Pride, Colour, Joy

It's a big world, and I am still searching for my place within it. This blog is one expression of that endeavour. Thank you to those who engage with me regularly. Click 'Replies' to see the advice I have provided. Please send me a message or two. I love hearing from you.

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Ring the alarm

What is it about the story in Call Me By Your Name that brings me ache, and shakes me? I think I know. It is its depiction of our sorrowful lives. In this life, if we are lucky, we taste love, lust, euphoria, or something else that catapults us over the clouds. Then, we plummet. Love disappears. We grieve forever. This is a fundamental truth of our lives, and sometimes it is a novel that rings the alarm.

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Alone

For a fortnight, my body ached for you. I pondered without end how I might see you again. The banter of our previous meeting in my mind, on replay, without pause. The intricacies of your body were my daydream.

Then, I lost you to someone else. Now, I seek comfort. I cannot have you, I remind myself, so my day must go on. Perhaps I don't love you. But, still, every morning I feel that ache and longing. Your warm kiss on my neck. Entangled, under a blanket. Then, the cold of the winter penetrates even the warmest dream, and I am awakened. I am alone.

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Tornado

For how long will I deny myself the love of another man? I might know melancholy because I don't grant myself what I've wanted for a while. Perhaps, after a decade of practice, I am trained now to ignore, reject these most carnal desires. Suppress them. Hide them. There are those moments of deafening loneliness, I think to myself, just maybe, love is the disruption I need. Perhaps there will be a day when love will move through my life and body like a tornado.

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What is to be said

I let men wield a power over me. They have no idea; perhaps I have been forgotten for years. What is to be said to the men I love, the memory of whom emerges unannounced when nearby trees shine bright red and orange? Would I tell them I have not yet learned how to accept their absence, or that I remember everything; I hold closely their essence: soft, black beards or light brown eyes, fleeting glances, receding hair simple yet coif, a scent I wish they would leave behind. They command the soil on which they move and I had their smiles like cocaine. What is to be said to men who do not remember my name although I whisper theirs most nights. They who conquered the soft, beautiful women they wanted all along. Why would they care for broken men like me?

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Just watch

It is as I arrive at the fork in the road, that I hear the taunts of that distant witch that is middle age. I disrobe by the nearby pond, as the witch gawks, to see a reflection of the man that has arrived. Bruised, weary, frazzled. A product of the violence that only I could impose on myself. I, too, was alive once.

I raise my fist and tell the distant witch that I, only in a few years from now, will embrace it so tight. You just wait and see, oh how you’ll love the man that I will become. 

He will be strong. He will have the posture and energy of the newly virile. You will gaze in awe at the tsunami that will arrive. The intellectual typhoon, the compassionate friend, the passionate lover, the fierce advocate, the patient parent.

You will sing songs about him, and adorn this very road with rose petals as he arrives. Just watch.

[themindmovement]

Perfectionism is very addictive because it is very seductive. It’s so great to think, ‘There’s a way I can do things where I can never be held in judgment by other people, that I can totally escape criticism.’ But it doesn’t work.

Brené Brown (via themindmovement)

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What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65… and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?

Anne Lamott (via toinfinityandswann)

[austinkleon]

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Anne Lamott, “Shitty First Drafts,” in Bird By Bird  (via austinkleon)

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SMS

On this eerie summer day, with not a cloud in the sky over leafy suburbs, and the smell of espresso and white-collar noise emanating from corner coffee shops, all I could hope for is a text from you.

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On resilience

To the brothers and sisters that climbed out of the depths of anxiety or depression, from that canyon of suffering. To the resilient soldiers who kept going even though the mind screamed otherwise. To you - he who has come up for air - I am here for you. We’re both afraid it will happen again. But we have each other.

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My heart aches for him. Modest man, kind, gentle. Soft hum. Quiet laughter. Tall, dark. Thin and sweet like sugar cane. Average. Profound. I feel immense pain as the days go by.

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God danced the day you were born, baby

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Alienation

You know that feeling where everything is objectively going well, and that outside observers would describe your current situation as comfortable or secure, or even ‘remarkable,’ but the only adjectives that you can come up with include ‘meaninglessness,’ ‘absence,’ or ‘alienated.’ 

Yeah.

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Dear God, please help the families suffering in Florida. Please help those who are pushed to the margins of society because they are different. Please give those without purpose some Purpose, so that they do not resort to radical and extreme ideologies. Please give me reason to hope and the strength to be resilient, particularly this week, as I drag around a heavy heart filled with violent, silent sorrow...

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Something is happening in the United States. A deeply disturbing current of something unimaginable.

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All I need right now is for Suheir Hammad to release a couple lines of poetry on what is happening in the world. Her silence is killing me.