G Y P S Y

 I’m floating.

Strange mood tonight.  It’s both perfectly normal and exceptionally inconvenient that it’s now that I want to write after months and months of feeling a little lackluster about the deed.  Tonight, I should be microscopically copying anatomy and physiology textbook scribe onto a notecard, but instead, I’m sitting here at this coffeehouse and I’m feeling something… something that isn’t the stress of balancing work and school and trying to be a friend and a daughter and girlfriend who is as present as I yearn to be… and something that isn’t that relief of being so busy, it’s somehow “okay” to not take time for self-care.  There’s a contradictory calm to running around from commitment to commitment, because of its active mindlessness, but it’s never been “me” to do that for very long.  Everything bubbles up eventually; the seams split; whatever I’ve been stuffing into subconsconsciousness breaks through.  

So I’m feeling a lot of things.  

I had a theory years ago that when an individual is feeling exceptionally fluid (honest to the core) with themselves… that they attract a similar raw honesty in their interactions.  I’ve been feeling more “myself” since the turn of 2013- it’s been partially deliberate and partially out of a giving myself over to vulnerability.  I’ve never been so in the moment, in my life, and I also, before now, haven’t set myself up to be such.  It’s weird how we set traps for ourselves, but we do.  I’d been longing to let my hair down and be flawed and real and in between for myself and someone else for so long now… and I persisted to maintain these deep connections with people who couldn’t be a part of my day to day life.  How terrible to be in longing, to have so much time alone that way.  And I did it for most of my adult life and wondered why there were emotional gaps I couldn’t cross and experiences I was living on a loop.  

The last few months, I’ve had genuine interactions with the women who I thought were a part of this fucked up past and lost to that chaos.  A coffeedate.  Tears.  A beer oceanside.  Laughs.   A Skype date for 4 hours.  Peace.  The feelings these women evoked in me were nothing but pure.  There was dust on them, but they were still strong beneath the surface and there was still so much there.  This is the first time in awhile that I’ve felt peace.  I’d been carrying around regret and disappointment, shame and loss for years now.  I’d found ways to liberate and love myself again, giving myself grace where others hadn’t and growing in the ways I needed to grow.  But there’s something so different about being there, with a person who could floor you with a look, and having them say it’s okay now, that they’re sorry, that they love you.  

Tonight I’m unfriended by one of them again on the trivial site of Facebook and I have no idea why and frankly, I don’t have the energy to sort through what I did or didn’t do; whether it was good or bad and why it’s inspired a cutting of ties again.  I guess I’m just tired of there always being someone cutting someone.  Maybe I’m not meant to have too much intensity in my orbit.  Maybe it’s too much for my center.  

Things are good, right now.  I love a girl named Erica.  She’s pretty wonderful.  I’ve never spent so much time with another human being in my life.  We never run out of things to say and the kisses never stop feeling important.  It’s been so nice to allow myself to be intimate with someone again… to let them see all of me without pauses.  I’m sure with her.  

And still, there are so many uncertainties.  I don’t yet know where I’ll be living in a matter of months.  Berkeley/Oakland.  San Diego.  Here in Sacramento.  There are people who are stuck in me and I don’t know why they linger, why they can still unhinge me with a word.  There are still so many questions.  About her- the one I’ve loved since eightteen.  About her- the one I’ve yet to meet.  I wonder about who I’ll be for life, for them.  About the way it’ll turn out.  Where the roads will cross.  Which roads will end.  When I’ll start forgetting.

I still miss Angela too.  I miss knowing her days and her life.  I miss making her laugh and the little things we did to make nothing days everything.  She loved me a lot and well and I’m grateful for that, even if we have become this mess of anger and sadness and harsh words and blunt actions.  I’m sad we lost our connection.  I’m more sad that I don’t know how to build upon it again.  That year already seems like years ago, but on days like today, I feel like it was just days ago.  

Now I’ve resorted to rambling.  I feel okay about the fact that I’m in the middle of a lot of feelings.  And that I haven’t written in so long that my creative muscles are fatiguing already.  I’ll get back to that place.   Right now… I feel gratitude for where I am.  I feel okay with the not knowing.  

I love you.  You know who you are.