I've almost forgotten how to see myself.  Sometimes I feel as if I've almost forgotten me; as if, on some level, I don't remember what I look like anymore.  I see my fingerprints on things I've touched in the past, leaving me in awe of the woman who owned those fingerprints -- I wonder if she's still within me now.  I feel younger than I felt when I was sixteen, in part because everything has never felt so new, or so lovely.  

I'm growing up.  Throughout the torturous process, it is becoming evermore painstakingly clear to me that I can't hold everything to my chest; I can't be everyone in the flesh.  These were the secret, unspoken desires of my adolescence, whose very verbalization would have shattered their essence like a red coal pressed to iced glass.  I am seeing that I have to make a choice - I have to choose in which direction my feet are going.  Even the refusal to decide is a decision.  

I am not a child.

With more and more urgency, I find myself trying to conserve my wanderlust.  I want to remain forever hungry.  I'm afraid of exchanging my freedom for contentment.  I think, however, the inescapable end of happiness is satisfaction, and maybe even peace, and this knowledge sometimes incites me to repel happiness.  I am trying to teach myself that peace does not mean death of stagnancy, and curiosity and wonder are also instruments of the peaceful.  Love is warm in my chest now.  It doesn't burn through me like acid or eat me alive when I wake up aching in the middle of the night.  It wraps its arms around me and sings to me quietly when I can't sleep.  It is sunshine on my face, a feeling of trust so deep that it occasionally terrifies me (I think to myself that if that trust were to be forsaken, I have no other spot in my body deep enough to love again).  Love is home, a feeling of summer outside on the lawn that lives inside of me even as I drift through another continent.

I remember before.  I remember when love was not full, when I was famished and gorged and lost and exhilarated on the precipice of some exquisite event - ecstasy or catastrophe.  When every touch was electric war in my body because it meant that - fortunately? unfortunately? - I did, in fact, exist.  I sometimes still think about that, I think about you and who you were to me, and I think about me and what you made of me.  I'm not angry anymore, and truthfully, I haven't been angry for a long time.  I did love you.  I've decided I did.  But what does it really matter, anyway?  I haven't loved you for even longer.  

I remember you told me once, one night in August, that it was better to try in anguish with someone we loved than be in peace with someone we didn't.  You were right.  And I had stopped loving you by then.

It came and faded so quickly.  Why does no one ever talk about how it can come and fade so quickly?  You didn't linger for me.  I never even wondered if I did for you.

I think that's because I stumbled upon what I have with me now.  But it could also be because I am stronger than I thought I was.  As I sit here on a small bed in a small room in a small house in a shatter-glass city in an undulating nation in a lost continent, I know I am, in fact, stronger than I thought I was.

The world really is as beautiful as I always feared it would be.  And I do recognize in every other person so different from me that thing which is always the same.  

No gift is as great as that of examining yourself from a palette of perspectives.  Maybe, one day, I finally will know me. 

I'm so angry.  It's just this irrational anger and it clots my lungs and makes it hard to breathe and I'm well aware that there's really no reason for it and it's basically loneliness, or what amounts to loneliness, a whisper-shove of frustration that goes straight to my abdomen, an exhaustion and a burn and a loss loss loss loss.  I don't know why I'm so angry, it's bitter like betrayal and cheating and it isn't either, it's the forgotten feeling on the road and the question of really where is this all going and where did it ever come from and where is it in this second, and how can this and why can this and why did this.  It's finding the lock changed to your room or your clothes torn out of your closet or a dark window where there was a light or a stripping cold wind in June, a shiver down the back and a not-enough-too-much golpe on an operating table.  

I'm so angry that they are no words, I'm so angry that there is the immediate demand of words, I'm so angry I feel it in my body, not a hard thing but hot and alive and growing and undulating.  It's terrifying and it's invigorating and it drinks action and I have to calm myself, steady myself, while I feel the seams of my soul threatening to desist.  I'm so angry that -

Control, adapt, love.

Self-control, it is becoming more and more glaringly obviously to me, is one of the highest virtues.  Coincidently (or perhaps not so much so), it also happens to be the virtue I find I desperately lack . . . But fortunately, one of the only virtues that can be built.

I dream tormented fever dreams in the summer, all the time.

Adaptation: a generally-accepted survival skill since the inky dawn of prehistoric time.  But how do we define that adaptation?  Is it the altering of one's self to one's environment, or the altering of one's environment to one's self?  I suppose the first-gut call would be for the former, but I disagree.  I think one of those oh-so-tenuous characteristics that classify us as human is our ability to alter our environment to our needs and wants.  And yet, and yet . . . Somehow it has to be a sort of balancing act, I suppose . . . We never emerge from any encounter with reality completely whole.  We change as well.  That loss of purity of purpose may be one of the saddest things about growing up . . . We find ourselves snipped and moulded and shaped by winds beyond our control.  It's strange in a way how the more supposed autonomy you have, the less autonomous you feel.

Love.  Let's talk about it.  I don't understand why some people treat it as this flowery-indefinite-perfumed cloud that drifts somewhat inactively through life, messing with more ambitious goals: ineffective, without agency, something to never quite be taken seriously, inferior to the general need of companionship.  Well, maybe I do - Nicholas Sparks, anyone?  But Nicholas Sparks is hardly an appropriate diplomat for a force that, along with greed and ambition and hope, has always driven the world.  Love is concrete.  Love, to borrow a phrase, is a movement - a revolution.  It derails, it wrecks, and it demands more of you than perhaps any other situation you will ever face.  It changes you . . . Real love changes you.  What you wanted before is almost unrecognizable.  And this makes love completely, utterly, devastatingly dangerous.  You accept a new self because your transition self can't possibly imagine moving forward without the object of your love.  The deepest, truest strain of love that literally wipes you breathless will spur you to great, almost infinite heights - but nonetheless different heights.  Two people entering a love relationship must be completely aware of this power, and they almost never are at first.  They fall rather unknowingly into it, step by step, moment by moment, fight by fight, smile by smile, until at last they have received a kind of cancer that eats away at their previous notions of the world, of their own life.  No matter how sincerely and purely one may plead and beg with the person they love not to change, the very definition of love demands a sacrifice of change on its altar from both parties . . . Man and woman come together to form one flesh, not just sexually, as the verse is often taught, but in every conceivable way.  You support your partner's goals and he yours, with as much ambition and drive and effort as you chase your own.  This is - there is no way around it - almost murderously exhausting.  Apoyame.  Support me.  Hold me up.  You become a reserve of strength and you receive another to draw from.  Feeding and taking, feeding and taking . . . The fires to have your love succeed, and to be successful yourself, are indistinguishable from each other.  And the peace, the knowledge that almost makes you want to weep with relief, that someone honestly, truly wills you to be happy, to fulfill yourself, to have a dream and complete it, is freedom.

I believe in something like fateful encounters.  I believe in the guiding hand of Destiny . . . and our own choice-full reaction towards those things laid in our path.  I believe that you can infuse purpose into everything you do.  

I am breathless with anticipation.

It's strange how, through the right lens, almost every human activity seems to be the result of touch starvation.  Stranded on our islands built from the ruins of everyday things, everyday things destroyed by fear of both failure and success, we light signal fires and pray for the pause of a passing light.

O my people, O my people,
What have I done unto thee?

F 

"My body is a cage."

I can't sit still, I can't move.  I'm paralyzed and catalyzed.  And numb.  Very numb.  I feel like nothing stays, nothing stays.

So much selfishness.  It hurts to see it.