Declaration

I want to be a writer. Sometimes, I want it so bad that it scares me. What if I turn out to be really mediocre in something I love? It may kill me. I don't imagine I'm going to be great. No, I don't actually aim for greatness - to write The Novel of the Century or any time period (however small). I just want to write something simple and true, and hopefully have people enjoy reading it too. It scares me so much. But, it's worth trying right?

Then again, there are so many other barriers to cross. Those barriers are neither about time nor money. It's about being able to really go deep into your soul and write. Sometimes, when I think about this, the fear makes it such that I can barely breath. God, give me courage, for it truly is a long day's journey into night.

Insomnia

I have been having trouble sleeping. As if I was afraid of what tomorrow might bring.

So, I've been reading my old blog. Funnily enough to have my twenty-one and twenty-two year old selves giving me comfort.

And then, I reached this old entry written when I was twenty:

And so my seventeen year old self gives me a little hug, and tells me to carry on.

It's time to sleep, my dear.

Prayer

I sat down and prayed for all kinds of people and all kinds of love and we lit two long white candles. There's something about lighting the candles that feels especially warm, more than the physical warmth of the flames. Perhaps it's that feeling of leaving a part of ourselves, here, to burn for someone else.

- Written on 21 December 2008

Why Regret?, Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Andrea Gibson, How it Ends (an excerpt)

You kiss me deep as my roots will reach and I want nothing more
Than to be an eyelash fallen on your cheek
A thing collected by your fingers
And held like a wish
I promise whatever I do
I will always try my best
To come true

Echoing Light, W. S. Mervin

When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings

Thank you, young self

I'm re-reading my old blogs now and I just want to reach out to my young self, hug her and say "thank you". I feel real again - even a little beautiful.

But today was an incredibly good day, the kind of day that just builds up as the day goes by as if God was sending me morse code, tap tap tap , on your shoulder, you can do it , tap tap tap , I was almost waiting for a dove with an olive branch to fly towards me. I can almost hear him whisper, Why carry all these hurt around?

- Me, 22 years old, 21 Oct 2009

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.