Have had a lot of restless nights thinking about what liberation, gratitude, safety and satiety mean modernly. I shaken by Colorado Springs as I was shaken by Buffalo— I don’t want to make sense of it. I won’t get the gold this year for mental gymnastics— I have fallen off the high beam. I spend a lot of time thinking about equal and complementary forces - each action has a reaction. For each day of silence, I want to scream. For each day we howl, I want to sleep in the darkness of a newly blown out star. What is up goes down and there are times of feasting and there are times of scarcity, of abstinence.
Watch footage in Iran and think of the courage of becoming, of asserting your freedom & I see a regime in retrograde and the birth of something new. The globalized world is digital and I can choose to not let it affect me but I know that the apocalypse will be televised. There are men, women, children in the streets marching and screaming that they will be heard; that the police and self-elected oppressors will no longer define and restrict the dimensions of self-determination.
Many attest in interviews that women have disappeared before and that the violence was known but it was boogeyman realness. I know what they meant that it didn’t matter if it was bad timing or the wrong gait— it’s a loose cigarette, a fake twenty, a few strands of hair — it’s the transparency of a social disease, a history of violence and terror clear as day.
Our world isn’t one that praises what you can do without unless you can afford it. Minimalism is only beautiful if you’re rich and for all those who embrace their modesty they seem foolish for not wanting more. These days I wonder why I can’t rest when I’m tired and why stillness is something that seems nicer to write poems about; goofy and whimsical aspirations of an easy going aesthetic. Why have we done this to living? I’ve sat in my mundane, in my house of foraged wonders and second hand things and tried to joy in the daily meditation of life. I can always think of what I want to add to my life but I am never here with what I have and trying to let go of what I don’t need. I haven’t mourned or taken time to observe what I’ve done, where I’ve come and to say I am sorry it’s been so much. To say that I am enough and that yes, it has been hurting and that I don’t have to push myself to indulge and pretend that I’m happier or sadder than I am. Does that make sense?
I am nothing without you, my friend. I am nothing without God. I am nothing without those who choose to smile my way and see me when I can’t see myself. Thank you. Thank you for shining a light in a dark place.
Think a lot of thanksgiving– each year it comes upon and how these days are modeled from the Eucharist. A harvest dinner that never had pumpkin pie or your mother’s stuffing tells a hard story of the beginning of us and the end of another. Many are choosing meal or gas, meal or heat, nothing or nothing. I don’t get to sit too often at a table and eat with people. I can count each time on a hand after each year and the loner, the bullied kid, the poser, the imposter that I’ve been my whole life can’t bring myself to sit at the last supper. I can feel regret and sadness well up in me as another birthday approaches — I deserve nothing for all my sins.
Each time I make myself a meal it’s with a loving kindness that has been learned, trained and not a relationship with food that came naturally— I choose to feed myself because I can’t guarantee another will. There are days I leave my house and I am unsure if anyone I know will say my name, if I’ll be seen by someone who knows me and I have to come home and be the kindness I longed for each day.
What meal doesn’t get biblical? A moment of rest, a moment of reflection, a moment to ask for clarity and a moment to ask for abundance. Each dance from rain to mercy, our feet and hands know when to arch and clasp and spin. Our knees know how to withstand the bend and our heads bow. What doesn’t travel back in time to a supper or two held in times of sand and stone; from bacchanalias in Babylon and famines in Cairo. I think of how historically the Puritan’s days of gratitude would’ve included fasting and that the tradition of honoring the harvest, kissing the soil as it delivers our best intentions and toils of the year is the so-called new world.
I am overcome with gratitude for all that I’ve survived this year and all that I have still to process. I am salting, pickling the hard lessons and hoping that I’ll enjoy them in the distant future. I’ll never be perfect.
There is a funereal hummingbird in my heart. The wings flutter like Anna Pavlova’s arms dancing as a dying swan. There are days I awake a prize winning pony and days I awake buzzing and hissing cockroaches in the shape of a girl– I am some days a hero and some days a poser.
Admittedly I am thinking about my grandmother or my lack of roots as an orphan — I have no baby pictures and my past is just stories and my family is mostly chosen. Recently I’ve taken up working for a family and the grandmother sits with me and tells me her stories and we laugh and cook while everyone’s asleep. She touches my face before she goes to bed and says it is a joy to sit with me. It is a joy to see me. She says I can’t always expect you - I know that you are working but know that I look forward to seeing you.
Club, church and grocery stores are all spaces I’ve worked in so closely that I’ve called them home. I know that sanctuary is a place we declare and we can transform each space with our presence. Nowhere is safe these days but I look forward to the safety of the next time I feel a loving hand on my face. I look forward to the next time I get to hear that beat but I fear each time it’s the last.
In observance of all that I’ve lost, all that I still carry, of the five more names I’ll recite from Colorado Spring and the names and the forgotten many that will never be recalled by history and all those many more that I hope to call out lovingly, joyfully, hopefully, respectfully - I will be observing a day of fast and meditation on Thanksgiving.
This is not a request for you to join. This is not a moment of judgement or shame for what you’ve chosen to do. This is not a request for you to applaud me. This is not a moment where I expect you to understand and I believe you should do what you must and live according to what’s for you. Can’t say it’s right or wrong. If you choose to volunteer, if you choose to donate, if you choose to dine - do all those things in joy and mindfully. Take what you have and cherish it.
I’ll be here sorting woes and joys like I do dark from lights on laundry day.
Of sorrow and of joy, I am full.
I am grateful.
Godspeed loners,
Kx
alone in my room is a sometimes newsletter written by a ficus that wishes it was a peony.