Make it Forever !!!

constant rejuvenating synchronous perfection

“Inside of me there are lighted candles, live fires, shadows, spaces, open doors, shelters and air currents. Inside of me there is color and warmth.” Anais Nin

The rainbow energies that course through my veins have been appearing on-and-off for years, starting in my senior year days of concentrated meditation and subsequently lost to me and ever-returning; and as of this December, they’re back. 

The shift may have occurred earlier, actually. It was Thanksgiving, but more importantly Thursday, and I felt this great warmth drop from my forehead to my chest and then into my stomach, and then I couldn’t stop crying, and this feeling brought the great realization that if I love my friends, I should probably make some kind of effort to communicate that love, and then I texted my friend and drove to San Francisco and we went to an art show on Lucky St. and drank soursop juice from the corner store and I fell asleep in my hotel that night with the crisp white sheets drawn up to my chin and an immense warmth permeating every space in my body

.

I stared at this courtyard in SF for several minutes to try and take a mental picture. It’s more beautiful in my head than it is here but u get the point.

I wanted to write to you the second it happened to me, but I lacked the words to describe what actually happened. I still don’t have the words. It was difficult to trust. I don’t tend to trust good feelings. I struggle to define what constitutes a good feeling. I experience good feelings in incremental flashes, and lately I make note of them - I felt good driving home from the radio station at 5pm last night, blasting underscores’s Wallsocket, the vibrant rolling green of campus illuminated in dusky marine blue. I felt good in yoga class. I felt good dancing with my friends and sweating my makeup off last weekend in a warehouse somewhere. I felt good drunk in the hot tub my roommates and I broke into. I felt good listening to the frogsong outside my bedroom window, one of the many offerings of Santa Cruz January. Santa Cruz January is marginally less depressing than anywhere-else January; little red leaves stick to my boots; I drink black coffee in a shell-blue mug and watch glittering raindrops fall off silver tree branches. I languish less and talk to my friends more. I struggle to determine when the shift really occurred. Maybe it was before that Thursday, in the wake of our Animal Crossing-themed funeral/housewarming party, in which we laid our old lives to rest in a fire ritual and stayed up all night talking over chamomile tea. Maybe it was afterwards, when I realized recently I’d been crying more in awe of the universe rather than in spite of it, and talking on the phone to the person I left behind suddenly felt easy again, natural. Maybe God doesn’t hate us, after all, I thought.

I’m aware that my attempt to outline this shift’s significance, or predict its legacy in advance, is just another way I repeat a pattern. Reading my diary from sophomore year of high school reminds me I’ve been looking for a swift and meaningful exit from pain all my life. Every other week, it seems I’d have a revelation; I’d drive to the beach one day, witness a thunderstorm the next, stumble upon a particularly resonant quote or song to which I could affix my life and its loose change, and then I’d write in my diary that I was “better now”, that I was no longer brokenhearted, or deeply depressed, because I’d found the answer! I refused to acknowledge the cyclical nature of my moods. I didn’t want to anticipate the return to regularly scheduled programming, the disheartening ennui of hot sweaty Valley high school life. To live in the waiting period is exhausting. When people tell me progress isn’t linear, I think to myself: yeah, I’ve seen that Instagram infographic, too.

And I can’t shake the fear that half of 20 has slipped through my fingers. Even turning 20 I knew it wouldn’t be like 19, an age that, based on completely subjective value alone, felt fiery, dynamic, trailblazing. 20 feels awkward, weak-elbowed, a little washed out. And I spent the first six months of it unbelievably depressed. I started a whole new life and couldn’t seem to retain anything from it. I watched things happen to me through the filmy lens of detachment. I danced in the forest. I watched the sunset almost every evening. I started sitting with myself, cross legged, chest open, face and palms up to the sun, meditating between classes. I met EVABOY. I fell asleep in strangers’ beds, albeit uneasily. I stargazed in fields, back to the flat grass, staring out into the great black, imagining myself hanging from the bottom of the Earth. I got bit on the shoulderblade by a black widow and the pain made me see God. 

One such fire ritual

Still, somehow, what I remember most vividly is the distinct lack of anything worth remembering. Padding around my white-walled apartment before any of my roommates moved in, making pourover coffee, filling journals with my neuroticism, looking for any excuse to get out of the house but unable to escape my grief in any new place I ended up. I couldn’t get myself to romanticize it. Even with massive ancient evergreens towering above me, even with the freezing Pacific Ocean lapping at my feet, even all wrapped up in strangers’ arms at parties or on dewy trampolines or kitchen tables eating buttered toast, I could not find anything beautiful about my pain. I still can’t.

20, then, appears to me in glimpses. In the crucifix hanging above the drink menu at my favorite coffee shop which is also the Shrine of St. Joseph, or watching the storm roll in over the Monterey Bay, or spending time with my friends back home, cooking dinner, fighting with the plug, pulling off PCH to split raspberry gelato four ways and stare out into the black ocean. December put some color back into my face. My lungs suck up a little more air. I’m less afraid. Post-dinner party, lying on my stomach on the carpet of my friend’s room, sharing a December-cold Coors Banquet, as he plays me a song he’s been writing on guitar, with lyrics about love that I fight the urge to think about. It’s not his first work of art containing ambiguously about-love lyrics, and I’m tiring of analyzing each one to determine the subject material. I’m watching his fingers slide over the fretboard, clumsily but less so than the last time he played guitar for me, and strikingly earnestly, and listening to these lyrics and thinking, I finally feel 20. What a 20 thing to happen. 

A very serious phone call being made?

There’s a phenomenon you experience when you hit a certain level of prolonged pain, in which the pain is so great and all-consuming that you have no choice but to observe it as if hovering slightly over your own body. You can see the tidal wave coming before it crashes over you and consumes you completely, and you have a moment of clarity in knowing how fucked you’re about to be. I’ve found a great sense of peace in this feeling - my pain feels so inextricable from my identity that I usually don’t get the opportunity to see it as an entity separate from myself, but in the small gap between me and the pain, I observe the boundaries of our beings. I begin to observe my own patterns in every stage. I see that I am the universe taking a certain arbitrary shape. The universe’s shape, in my case, a brunette white girl from The Valley, a small dot on a great multidimensional spectrum, sitting cross legged in a library in a small forest town in California having a caffeine induced anxiety attack. A cocktail shaker of elements, that which take form around me elsewhere in armchairs and books and trees and smoke rising from chimneys and other talking, breathing, cosmic cocktail shakers.

And, like the rest of the universe, I blink in and out. I blink out and I lose focus; I lose myself in the nearly five minutes it takes to unlock my car with my eroded key, or the perceived disconnect from another being who I desperately want to connect with, or in the complex matrix of my neural pathways that repeatedly fire down the lines of unworthiness and mistrust. I become paranoid. I become jealous, insecure, I retreat inwards, I become deeply avoidant. I get stuck creatively, I feel stagnant, restless; I forget the temporary nature of problems and emotions and become fixed to this singular miserable reality, marked by a refusal to give it up and understand that my mind will change later, maybe sooner than I think. I’m tapped out, to put it simply. And then, at random, I tap back in. The world around me is no longer a backdrop - I feel its perpetual motion, its endlessly unforeseeable and yet undeniably present opportunity. I look around me and suddenly the man seated next in the armchair next to mine is filled with frenetic energy, his windbreaker moving with the rise and fall of his breath, his hands moving in the same nervous gestures my hands move in. Suddenly, it occurs to me how many people love me, and how much I love them, too, and it occurs to me that what I don’t see is there, too, that reality isn’t limited to my perception of it. I feel myself drop back into my body. I’m filled with radiance. I look through eyes of wonder, of forgiveness, of unflinching acceptance of the perfection of the present moment, regardless of what’s actually happening in it. How could it not be perfect? I’m here in it. It’s this concept of perfection that’s carried me through the last several months of seeming meaninglessness, of absurdity, that’s provided me with a sense of intuition, which I usually have a lot of difficulty defining and tapping into. Constant, rejuvenating, synchronous perfection - and every time I blink out, I can always blink back in.

Me & my beloved friends dancing; been feeling very electric blue lately

My problem, then, is that I stay blinked out for months on end. I operate in much of my day-to-day life with a sense of complete disconnect from infinity. The present moment is not big enough to hold me, so my being spills out into the past, of which I am constantly trying to make sense, and into the future, which doesn’t exist, and therefore can’t hold me, either. Here and now is not enough. In those moments I blink in, my focus quickly becomes making it last forever, which sets me up for disappointment pretty quickly. Those moments of clarity don’t last long for me, and it seems that as quickly as I blink in, I blink right back out. I get locked out of my car again. I find another micro interaction to analyze. Another person to project fear onto. When it’s not a person, it’s myself, and when it’s not myself, it’s the void. Barely stopping to realize they’re all the same thing. Just another destination for my wound to seek familiar ground on. In those moments, I forget I’m everything else, I’m everyone else, we’re all fragments of something much bigger, something that used to be one. I forget it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true. 

So much of the time I ask myself what is keeping me here; why can’t I consider any option other than to keep moving forwards? It’s not like I’m enjoying myself, like, 80% of the time. But I see no other way around it. Even with the prospect of being vaguely miserable forever, there’s just no other solution in my brain. Something within me is far too cosmically in-tune to lose myself completely. 

Pre-party pasta with Tiffany

Of course, I bend the narrative at will. I write about the frogsong but not the smashed frog rotting outside my apartment, his foamy guts all over the concrete. I write about the ecstasy of understanding, the magnetism of prolonged eye contact with the people I love most, but not the ache of trepidation before and after and often during the time I spend with them, the constant dissatisfaction, the unease. I don’t write about all the time I spend crying in my car after therapy until my sinuses feel like I drank pool water. Or the white-hot flashes of jealousy that send me to the bathroom to throw up mid-conversation. I don’t write about the inner voyeur whose ugly presence has infected my waking life lately, turning me into someone who judges other girls’ ponytails and sucks in my stomach in the mirror for no one. I don’t write about the ache of the mundane, how the landscape around me, bejeweled with glittering rain and ancient evergreens and families of deer and sprawling sunsets that stop me in my tracks, always ends up looking like drab and 2D when filtered through my ungrateful eyes, just another backdrop to mull over my dull and ultimately deeply boring pain against. On the bus, I start counting every time I make myself suffer in my head - I reach 10 instances before getting off at my final stop.

You told me you were scared of going back to the way it was when you were coming down last May. You were scared because you weren’t high anymore and you still felt good. You asked if it could be forever like this. If maybe there was no catch. I don’t have an answer for you, but I hope you were onto something.

Typa shit I’ve been on