"For Women Who Are Difficult to Love" 

 written and performed by Warsan Shire

(read interview with her "To be Vulnerable and Fearless" here and see the video of her performance here)

You are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?

closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

Also, this morning:

hearing about lovely surprises, like learning that you live across the symphony in the new city you're living in.
 the creation (acceptance?) of new beginnings (if only i had opened my eyes sooner!)
the gutting of a camera,
 belgian fries and chimicurri aioli for dinner,
 and, finally.... 

Last night I was ridiculously sick. I crawled out of bed and made myself tea and lay in bed for hours staring into space. Suddenly, I noticed the tiny text on the end of my tea bag.

"Be happy as long breath is within you." 

I closed my eyes.

I.
how you always liked your food spicier than mine. how you always remembered to ask for water with no ice for me. how you would carry my bags no matter how often i refused. how you were more stubborn than i was. how you scraped both knees trying to prove how high you could jump. how you stayed awake at night to hold me and tell me stories because i couldn't sleep. how you knew exactly when to look over at me to catch me crying while watching a movie.  how the first thing you would do when you woke up was cover me up with the blankets and then go to the kitchen to make me blueberry pancakes. how you would burn yourself flipping eggs shirtless. how you would let me photograph you when the light was good in the mornings. how you would microwave towels for me to put on my belly when my stomach was hurting. how you left the tops off of all the bottles you drank out of. how you listened to NPR and quoted idioms from different countries. how you would laugh at me when i got things wrong but never ever made me feel stupid. how i would laugh at your mispronunciations. how you would laugh at mine.

II.
"Hopefully, I’ll have lived in so many parts of the world that I feel at home anywhere instead of nowhere. Hopefully, someone will fall in love with me and I’ll fall in love with that someone and we can create a world between us that I’ll believe in more than anything."

III.

I climb up on the cabin roof sometimes to let the stars into my eyes. But once I am up there they seem farther away than when I am on the ground. There is a constellation that reminds me of your hipbone. I think I am trying to get closer to that bundle of light.

When they say its okay to leave here, I swear I’m coming straight to see you. I should have come to see you when it was easy.

-Letter 50 from Letters to Emma Bowlcut

IV.
Excerpted from Shinji Moon's "This is what my mother has taught me":

This is how you take oil paints off of your hands with turpentine. This
is how you baste a turkey, how you dance at a club to make all the men fall in love
with you. This is where you put your hands, Shinji — you who are so
unsure of what limbs were made for.
The things you’ve inherited from me are all the characteristics of an ox.
Drive forward.
There is nothing to be afraid of.
A pair of shoulders is only made for one life. There will be a point where you will have
to take that into consideration. You live to save other people’s lives, but you are capable of
saving only yourself.

V.

I am not sure of anything
I am uncertain of nothing.

"And then one student said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can’t even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead of under them, although try to sleep is probably more accurate. And then at some point late, late, late at night, say just a bit before dawn, the heat finally breaks and the night turns into cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you’re almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it’s that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what’s warm - whether it’s something or someone - toward us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being sad in the world and ready for sleep, that’s happiness."

Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition

Kay Ryan (2013)

You are a
land I can't
stand leaving
and can't not.
My party ship
is pulling out.
We all have
hats. I try to
toot some notes
you'll understand
but this was not
our instrument
or plan.

i have all sorts of expletives that i want to say right now. though i might offend you... all i could think of when i read this was "jesus fucking christ"


Alberto Ruy-Sánchez's III. Concerning Time in Mogador

III. Concerning Time in Mogador

Nineteen

They say that according to the calculations of the most ancient African astronomers, the sun slows down when it passes over Mogador, lingering there more than any other place on the planet. That is why time is measured here at a leisurely pace and things in the world are perceived differently, with a certain throbbing intensity.

Twenty

Because time in Mogador passes differently under the sun than in the shade, and with even greater distinction from day to night, very infantile elders and extremely wise babies may cross our paths, as well as meticulous lovers who in the blink of an eye can cover an entire body with deep caresses and kisses that last a lifetime.

Twenty-one

Even the sand in the hourglass falls differently here, at times very quickly and at others more restrained. Each hourglass is believed to carry an internal wind that controls the shifting of its small dunes. And they say lovers with a penetratingly slow touch acquire and develop an inner wind that commands all their movements, setting, in particular, the cadence of their urgent caresses. 

Twenty-two

In Mogador, the heart is considered the most precise clock, or at least the most respected, not just for its consistency but for its ability to distinguish the profound nuances of each instant. It is a clock that falls in love, becomes frightened and aroused. Those skipped heartbeats become milestones of life shared by more than two and at times by all. The history of this city is measured by inflamed hearts. The rhythm of blood in the veins, what one poet called “the music of the body,” is a kind of national hymn for the Mogadorians. And making love with a very erratic heart is how it is best interpreted and sung, to such an extent that at official ceremonies foreigners are amazed to hear the most patriotic Mogadorians nearly moan their hymn with an enthusiasm more amorous than warlike.

Twenty-three

Another clock that is very respected in Mogador is the sea with her moving insistence. The waves rise and fall against the walls, sowing in the city a stubborn sensation of the constant rhythm that touches everything. Here, the moisture on the skin, on clothing, in corners, books, and even the air are a clear measure of time. In Mogador time is liquid. They say it calms thirst and eases the penetrations of lovers. And so the gesture of anointing a lover is often accompanied by a fluid smile and the saying, “To love, give time.”  

Twenty-four

The waves and tides are pendulums of that expansive clock of the sea. In Mogador, lovers sense that their city expands within that immense saline clock, and desire incites them to caress bellies and backs like an undulating swell. And they enter each other like tides obeying the moon, embracing with enthusiasm the magnetic allure of the stars. To love, here, is to measure time.

“Let me touch your time with my hands,” is a common but rather desperate saying, used to request a much longed for intimacy. But if someone here brashly tells a lover, “give me time,” it is considered an obvious act of pornography. For some it is insulting, while others find it very exciting. Time in Mogador leaves no one immune.

Twenty-five

Singing and dancing is yet another way to measure time in Mogador. The heart is a bass drum or, if you prefer, castanets hidden deep beneath the skin. It is a kind of ritual guitar: the gambri, with strings like arteries. Time dances in the veins of lovers and expands its volume when the uncontainable blood swells the sexual organs. And it beats and beats reinventing the rhythm of the clave (one, two, three, one-two). They dance to measure scattered time, to discover it in the body of others as in a broken mirror. And, if everything falls into place with a certain grace and finesse, the moment arrives when the time of one person is within the time of the other. And they say that a clock is within another clock when lovers are united and chime in unison to the beat of their hearts, as if dancing. But it is not advisable to coincide with absolute precision, absorbing the same fragment of time, for that is when time stops, like a heart stricken by a severe case of arrhythmia.

Twenty-six

Every day in the squares of Mogador, the story is told of a pair of clandestine lovers who began making love in an excessively rushed manner, beneath an old staircase in the marketplace, under the shadow of an ephemeral wall of flour sacks. And when, with haste and reluctance to part, the couple finished their “quickie,” more than twenty-seven years had past. Their respective spouses had remarried and their children had moved away. Unbeknownst to the lovers and without them ever being exposed, the flour that shielded them had become loaves of bread. “The inevitable happened,” says the storyteller of the Square of the Snail, “and it is not the first time this has happened in Mogador: the excessive impatience of those who desire burns the surface of time, which as everyone knows is as smooth as silk, and lovers fall into one of the abysses of the calendar. The same kind of abyss of time that always leads us to believe, whenever we are making love, that only our love is eternal.”

Twenty-seven

They say, with rhythmic insistence, that time in Mogador is another entrance to the body: an open and deep sex, a long good night, an appealing mystery. An apparition.

“Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy.”

The opening lines of John Banville's The Infinities, from the point of view of the immortals. Amazon calls it a wise look at the "terrible, wonderful plight of being human"

he sends me photographs of the blue skies outside his window.
i send him photographs of the blue skies outside mine.

though we are so far apart, it makes me feel closer to him knowing we are still sitting under the same sky.

(just so you know, after that post i promptly got up and went to eat a banana)

i.
the children of flight attendants, who leave at their whimsies

ii.
the way my mother puts cubes of watermelon in those plastic buckets that chinese restaurants give you when you order soup for take out

iii.
waking up once at 1am, another time at 3:32am, and finally again at 6:59am. each time waking up in a panic, thinking of you.

iv.
hoping someone else is as excited as i am to live on a sailboat for a few nights. no rhyme or reason, no hope even that it will cure me. just being on the water is enough.

v.
how much i love bananas. my mother calls them the lazy girl's fruit. and damn is she right. i love just peeling it open and the mushy sweetness and the perfect number of spots, and the way the black grows on the yellow peel and it's an achievement to taste it juuuust right.

vi.
reading writing that reminds me of the way i used to write, and being consumed by nostalgia for the girl who ate peanut butter off of one chopstick, who believed in soul mates, who fell asleep to the smell of tiger balm, who always painted her toenails silver.

vii.
feeling your absence like an x-ray. this is exposure, this is vulnerability, this is absolutely medical.

viii.
it's my birthday month. this month, my birthday lands on a Friday. that should be more special than zodiacs or astrology significance, combined.
 i ate my first caramel apple this year.
i had stopped answering your calls. i remember, vividly, the sheets around me that were as rumpled and as distraught as my tear-soaked cheeks. i remember floundering helplessly, on a Monday evening while the sun was almost setting, parked in an empty lot, hands shaking while they dialed your number. a few minutes later, you found me, and you stood in your perfectly pressed white dress shirt and your meticulously knotted tie.
the wind found its way toward this empty lot, and it was chasing itself against my back as i pressed my face into you. i remember that all i could think about was that i would get your work clothes all snotty. i was desperate to cry into you and terrified to do it at the same time. come to think of it, i think most of my time with you, i felt similar conflicts in my heart.
we listened to country music and rode the ferris wheel. you took my hand and won a purple dinosaur the size of my face. we ate various carnival renditions of meat. as we were leaving, i gazed at you and your smile, and then, i bit into my very first caramel apple. you saved yours for later.
that was us.

"A pier is a disappointed bridge: yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel." - Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Go down any road far enough
and you'll come to a slaughterhouse,
but keep going and you'll reach the sea.” - Dean Young, First Course in Turbulence

thank you, CS

i am of the sort that had to learn to be alone. it doesn't come easily to me. new york city taught me to walk through parks by myself, eat sandwiches under trees by myself, watch dance theatre by myself, cry in my room by myself, slurp warm japanese soup by myself. out of habit (or something), i still pack my days and weekends with dates and outings with people, but tanya davis reminds me how beautiful it can be to be yourself.


(i'm adding, in retrospect, a quote that Angie pointed out from this video:)

"Dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things, down your back, like a book of blessings."

(atwood)

echo. echo. echo.

Vincent Segal & Ballaké Sissoko | Part 1 (Houdesti) | A Take Away Show.

geez. inundated.
why travel?


“Ms. O’Brien describes her young self this way: “I was ravenous. For food. For life. For the stories that I would write, except that everything was effervescent and inchoate in my overexcitable brain.” She desired, she says, to be “drawn into the wild heart of things.”
— Edna O’Brien,Seeking the Ardent Life. O, joy! To the wild, wild heart of things!

And, from Pico Iyer:

“I travel because I feel that the world is much larger than my ideas of it. Every stereotype dissolves as soon as I set foot in Syria or Cuba or Vietnam (though not North Korea) and, sitting at home, I’m usually in a perfect state of ignorance and complacency. Living in rural Japan for more than a quarter of a century now has taught me that questions are much richer and deeper than most answers, and that the more I live with someone or something, the less I know of them. So maybe I travel and write to get past the dangerous illusion of knowingness. I’m ever more keen to acknowledge the mystery in everything, even my prosaic old self.”


“As Thoreau famously said, it doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.”


“So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.”

“Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.”

“...home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.”

I sign up for a lot of stupid shit on the internet, just to try it out.

Today, I found the answers to this Quora question so enticing that I (albeit reluctantly) used my Google account to sign up.

I think so far, it's been worth it. I haven't gotten through it all, but here are bits and pieces from different lists. I don't necessarily agree 100% with what was written but I find them fascinating to think about.

"What are the top 10 things that we should be informed about in life?"


4. Be aware of your actions, and form good habits. It becomes very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you're doing the right thing, or that you actually have good habits etc. Most people will not realize how their habits are very self destructive, as Warren Buffet said "The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken".

8. If you cannot picture your life partner making you laugh 50 years from now, bail out. Humor rekindles love and warmth. Humor brings you back to earth and humbles you. Humor depends on insights and timing, something hugely important in truly intimate relationships. Not just wit, but humor that depends on understanding you, your tastes, your psyche. Life can become very tough and your body will surely degenerate. Humor looks past all of that and heals with resilience.

(rose interjecting here- as a side note about the power of humor,  this article talks about how Turks have been using humor in the face of government repression)


5. In order to see yourself, do different things often and do many things differently. Sports, music, ballet, kung fu, MMA, dance, coding, drawing, massage, poetry, reading, listening, crying, movies. Do them with passion and discipline in addition to whatever your day job is. Live in the physical world, the creative world, the gastronomical world, the logical world. The more worlds you can traverse, the clearer your vision of self becomes. Spend a day in a classroom of preschoolers or juvenile delinquents, and listen. Volunteer in a retired group home and help residents work their smartphones. Many of my innovations arise from these experiences.


This is from Sri Madbhagvatam, written almost 5000 years back. I am surprised as how true these words are even in this age:

Whatever happened, happened for good.
Whatever is happening, is happening for good.
Whatever will happen, that will be for good as well.
What have you lost? why are you crying?
What did you bring with you, which you have lost?
What did you produce, which was destroyed?
Whatever was received, was received from here.
Whatever was given, was given here
You brought nothing when you were born
You are taking nothing with you when you die
Whatever is yours today was somebody else’s yesterday and will be somebody else’s tomorrow.
Change is the law of the universe.

Stop worrying.


7) There are few ways of communicating better than holding hands. You can learn everything you need to know about what someone is thinking simply by holding their hand. If you want to know if your relationship is in good shape or trouble, just hold hands with your partner for 5 minutes. You will know beyond a doubt. 



9) Few things are as liberating or as powerful as forgiveness. There are lots of expressions about this, such as forgiveness is great revenge -- forget them. When you forgive someone, you are forgiving yourself. You will not believe how forgiving someone will make you feel like a huge weight is lifted off you. It doesn't matter what they did, or how guilty they are. I didn't say it was easy either. But holding a grudge, feeling resentment, hating someone is worse then letting them live rent free in your head, it actually holds you back and hold you down. When you are wrong, admit it and ask for forgiveness, If you don't get it from others, forgive yourself and focus on improving next time. 

10) There are no poetic justices, happy endings or absolute love. The bad guys win at least as often as the good guys, possibly more often. It's easy to crush goodness. Goodness is weak and depends on mutual weakness to thrive. Badness only requires that one person be capable of taking advantage. Trust everyone -- but always cut the cards. If you want a happy ending, remember that is just the beginning of the next chapter and that we all die someday. You may love someone today, they may be the ONE for you -- but they are not the only one. And if they die or leave or anything else, it's possible (but not certain or even probable) that you will find love again.


9. Don’t spend your life working. Enjoy this beautiful gift that is life. Spend time with your family and loved ones. Don’t let your life and your legacy be about work. I understand everyone has to ‘work to live’ but don’t ‘live to work’. Don't let a 9 to 5 work week turn into a 9 to 9, six or seven day work week. Always make sure your keep a positive work/life balance. “Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” - Dolly Parton



“The trouble is, you think you have time.” – Buddha



9. Wonder & Awe will keep you young.  I annoy people with this, but everything is fascinating to me.  It goes back to #7.  If you develop a sense of awe and wonder in this experience of life, you will never have time for sadness or negativiy.  Everything is part of greater process, many of which are highly interrelated.  Inquire, ponder, look at things from different angles - if the complexity doesn't amaze, the brilliance of random chance should mystify you.  There's enough wonder and awe in this universe to negate the need in fanciful jest or bizarre belief systems.  Real systems demonstrate magic all around us, and you are missing out on the adventure of living if you don't mine these profound realizations.  Have fun learning.  Everything is interesting.  As simple as this, a viral quote I saw the other day: "The only cure for boredom is curiosity.  There is no cure for curiosity".

Imagine your leg falls asleep, and you never walk again to avoid that one moment of discomfort waking it. That’s most people psychologically.
- ronenv

He offered her the world. She said she had her own.
- Monique Duval

“

When you’re tired, sleep, when you’re hungry, eat, when you’re depressed, work, when you’re horny, fuck, when you’re sad, cry, and when you’re happy, smile. When you’re bored, imagine, when you’re restless, exercise. When you’re afraid, breath, when you’re excited, jump, when you’re lost, explore, when you’re thinking, think, when you’re talking, listen, and when a pretty girl smiles at you, smile back.

When there’s music in your heart, dance to it.

”

- Ronen V 
via Michael Galpert

Cherish your wilderness.  - Maxine Kumin

(at first, this didn't seem extraordinary but i couldn't stop thinking about it)

I loved this sentence:

"Linda told me that on their last long stretch of time in Greece, she had a house at the top of a hill and Jack’s was at the bottom, thus to set off the radiant value of time together and time apart."

in the midst of all these roaring movies of apocalypses, i feel compelled to think about how i would feel about  falling in love. perhaps these days spend in the haze of anesthetized heartache would suddenly seem even more beautiful.

perhaps i would suddenly remember with more fondness than disdain the mornings when the sunlight is just turning from grey to amber and i feel all of myself ache for arms around me, when i can't hear anything but the fan turning, and the house sighing from the summer heat. perhaps i would think back with disbelief on these moments spent swearing to myself that love is an awful, monstrous thing, that i wish to never fall in love again.

perhaps silently i would plead, like jack gilbert's prayer, for another chance: "Let me fall / in love one last time, I beg them / Teach me mortality, frighten me / into the present. Help me to find / the heft of these days."

shh, quiet, there it is.  i can hear it beginning again.

* * *

I cannot count the times I have cursed my lack of urgency. If ever I love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love. - Dave Eggers