CXXXVII

Today is a good day
My breathing is light.
It won't always be this way
I am sure.
Tomorrow, or the next day
Or a moment between
Clouds impend over the skyline
But they do not stay.
Perhaps they pour, or sprinkle
Cast shade
Perhaps they simply blow away
And I look up at the heavens marked by passing time
And I shout, "It's marking me too."
For it is
I am sure.

Today is not a good day
And my breathing is not light.
For fear of what
I don't quite know.
It won't always be this way, I say
I am sure.
But what if it is.
These clouds hover upon my window sill
And though I beg them not to stay
To simply blow away
They are marking me and making me.
And somewhere he's shouting, "They're marking me too."
But I can't hear him
Because he is not here.
And it wont always be this way.
But what if it is.
I am not sure.

CXXXVI

17/8: Waiting. Always waiting. Waiting for you to call me back. Waiting for you to want me back. Waiting for you to do anything, really. Speak, text, call, write, touch, ask, look, speak, arrive. Be. With me. I could be waiting my whole life. 

[Image: Unkown]

CXXXV

I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.

When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.

And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.

Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to me.

The Queen, Pablo Neruda

[Image: Toni Garn for Paris Match]

CXXXIV

BEHOLD I am making all things new;
These words are trustworthy and true.

- The Book of Revelation

CXXXIII

Bravery is not the absence of fear but the intimacy with fear.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Life is a good teacher, and a good friend.

- Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

CXXXII

I check the weight of all your words
temper them out
wondering if the consistency will hold.
They roll off your tongue, and I balance them
on the scales I've come to know
all too well.
Do you love me, still.
Do you want me, more.
Do you need me, at all.
Am I only counting chances.

I check the weight of all your words.
This one a little light, a little insincere.
This one heavier than any I'd ever want to hear.
Will I detect it before you tell it?
That fearful fateful forlorn truth I search for.
Will I know it before you let on
that our time is drying up
that all we've got isn't all that much, after all.

You're bearing my soul down, you know that?
This weight, just too much.
Cutting to the quick of who I am
and who we are
who I thought we could be
bearing down on all of it.
And I can't let you tear us apart.

CXXXI

10/5: What does love do?
Love would lean in, and accept.

CXXIX

His smell still lingers, for what feels like an eternity, in the room after he has left it. Skin-smell, and hair-smell, and sleep-smell. A sweet fragrance; the sweetest. I pray for it not to dissipate, but the ordinary inevitably takes it's hold, and I can't stop myself from filling up the spaces where he once was. A flash and a dance of splendour and then a long, arduous awaiting. In ardour. In expectation. My own skin can't keep the smell of where he caressed it; can't bottle it up to hold onto. So I wait. And the promise of return tingles every fibre of my being. Will he come again? And when? And how soon? Not for my skin to know. In ardour. In expectation. It awaits.

[Images: Jennifer Stenglein]

CXXVIII

"I love you" is still a startling sound, even after all these years. When it comes from your lips, it is. When your eyes don't leave my face, it is. When your hands won't stop. I love you too. Even when my lungs give out from the weight of it all upon me, I do. I love you still.

CXXVII

You can't buy happiness, and you can't buy time. You can't buy true, authentic relationship, or love. You can't buy hope, you can't buy meaning, you can't buy any of it. The best things in life really are free - in the sense that they cost you no material value. But intrinsically, they are not free. They are hard fought, and won. They are bought with self-sacrifice, bleeding hearts, tired eyes, worn hands. They are broken and then painstakingly mended, time and time again. I should know, I have tasted them all, and all of them have taken as much as they have given to me. It's on you whether they're truly worth the fight.
I know the pursuit of happiness is. I know counting the minutes and making them count is. I know love is, and friendship, no matter what the cost - these things are not truly free. I know hope is worth the fight - I've known it most when hope has left me. I know meaning is worth the search, and the ache, and the candle you hold for it, and the empty place your reserve for it in your heart. Nothing ill-fitting can last in that place, it has to be right. So we wait.
I've been around town, not too many times, but enough times to know that it's never the things that you think will matter that do. Life is the ultimate catch-you-by-surprise, and you'll never see her coming, even when you do.



[Image: Myself Germany, July '17]

CXXVI

19/01: Here I am, all of twenty-three, and I have made peace with silence. Peace with solitude. Peace with uncertain futures and with the creative frustration on the inside of me. Perhaps not all so fully, but I am well on the road to peace (there is no destination, peace is a road, is a river) and that's a far better place than where I once was.

All these demons of youth - those that make us long for places we are not, and people we've never met, and things we know, deep down, we'll never do (but why not) - they are all gone. Perhaps only their shadow crosses my front porch on very bad days, but otherwise, gone. If only I had known that all this too shall pass (though i think i really did know).

Oh life. Oh difficult, long drawn life. The hellish musings of youth only to give way to the damned knowing of age. I say I'm twenty-three, perhaps I know nothing of these things yet. I probably don't.

[Image: Anna Ewers for Vogue Paris]

CXXV

Strangers are never as desirable as you first think them to be

And the ones that are 

It turns out

Are not strangers at all.

CXXIV

The kind've love that'll ditch the health train for a moment and buy the fresh baked Jam Doughnuts from the bakery across the street in a town you’ve never been. Because you never know, they might just be the best of your life. And that's a revelation I want to share with you. 

CXXIII

I cried like a baby when I had to leave you. Because the truth is I don't like living without you. I don't like the waking, I don't like the sleeping, I don't like the eating, or the walking, or the talking, the decision-making, or the question-asking. I don't like spending a day you don't spend with me. I hate to open my eyes and not see you, even from across the room. I can't see you from across the world. I can't feel your touch. I can't have you warm my cold feet. Or crinkle your face at my strange personality. I can do it all without you but I just can't bear to anymore. And it's so hard. 

I cried like a baby when I left you, because it's so hard not to. And I'm sitting on the plane with fat tears in my eyes trying not to let the distance get to me. Even as it grows. Even as I go farther in the wrong bloody direction.

Take me back, baby. Take me back. 

CXXII

What does it mean to share a life. Is there enough there to share? Is it worth something to try. What are the inextricable’s; a bed, a house, a home, a monetary sum, a child, a fundamental set of ideals, a hope for the future, an intent. What markers are these? How many must we acquire? Somebody tell me because I do not know.

The courts hold my signature and say my life is won. Is wed. Is yours. Is shared. How simple could it be?

CXXI

19/4: Its the qualitative value of things that get me. That move me. It's almost impossible to explain to a quantitative person, because I am not one of them, and they are not one of me. I walk into a place of worship and I wonder at the lives touched and the depth of experience, no need to convince me of the foot traffic. What does that mean for spiritual awakening anyway? Give me a room of beautiful, abstract, crafted evidence of a visionaries existence and I will stop and stare. No price tags needed. No pathways to tangible outcomes highlighted. There couldn't be, there are none, none that could be vocalised at least. I love the feel of things, not on my skin but on my senses, on my beating heart. How do you measure that? The quickening of blood. Not without stripping the romanticism out of it. I hear something I like and I cling to it - a word, a sound, a near-inaudible fragment. It means something to me. Because life means something to me, and the way I live it, and with who, and why, and how, and where, and when, and with how much vigour. It all means everything. But who could understand, unless they already knew. 

CXX

The world's not a big deal but even if it goes

I know we have a secret that nobody knows.

CXIX

The world is a strange and wonderful place, that you can carelessly float the Mediterranean Sea one day, and fail to get your rain-dampened self to the bus stop on time the next. 

CXVIII

Nothing comes easy

Not even your surest talents

If you want to be brilliant, build brilliance into your every day

If you want mediocrity, let every day be mediocre 

Results are in the every day

What do you find there?

CXVII

In life there are no hand outs. You get to high places when you do hard work. Even when it looks like they took a shortcut, they didn't, even when it seems that they had a free ride, they didn't, and even when they made it all look so easy, it wasn't. Learning this is one of the greatest let downs and biggest encouragements you can find. That life can look easy and be hard all at once, do you get that? Bums on seats, feet on pavement, pens on paper, fingers on the pulse. No one gets to be where they are without positioning and purpose. So why would you? And that one time it seems as if someone's beaten the system? Take stock of all the lessons you've learnt and ask yourself, would you want to?

CXVI

Listening to your steady sleeping slowing breath is becoming a favourite thing. Favourite because you're mine and I can hear this every night, if I stayed awake to listen. Favourite because you're peaceful and you're okay and that means I am, too. Favourite because this is what I dreamed of, and now I need to stay awake to listen. Favourite because it's you, and you're next to me, and the whole world is as nought, and your steady sleeping slowing breath is the only thing. My only thing. It's becoming a favourite thing, to visit these dreams of mine in my waking. You are my dream come to life, and I love you for it. You and your steady sleeping slowing breath. I love you.