Sunday blogs - on the malleability of time and hearts (adaptation of a journal entry)

I feel like I am so used to having a heart half empty feeling. I also, however, do not like being the fool - life is not easy no matter how full one's heart. Everything in the universe these days is speaking patience, albeit going about it blindly. Whatever it is, it stretches, contracts, occurs at a pace you can't always control.

That can both be a good or a bad thing.You can employ it advantageously to leave behind regrettable moments. In the same moment, it can induce anxiety and pain to finally confront that feared leap of faith that you must take to get to where you need to be. Your avoidances eventually catch up with you. But it can also be a process of moving beyond, the part that comes afterwards. The birth of a lesson, strength. There are so many ways we are pushed, pulled, and fastened by time all at once.

The hardest time I have is when I'm hanging on to now. 11:30pm – one of my favorite hours, every day of the week. It's the descent of Indian summer in Brooklyn, and the bedroom lamps are always soft and golden. Fall has always been my favorite season, maybe because it was the closest to the stereotypical seasonal ecosystem that we ever got growing up in San Francisco. I still remember fallen yellowing leaves gathering at my feat in damp piles on my walk home from my bus station after school. For a certain recent virgo suitor, it might entail a hint of shameless zodiac elitism. (We laughed about it already, don't worry.)

I can't stop listening to the blues. It seems like one of the only things that resonates with me strongly right now. One of my musical peers had said that feeling the blues properly is best honored by people who have really been through some shit. And I got to say – the older I get, the more I understand what that really means. I don't notice things as simple as the piles of leaves on my walk home and let them stand in for a memory indicative of a certain time period in my life. My life now struggles to grasp at images. It is, however, dominated by emotions, impulses, and thoughts. I'm not really sure what to make of this, but something tells me it's my brain finally throwing a major tantrum due to the hell it puts itself through. Talk about self destruction.

Naturally, I tell myself it'll all be fine, I've done this before, et cetera. I've moved through pain time and time again. My ability to move is why I am better. And yet, I can't really seem to learn my lesson. I want to be paralyzed. I want to surrender. It's easier. Defiantly, begrudgingly, and often with tears in my eyes, I keep the ball rolling on. No matter the post-panic analysis – i.e. such as why I might always get in the way of my own success as a safety retreating coping mechanism, the good, bad, and the ugly – it can all be washed away with time if you let it. Other people let your mistakes go out of their mind. Why can't you treat yourself the same?

I've been fighting nausea a lot recently. I'm not really sure why. My days feel like they are a million little puzzle pieces, all pushed together in one deeply fragile conglomerate. It is all changing so rapidly, throughout all hours, and sitting deep in my chest at the conclusion of the day with its edges wedged in my ribs.

11:30pm. Wynton Kelly playing Willow Weep For Me, snoring fur baby in a croissant shape. The light hasn't changed. I feel the need to hold my own hand. I find out my ex boyfriend who I used to live with has a new girlfriend and he didn't tell me. Even more so - he beat me to the punch. Maybe it's a good thing. A notion of patience dropped in to my awareness like a pin.

I can think of another time I melted into this hour. When you melt, something a week ago may come to feel more like a month. Time gets all sappy and slow. I'm feeling all this shit, and I sit on my bed alone at 11:30pm, and I am resisting the urge to ask you to freeze time for me again, when after all, it's taken so long and what's so special about you a year ago versus you now -

but sometimes we don't always see the angels when they drop right in front of us.

I do believe, though, that the realization is significant. And like a striking image that I haven't seen since those deeply visceral snapshots that marked my childhood – school walks, among other things – I've recalled the scenes of the past year in high detail around you. I remember walking on the farm, you smoking a cigarette by the stage, cracking jokes with you about the heirloom chickens and turkeys. I remember talking about the tour you were going on with the two front musicians actively beefing, defaulting to your charm and splendor as a safe spot for all – the one that happened right after the gifts and the Hennessy and the terrible bar games and finding how many inches of west village we can kiss on. We went to sleep when the sun was starting to come up. I remember thinking he is the first man who isn't in a rush to get the fuck out of my apartment. For too long I thought that was just how it was supposed to be. Then I remember the pangs of disappointment, the half hearted justifications, that followed those days.

Everything dropped in my mind like perfectly laid seedlings tracing me to what we could actually, feasibly, be. Visual vignettes were never that strong for someone who I used to consider just a work friend and a peer. I'm left with moments of stop-time visuals stacking up like perfectly laid slats. It took me until now to look right at it and admire how startlingly tall that tower became.

It's precisely at this moment – now 11:45pm – that I understand the other fruitless paths, why my heart always feels half empty, conditioned to look down on everything - including my own standards of fundamental, unadulterated love. I thought it was your happiness that you owe for the cost of trauma. And I didn't realize how committed I was to disproving that.

If this tower tumbles like Jenga blocks, so be it. But it would be the first time the shock was warranted – because I caught a glimpse of sappy, saccharine, swirling huge pots of time, and for the first time, it wasn't so far away.

The next feat, at precisely 11:49pm, is shooing away anxious attachment and pardoning the trauma defense team. It tends to go in to overdrive for the folks who's involvement is normal

and patient

and radiates love like a sunbeam

and might teach me a thing or two, if it isn't the most painful and/or beautiful thing I ever do.

Fin, 11:50pm.