All the roads we have to walk are winding

What about this skin I have? What am I supposed to do with it once it's clean from a perfect September? And, while I'm asking questions, what does it mean to wash the shadows off? Where do we go?

But what about the unkind?

But also, the divine?

These questions are irrelevant.

Irreverent.

What Sunshine Do You Bring?

I'm writing this for you. Not actually, because knowing would be something completely different. But I think I'm writing this for you. You eat the day, tenderly, with just a tad bit of salt. And the way you brush your hair? I love it. That's why I'm writing this for you. Also, you walk like pop rocks, and I dig that. You talk to me, sunset colors in your voice. Oh, and the hushed sound of wings ripping through air.

Don't be confused. This isn't a love poem. I don't write those.

I just wanted you to know, that a few times a day, I write for you. In a way that's not actually writing, but in a way where I notice things (because that's what I do, I notice things) and think, I want to write that. I want to write that for you - always.

Here's what I want to say: mortal sins are sins but so are venial sins, but not in the same way.

Love is like that, too.

Love is like that, too. (but this isn't a love poem). It just isn't.

This Old House Is Falling Down Around My Ears

I'm doing the most graceful pirouettes in this dizzying time of interim. A year from now seems blurry. A week from now is blurry. But right now, it feels good to pick up the fruits and eat them, to get red faced with whiskey, to pick apart the scales of the freshwater mermaid.

Life is myth. Or some lives are myth: superstition buried in the sand of Utah, love swirling around, tap dancing with the Tropic of Cancer, destruction with a fancy paper mask.

(Destruction with a fancy paper mask.)

you live, you learn

The water always works it's magic into my body. Early morning fog, heavy like grief - mayflies resting easily - the smell of slate rocks and dew. It's alchemy. It's medicinal. It's a balmy affair, sincere with understanding. There is never a trip to the lake that leaves me unsatisfied.

Can I say those things even if this trip was wrought with a dissonance so uncomfortable I had to shift my heart; stick my hand under my sternum and adjust that thing, slippery with pain? I think I can. The thing about magic is it's mysterious. And we can let it be.

Let me just tell you this: my cousin killed a snake. I begged him not to. Tried to reason with him. Please, you know? I said. I said, it doesn't make sense to kill for the sake of killing. That snake is hurting no one, that snake is just being a snake. Sitting in the water like we do. Sitting and resting like the mayflies. Sitting like this lake sits - peaceful and full of life and essential his surroundings.

My papa, with his wide brimmed hat to shade his nose from the sun, said he was an adult before he could give respect to life the way it deserves. He confided he used to kill birds. He used to kill birds with a gun to just kill birds with a gun. And, he continued, he wished he didn't. He has shame folded up and hidden in his back pocket. "We grow up," he reminded me.

He said he remembers when he used to hate gay people, too. More shame, more sadness. But we grow up, he said. We grow into love. We grow into understanding. Be gentle with him, he said. Be gentle with him, he'll grow.

The next morning, his friend at the dock died. Heart attack in his houseboat. His widow called my papa first - and we cried and cried. We sat with her while she shook and drank her coffee. My papa promised the dead man's wife that he will finish the eaves-trough on the starboard side - and he'll maintain the boat while she's away. We love you, he told her. We loved him, too. And together, drinking coffee in the quiet, sitting at a table that 4 hours before a dead man sat, we gave life the respect it deserves.

We grow up, you know? We grow into understanding and love. And, this now, I'm sure of.

untitled: a little like my heart

Once, I read this thing in a newspaper. Seriously. In high school, I would read the newspaper. Anyway, I read this thing in a newspaper that said: "Just because someone doesn't love you the way you think they should, doesn't mean he/she doesn't love you." It's true, I suppose. But I'm selfish enough to look at that statement (that obviously made a huge impression) and say, right to it's eyes: Fuck you.

Fuck you.

I don't want to buy that. I don't want to acknowledge that someone may know how to NOT hurt me, and do it anyway. Doesn't seem fair. I offer everyone I know an advantage - because everything I am and everything I'm about is right out in the open.

My dad used to tell my grandmother that I was too vulnerable for my own good. That exposing my feelings the way I do would eventually be my downfall - that surely, it's a fault.

I'm beginning to agree.

We Will Never Die

Few things are barely connected; most things are.

Two things fucked me up real bad today. If they happened to you, maybe it would have been a passing breeze. And if it happened to me yesterday or maybe if it even happened tomorrow, maybe it'd be just nothing, but today: today, these two things were everything. And somehow, I know they are interconnected by delicate strings.

Here they are:

I watched a beetle die today. Much to my protest, this beetle died. And his life ended in front of me. I watched it. Do you get it? I FUCKING WATCHED IT.

I saw a lonely man today with a lame arm.

goddamnit. both things made me want to die. but somehow afterwards, I felt more. Just.. more.

It Feels Like Independence Day

[This one was hard to write. It may be hard to read]

Once, when I was smaller, I was terrified that my aunt and uncle were going to beat someone up in the big blue van they had. And when I say "terrified", I mean that. Memories of the nervous nausea that comes along with that kind of anxiety never leaves you. And I knew they were serious. A few years before, while we were camping at the Prairie Creek Reservoir, they captured a mole around 10am and stabbed it to death with a screwdriver. I begged them. I remember begging them until I threw up to just let it live. They didn't listen; I locked myself in our pop-up camper and cried until I was delirious.

So, I knew they'd do it. This time I didn't protest.

They lived near the rumored gay park in Muncie where, if you were driving through the park at night and someone tapped his brakes at you, it was invitation to get to know each other better. And this just didn't sit well with them. I still don't know the origin of the hate they had. Queer Bashing became an obsession in many conversations and it all became super aggravated after school one day. My cousin came home and said that a man tried to coerce him into his car. Which, I believe happened. Instead of praising my cousin for staying strong and getting away, and thanking their lucky stars nothing happened to their son, my aunt and uncle were furious. This was the night that someone was going to get it real bad, pay for these sins and get dumped near the White River, bloody and broken. They had a plan and I was this little tiny thing, petrified for another living soul.

Yesterday I was reminded of this memory while I was running. Running affords me a lot of time to myself - and yesterday... yesterday, I felt free. Absolutely and stunningly free. Somehow I got out of terrible situations in my formative years unscathed - save my gnawing anxieties. Somehow, even as a tiny, I knew killing a mole with a screwdriver was a disgusting display of brute and possibly the deepest sin I had experienced.

Somehow, even though I was inundated with the gospel that homosexuality was wrong and needed to be punished, I never believed it. I never believed it and I never understood it.

Yesterday I was reminded that sometimes there's a resiliency that needs to be praised.
I was reminded that even though some people hate, some people love. Some people love. Some people love.

And how lucky I am for a million reasons.