#to beginnings

[anenlighteningellipsis]

hope is only a beginning; it’s not a substitute for action, only a basis for it.

Rebecca Solnit, from the Forward to the Third Edition, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

[rgbvscmyk]

A Letter on Watching Your Friends Become Homes, or: One Begins One, and then One Begins:

Dearest,

I'm shaken.

Probably more-so than I've ever been. I didn't expect you to be this close. I didn't expect you to be at all. But you're here, almost, and I'm trying. Still, no place is enough, and I can't quite get over that.

--

I felt you today. Everything in me contracted, just like the first time I'd seen you:

I want to take you to breakfast, she'd said.

You weren't even there. Not really. Just some ether - unsolid and amorphous and powerful darkness. Something like a butterfly, just after it stops being a caterpillar, cocooned and all over the place on the inside. 

My whole life had felt too small. I don't really like to touch people.

--

I spent the better parts of 3 hours in the bed of a covered pick-up, surrounded by backward motion and bare trees. Waning light. Sound, rocking and crashing with every bump. My ear pressed to the hollow above the axel. 

She's always been one for unbelievable explosions; the kind you're sure the wind is somehow involved with:

I'm keeping it, she'd said. 

I try not to make a habit of crying in public.

--

She whispered confidently upfront: Comfortable, spread out. They laughed together. Planned. Yours and mine. 

My suggestions are never welcome. I'm practical, inquisitive, artistic when I want. Stars seemed appropriate. Honest. Theres probably nothing entertaining about atomic makeup anyway:

I haven't been alone in months, she'd said.

You've probably been alone forever.

--

See, I've watched you through a coalescences of years and currents. Not yet's and not yet's and not yet's, still. Configurations and coasting asymptotes, zygotes pending. Entire lifetimes. Entire worlds. 

Life is not how they say. Only catharsis happens slowly. Everything else is sudden. You are, and then suddenly, you are different. 

The present is always becoming. 

I did not expect you.

--

There are days i wake with my fingers swollen and imagine you there. Not you specifically - my own, perhaps; Bits and Fragments of plump, covered in fluid and redness, and dark. Wayward nearly's migrating through veins and flesh and depth until finally, finally, they meet. 

To think, there will be pieces of her - fresh and wild and unguarded. Tiny. New.

Just existing. Just because. 

Usually my heart starts to hurt so I roll over, bumble into lucidity. I bumble a lot.

Homes should be sturdy - made to bend, at least. 

--

She looks softer here. Limbs folded and perched under the dim of the only bright light enough to encase her. Comfortable, still. 

There is nothing I can teach you, but you'll learn from me just the same. 

The strength in knots. In tension. In I don't know. One at a time. 

I'm so young.

--

I never was.

I can't be.

--

Give me your hand, she'd said

They were wet. Soapy. I like to feel things when I wash them. I don't really like to touch people. I should have known. 

--

She laughed and wiped my cheek.

I smiled but couldn't see her. 

[pheasanthunting]

That ain't no goat singing along, it's me

You know your life is in a shit place when you start connecting with Taylor Swift lyrics.

It's not that I have anything against Taylor Swift, but her lyrics are supposed to be the ones you relate to when you're 13, day dreaming about boys in a very PG friendly way, not when you're 17, trying to find your footing after losing yourself to them in a very rated R kind of way.  But I suppose I should give Taylor some credit, I mean, considering the way she's covered in tabloids, she must know a thing or two about boys.

But alas, here I am, connecting to fucking Taylor Swift.  I knew you were trouble when you walked in, so shame on meeEEE. Add another line about a being a notch on some bed post, and suddenly, it's like Taylor knows me! She's writing my diary! 

Lol, no. 

My greatest fear is that I come off as some recycled Taylor Swift song.  I take solace in the fact that she would have to be writing a very specific kind of song in order to encapsulate all that has happened to me. But still, there have been low moments when I feel like nothing would make me feel quite as comforted than knowing that Taylor Swift went through something like this.  

So, Taylor, got any lyrics?