Trust Is An Experiment
Trust Is An Experiment
July 8 - 14 / Nightmares & Morning Pages
7/8: I am home tonight w/ stars in a spiral about my head dreaming or just dizzy from the heat. Fireflies in the garden, lace and leather till I die. I am on my back in someone’s dream but I am whole in reality, the sweat and bug bites of me, weekend skin living large in July. July, bigger than you, bigger than I. I smile from the inside out. I love w/ the teeth of me. Watermelon and cucumber and feta in the fridge. Lover’s hands under sticky layers.
I drove home singing to the blushing sun, orange oration. She requested songs for old lovers and I sang easy and unattached. Happy that the living past faces all new directions. Happy that the present is what it is, the Now born from before, the Always in the air, singing, my baby shot me dooowwwwn.
I ask the fireflies what they see when their lights go out. I ask them where they look when the summer lets them down, when a season doesn’t feel long enough for a life, when they can’t get to the mud, when a hand comes down swatting, singing, Bang bang! They fly close but I feel protective this week. I am what the heat has made me, redefining relief, worshiping the waves, clinging close to love despite the added warmth.
I tell my love, I have to do some writing first. T laughs, echoes Chris Farley, I hear you’re not using your paper much for writing, but for rollin’ doobies. He laughs again, says honestly, No, I’m glad you’re writing.
If I don’t make time for it, it doesn’t happen, I say. He smiles and says, exactly.
Two planes cross overhead - an X in the cerulean sky - and in the center, the center, a star, a bear, bright in the playful night. Two paths diverge into one. They cheek kiss and slip away, keepin’ on in their own directions. I see prey in the point of connection, love in motion, on and on how life goes. See, the angels weep in sparks of fire. Day lilies don’t last on the kitchen counter. Orange skies bruise easy into blue raspberry, my room the red cherry in the sky, glowing. Someone I love is waiting for me, windows open, fan on. I smile from the inside out. I love w/ the teeth of me. This is the work of living wide open.
I meet w/ the mud. I meet w/ the bugs. I sweat as long as I can before the rains return. Goodnight, Monday, baby born blue.
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7/9: Last night, I was swatting mosquitoes, talking to fireflies, calling myself Earth. But Earth doesn’t swat. Earth doesn’t come down hard on us when we land, or maybe she does. Maybe she floods and cracks and bakes us. Maybe she retaliates. Maybe we do it to each other. Maybe consequence. Maybe magic. In our water and waste, maybe we’ve always been an itch, an irritant, breathing up all the air and polluting it, turning it black. OK OK OK. Well, we’re here now. I still believe in a future I struggle to see. Flip through forgiveness. Try on endurance. Once again wade into the wet. We are weeds and I’m smoking thoughtless in my city. Growing together, the world and everyone on it, learning to love in and out and in and out.
OK July, kiss me sweet like you do, make this life worth sweating for. Fog rolls off the sea into the city and burns off in the afternoon. I feel a little wild here, waiting for the rain, our mornings over high heat. I listen to both versions of Cinnamon Girl on my way into work but only one stays stuck on its track. Horses on my shirt ready to run and I am anxious, close to the edge. I am a small stone looking out below, listening for the echoes over the canyon. Bug bites are finally itchy from the weekend. Humidity swells and we are tender things again.
I asked a woman how she was the today and she said, Oh, I’m just putting my bag here. The tip jars between good and evil are out of balance, the donations all pocketed. I’m in a city that smells consistently like the sea. Wanna come play w/ me? Labyrinthian riddles, the rocky canyon below, the world pearlescent and made of hope. We build temples of language not meant to last forever. Here, it’s summer every day. Read closely. Wade weightless. Maybe you’ll find out what I’m saying before I do. My words are cobalt for you.
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7/10: River is insatiable in this heat, rolling all over, asking fearlessly for love. We oblige easy. In the dark before bed, I did some writing. I came in from the tender night and sat w/ my gray boy on the gray couch. Gray tee shirt shed in the dog days of summer. Tufts of fur on the couch, in the car, floating like wishes and weeds, everywhere everywhere. Together, we learn to let go, to accept love, to accept help. He’s on his back now purring, leaning his full body into my touch.
This morning it was back in the crate, back in the car, back to the vet to get the rest of his teeth extracted, just when he thought he was in the clear. I’m telling him stories of comfort, of once and for all, w/ my fingers through the cage of his crate where he protests and protests. We were both impatient this morning, rushing along. In impatience, I am not as gentle as I should be but I was awake, being careful. I was driving, saying, Trust me, wouldya? I asked for his canine tooth and left him meowing in the waiting room. He’s a good boy. I’m waiting by the phone all day at work today. Love gives me so much to lose.
Heat, relentless heat, exhausted power grid, abundant world all heavy in the summer. Immense life, how do we hold it all? I glow orange like day lilies. I cut them again from the yard. I come here all salted, sweat and sadness, tang of truth. My lover sprinkles salt on his watermelon, likes his fruit dipped in the sea. Look at him, cleaning up after me, being sweet. It is summer here at home but it is spring in my body, green and wet and not very hungry today or just not listening. At work, the power was out, all the ACs & all the AI, almost unbearable. It’s been a day of rising up, of looking at the sun and reaching further, of having courage or just being impatient. Whatever brings us closer to the light.
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7/11: I’m thinking I want the TUTTO PASSA tattoo on the back of my neck where I can’t see it, where it lives on me and leaves you a little lonely. River is home and drooling, a waterfall from my cat’s mouth. Naked but the cone around his head in our brat summer. River and his cone, me and my silver. Half-free things.
It’s the peak of summer where I kill w/out thought, ants and flies and mosquitos. We listen to hyperpop on the couch in July. We wish we could always be young things, flinging ourselves at life. To feel, as T has always said, Invincible. To be perky and unhurt at the party, to dance on tables and leap off cliffs into the cool water below. Jesus Christ gets younger every year. Candles melt down. Bodies compensate. Money comes and goes, inflamed in the routinely violent summer. I am happy to be alive still, melting down to the wick of me, tan skin and silver and guess the colour of my
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7/12: There is one strand of silver in my hair. I’ve been watching it grow for a while. It glistens in the sun. I earn my stripes. This body, a fever fever. Tufts of silver around the house. My boy sheds vigorously. He melts in my hands, weak for more, healing and overheating. He finds comfort in discomfort - the crumb of life, the seed of love. My body is excited to be alive, more and more every year. Hope, a perennial. My city, fevered too. I already told you. Mystery bred in familiar streets. My friends and I and our city, we have company, hungry like company always is. You know, hunger is natural until it’s not. We’re half rabid, thinking from lack.
Fear, the opposite of love. Fear dehydrates. Half the world is on fire. 74 active wildfires in the US today, more and more corners of violence, a world at war w/ itself just calling it something different. It’s 11:13, I’m writing my morning away, making wishes for all of us who are left.
Tonight, I will walk down my city’s streets in green cowboy boots and I will digest fear as the night flowers wait for rain. I’ll turn fear into a kind of power we’re not supposed to have anymore, the wet thing we are all born out of, the dripping, savage thing, the baptizing thing, dew on a new radical dawn of loss. Loss and change, change and chaos, chaos and flow. I throw my trust up into the air, the pearl of me catching light, and I become so breakable that I can never be truly destroyed.
I am friend everlasting. The mud of me holds the mud of you, digested and changing shapes. The way I love w/ roots into forever. So much forever that I slip and disappear. Messages unanswered, flags in the wind, no response from the other side of the door until I go looking for you. I crawl into your cave w/ something to confess and something to smoke and time becomes infinite again. I wish I could spend my life living next to my friends, I still want that.
When my cats lose more than teeth and I sprout more silver strands, in the Future when I am even more excited to be alive, I want to be around people I can lay my love down next to w/out fear, w/out regret, w/out mutating misunderstandings. If there is a kitchen in my future, I want to be dancing in it. I want my lover to cook in it and my friends around a table that never ends. For me and my family, it was always the kitchen, the center of it all - chaos and care, tradition and occasion and every day every day. My home is a mess right now, dirt and cotton all over from moving in and moving out. When T stops working nights and I can think straight, we will clean off the table outside and invite our friends over to share a meal again. This summer has been lacking in communion.
There's a part of me that's always rolling in a fit of laughter, it echoes through the museum of my body. Primal possibility follows me down the hallway and I'm shaking off nerves, I get nervous, nervous, but not around this corner. Hug the walls and they will move me, or something will. I am learning to let the nerves travel through me, a rolling boil and something to get excited about. I used to hold it all out here, a bloody rag, my shame at arms reach, but it turned electric, zapped back in.
Lately I've been walking around with it. I leave the blood to drip. Let the buzzing sound like Future. It takes all my energy to keep my eyes open, all my focus to keep this energy. I look forward to the pot overflowing.
I am looking for a candle that smells like the tomatoes once overgrown in my garden and a door that is easier to open than it is to close. I'm looking for velvet, or just something I can keep touching. I am looking for what is looking for me. My belief in the spiral is all I've got. Teaching myself to believe that I can have it all, have it all, a big gulp of this beautiful, mysterious life!
🕯️ A drink to drink, a dance to dance, change that carries us where we're happiest. Our own authenticity acts as planet, as magnet, as dragnet daydream. I dream of an electric field that pulls my friends all back to me, drag them through cities into mine, nail their dinner tables onto mine and keep adding chairs. There's a celebration, always something to celebrate. We make celebration a project or an altar or an experiment and the velvet touches itself.
I am told TRUST IS AN EXPERIMENT and two faces move closer together. Something is beginning in the middle, a song or a set up. Either way, there are sparks. First we tell each other how we feel, then we tell each other what we want. We take our time to give. We get weird with it. It's something we practice over and over but we don't always get it right. There are hands to help us along. More and more faces moving closer together. 🕯️
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7/13: Saturday w/ the sun on all sides, the capable mess of me drives in a bikini down to the mountains for the day, 2 hours and 22 minutes from home. Just going, hands on the wheel and singing. My lover and our friends are waiting now by the lake. And last night, last night, I went to the Coyote Ugly party, found my friends on Congress St. I’m spending the last summer of my twenties stretched out in my city, dancing on the bar w/ fear here somewhere. A shadow over my head but nothing in the sky, dying stars invisible in the daylight.
When I feel like kissing crazy on the mouth, I say to my friends, I say, Hey, would you want to talk a walk w/ me? Drooling and humid, whatever. We’re spit out into our city on a forced Friday night when we can’t forget about the rumbling. I thought there would be more dancing at this thing but when I really need it, it’s mostly standing in the way or slouching by the window. Cowboy boots and denim and fireflies, something deeper than exhaustion in our eyes. Joan and I hit the street automatic, taking arbitrary turns around gas stations and the grand brick houses on the shoulder of our city. What once overlooked water now overlooks highways, traffic lights, shipping containers. It’s nice to look at all the same, quiet in the park, quiet in this part of town.
Dry mouth in a wet world, twisted, taking our breath away. We talk of paper things and funny feelings, ones that will just keep growing and growing.
Mass and Time. Mass of earth. Mass of sun. Mass of moon. Mass of sea. Mass of mud. Mass of you. Mass of me. Sinking. Swallowing. Loving. Allowing. Nonsense, the world and what it makes of us. Nonsense. The beauty. The utter freedom. The essence of life. What is carved should be celebrated. I speak of mercy before the nails meet flesh and bone. I listen to the drip drip, the rustle, the animals of this American night. A bunny on our path last night. Dead deer on the side of the road. A raven silhouetted on a branch against a blue blue sky. Today. The lake w/ mountains on all sides. Swimming in God’s spit puddle in the sun.
It’s been a while since I drove on my own this long. When I’m too comfortable, I don’t want to leave home. My home expanded into the city and I started to feel like I couldn’t leave Portland. Smog, my ceiling light. My friends, the stars in the sky. Expanding on and on, a world with the headlights on. Drive on, drive on, driving the Soul disconnected into the mountains, spiraling through tufts of green and clean highways. T and I held hands diving in and we dried off too quickly. Clouds moving in and clouds moving out, blue skies waiting until our summer day was satisfied.
On the drive home, the orange sun was at my back and I remembered youth as it faded on long winding drives in the green. I thought of Hometown, NH where I experienced the world cradled by pine trees over a glittering lake, boundless spirit and competing dreams. The desire to be loved won out for a long while. I learned love wasn’t so easy for others. I thought maybe I was doing it wrong, dreaming of forever. I stopped fighting the mud and simply started loving harder. Today by the lake, my lover and I waded into the silt together, freer together, our hair drying natural in the sun.
I sit in our driveway now, shadows against the blue and daylilies in headlights. I’m thinking about the moon in the sky and the stones on my chest, left by lovers, left by leavers. Stones smooth & polished over time, licked wet by love. We were in the lake and then we were in the river, where mountain water trickled over rocks, all smaller at the bottom. I step on the big ones until I slide. Try to step on the lower points, T says, then you won’t slip very far. We are upright and ankle deep. The rocks are all sweet to each other, rolling along, changing and being changed, shining in the sun. May we take up space and be changed. May we land heavy on each others’ hearts w/out crushing. May we be unafraid to mean the world to each other.
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7/14: The Future says, Be careful how you speak on me. Quiet now. Hollow heatwave. The sounds of crows above, cars beyond, communion below. I pour water over my head and down my body. It tickles as it drips, as it dries, and today it dries quickly. Alive, alive! Smudges and stains on the last page of this book. Something new is born in the sweat that pools from me.
Naked and centered below the sun, will I know mercy? If I call out for adventure, what will hear me? All this hair, all this hope, all this overgrowth, is it good for me? I’m dreaming of life w/out all the words around it (What it is! What it is!) and the miracle of ever after, worms in the dirt. I say Thank you now to a life that never ends.
This entry is a part of my Nightmares & Morning Pages series, where I write every day and share the good stuff. Subscribe to keep up with me & share what you like (please).
My messages & chat are open for inspired journal prompts or anyone who wants to pick apart the world with me. Catch you on the next go around 𖦹
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