Garden of Eden

I can tell you the exact moment in which I changed from the "me" I was to the "me" I am. It was at the height of my downward spiral.
California meant changing everything about myself, everything I was too afraid to change in Kansas City. California meant shedding suffocating relationships and forgiving myself for being human.California meant accepting that there are some things that can't be changed and many things that can.
Arriving in California is my happiest memory because I was free to be anything my imagination could conjure. I chose from the best lot of options initially. I chose to be the free spirit. I chose to be the leader. I chose to be what I was convinced for years I was incapable of being- self sufficient.
And then I chose to be a drug addict.
And a liar.
And a cheater.
There was a moment when I was sitting on the patio of a local coffee shop and I felt myself completely die inside and I equate it now to the way Adam & Eve must've felt when God banished them from the Garden of Eden. Absolute terrifying uncertainty.
I was strung out and devastated by a series of bad decisions. My relationship with Bri had ended because, like all relationships built upon false pretenses, it was only a matter of time. I was convinced I was in love until I realized I was in fear.
I was in fear of being alone.
I was in fear because despite only carrying 3 suitcases cross-country, Ryan brought with him a lifetime of baggage; both his and mine, and I didn't want anything to do with the past. I was in fear because I wasn't on speaking terms with the love of my life, and the final blow to the relationship had been my heavy-handed judgment on how things between us "ought to be."
I was in fear because it was easy to fake connections and relationships with day to day people when they were within reach, but so far away from everyone I'd ever depended upon, it occurred to me that they didn't really need me and suddenly, I very much needed them.
I was just sitting there on that patio...cross-legged, high as ever, waiting for a beautiful surfer who teased me with the potential of a relationship, made love to my mind, fucked my soul, and acted as if she didn't know me in the morning.
I was sitting there waiting for her to get off work, to confuse my mind even more so with her trecherous self-misunderstandings projected onto me as my own.
I was sitting there when Ryan demanded via text message that I travel to the city and experience San Francisco Pride at its fullest.
But my response was, in summary, that I could not go because I didn't believe in love anymore.
I couldn't celebrate being a twisted bundle of broken promises. There was no pride in the way I'd loved for years. My love had been selfish in every way possible. Relationship after relationship had failed because I had heaped massive expectations upon one lover and then the next- I needed them to fix me. To make me into what they saw when they looked at me. I wanted to believe their words: that I am brave, talented, beautiful, intelligent. I wanted them to make me believe because I didn't have the strength to do it myself.
But just as I was incapable of fixing them, they too were incapable of fixing me.
Sitting there on that patio...the surfer emerged for a momentary break, veins full of heroin, her mind in a constant battle to be sober and gay and happy as she is in her truest form- or to continue lying to everyone, especially herself.
She demanded that I go to Pride with her once her shift ended and I hoped for just a moment that what she really meant to say was "I believe love is possible." But I knew better.
And once I realized I knew better, my soul broke apart as deeply at the first continent-shattering earthquake. 
Who I was until that moment separated from the woman I am right now.
The woman I became in that desolate moment of pitch black emotional despair is a woman who will never again look for definitions outside her own skin. No matter your religion or spiritual beliefs, each of us knows that our species is connected by an unseen energy that radiates the emotions of the beholder.
It's that feeling of uniting after a national tragedy, or in the height of the Star Spangled Banner before a baseball game. It's the panic and anger in a shouting match. It's the way the man at market smiles at you as he hands you an extra bundle of dahlia's for free.
We are united in our unspoken elements and it is that force, and only that force, that defines each of us equally.
So when my soul splintered, it revealed me to a truth I'd been ignorant of prior.
It revealed to me that I am brave and talented, beautiful and intelligent. But more importantly, I am the sole provider of my happiness and to maintain happiness, a person has no choice but to make the hardest choices.

That's when I got sober.

You might be amazed at how painfully difficult it is to say goodbye to the comfort of misery, but I know most of you aren't surprised at all. Misery is masked by its smooth trails and open horizons, but it's a circular path, never leading anywhere.   
I have since chosen to no longer excuse bad behavior, afflicted attitudes and indignation from myself or others. Our very existence's are statistical miracles. Our thriving or drowning- entirely our choice. Our mental, emotional and physical dispositions- solely our responsibilities. And I, as with us all, am entirely responsible for the way I treat others and the way I allow them to treat me.
This has forced me to apologize when I didn't want to, to forgive people I'd begrudged for years, and to end friendships and relationships with individuals who consciously choose toxicity.
That feeling I had of my soul opening up and releasing a new me...that was the metamorphosis of real change. Change brought on by no longer being able to maintain my sub-par status quo. Change brought on by accepting my tremendously powerful unseen energy and the affect it has.
When I radiate sincerity and goodness, my life is filled with such things and when I expel bitter discontentment with the world around me, such is my life.
I am what people see in me- so my main priority is to nurture the good and weed out the slow and silent killers as soon as I spot them.
I am a garden all my own and despite the pain of unavoidable choices and damage reversal, I am flourishing like never before. 
I recognize that happiness is uniquely mailable to the beholder and love is possible when it emanates from the core of your being.
That's why I believe the Garden of Eden will never be found, because it was a representation of unity between the Creating Energy and the Human Species and when Adam and Eve found reasons to be discontent, Eden was dissolved and they were ejected into the disconnected reality of seeking happiness outside one's self.
The only reality is what's within you...the rest of this is an illusion.
So if you're looking for me, I'll be in my garden, writing Frances and learning to play the piano; taking long walks down the pier and sleeping til noon whenever I so choose. I'll be loving as sincerely as ever and guiltless in my own skin. It contains all the happiness I'll ever need and is only willing to be touched by the enriching energies of equally content souls.
Love.
is.
Possible.


 

Under my umbrella

I don't know if it's possible to describe just how lonely I've been these past 7 months. Even typing the words "I've been lonely" pinches me hard enough for guilt to pool at the surface of my pride, but the skin of my armor doesn't burst, the guilt doesn't overflow...it only lingers, coexisting with the tremendous sadness in my heart.
Since November I've been kissed by 4 lovers, buried a friend, moved across the country leaving all sense of comfort and familiarity on the horizon, seen Native American ritual dances, slept in mountains and valleys, in snowstorms and on sand, eaten the most amazing food, gotten fearlessly lost in a city where no one I knew or trusted would be able to rescue me, been adorned with a traditional India bindi and rescued by the cord of Vishnu, listened to a psychic tell me my aura is blotched & known she was right, gotten a little too comfortable with drug abuse, been made a business partner, received my best friend from his own cross-country expedition only to lose him to the canyon created by our own private evolutions, missed my niece's 4th birthday, learned to ride public transit and Northern California waves, (relearn) how to ride a bike, lost 17 lbs, been told I'm the most incredible woman in existence, been told I am the worst human being ever created, performed at poetry slams in front of an audience of genius writers and received raving praise afterwards, changed my cell phone number for the first time in 10 years, completed another college semester and subsequently dropped out and made more money than I ever have in my life. That is the snapshot synopsis.
I've had the most torrential downpour of loss and blessings.
I want to be grateful.
I don't want to focus on the enormity of my sadness when the days are long and rough and all I need in the world is to crawl in bed with Rach and a movie, or sit on the patio and drink whiskey with Johanna. I don't want to think about all the places I've been and all the places I am and all the places I've yet to see. I don't want to think about love's long gone in the Midwest every.single.time I turn on my iPod. I don't want to hold a flannel shirt of my mother's because it's the closest thing I have to hugging her right now. I don't want to think about how much I miss late nights with Sara Steele and early mornings with the brooding artists that fill the Half Price Books employee roster.
I want to be grateful.
So many doubts flooded my ears before I pointed my car West and threw my hands in the air, "Fuck it." I had to go. I had to know if all the roads between what I knew and what I wanted truly existed. They do. Every pothole, every cactus, every Evergreen, every grain of red desert silt that compacts to make each fire mountain exists and they all guided me to the Promise Land with gentle voices and soft caresses. At some point on those lonely highways between home and destiny God whispered to me through the landscape, conveying that no matter the beauty I was leaving behind, there would certainly be more to come.
I want to be grateful because beauty has come in every medium imaginable. I've not once been alone or in any way suffered the way so many suffer every day. I am at my best in every aspect of my life. My worries are inconsequential to the betterment of the world and yet, they are consuming. They are consuming because it is safer to hide underneath an umbrella than drift aimlessly in a hot air balloon. I've been experiencing and resisting my own evolution for months, years even and now, in my acknowledgement of loneliness, the umbrella has blown away and I have no choice but to accept the nudity of being revealed small in an enormous world.
Perhaps it's just one of those nights, one of those weeks, one of those times in life where everything culminates and compacts to build a directional fire mountain and the most I can do is be patient and listen for the whisper of God.

The Greatest Work I've Ever Written

I have had the great fortune of loving and being loved by many tremendous women.

In the entirety of my conscious recollection I’ve sought a romantic, passionate love that burned as thoroughly as my desire to obtain it. To my dismay I learned time and again that love, being loved, and being in love are an elusive trinity in which most often achieved is only two of the three.

As recent as earlier this week I was certain that the love of my life had come and gone. But as it always is with certainty, many facets and layers lie deeper than comprehension, revealing themselves in that distinct instant that resolve is achieved.

I’ve never experienced love without the accompaniment of a commitment to “forever.” I’ve instinctually known and repressed innumerable hesitations (and glaring forewarnings) in the belief that opening myself up to the possibility of possibility equated to loving unconditionally. Where this pursuit has failed is in the reality that no creature or concept exists unconditionally. Every present and future detail hinges on the condition of past circumstances.

Often I’ve encountered the role of probability in love, like a seedling that on one particular day falls to the rainforest floor, nestles in wholesome soil, but fails to bud in the enveloping darkness. But in another equally obscure week, month or year a seedling almost identical in proportion and ambition falls in perfect unison with the collapse of a massive tree. Sunlight suddenly inundates the crevices of a previously insurmountable blackness, nourishing this particular seedling to rise higher and higher toward the life force that sustains its very existence.

The difference between life or death for the seedlings is the same for the life or death of romantic love. What roots and springs in darkness starves rapidly, though try as it might, withering dissipation is inevitable amidst the lack of sustenance. In a bout of unpredictability, as fate so chooses to tumble a monstrous blockade and let light in, an equally deserving particular seedling, a similarly honestly-intentioned love, has a chance to flourish that was previously proven impossible.

Therefore, I’ve concluded that it is not possible to love without condition, without expectation, because every moment prior to the collision and surrender of two compatible energies is conditioning the reactions, rejections, stipulations, tendencies and tolerances of the unique individual and it is not until agitating conflict or synchronized revelation that two souls are capable of deciphering the circumstances of their lovers’ past and compassionately embracing such conditions as the manifestation of their lover in the present. This is compatibility. The unification of two people as they were, transformed into who they are and either optimistically or pessimistically, who they will become.

In October I found myself tangled in loves grip. The failure to be truthfully compatible with anyone for an extended period of time had left me in shambles. My reaction to the suffocating lack of unconditional love was to sprout wings and travel. Through a series of unpredictable interactions I was introduced to the poet, to Brianna, to Bri. While acknowledging the bristling nervous energy that was exchanged between us, I was still in love with one woman and falling in love with another. So I set aside the possibility of possibility and proceeded to participate in my previously initiated emotional demise. I was not ready to shed the familiar disappointment so often encountered in the Midwest and embark on a new adventure. Though knowing I must, I had yet to redefine myself, to know myself in perfect alignment with the Universe as I did in the solitary cross-country drive. Our seedling had fallen but remained indeterminately dormant.

I arrived on California’s doorstep somewhere between molting and being renewed, a process that took weeks more to complete. Finding that I was, for the very first time, entirely alone led to silence, then exploration, and then to an eager young lover intrigued by my withholding. Another first- to be viewed as complex and mysterious. She would often say, “Tell me everything,” but I was uncertain, undefined; free of the slavery that coincides with being known and naked in every way. I was vulnerable to presumptions and misinterpretations within and without my silence.

We were lovers who shared stolen moments between obligations.

We were enemies, suspect of agendas.

We were friends, backtracking the canyons and canopies overlooked in our haste for instant gratification.

We were companions in particularities: .07 black ink pens, highlighting Camus, adoring the rush of substances that removed us from unalterable realities.

My heart fought against her lulling tide and sweeping undertow for months – conflicted by the emotions this stranger evoked with her foreign mannerisms – tender gentleness I’d rarely encountered with lovers twice her age and who, even after thousands of hours of invested effort, still felt like strangers themselves.

She first told me that she loved me after discovering an Einstein book (a post-shift surprise) I’d tucked between the windshield and wiper of her stylishly logical hatchback. Her reaction floored me. It was too soon for my heart, but the intuition that guided me on many an unfamiliar route advised me to be patient with myself. The uncertainty of such uncertainty is the potential that all one should feel never comes, that one has forced the impossible and therefore lied by omission. The elusive trinity glows like the Holy Grail, to love and be in love are concepts divisible by acceptance. I have more than once believed that the woman in my bed, on my arm, occupying my mind, would call me their wife and have the flexibility to achieve “forever” one day at a time. I had already believed that I’d encountered the love of my life.

These ridged restraints left no room for Bri. I was certain that all I’d left to offer her would eventually be unveiled as inadequate. But as it always is with certainty, the compression of resolve grinding against the force of potential erupted to reveal a sunset epiphany that I have had the great fortune of loving and being loved by many tremendous women. I’ve once encountered the love of my life as she pertained, as I pertained, to the understandings of one another and ourselves in the defining moments we shared. Evolution is swift in a famine and I have been starving for reincarnation for years – years that manifested their trials, successes, failures and achievements into the very moment when the compatible energy that shaped Bri’s reactions, rejections, stipulations, tendencies and tolerances collided with my own – and through agitating conflict and synchronized revelation, our compatibility was born.

Last evening, on the bed in which she and I have shaped so many understandings of one another, I found a 1929 Underwood Typewriter that even after I’d sold my television, BluRay player, excess books and glittering reminders of promises not kept, I was unable to afford. It is invaluable if you worship Kerouac and Ginsberg, Anais and (moderately) Hemingway, as I do.  Its steel keys offer up a rhythmic symphony that pre-dates economic ruin, historically devastating mass genocide, the technology on which you’re reading this. It reaches back to a time when there was still something to hope for.

Be it purposeful recognition or accidental indifference, this navy blue marvel is as crisp as the pack of cigarettes in my palm and when I saw it resting there with a note cradled across the type bar that read, “Because I simply love you,” tears came easier than they have in decades. My broken heart was suddenly laced back into a condition of entirety it cannot recall having known since the age of double-knotted tennis shoes and learning to ride a bike. Years of self-inflicted scars faded to expose delicate skin worth treasuring. My mind was flooded with gratitude and appreciation for the probability woven amidst pure chance that resulted in our initial introduction and conditioned our pasts and present with such purposeful coincidences that it impossible to dismiss the obviousness of the miracle of us.

I will never be able to regret, or cease, or dissipate loving or being loved by the many tremendous women whose conditions did not equate to long term compatibility. On the contrary, I am eternally indebted to the perpendicular intersections of magnificent loves and lovers whose labyrinths charted my course to Brianna’s arms, to my head on her chest, feeling the glow of that most sacred trinity within her, within me. I am loved, I love, I am in love with a woman flexible enough to achieve forever one day at a time. She is the cinnamon in my coffee, the ink smudges on my wrist, the answer to every prayer I’ve ever said or will say. She is the passage in the novel that incites reckless dog eared, furiously highlighted gasps of utter disbelief while tugging on the sleeve of your subway companion, clumsily forcing the literature in their hands, begging for them to experience the incredible beauty of the simplest words that, when combined, induce emotions within you that are so profound -- you are absolutely certain that it is in this moment that you have been brought back to the galaxy of the truly alive, reincarnated from the famine, no longer near extinction, now widely proclaimed as the happenstance phenomenon of strictly conditional evolution.  

Be still, my heart...

I am Swiss cheese, Part I

I've found the more positive the blog message, the more people respond. While I think it's a heaping pile of bullshit to only acknowledge a person when they're happy, I'll nonetheless try to even the score by sharing some of the good. It's a difficult thing to write a blog when you are writing a book, writing for yourself, writing letters, penning edits and e-mails day in and day out. To write the truth (here) is nearly impossible. Days go by that are entirely consumed with felonious activities and the tremendous secrets of friends young and old. I can't share their secrets, nor the emotions these secrets contrive, not here. Frances (my alter ego/fictional memoir character) can fictionalize them, SHE can tell you the truth by changing the names, the weather, the date and time, whereby skewing pinpoint accuracy. I write as Frances quite often these days. It's much easier to tell the truth about yourself, to yourself and to your audience when you can displace your own ego and filters and write as if it all weren't happening to you but to some poor sap you encounter on a cross-country bus trip.

Let us begin shall we? I've taken up slam poetry as of last week, performing at night on makeshift stages with second rate microphones. Monologues of truth I dare not tell in the Midwest or in a memoir until long after everyone I love is dead or has forgotten me. Unabashed, I can declare all outrageous truths that belongs to me and the audience, oh the audience, they snap and clap, cheer, praise, shout "AMEN!" "TELL IT!" and "HALLELUJAH!" They nod, smile, grimace- they react to my words as I react to theirs- with intrigue and anticipation. Silence is respected, lyrical genius in celebrated. Last Wednesday I performed for the first time, this is what I read at the Starry Plough in Berkeley:
**The last stanza is directed to a biracial man who read a poem the week prior**
This is what Berkeley was suppose to look like
From Kansas wheat fields where I peered over sunflowers stalks
To see your golden poppy skullcaps
And through her dishwater sunshine streaked hair
To the West
To the Sunshine State
Where I could kiss her with my hands in the
Dishwater or dandelion tea remnants.
The ebony emcee said this stage is our church
And where I come from
The only safe black men were found in church
On Wednesdays and Sundays
Where I knew that no matter how white washed Jesus was
He was never the color of bleach
Like the hair of the woman I was forbade to kiss
Or the vanilla wafers they shoved down our throats
As we rehearsed the Bible verses
Of a mercilessly judgmental God
Who created none of the us the same
Yet all of us equal.

This is what Berkeley was suppose to look like
When God said go forth and prosper
He didn't specify "go forth and fuck"
 What he said
What he meant
Is what Berkeley looks like
This place
Where my fairy fag
Truman Capote genius
Bukowski brilliant best friend
Can shroom his way down a sidewalk
Arm in arm
With his militant muff-diving Harper Lee
And wonder
How does my ass look in these heels?
Rather than the abomination he feels
He felt
When we stayed up all night
And debated in those small town prairie cornstalks
If this is what Berkeley would really look like.

 Last week
He said, I have to wonder
 If half of me
Ever owned half of me?
Well sir, I ask politely
This beaten, abandoned, molested, raped, deserted minority
Wants to say stop focusing on the negativity.
You are the cosmic miracle of both dark and light
Deep and strong,
Wise and lovely
And that
And this
Is what Berkeley was suppose to look like.

My success that night was significant and while words ran short this week, I intend to return to the stage and perform until I transform, and then speak of truths in the present rather than solely in the past. I have found a place that genuinely feels like home. My hair has grown long and fuzzy and natural, the only style I possess is unintentional curls that seem to have sprung up and out and all from nowhere. The last of my makeup crumbs are reserved for special occasions. I've begun quite the sweater collection but otherwise my jeans and shirts and dresses and shoes are secondary, aged to perfection, holey like Swiss cheese.