wines by the glass

i am in love

and it is the greatest thing
even when it hurts. even when my heart is threatened to beat itself out for being in love.
because when you're in love, your heart beats in a different way. it's stronger, louder, more obvious. it takes up space in parts of your body that it has no business inhabiting: heads, hands, legs, lips...and it quiets down when it gets an answer. but when the receiving end is silent, the heart cannot help but yell louder, screaming for attention. but that need pushes the boundaries into something darker and more hurtful.
lust. i try not to, for i have something far stronger and better than that. the instant gratification i seek from a passionate and desiring touch pales in comparison to see someone's soul. quick and cheap cannot rival even the most futile or unfulfilled adorations. and true and unadulterated and unconditional love stands above all that.
lust and easy passion are a mere shadow of the real thing. they lull one into a false sense of attachment, a traitorous feeling of happiness as evanescent and fuzzy as figures dancing on the wall of the cave.
at times, your body is alone for a burst of time, but with love your soul has companionship eternally. the whole of love is beautiful and useful and wholesome. a stint of color in an otherwise dark world. love lifts, enriches, strengthens, and protects. the purest feeling of all is just to know what it feels like to love. it is a juxtaposition of a calming sense of peace, and ecstatically pure joy and excitement. it feeds the soul. you can drink it in and eat it up like a starving man at the end of a long, long fast. love warms from the inside, stimulates the senses from inward out to the tips of the fingers and ends of the toes and everywhere in between
unlike lust
loving is a giving and renewing resource. it is something that can be offered without any thought of return and not lose its strength. this i know. i've felt the bitter sadness that can come with unrequited love. i've experienced what it is to be powered every day by love for someone, but to be sure that your feelings aren't returned. it's ridiculously painful at times. but those times are powered by lust. by a feeling of selfish desire, of physical yearning. pure love doesn't take anything from you. lust does, and leaves behind only pitted emptiness in your stomach.
even when being in love causes the pain, you're still better for loving than to never have experienced it at all.
i believe in love.

down on the knees of my heart

"organized uncertainty, not chaos" says the talented marimba player simon boyar in reference to life

merely existing can be maddeningly crazy. the world rushes by and around and over and under us, and all we can do is just hold onto ourselves and try not to get swept away. caught up in so many tasks and to-do lists, it seems as though the clock cannot hold enough time in its mechanical pieces to functionally get through them all. and if we were able to schedule everything into our over-booked day planners, there are always plans that fall through and unexpected incidents that change our lives in the blink of an eye. often we have all these grand ideas and hopeful aspirations, and live our lives around them. we look to the future with a single mindset, with an unchangeable desire cemented in our crystal ball. but.
de repente, todo es diferente, y no hay nada hacer
it's always frightening, to find oneself in the middle of an open desert with nothing familiar in reaching distance. the wind picks up and the sand blows around as a dust storm chaos in all its glory.
and it seems so unfair. it's hurtful. it's confusing and chaotic and completely unnecessary. it wasn't time for him to die. we were supposed to be together. i thought that this was where i was meant to be. this isn't what should be happening.
but it is.
so we must learn to look at the mess-ups and the deviances and the tragedies as something grand and meaningful. to take their purposes or even their randomness and make something out of it. somewhere in the universe there is an order to things. there is a plan of attack that the cosmos are just waiting to put into play. and we rarely see it, except for in hindsight. (and at that point, the only thing to do is learn from it for next time, but that never helps in the moments of our suffering.)
so we take the trial and use it in the moment. we become tortured artists, tragically productive in our pain.

this is the first day of my life

i rose this morning to new snow and a strange quiet. the high bedroom window had been open all night and my blanket had fallen off and i awoke, cold and alone. my ears rang with the silence.
there is a specific quiet that accompanies new snow. it's a muffling of distracting noise, a deadening of invasive traffic, a dampening of worldly ambiance. scarcely an inch of the stuff calms the chaos of living. in the sequestered mountains, it's always easy to hear yourself think, but the snow adds another level of solitude. it insulates the world, capturing the din and tucking it away in its cold crevices. i like it when i take my dog out and he barks and barks, but the noises don't carry across the large expanse. sound waves are simply...absent.
maybe that is why, before i even opened my eyes, i could tell that somehow, the world was different. my head had an unfamiliar emptiness in it. after days and days of waking up from the same nightmare to the same dread, after fighting every hour to keep at bay the loneliness and the worry and the fear and the insecurity confusion apprehension weight sadness--today i felt only the striking sense of quiet. i had slept all the way through the night. my mind was clear. yes i was cold, but it was a clarifying type of chill. yes i was alone, but i was not lonely. it's different. you choose to be alone.
snow in may! these weather patterns were not predicted, but when you live in a place that doesn't exist, the universe don't have to follow any special order. i myself was surprised to wake up to the silence. i just didn't think it possible at this time of year, after everything that happened, for the cold and the silence to come. the snow infiltrated my mind to freeze up and kill off all the excess. nature, even in its backwards state, knew how to fix everything.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
it whispered, and left me to myself