We sat on the beach and
drank the sea. Foamy
tops spilling over salt
rimmed glasses. Our skin
sparkled and softened in
the golden light. Drunk
on the waves, baked by
the sun.

The art of finding myself was discovered in the practice of losing myself.

Bit by bit, drip by drip. A dare, a challenge.

I’d watch trees in autumn happily shake loose the weight of their leaves and I’d look at my own in sadness. They were a part of me; they couldn’t come free. The same old leaves, year after year. Ragged edges, disintegrating, but still firmly attached.

The trees would laugh and wave their branches at me. “What are you so worried about? We lost it all and we’re still here. Feeling freer than free.”

It seemed a melancholy process, a dance with grief, to lose everything. But it also looked unspeakably, joyfully freeing. So bit by bit, drip by drip, I practiced slowly setting to the ground the ways of being that had grown all over my body.

The more I lost, the more I mourned. But the more I began to feel like myself. As if life wasn’t exclusively about learning and collecting, but also about being comfortable with shedding the pieces that clung to me starting the second that I came out of the womb.

Drip, drip, drop. Beautiful undressing.

I told my sister that I felt like the moon. There one day, gone the next. Bright and visible and craving attention, and then all of a sudden fleeing, hibernating, non-existent. It was kind of tiring, I told her. Always waking up each day a little bit different. The phases never stuck around long enough to stabilize or feel comfortable.

My sister said she was jealous of that. She wished she could change quicker but felt like she was always there, like the sun. And if she wasn’t it was because she was unable to push away the thick dark clouds that turned her invisible, unable to gauge when she’d shine again.

I said her consistency sounded kind of nice. She said she liked my ability to quickly bounce back.

The sun and the moon have always been in love with each other.

I leave a little bit of coffee or tea in the bottom of my mugs, and when I clean the kitchen I make sure there’s always a dish or two left unwashed in the sink. I abandon TV shows right before watching the final season and if I get interrupted in conversations I never trail back around to finish the point I was trying to make.

A prayer, an offering, to the gods. So that hopefully as they sit up there, watching me, gossiping about me, they come to the conclusion that “Clearly this girl is just getting started. She’s so messy, so many moving parts and unfinished projects in her life.”

Yes, I’ll finish this tomorrow. Agreed, there’s still so much for me to do here. I promise to come back in the morning. No, I’m not ready to leave yet.

Not a fear of death, not a superstition, but a celebration of life. Look! I’m here, I’m messy, I am moving pieces and parts everywhere I go, I’m alive, I am now.

I make sure I always start more projects than I can possibly finish, because if I’ve run out of projects and all my loops are closed I’ll know for sure that I’ve died.

I don’t know what to write anymore so I’m just going to write my feelings.⁣

Which is what I should have been doing all along, because every time I ask myself what I want to do with my life I reply, “I just want to write stories and make people feel things.” But it’s kind of tough to make people feel things when I strip all the emotion out of my writing.⁣

I’m emotionally honest with myself though. Of course I am. That’s all I ever am. It’s basically my religion—that brutally honest moralistic authenticity, baby—my INFP power. But when I express myself to others, it’s edited so much that it feels like sterile dusty soil after decades of planting the same shitty crops on them. Words, writing, voices. All hollowed out until there’s nothing of myself left.⁣

I’ve had trouble communicating my feelings my entire life, and I guess that comes from growing up with emotionally unavailable parents. It’s been seeping into my writing without me even realizing it. Until I began to feel like I could only write when I was pissed off or when I wanted to crack jokes. That’s the only way I, a generationally emotionally unavailable person, knows how to connect with others. Pick fights or deflect intimacy with humor. Friction. Chaos. Ah, familiar comforts.⁣

But what do I do if I’m not offending people by criticizing their religion or cracking jokes while having sex with people I barely know? Do I make people happy? Do I make people cry? I suppose it’s time to openly face my feelings or give up writing. That’s all I have left to offer, that’s the only way out. Fuck facts, face my feelings, share what I find.

Ancient earth
Ancient dirt
Layers of death pressed into life

A thousand and one
Cycles of evolutions
To create this compression

I feel the whisper
Of life buried and overturned
And spread out across surfaces

How can you think you know me?
I am a cycle of evolutions too
I am made up of a million and one
Deaths pressed into life

I am not me
You are not you
We are made of each other
And of the ground we’ll return to