No longer using this account. I will be starting a new blog as a sort of rebirth of sorts. It will be a lot more engaging, interactive, healing and based more on art and culture and life as a young adult, I suppose. I will update and let you know where I moving my site to soon.

there in evaporated spaces lies the winter and the summer

In the shower, I bend my head in silent forgiveness. What seems like a reign of tears travelling the length of my forehead, hanging onto dear life at the peak of my nose, out of control and down the curve of my lips, kiss my chin goodbye as if to say,

"we've heard your prayer."

I'm made of tears--we all are. I wonder if we could be swept away by the sky, evaporating into a light fog high in the lining of space's layers. Until we all pound together in unwanted friction, numb and so cold, we don't know who we are, or that we've become clouds, so heavy; and sometimes we are white, sometimes we are black. And when we call the night home, we fall because we are made of water, or tears, whichever one wants to call it, and we don't want to be friction, we just want to get away from all the lightning.

I wonder if I'll meet the sea again, the lakes, the rivers and tiny ponds that seem too naive to hope that they could grow because we all seem to shrink in the summer months. We evaporate because we are water, or tears, whichever one wants to call it. The sky begs to claim us, we raise our hands for it to take us. 

We aren't ever so certain are we? Even the iced over ponds break in the frozen winter months, you know those months that make you wonder if you are in fact living in an ice box. I'm surprised all our tears don't freeze into a permanent scarlet letter, in the shower, in our beds at night, walking alone in the streets, past the cars where everyone is but no one sees. Our parents tell us to be careful on the pond with our ice skates, they tell us to watch for the cracks because if you aren't feeling you could lose your grip and fall in and fall out. Maybe it's because they were us once, walking over it, daring it to break the only truth we led: that thin ice is strong like us because it has to be.

Nothing is ever so solid, so why do we think we are?

Hot water at night thaws our ice box hearts. We are amass with tears, and that doesn't mean we can't skate a figure eight like we used to, even in the summer months with our rollerblades. 

They say that the sky is heavy with gravity--it catches what needs be and throws it back. So what about our forgiven prayers?

I can't evaporate anymore though, I hope you don't either. 

(listen to this when reading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBcknwgUKeU) 

Journaling

   
























An era has ended as I now say goodbye to my old leather journal and welcome in a new time of my life, hopefully a little wiser, a little brighter. I was sent this new journal, one that I now call my youthful travels. Fitting, I think. This first entry is about the welcoming of spring in New York. 

March 20, 2012

When I think of New York, I think of my future. Phoenix renders me in riddled dreams of the past, mine and those forlorn ages cradled in green.  Thursday morning, the darkness pulled back until eyes wept in a golden glaze. The clouds frothed back and forth, rolling waves of a calm sea. The storm of a heavy night of restless talks and thoughts of the heavy autumn rush, a falling kind seemed to heave its final cry.  And all that was left was the morning dream, waves like blankets.  They seemed so close you wished you could roll the thick, double paned windows down and let your fingers swim in the clouds. Do what you knew as a kid.  I turned to my side as we descended into a communal fog of neither the heavy or light kind. It was just there. The pink and yellow, deep blue of an earlier time rose so high, it stayed behind, it said goodbye. I was approached by a baby’s eyes—welcomed into this new city that would be my home for a week.  Its mother whispered, “Good Morning.” I smiled at him, he laughed.  His eyes widened in excitement, raw and young and free.  I couldn’t help but laugh too because this was a new era.  I was away from something so heavy: the past.  But I was in flight, I was a bird like I always imagined young and in bed drifting away to bedtime stories.  The airplane was like a boat descending the sea, nothing was as serious as it seemed.  These past six days have blurred my vision of self, or it has awakened a new sense that has always been there, that I have never seen.  When I landed, I grabbed a ticket and trusted the yellow taxicab that seemed to be waiting to take me into New York City.  I pretended to know where I was or where I was going.  The traffic was the only thing keeping me from something bigger than myself. I spotted my best friend, Jackie, in her purple NYU sweatshirt. I didn’t even realize the 10 dollar tip I handed to the driver.  He didn’t say much.  After Jackie and I grabbed breakfast at this cute french bakery and restaurant, Le Pain, we joined the routine of the subway: the music, the people rushing and stopping, the incessant swiping of metrocards, the wind of those fast, frenzied underground trains. 

Our first stop was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  The waterfront, broken windows and graffiti art with cats and teenage hearts. We sat on the ground of this thrift shop, Junk, and held pictures that was once the property of lost families and dearest dears.  I wondered if they were missed.  We sat on the ground and held them up until the sun shone through.  That evening, we ventured to the markets of Chelsea, explored galleries, and drank don’t-mind-if-I-do glasses of wine. The crepes back in Greenwich were lovely. In the early hours of the morning, we walked through Washington Square Park, cast by the hazy shadow of the massive white arch.  Frozen and cold, we made it to St. Marks where I held my 99 cent pizza for warmth.  I felt more than what was, and even now my memory begins to fade.

Running on what seemed like no more than two hours of sleep, we awoke to a rainy mist and the brooklyn seashore.  I joined Jackie and her wonderfully artistic friends she made through photography. I couldn’t stop smiling at their eclectic blend of personalities that seemed to mix so well, and the way their views of the world painted itself beautifully through pictures (inspiring, might I add).  We were the only ones on a shore ridden with broken glass and bottles—a mosaic array that reminded me of stepping stones we used to make in Garden class in elementary school.  The shattered treasures became the sand itself, the bottles that washed among the current like an ancient celtic folklore clanged together with the tune of chimes dancing in the wind, not cradled by the lull of a waters edge.  It was so beautiful and untouched even though they say it was once a landfill, forgotten and left in decaying grace. I collected glass bottles, green, brown, clear for my future and past. A sacrificed present to the gods. I wondered who held these once, what apothecary named these Bella Donna.  My feet soon dragged on this cold, English coast.  We pandered through golden fields and found our way back to the bus stop, our noses and lips bruised blue by the cold, until we gathered for final warmth in Snice coffee shop with tea, bagels and cookies. 

St. Patrick’s Day filtered the city in green people. The bar hoppers started early with their green shirts and green, sparkly hats--an obvious patronage to the Irish spirit.  However, Jackie and her friend Jessie and I met some lovely old ladies, dressed in style at the famous "off broadway". We perused the shelves of a book store, novels and the likes painting the walls to the ceiling. We stopped for lunch at Cafe Lalo, a two-hour affair that was enjoyed over coffee and talks that perused the very living.  Central park bloomed cherry blossom and white daisy trees, the Guggenheim museum a marvel of art and photographs of Francesca Woodman that seemed so sad because maybe her life’s end was so sad. I lost myself in translation that night. Starting off the night in one of Jackie’s good friend, Maddie’s dorm room, I met some lovely, sweet and unique people. Swayed by influences that seemed to bubble in happy fever, I held a cigarette to my lips and knew that this is what my five-year-old self was thinking of: cool and burning like the embers lit.  We were fumbling over our high, unfiltered laughs.  Coughing the smoke away, sitting on St. Mark’s stoops with our 99 cent slice.  I didn’t want to leave these people. I wanted to collect every moment and sense. 

Walking by myself around west village, I noticed the movement of trees and flowers: nature in such a high rise city garden.  We look for what is more than ourselves, hoping to lose what has been garnered real and vaguely this. Words are lost when attempting to pinpoint each encumbrance.  If only I could envelop the words of all the great poets and novelists, but I find that I am only left with an empty sugar packet and a dehydrated cherry blossom.  My tea bag of apricot orange has floated, or descended to the warmth of a grounded city. 

“I am living,” I laughed uncontrollably under the sway of bubbly, happy fever drinks. 

 I am living. 

Raisin Oranges

My mother and her best friend sat at our kitchen table crying and smiling, watching us children jump and sink like titanic on that lone raft in the pool—we were the sailors, our dog the captain. it was summertime and the sun was hot and heavy, but freeing like the smell of citrus from the orange trees in the backyard. I stood on the cool kitchen tiles looking out, but not looking back. The table was bare with just their hands. My own felt like raisins, pruned from the indian waters, wrung out in nervous predicament. My mother played with my hair, and I told them about my break from this child’s play of the populars, and they laughed over a possible poplar tree, “populars or poplars?” I couldn’t understand how trees had anything to do with being popular. I can’t understand how I thought they had nothing to do with being loved. My pronunciation was no good; I was young and knew I wanted to be neither.

We aren't what we say we are

Blueberry Bliss, Ginger Vitality

A godess's homesickness for the romanticized

I couldn’t look up any longer; I couldn’t speak up any louder. I just lay on the ground and imagined myself in some distant landing. If I closed my eyes, could I make you and all of this disappear? My pulse sighed in rendered dreams of energy; there I was, my final release to therapeutic presence. Immersed, faded and invisible like one who’s already experienced and channeled. But I haven’t experienced, I have yet to channel. Yet I feel so old. I feel so withered and old. A raisin in the sun, a child looking up at Shel Silverstein’s pizza sun. But I remember being young where the sun engulfed everything you touched and felt and said and cried. I dreamt of nothing because I knew of nothing to dream. Time didn’t find me; it didn’t stalk me until I knew pain. I could cry and it would be the dark ages. I was so young and already eye level with the sun and moon—friends of transcendence in flight. The must of my grandmother’s brown and white lace curtains stuck to my skin and eyes, relics of a golden age where rock-and-roll and desert sun made waves in the sand, and oasis’s in velvet pools and string bean rope trees. Because there you were. There it was. Time meant nothing, it didn’t weigh this energy of now, brief and fleeting and, hold on, step back, cheap. Hang on, wait up. What’s wrong? I’m not now. These tears can’t be taken away. You can’t just keep on saying that someday, someday now I will find a way to forget those goddamn hearts and flowers. Because what if it will all only take this one day, these one tears to say that you aren’t alone in what you fear and what sears every nerve and childish cry. Why did I care so much about that key and the lock to the aged, rosewood Grandfather clock? I would follow the swing, and hope to grow as tall as the wall of vanillin books, ripened with age and travels and voices. Goddammit relinquish control—let me fall and hit hard. Let the sand wash me away so I can sail the seven moons. The sky tells us we can’t go back, but we can live between the two, night and day and eye level all the same. The yin and yang of a child’s heart, or maybe just homesickness for the romanticized.  I’ve realized that it wasn’t the specificity of time, but the release of time itself, the ignorance and innocence of a child in relation to an era. The road only went for some time until it was you and the wild—people were wild, not tamed and estranged. What a calamity to no longer feel the wind’s silky wrap, watch lips kiss smoke, feel the sparseness of change and a pay phone, the haunting of all those people before you reaching for the call of home, honey and wine to nameless, weathered voices.

Sweet child of mine, you feel that your hair has grown too fierce and coarse for the comfort of a mother’s hands, soothing the tangles and brushing away your gasping fears that seem to yank you to the floor in a broken water depth, a dragging jerk that pulls you fighting, a cold recluse with no breath. You can’t seem to escape the sea, lying broken in your mother’s hands. Sweet child, you’ve seemed to have forgotten those healing hands, touching your forehead in a pause of hope and light, honing those sun rays and the moon’s pale, seeping chill until breath returned, your chest fell heavy and still. You weren’t blue, you weren’t black, you were coral peach, the dip between the two. Sweet child, you were taken by the sky. You wish to feel the braid of a mother’s hands, the stories of nostalgia and its cratered heart; you wish to smile all the smiles you’ve heard and seen and felt. Lived all the moments, black and white, coral peach, cradled in the lights of stop and go; a mother’s hands balmy sweep and butterfly dance through turbulent and anxious tidal waves, until you are soothed, you are healed. 

Wild skies, freed hearts seek solace, “will you ever win?” Those words carpeted the Shirley curls of orange shag, the strung guitar that my mother once held in gypsy rhythm, individual and soul, and me, healing those strings in smiles I’ve heard and seen and felt. Nostalgia fluttered and like melding stars in poetry, glowed like the goddess itself. I was surrounded, a child dripping in nectar calling for the monarch butterflies until they amassed as fields of flowers in the sky—their arched wings each a broken piece of holy, stained glass drenched in golden light, each a broken, wild smile of heaven—the true cathedral in all its pure divinity. I looked up, I spoke, I was overcome.

Listen while reading: http://crystallizedhope.tumblr.com/post/16207156171/crystallineknowledge-her-breath-is-the-wind