— Leave a Comment

Technicolour

Black.

Black hole, black pillow, black sheets, blank sheets, blank pillow

Black void

Blank line, white line, crimson line, blue line.

Crimson gash, crimson stitch, crimson wound, crimson blood

Black blood, blue blood, blank blood,

No blood.

Black love, black blood, no blood, no love

Black hate, black void, blank love, no blood

Black blood on black wound

Wound in black sheet set on black pillow nursing

Black void

Black music like the buck, like the step, like the twist, like the stick

Black envy like a black rose filled with black thorns creating black holes

Red garden, green garden, yellow garden, purple garden

White garden, white rose, white snow,

White blood

Wine line, fine line, bloodline, crossed line

White chest, wine chest, lying chest, black vest

White sleeve, wine sleeve, cut sleeve, blocked sleeve

Wine float, black throat, long throat, cut throat

Black tip, blank tip, black rose,

Black love

Green leaf, yellow leaf, brown leaf, black fall

White walls, white roof, white washed, white gall

White foam, white froth, white sea, seagull

White truck, white ball, wide ball, white net, white goal

Wine drink, wine seat, wine crown wine love

Wine ring, wine stone, rhinestone, white love, red lust, bloodlust

Bloodlust for wine blood bearing white rings feeding wine drink, feeling

Black love

Black love, white love, wine love, wine rose

White love with wine rose swathed in black cloth

Black cloth, black sheet, white sheet, white rose

Blank white, frail white, tight white, white

White.

Prose et Poesie
— 1 Comment

Pandora’s love

I spoke with one of my best friends yesterday about love. I don’t even recall how we arrived at the topic, but I do remember the discussion with the sort of kickstarting clarity that engages all your senses when you revisit the memory. You know… like the way I remember eating paella in a little dungeon of a place in Barcelona. But more than that, I recall the smell of that restaurant and the unconfined laughter bursting out from the kitchens and the way the tablecloths looked and the happiness that I felt. I was completely engaged. But I ramble.

My dear friend – we’ll call this one E – was of the opinion that love is like a pandora’s box. It can remain shut for an age and a half but once opened, well… Her type of love struck me for a couple of reasons: First, I had never assumed love to have such a catastrophic persona and second, I was weary to agree that her pandora’s box had not been open from the beginning. Before going any further, I should clarify that love can have catastrophic consequences. But the persona of the consequences cannot pretend to be those of the love itself. And love as an act is usually far too simple to be destructive in its purest form. I got E’s broader points though – the ones that preceded her bold description of love. She would rather not open up herself to love unless the other person was absolutely ready to jump in- head first- into the complete pandora that her love could be. And I understand that. Perfectly.

It takes a great deal more than courage to declare a love you are not sure will be returned. It takes a certain fearlessness, and a blind confidence in that fearlessness that some these days label, “sense of self” to step into the void and make such a proclamation. Especially as the chances of hearing an echo back from that void these days is so slim. To be sure, courage is not fearlessness. Although, the two are very nearly interchangeable, in my opinion. Fearlessness requires a certain absence of the “wisdom” in courage. But in such a way that is applaudable. I also do not entirely recommend fearlessness. It is to a great many still interchangeable with foolishness, and only to a precious few replaceable with faith.

This year, I decided to embark on a journey of fearlessness. I jumped willingly into that particular void I feel E was referencing and I shouted out with no certainty of response. There have been many quiet moments since when I have grown tired of questioning myself and this decision, but nary a moment of regret. Because, as I told E then, the love we have in us is not for us. This is going to be a difficult concept to expand  on but I will try (forgive me in advance if I fall woefully short of doing it justice).

We are human, yes? And on this plane we consist of water- a lot of it. We have blood and bones and flesh and muscles, but mainly water. On an atomic level, we have the nuclei and mitochondria and all that other biology stuff that form cells. We can also argue that we are mostly hydrogen and oxygen if we really think about it. But on some other plane, I believe we are stuffed with love (I have expanded a bit more on this in my about section).  We eat love and breathe it. But more importantly, we work/run right because of love. Like we have this centre of mass that propels us and it is love. And we can think of it, like I do, if we try and picture it like a pulsating box or sapphire orb at our core. That love, that orb is the love that is from us. It is us. This love is not  for us. Rather, it is for us to give. We can give it to ourselves aka self-love, but in the same external manner in which we receive love from others. That love that we get from others is kept in a different place and manifested differently.

Simply, I think the love we hold in ourselves was always meant to be for others. And since love, to me, is a verb, you can’t do nothing with it like you can’t do nothing with a verb (those are called nouns, I believe). You can’t just sit on love. You have to do something with it; share it, display it, forge it, solidify it. And this was my point to E.

Love, or shouting into that void, is like giving someone a box of chocolates (mmm Lindt Lindor dark chocolate truffles). they might really like them (aka love you back) or they might not. If they like them, great! I will continue to buy you chocolates/ shower you with my love. But if they don’t like them, very much like the etiquette involved in actual gift receipt, please hold on to that information and never let it go. And at an opportune time, regift that darling box as you, I feel, have an obligation to use your love. In the end, it does not matter to me that you do not love me if the love is important enough to me and remains mine to give, which it will. So long as you do not hurt me (or to continue my lovely metaphor, throw that box of chocolates in my face).

It is funny that I say all this now – and said the same to E then- with a bit of hindsight. But I think it is also a credit to us nearly-fearless few who take that risk. I jumped into the void and there I still am. But I would rather be completely uncertain in the certainty of my own truth than hold on to the concept of an un-emptied pandora’s box.

And so to (rather comically) to rephrase one of my favourite sayings:

“Holding unto love (anger)

Is like eating chocolate (poison)

And expecting the other

Person to glow (die).”

– YD (Buddha)

Journaling
— Leave a Comment

Wilt

He was going through a hard time. They both knew it but somehow, she knew it more. They talked about it in the wordless ways that humans beings in dying relationships converse through act and emotion- through the rashness of acts and the absence of emotions. The Friday night ritual of Chateauneuf-du-Pape was the first to go. Then the intermittent post-it notes hastily placed not all the way down on her phone screen so they were the first things she saw when her alarm went off in the morning, followed. The first few months those darned post-its had irked her. Waking up to her phone alarm and not being able to snooze it right away because some pesky thing was in the way… but they had grown on her. They weren’t ever mushy, too. That’s what she had loved the most about them. And they usually made absolutely no sense but she kept most of them anyway. Some she stored in memory, like the note after the night she had gone out with her girls for some Mexican two months following their move-in together:

“Elsa, please do not let it go when you sleep. It stinks. Love, Olaf. P.S. Coffee’s ready”.

…Or the one after Curry, her pre-pubescence Tabby, passed. That one had been a tiny caricature of a dog with a thought bubble above it’s head saying :

“All (cats that act like) dogs go to heaven.”

She had almost shed a tear after that one. Almost.

It wasn’t the attempts at failed prose or romanticism that engaged her, it was the vigour with which he had adored her smile and the reverence through which he had aimed to preserve it. But all that vanished in the summer of the year her peonies did not bloom.  She was later told by the horticulturist ex-wife of a colleague that her quack of a gardener had planted them too deeply. Their foliage in early spring had held so much promise, the three wilted flower buds that showed in early April brought heart shattering disappointment. Years down the line, friends and family would ask her about that period of her life and all she would ever remember with annoying clarity were those goddamned wilted peonies.

He left in late September. There wasn’t any of that slow realisation that you get when you read a suspense novel or watch a romantic movie. There was no immediate warning but there was the exceptionally huge lump constricting her breathing when she saw him sitting quietly in the living room waiting on her that evening. It wasn’t the waiting or the stiff sitting, not even the single suitcase and stained carry-on shoulder bag leaning on the chaise. It was his complete awareness of her in a way that had not happened in several weeks. She had only just adjusted to life with a stranger and now she couldn’t handle the discomfort of having him stare directly at her and still not see her. She looked blankly at that travel bag the whole time he talked. He told her it had been over a long while, that he had tried to re-invest time and time again. He mentioned the one day she had come in shouting about the unwashed dishes and he had had such a difficult day but she had not even cared. She was mildly aware that he spoke a long time but she was careful not to listen to the details. She knew this would become an argument if she did and she did not want that; she was too good at gathering that kind of word ammunition but this situation required no sifting through the finer points and pressing of pressed issues. As a matter of fact, she had made up her mind to forget the details of the conversation the moment he walked out her door if she could help it.

He spent 39 minutes trying to let her off easy, like she needed it. By the end he was uncomfortable because she kept her silence. There was nothing she could say that would further solidify or weaken the resignation that she felt. He asked her to say anything, that he knew he had told her it was forever and he was chickening out. He did not say sorry though. He had always believed sorries were a pitiful attempt at taking the easier road out of a difficult situation. But it did not matter. She was spent.

She nodded her head once to indicate her understanding, stood up from the edge of the chaise where she had been sitting, and kissed him on the left side of his temple like she would have if this were any regular day.

“Leave the keys on the accent table by the door. Don’t bother locking it”.

She left him on the sofa, grabbed the grocery bag she had brought home with the Chateauneuf in it, got a wine glass out a kitchen cabinet, and walked into the bedroom. Fifteen minutes later, she heard the door shut quietly. It would have been better if he had just left without trying for goodbye

Prose et Poesie
— Leave a Comment

THREE

I spend a great deal of time on love. On feeling it, giving it, thinking about it, being it. I know, I know, no one can really BE love. But we turn out to be such vessels of love, how can we really be identified any other way? Think about it… I could use my toothbrush holder to hold my pens but someone would probably look at my desk like I was crazy. A pen has no business in a toothbrush holder! And they would be right, mostly. We can put other things in these beautiful bodies of ours but somewhere – out there – in this colossal universe, some supernatural being is probably screaming, “Wait! that doesn’t belong there! You’re putting anger/pride/hatred in the love holder, you silly potato!”. And that’s what I feel about love. Sure, we feel it and share it; find it then promptly lose it again. But it’s never really going anywhere because we carry it with us. Always. And that, in my opinion, is humanity’s most redeeming quality.

It’s a no-brainer, then, that I write about it. I write about love a lot. Sometimes I write about hopes and dreams and pain, but aren’t those things just connected to or other forms of love? So when I decided to start a blog (and I have decided this many times over the years. It was nearly a yearly renewal of vows I had not actually put into effect), what else could it really be about but love?

The name of this blog, in-threes, was simply another way of unpacking this running theme. They tell us always that good things come in threes (and according to one of my faves, Sarah Kay, so do bad things). We are told that the third time is the charm and are quick to start the countdown to a momentous celebration or a menial task by announcing, “On three! 1, 2, 3…” .

In my case, three is my favourite number. I was born on the third in the third season of the year (depending on the way you count, autumn is third because winter MUST come last), which also doubles as my favourite season of the year. I am an only child (but really the third of many) and most of those epic cliche sayings that I love so much come in monosyllabic threes. Live, laugh, love, for example. Or one of my all time faves –

“And so these three remain: Faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love”

By this point, you get it. I’m a firm believer in love or the lack of it or the reactions to it; that we cannot live unaffected by it. And somehow, along the way, I decided that I wanted to share that  – my love of stories and opinions and travelling and food (ohhhh fooddddd). But most importantly, I wanted to share the love I have for myself, which is an ever-evolving thing. Because, love – even self love – cannot be kept selfishly.

Remember:

“We cannot live unaffected by love. We are most alive when we find it, most devastated when we lose it, most empty when we give up on it, most inhumane when we betray it, and most passionate when we pursue it.”

Happy Readings and Bienvenue…

About
— Leave a Comment

Dreams II

“For what it’s worth: It’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Inspiration
— 2 Comments

Reclaim of Pain

I once had a really good friend and, if friendships are really broken down into tiers of closeness (which they are), I might even say that we were the best of friends. But, a few months ago, there was a huge falling out. And this, I think, is where this really begins. You see, J – we’ll just call this person J- and I are no longer friends. This has had a profoundly larger impact on my being than even I thought possible. And I think, in many ways, I have allowed this. I wanted to not feel anything at the end. We are always so tempted by the ease a lack of emotion or pain offers. The lies with which we are fed that unfeeling is strength or peace. There is no strength in hiding from your pain. There is no courage in locking up our emotions. They go nowhere; they fester and putrefy. John Greene said pain demands to be felt-

So.Much.Truth.

But, my point is my pain went nowhere. It did not fizzle out with time because I had not experienced it. And if I had not experienced it, I couldn’t let it go. I woke up yesterday morning and I had a dream with a feature from J. You know you’re bottling something up when it no longer torments your consciousness, but goes even deeper. I had not let myself acknowledge my feelings in my waking, so they tormented my dreams. Yesterday I caught myself, though. Finally. I guess what I’ve been trying to say, what I’m still trying to say (and doing a poor job saying) is that I’ve been afraid- afraid of experiencing unpleasantness. Fear is a powerful compeller but I find that for me I fail too often to acknowledge that it is the root cause of many of my problems.

J and I stopped being friends and I did not cry. I did not look back. I did not let go of hope even in such a hopeless situation. I pretended that my pain and loss did not exist, then I sugarcoated my denial and called it “moving on”. I told myself that if I looked back, I was lost. But as it turns out, I am still lost now. I do not pine for what was once, but I acknowledge now that I do have to grieve for its loss. My life is no longer exactly as it was and I’ll be damned if I don’t stop and realise it. So, if I feel like going through a bag of lindor truffles to grieve, I won’t stop myself. I am the only one that can make ‘being alone’ feel ‘lonely’, and I am the only one who can reclaim my solitude.

Journaling
— 1 Comment

For Shit’s Sake

Happy New Month!

It’s March! And my first post! I warn you that it will be nothing spectacular. The title IS a precedent, and this is my journal after all.

I have an inordinate amount of fear or apprehension about being caught with my pants down… literally. I take every precaution to ascertain that the least amount of people ever can attribute that stray fart or that relieved sigh following the tinkle (or splash) behind closed doors to me. Call it silliness or some milder form of OCD or whatever. Does it really matter as long as I am plagued with it? There’s something constantly new and exposing about excretion; about the indignity involved in producing waste matter. It’s so unglamorous. But it is out of our control. Really really. Our body is responding in those times to one of the many primal urges it still retains and that leaves me raw, exposed. Human? Lol. Some people probably don’t give a shit (seriously, no pun intended). I give one too many as far as shits (literal or metaphoric) are concerned.

I bring my vulnerability up because today, I stepped into someone else’s quite unintentionally and if I had had but a moment’s notice or warning, I mightn’t have. Not because the person in question fills their time with my petty, air headed musings or because they feel some profound insecurity (which is really what this is all about) about using the loo in public. No, this was the sort of vulnerability I surely must share with another human being or seven billion.

The million dollar question: What do you do with skid marks in someone else’s loo? It’s their loo, it’s their space. The question here isn’t about ownership, its about reaction.

Does your view of that person shift for a nanosecond or for a lifetime? Not a passing judgement, not a hygiene call, your view. The fundamental way you understand them or see them.Do they become more human, more relatable? After those first few seconds of stark revulsion, do you appreciate the humanity in being the uninvited witness of that vulnerability? Do you appreciate the true meaning of six degrees of separation behind the toilet walls?

I did.

I mean, fuck it. My irrationalities will be here tomorrow and probably after that. But for the love of God, I can find an appreciation for that human being who takes a dump and means it. We are human. We shit. We shit and then we die. That is my bible of life’s vicious cycle.

 

Journaling