Love.

You know the words. Repeat them with me.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves.

Except here’s the thing, sugar.

Love is not patient. Or kind. it is not God’s work or a thing of beauty. It is vile, repulsive. You hate it, and yourself. It changes you.

Love is long-distance marriages, common law marriages, people who want to get married but can’t, people who don’t want to get married and do, people who shouldn’t get married; people you never thought would find someone and did.

Love is good decisions for bad reasons and bad decisions for good reasons; it is good sex and bad fights; bad sex and good fights. Love is confusing, uncertain, unexpected. It is different political views, different religions; one partner wanting children and one not.

It is falling for someone you hate; beginning to hate someone you once loved. It is knowing you were meant to be with someone 15 minutes into the first date, and it is not realizing that you are not right for each other until 15 years too late.

Love is a lot of things. It is rain and snow, broken shoes and torn clothes, friendship bracelets and white-gold rings; arguments over dinner and make-up sex, but it is not patient, and it is not kind. It will break you, but you won’t mind. In fact, you will love it.

bookstore.

fingers run over spines of books as if all of the knowledge and comfort the words bring will come through osmosis.

concentration is broken; how many books have been touched? which disease was caught; which title remembered?

one dollar, five dollars, eight dollars. books collected that mean nothing except for a famous author; words not yet absorbed that should have been; will be.

stacks are slipped in to plastic bags, lines move forward; still seated, enthralled by the people passing, the conversations quietly overheard, the words lacing through veins.

one hour, five hours, eight hours. dark has settled, closing time approaches; still seated, progression of time unimportant. one book has been finished, another postponed for a future reading moment.

moleskine closes, mac shuts down, espresso machine turns off. final purchases are made, people leave, brains still in the book as feet shuffle to cars, buses, bikes.

all that is left are the books, the titles, sentences, phrases; words that change lives. they will open again tomorrow, communicating beauty to those willing to see it.

LIFE

One day I will write something. It will tell the story of me, of those I have loved, those who have hurt me and those who are still with me. It will tell the story of the women in my life: the mother who scarred me, the step-mother who loved me, and the redhead who believed in me. It will tell of the men: the father who did his best for me, the almost step-father who emotionally battered me, and, eventually, the man who fell in love with me.

It may not be something others read. It will take them years to read it; months to understand. It will be confusing, convoluted, and rocky - even the people closest to me may never read it, for fear they will never understand. But I will know what every word, every sentence, every grammatical aspect means. I will share bits and pieces with people, to help them to understand me, and this piece I write will tell such a story that everyone will want to read all of it.

I will title it LIFE, and I will distribute the most profound pieces to those in need of inspiration. I will try to make sure that my LIFE is passed on properly before I go, and if it is not I hope that my loved ones will pass it on once I am gone. LIFE will become a way of life, I predict, and I will watch from wherever it is I end up as people read and enjoy Life. Maybe I will even get lucky enough to experience the reincarnation that people speak of, and I will get to experience LIFE for myself. People will read LIFE far after I am gone, like Hemingway, Thoreau or Dickinson. My children’s grandchildren will read it, and they will know “this LIFE came from great-grandmother” and they will be honored. And maybe they will write LIFE as well.

One day I will write something. It will be beautiful, poetic, and it will tell the story of me and the people around me. I will call it LIFE.

To the Women of Kenya

May you always be maridadi; beautiful.
May you always be the strongest women I have ever met.
May your voices rise above all of the others.
May you forever give birth without pain drugs and continue to be stronger than your white counter parts.
May the water jugs always balance on your head.
May your babies outlive you.
May your children be grateful.
May your husband love you; your in-laws welcome you; your community worship you.
May you never get HIV/AIDS and pass it on to your children unknowingly.
May you never again have to sell your body for food and shelter.
May you always look more beautiful working with your hands than sitting behind a desk.
May you always have a smile that brightens a room.
May you forever live in peace.
May your husband protect you, and may you know how to protect yourself.
May you always sell your fruits and vegetables.
May you always be kind and willing to share.
May you always be maridadi; beautiful.

- written July 29, 2009 in Nairobi, Kenya.

what you don't know about me.

what you don’t know about me is that i am strong and weak. heartbroken, yet with a heart that has never been touched. i love easily and fast, chase people from my space, want to live in my own bubble and embrace the world at the same time.

what you don’t know about me is that i am you and i am me, i am the boy i love and the girl he doesn’t understand. i embrace the spirit of all people, want others to know they are special and wanted and yet never feel special or wanted myself.

what you don’t know about me is that i am memories of broken cigarettes and hidden glass bottles, secrets attempted to be masked and yet brutally told too soon to the wrong people. there is nothing i want more than for you to know who i am, but i know that you will never really know me.

Late blooms.

She grew up on her own; stretched her wings and flew too fast, too soon. She barely remembers what being in a sandbox is like, or how it feels to fall and skin her knee and have someone other than herself calm the tears. She was her own mother and she failed; she let herself fall apart.

Women are a novelty to her now. She doesn’t know how to be a strong one and admires those that do. She’s too old to still be learning how to be herself, she thinks, though she knows others would tell her differently. It doesn’t matter what they say, to her she should be all grown up, and not being there makes her a failure.

Early twenties in body, pre-teen in mind and spirit, she clings to the “grown-ups” she knows, denying herself the opportunity to learn and grow from those who most likely know best what she is going through. It’s a beautiful thing when she finds someone who satisfies both parts of her, but the relationship always ends; stalls when she has clung too fast and too hard and scared them away.

She imagines that one day her two parts will merge together and she will become one whole person with one whole spirit, but she is also terrified of that day. Is this maybe who she is supposed to be; should she be less afraid of herself and more afraid that she will lose herself?

It’s a subconscious decision to embrace the pre-teen, but she makes it all the same, her adult self hoping that she turns out to be who she is supposed to be and who others will enjoy at the same time. She figures the growth will come when it is supposed to, even if she is a little late to the party.

World Series.

She is jealous. She wants what they have, the can’t-eat, can’t-sleep, reach-for-the-stars, over-the-fence, world-series kind of love. Or what she assumes they have, because he looks at her in such a way and she talks about him in such a way that there’s no other explanation for it.

She wants to know every detail of their relationship, so that when she sleeps she can dream that it is her and the boy she loves, though she knows that when she wakes nothing will have changed. She will still be too shy, he will still not see her that way; she will still be jealous.

She imagines herself wearing the white-gold rings, sharing the covers with someone; snuggling under a blanket with a puppy tucked at their feet. She imagines it but deep down knows she won’t ever be that girl. Any ring will probably remain on a chain around her neck for otherwise she will lose it, she can’t even share covers with a friend, and if anything the dog will be snuggled under the blanket with her before the man is. She likes to pretend though.

She imagines that one day someone’s hand will fit in hers, and that is really what she wants the most. She wants to feel their fingers threaded together, and she’s excited for the day he will eventually come, if only because then she will finally have a hand to hold that doesn’t let go when someone better comes along.

She will probably always be jealous of them. She will always see the look in his eyes and hear the words fall from her lips and know that their world-series love is more than she can ever hope for.

Sentences.

She tries to write beautifully on purpose; wants to impress her, challenge him, be an artist. She tries to make the words sound right, realizing only too late that focus on vocabulary turns the reader away from the content.

She sits down one day, closes her eyes and lets the pen sprawl across the page; sentences, phrases and ideas forming before she has time to edit them in her head. What emerges on the paper is a story of love she has never told, a past she has hidden and a future she is afraid of. She can’t piece anything together but she tries, playing with the sentences until they make sense. They aren’t beautiful after that.

The scratched on piece of paper emerges from her bag, crumpled and dirty, and she reads through it from beginning to end, seeing the story in it that she missed the first time. It tells the story of the men and women she has loved, the pain she has experienced and the unexpected things to come. She tapes it to her wall, watching the sentences come to life as she experiences each day. Each day is an experience; each experience a sentence.

The phrases spill off the paper and on to her walls, covering the concrete structure she hid behind with the reasons she can no longer be so afraid.

It dawns on her one day that the writing she was trying to make beautiful already was, she just needed to let Life do a little writing for her.

Crayola

She defines things in colors. His eyes are blue; green; today they’re grey. Her hair is red; orange; strawberry blonde. She finds that the way the light reflects off of things and changes their color to be the most fascinating event she has ever experienced. She observes things mostly, looking away when people catch her staring because she doesn’t want them to think she is different in any way.

She likes the way colors melt together; it is what she likes most about coloring books and crayons, for she can make things in to the colors she thinks they should be. It is also why she likes fall best; the grass is green and the leaves are yellow and orange and the sky is the prettiest grey she has ever seen.

Color defines her life nearly as much as sound does; if not more. When she listens to music the notes dance across her brain in different colors; blue for melody, purple for harmony, red for the drums. Laughter is bright orange; sarcasm a deep green. Colors are different every day, which is one of her favorite things about color. His eyes are a different shade of blue; her hair more red on a Monday than it is on a Friday. Can colors really change like that?

Resistance is futile, she reminds herself. Embrace the colors. Paint your nails bright orange; decorate in deep reds and greens during the holidays. Let the colors surround you, for one day they will fade. One day his eyes will be a bland grey; her hair nearly white. She will see in shades of grey instead of Crayola colors, and if she doesn’t take advantage of the colors now she will regret it for the rest of her life.