Life as a Run on Sentence
I am at the threshold- I can tell because I’m nervous, because I wish it was different, because I wish that I could scoop the sunshine out behind the clouds and place it as I please, that I could shift the way the water flows, that I could control the uncontrollable. A need born from the beginnings of my flesh peeling from my soul and I hold the weight in my chest, or in my throat, and the man behind me begins to speak French and the sun lays across the water spilling into the pools of my eyes and it is as I wished, as I wanted, and I have to remind each muscle to release and I let the energy trickle down my spine and focus on how the pen marks the paper and I linger on the loops. I love the letter y and I love the letter g and everything they represent in this code I am writing and and its history and the beauty of language born from a need to communicate and words as a testament of the human need of vulnerability born solely for connection, altered by the infliction of your voice or the movement of your muscles. Each stroke differing, the same word arriving as different colors to different flavors, that how you choose to articulate can only be controlled up to the point of reception upon which it is passed through the filter of my experiences and absorbed into my skin signaling a change of ownership and think of all the words we choose not to say and how they live trapped within their birthplace with no freedom to breathe- festering within my bloodstream*- it is no wonder I did not sleep when I did not speak, too many thoughts to tend to, to many wounds to close, and how beautiful to feel the lightening of a sound leaving my parted lips I feel the most powerful as I watch the syllables swirl through the air like the last drag of a cigarette or the death of a wick or the end of a forest. And to realize there is no direct relationship between the amount of words and their gravity- meaning being a relationship of the aforementioned considerations of conditioning, tone, and how you look me in the eyes. And I am free- autonomous- and I have chosen desire (for this life, for others, for myself), and more appropriately I have chosen to allow desire, or more appropriately I have chosen to not be ashamed of my desire as I accept that I have little say in the historical and chemical bonding of my emotions and I remind myself to breathe and I taste the smoke stuck between my teeth and remember that teeth are bones and I am thankful the bitterness has replaced the taste of you- though their similarities mock me- and if I just remind myself to look up I melt into the water and I stand still among the crowd and how staggering is this life and the enormity of it and the opportunity of it and that I may sigh out the weight should I choose to and taste again the smoke mixed with the air in my saliva and value the dark in the way I do the light, and listen to dinner plans being made behind me and to write without comprehension or attachment- to do what I love without trying to control its outcome, no wonder the pages fill so quickly- I have missed you- But I keep forgetting, or I never will know, how to love correctly, how to not fear the loss, how to not suffocate the joy from my life
But I am learning, can’t you tell that I am learning, because I am changing and it all feels quieter, closer, like you can whisper because I am already here, sitting in your lap not across the glass and you can be more gentle because I am looking right at you. You don’t need to get my attention, you already have it, and this is how I feel life is meeting me now in this softly lit garden filled with your laughter and half an orange because I have allowed such a space to exist outside the darkly lit alleyway and I just looked up and everything has changed.
And every time I look up everything has changed but I have come to rely on this as a fact and look forward to it, to welcome it (not dissimilar to hopefulness, to faith) and say thank you thank you thank you for letting me see it a different way or taste it in a different flavor or know it as another person and this time I looked up and I am crying but not in the way you think I just feel Loved, with a word purposefully capitalized- can’t you see how that changes the meaning? And I feel loving and I am overflowing with something that love doesn’t quite quantify but I saw a quote earlier that said not everything has to feel like something else and this falls within that category and I am going to stop writing now because I want to sit and watch the light play with the water and I have front row seats and a body full of desire.
*As an addendum to this, I think there are words that we choose consciously not to say and in doing so block a transference of knowing or feeling or connection with another person and then there are words that are better left unsaid because they would fail to do justice to the palpable feeling already acknowledged and shared by one another. This difference is important. Not all unsaid words are burdens.
