Transitions
All the things I want to write.
Over the last several months there have been so many things I have wanted to write about. It's been an ongoing season of transition. From work, to family, to relationships, to my life in Seattle so much has changed. So here I am again, writing from an air conditioned workspace in Colombia, with about 36 mosquito bites, hair salted by the Caribbean, and a blistering burn on my right leg from rubbing it against the tailpipe of a motorcycle.
I want to write about sitting in silence with my therapist because I cannot find the words for all the goodness that I have seen. I want to write about how hard it is to write love letters. I want to write the years and how I told myself I was pathetic and unloveable for so long that in moments parts of me still almost believe. I want to write about living 29 years only to find myself a romantic mushy gushy bitch, and how withholding love in hopes of evading vulnerability and maintaining power just doesn't hit the way it used to.
I want to write about trauma and its effect on my ability to imagine realities in which I am loved. I want to write about how it has felt in my body to take a break from the constriction that is a constant expectation of harm and disappointment. I want to write about how from the depths of a capitalist exhaustion I found the kind of love that sits in a garden of wildflowers remembering grandmothers and great aunts. The kind of love that curates healing vibes while talking about violence and laughing a little too loudly. I want to write about the playfulness of singing our littlest selves out from their hiding places and the romanticism of believing in pacts strong enough to cross lifetimes. I want to write about sunlight on blackberry brambles and the quality of wind as we walked toward the sound of a rushing river, and how delicious it is to be held in the trunk of a tree. I want to write about laughing on facetime and text updates from thousands of miles away. I want to write about how knowing you has changed me and made me less afraid, and how I cannot even begin to explain what it has meant to be so welcomed, and so seen, and so fed, and so much less alone.
Other days, I want to write the pace of a roller coaster. I want to write poems and stories where the reader is so invested they cannot breathe. I want to write the intake of breath, the unconscious shoulder clench, and the brace before an inevitable drop. I want to write the falling, the shattering, the helplessness of not quite surrender and then the moment after. When we find ourselves still here and very much alive.
I want to write about a tragedy that is and isn't yet. I want to write about all the “too much” and “too broken” and “too close” things that I have seen. I want to write about all the things that scare me as if I am not afraid.
I want to write about how deeply unoriginal it is to be a writer who has not been writing. Or who has. Who has been sitting at her computer again and again. Has been trying to write for months. I want to write about how nothing I have written has been quite right. How everything is terrible and yet here I am again.
I want to write about trying and failing to talk to my therapist for the 3rd consecutive week. I want to write about how I simply cannot find the words for all the places I have been and how the only way out is through but I would rather watch netflix. I would rather spend the entire morning in bed.
Some days, some days I want to write the petty things. I want to write about the still beloved but not anymore friend who looked into my eyes and told me I was malicious. I want to write about the strangeness of trying to reconcile with someone who would rather feign apathy, when I have shown up with intention and care. I want to write about loving someone who reduces your friendship to statements like “we’ve barely known each other a full year” and “I really haven’t thought about you this whole time.” I want to write the shape of my surprise, and how cold so many words landed in my body, and how I thought I was tough but I sat in my car and cried after. How when I said I felt complete with this and walked away I meant I am done. I want to write about the full raging meltdown I had the following week at the audacity of someone who would treat me so coldly and still manage to walk away thinking there could be anything left to preserve and how I texted the friends who know their my friends to tell them how you texted me again as if things could be casual. I want to write about how I have already been misunderstood, mischaracterized, and vilified enough to last a lifetime and my tolerance for it has run out. I want to write about how a friend who cannot even admit that they are in a friendship is not a friend and how uninterested I am in people who can only make sense of their hurt by vilifying and painting false narratives that lack self awareness when inevitable conflict arises. I want to write that I hope you lose sleep at night and how if I had meant to hurt you I would have stood ten toes down in my truth without apology.
I want to write about how I still think about the friend who assumed that I must be homeless by now because I stopped working full time in June. I want to write the number of times they asked where I was living and the way the wind felt when I realized what they meant. I want to write the reactions of the people I told, and all the snapshots/moments I haven't sent. Me in the caribbean snorkeling, me eating sushi at a gorgeous restaurant, me chasing waterfalls on a monday, me walking slowly through the Botero Museum, me on the back of a motorcycle, me facetiming friends and laughing on a rooftop… Me, very much alive and still not homeless or poor. Me, freer than I have been. I want to write about how knowing that someone's story is not actually about me isn't enough to negate the shock of the things people have dared to say aloud.
I want to write about riding through the hills of Bogota and how strange it is that I was born on turtle island in so-called America instead of literally anywhere else. I want to write as if it is possible for me to imagine who I would be in an entirely different context and what it might be like to know and be known by some other land.
I want to write about the strangeness of remembering how much I love the ocean. About treading water and remembering being in the community center pool laughing with my mother. Remembering water aerobics classes and all the older women in the pool locker room and my Uncle RJ and my cousin Jaime and how we used to pass the swim test so we could go careening off the diving board. I want to write about holding my breath to dive beneath the surface and tumbling in circles with a grin on my face, while thinking about how strange it is that I used to write poems and short stories about drowning.