Cry me a river... oh cry me a river. i've cried a river over you.

Surreal to wait for a bus in the deep southern darkness, reminded me of a Miyazaki like image. I can see how he came up with the idea of a spirit bus, as in the darkness, each pair of headlights flows past me, gliding like twin souls. Waiting and watching, jumpy and pacing, the behemoth buses are silent in the distance, orange streaks of light hurtling towards me, but looking like slow motion, like an afterthought, the bodies of them blocking any headlights behind them. They move through the traffic like gaping holes in the flood of concrete and winking lights, with alien shaped strings of light floating towards me, everything with its own little halo, thanks to my poorly cleaned glasses and tired eyes.

In New York recently, with my lover and best friend, we groped through the fading light through harlem, hoping to find her new apartment before the ghosts of the homeless and mentally ill came seeking us out. Coming up on a park that descended steeply before us, I looked out and saw a body of water stretching out before me, the lights from the buildings winking at us from their reflections in the water, writhing playfully in the dark. Extremely confused, I stopped in frustration, as we were supposed to be heading inland, not towards the hudson, and we had already dragged our luggage through the subways and on a cab.

When I paused to express my severe annoyance, the vista changed, as my eyes caught up with my brain, as Christina laughed at my mistaken identification, as my visually trained perception clicked into place. we were standing over a late night rush, and the silent ebb and flow of the traffic had at first registered as water and reflected light.

Big City Survival Guide from a small town girl with big ideas.

RULE #1:

ALWAYS assume the people around you are crazy, until they exhibit some obvious form of coherent thought.

i.e. people sitting next to you on the bus, that guy drinking his starbucks, those annoying guys that hand out coupons and follow you through times square talking about your eyes, the crazy fucks that post random personal bullshit on your professional blog...



RULE #2:

Just because they write "homeless" or "veteran" on their ridiculous pieces of cardboard, doesn't mean they don't have a perfectly lovely home and beautiful family they go back to after you've coughed up your pity change. *

*please see the section referring to stepfathers

anyway my dear little phoenix, feel better soon and try not to have so many regrets

invaded. i feel deeply hostile and invaded that my tool for accessing the collective, my creative discussion with myself that i have used to define my writing style and direct a professional body to consider my writing as a skill set i have to offer has somehow been misunderstood for some tortured desperate plea for a hero, in the shape of a figure i exorcized years ago.

Awareness. it begins with self awareness, a most elusive creature. the fabric of the universe has fallen into a most compelling pattern, bringing the sewage to the surface, laid bare and unapologetic before all of us. these times are not for the fragile hearted, and i hope the country comes out scrubbed clean of delusions and more sure of our priorities. love is not enough to sustain us. it can fill us and invigorate us, give us purpose and passion and joy, but its very existence demands a glaring awareness that when it is gone we will be empty, bare, less than we were before we knew it. so we hoard it. we try to bottle it up for a rainy day, build a fortress of jealousy and questions to protect it from an atomic blast of reality, and in doing so, like a flame, we take away the very oxygen it thrives on - spontaneity, freedom, lightness of being.

i always knew my past would bubble up and threaten to eat away at my sense of wholeness. I have been stocking up for that time, building an elaborate defense against a villian and a vanity that i barely remember. similarly, in love, i found the minute i stumbled gracelessly and passionatley upon it, i began the terrified countdown for when it would eventually eradicate my sense of self, and with that , my existence.

i believe this is a love letter. the love letter of a cynic.

i don't believe in forever, words that made me cringe when they fell so easily from her perfect, unappreciated lips. i know forever is a joke, a ploy, a simplistic human creation to hopelessly define the smallness of our existence in the universe... but quixotically i fathom the intensity of my passion in that same term; something i feel i could never find a match in, the depth and breadth of my emotional commitment. part of me can see the dance of our souls and see her for what she truly is: my soulmate in so complete a form that lifetimes and human lovers and simple words will never have the capacity to define. that part of myself knows no fear, and has unending faith in the truth of that fact... but some deep unapproachable, illogical part of myself that i have refused to acknowledge reacts to the reality of my humanity in so sharp and fast and painful a voice, i am helpless to the tidal wave of my hideously human emotions like a thing possessed. jekyll and hyde must have been written by a similar soul.

i've been caught in a psychological mirror for the first time in my life, presented with the reality of who and what the world was seeing... what the love i had so vehemently protected... i finally saw the fortress of my love for the cage it had become. i exstinguished the flame by which i was trying so desperately to see by, and the voice of an equally strong and powerful woman fell deaf on my ears. i didn't know i lost the light, because i was blind.

so maybe the mirror was there the entire time... but what good is a mirror to the visually impaired? what good is words of love or hate to a person who cannot hear?

that elaborate fortress has served me no purpose. i sit here broken and empty not from a lack of love, since i had long since lost it, but broken from what i finally saw when i opened my eyes and gaped in horror at the reality of my fears manifested. like an alcoholic in a 12 step program, i want to reach out and ask forgiveness to those who were swept up in the deluge of my obsessive, controlling destructive love, more powerful as its own entity than i could ever have guessed. i have somehow missed that this romantic misanthropic beast had filled my form and consumed all of my relationships, its hunger and greed deeper than an uncharted ocean, fathomless. it seems everything i touch crumbles away, receding like a nightmare, like light from the day, turning into night horrors as the words fell from my lips.

i have met the beast finally. the doppleganger that robbed me of my joy, and consumed the love that filled me like oxygen. for fear of unleashing the monstrosity of my fear and jealousy, all i can do is walk away. walk slow and steady, ignoring the ache in my soul that i left with her. i can't look back or i'll lose my nerve.

all i can say is that i did it out of love. for love.

still love.

forever.

god, women and fairytales

wandering lost and heartbroken through the west village, trying to lose myself and this profound sense of loss in its quaint beauty, i walked past a shop window and paused. the cat statue in the window looked so real that i had to double back and really look at its suppleness. it was real fur, but had none of the stiffness of a stuffed creature. that is one skilled taxidermist, i thought to myself. then it blinked.

leaning back to see what the establishment was, much to my amusement, i realized it was a psychic's place. interesting, cause the word psychic was nowhere to be found. just the neon script in the front window that read: past, present, future. never has something felt so cosmic or meant to be. i rang the doorbell. a scrunched up old lady pushed the cage looking door open and squinted up at me. i asked what she offered and her prices, which were extremely reasonable compared to psychics i've encountered in the past. with nothing but a check card to offer, she sent me across the street to an atm. i took out 40 bucks.

the reading that i chose was a double palm psychic evaluation for 25 dollars. she spoke with a slightly foreign, but strongly new york accent and demanded my right palm and cupped gently, looking into its shadowed crevices. than she began telling me my life. my two crippling relationships, the seriousness of my feelings for my recent lover, the depth of my pain, the intensity of the baggage she carries with her, my recent decision to change my life and move to new york, the resentment towards my one parental figure, towards all my parental figures, my inability to connect with men so strong and clear that she paused to ask if i'd ever even been with a man sexually, my struggle to find a voice, that i opened myself up to the wrong people, untrustworthy people, my stagnation in the environment i was currently living in, even she saw a trip i had been considering the possibility of quietly in the back of my mind. she also had some intriguing comments about the next few months that are exciting to contemplate.

"she loves you very much" she told me. i know, and i don't know. "do you believe in god?" she asked. yes, in my own way. an answer to which she chuckled at. "you are so talented, but you are disconnected from your spirituality. you want things so strong that they come to you, but they always end badly and you don't really know where it is you lost the thread." i couldn't speak, i was too busy sobbing. "you have felt like you have no purpose, haven't you? you are happy on the outside, but on the inside it is not so."

"but i can help you. let me think and search, because i do not believe this bad karma to be your own. someone somewhere gave you there emotional scars, their negativity has damages some of your chakras, you know what chakras are? and there is scar tissue lingering still." funny, i grew up speaking of chakras and auras, tarot and karma, and it seems she can read my comfort with the language she speaks in. i haven't spoken these kinds of spiritual words since i started dating my last roman catholic girlfriend, and it was like greeting an old friend.

"i charge for this service only 75 dollars." amused, thoughtful, i could only honestly say i didn't have that much in my bank account. she told me, she would take what i could give her, and she would give it all back if she couldnt figure out how to help. so i left her the 40 i had taken out, and left with specific instructions. i was to locate a yellow rose, cut the stem short (the length of a pen), get in the shower, and meditate under the stream of water while i held the rose to my solar plexus. my sternum, the place in between my breasts where my girlfriend snuggled into when she woke from nightmares in the dark.

interesting, the revelations that come when you pause to really think about something, with no fear, and no remorse, when you hold out your arms and ask for help, to the empty room, the steam from the shower swirling around me, from the small piece of sunshine cupped to my chest that swooned open in the heat as it gracefully collected the rivulets of water and my burning, salty tears.

so i was there the next morning, to bring her the rose that meditated with me in the shower, and slept under my pillow, soaking up my tortured dreams, and handed it to her when she asked for it. "i will take it with me to church" she says, "and i will pray over every petal, while the wax from the candle drips, you understand?" yes. i am not about to question this intense, loving mysticism. "this weight you carry is not from god, if it were, i would not be able to help you. it is from a person, and i will find it so we can clear away the scar tissue." she's looking for someone who hurt me... but to be honest, there are so many sad insignificant instances that could lead up to the trauma she describes. she asked if something dark happened on my father's side, a suicide maybe, but i have no answer for her, as my grandmother with 7 different husbands in her lifetime, the gifted astrologer who taught my mother everything she knew is little more than fairytale to me, a myth i grew up hearing about. aside from her, there is a sister that ended up in an insane asylum, and my father who fancied himself a warlock and disappeared during the early years of my cognitive development. it strikes me sometimes, how bizarre and mythical my life sounds, especially when so much of my knowledge was fed to me in the form of glorified and emotional memories. it often seems that i've had to construct my early childhood from someone else's loves and disappointments, fears and romanticized way of dealing with their reality, so it didn't seem so lonely. i'm not surprised this scrunchy old lady sees other peoples hurt weighing me down. that is, in utter truth, the story that is my life.

she sends me away with more homework. she pulls out 4 sage leaves, pale and soft with a fine downy white coat of fibers, and instructs me to light 2 tonight and cleanse my aura, and to do the same with the next 2 the following day. sage was used by the native americans to chase away dark spirits and purify the atmosphere. the leaves burn like incense, and emit a strong herby odor, that is usually combatted with burning sweet grass at the same time (as my mother haughtily reminded me, a running critique that interrupts my explanation of my experience.). once again, i am struck by the familiarity of this act, like deja vu almost, and i am momentarily sad that i let so much of where i had come from get forgotten. for however fabricated my evolution and existence might be, and subject to the whims and memories of emotional and absent minded people, it is all i have that ties me to this world, and this lifetime.

the mormons have become my friends, and they stop by in their rounds and kindle my sense of being connected to some community. they broke up the loneliness and monotony of my first few weeks in richmond. recently in our talks, one of them asked a favor of me. he wanted me to ask god if he loved me. i immediately informed him that i had no doubt of the reciprocity of a greater power than myself, i do not fear a lack of faith in being a natural part of a powerful being. "no" he said. "please ask." ok fine. whatever. but later, in the stillness of my room, reading a book filled with jewish mysticism and kabbala, i contemplated that strange request. the room was suddenly filled with a stillness so deep i was falling into it, everything was saturated and every single texture was perfectly discernible... and i was so terrified i couldn't voice the words. so when this ancient and earnest little lady tells me i am not spiritually connected, i have to stop and think... i have heard this before.

just so stories.

oh sunshine. it has been a long cold winter. i dream of the beach, and curl up into a tight little ball without the warmth of my girlfriend to stretch out against.

exausted and overwhelmed, i've decided to lie low during my trip in NYC for this one decadent evening... responses from publishing companies, work i will be going home to... i'm just going to let it go. be just another human being for the evening.

hand somebody else the world i have on my shoulders for a few sweet moments, and just enjoy the fading sunshine.