falling
If a day goes by and I don’t fall in love, I get horribly depressed. My home base, the tonic, is an acceptance of the fact that the world is a hopeless pile of shit, which is why it is important to have those little encounters that make me fall in love, that turn my body back into some electrified, pulsing, bright white light, that magnetizes my skin and pulls me in. Because if there are beautiful things, soulful music, people whose bodies translate an emotion into a thing that overtakes my own body through dance, or aerial art, or any kind of movement, if these beautiful things persist, it cannot be completely hopeless. There is still something worth fighting for. Falling in love keeps me alive, and I need my daily fix. I need real human connection. I need the kid on the street who sees me and asks how my day is going, who opens up to me, who tells me I am the warmest, sweetest, brightest light he’s felt in years. Who asks how are you and wants the real answer, because he cares, because he cannot help but care. I sat with him for hours, just two structurally impaired kids, having a hard time in the world, sitting on a sidewalk hugging. He put his hand over my shoulder, barely touching me, and could feel how much it hurt. Woah, what’s going on in there? What happened? Are you okay? We talked about how difficult it is to be an empath, to be able to hear or see people’s thoughts, how lonely it is to be outside of everything else because of the burden of our shared “crazy.” In other cultures, people who had these gifts were honored, were healers, medicine women and men… here, mostly they are homeless. Because an inability to put your head down and trudge on through is seen as weakness. The inability to conform to a system of carelessness and destruction renders us useless, insane, unstable. If the man excitedly engaged in a conversation on the subway platform sees somebody, why are we all so quick to agree that he is the one who’s wrong? I know that I do not see anyone, but who am I to tell him what he sees is not real? What is real? Real is the way the sketchy punk boy loves me, real is the connection I have to human beings, the way I orient myself based on textures and colors that I can’t see with my eyes, real is a made up word. What’s real is the suffering of our shared existence if we continue to tell other people their realities are not real.