognize myself in their shadows.