18

My sister called me in tears and I answered before she spoke.

“You can’t beat yourself up. Don’t feel guilty about it. You didn’t do anything to be ashamed of.”

I could feel her feelings emanating through the phone.

“I feel so sad, I feel everything he’s feeling. I feel all of him and I want it to stop. “

She had sex for the second time in her life, and had been ghosted.

My sister and I are different in many ways. Her irish chin, my wide set eyes. I am always busy, moving around, productivity-pilled. She gets in the door and immediately lies down, surrendering to whatever atmosphere she is in. When Im hurt, I get angry first, sad later. She is the opposite. Water and Fire. I shield my vulnerability with overconfidence, she does it with nonchalance. My sister and I are different in disposition,in temperament, but we share one fatal flaw and insatiably important gift: sensitivity.

When I was 18, I snuck out a lot. Fiending the freedom in first kisses and first cars, clumsy in my trust. Had sex until it felt like my soul swapped homes. Was ghosted, dismissed, rubbed off, as if you can exchange fluids and atoms, ideas and atmospheres with someone, and it can disappear. It never does. So where does it go? Where does it all go?

Into us.

I was 21 before I stopped numbing out. I had to go to the ocean and sever ties with everyone I had been with, the salt water slapping my thighs, covered my palms in olive oil and read psalms to an imagined orchestra of Mid Men.

 And this was before biochemical warfare. 

She told me she absorbed everything he felt, and adopted it like sick dog. I do this too, and explain that girls like us have to be careful. We can end up accidentally superglued to someones internal terrain, and if they don’t garden it, were fucked. I give her herbs, a sparkler to make a wish, hot chocolate with adaptogens, a blanket. I cook her steak. Get her to text my healer. I am angry for her.

The climate of neurodivergence and inhumane interpersonal disassociation is a symptom. A symptom of a three generational spiritual war we are living in. She's feeling what he isn’t addressing. Women are stargates. Shes been detoxing for nearly six months, and what she takes on from him, she’ll have to transmute. A week ago, I felt the ancestors of everyone I’ve ever been with dislodge from my solar plexus, and hamper out like some sort of militant army. The level of aftercare it takes HAS to be worth the energetic exchange. Most 18 year old boys are shite and some of the older ones are worse, but you can't be bitter because it will make your insides rot. Bitterness will make you age faster and you have to fight off apathy with an open heart. You have to fight to stay vulnerable. Don’t be like them, the cold ones. They are liars. You can hold compassion and you can pray for them. Pray that they remember Love and therefore remember God. 

I cry for her and I cry for me, because this isn’t how things are supposed to be, this is no rom com. It is parasitic heartless robots against those clinging onto the thread between body and soul for dear life.

I love amorphous vantage points, places that look like they could be anywhere. If I toy with my perception, I am in a jungle, my garden is a fortress impenetrable, guarding against the fake rain and the fake people.

I am my own housewife, lover, witness, best friend. I build a violet firewall, I avoid static,misinformation,  interruption and interference. It's the spring equinox, and Persephone is resuscitated and returned from the underworld.  Hope jumps through the canyon like delicate insects, and flowers begin to congregate beneath the floorboards. I wonder if Hollywood is actually Hollow, and I trade my overhead lights for candles. An invisible exhibition. I try to bring the northern lights into my bedroom, built on a slant, tipping gently under cherubs. In that precarious place between sleep and waking, I imagine I have wings, and I clean the skies.

I was born homesick in my own body, as was my mother, and hers, and even hers: But I am working backwards. Bent over, hip deep in grandiose omnipresent recall. Light filaments unfold in my spine and my genetic code shifts for the better. My vulnerability is beautiful to me, and when the avalanche of lies I am plucking out of our world seems inconsolable,

 I face forward, 

And

I tell the fucking truth.

I want to speak fluent french

I want to not hate the french

I want to meet a dragon

I want good luck

I want protection

I want to be taken to the movies

I want to know what he meant by that

I want to disappear to a foriegn country

I want to be anonymous

I want to be found

I want to be known

I want to sit in his lap

I want to destroy my phone

I want everyone to remember god

I want a vodka soda

I want a pint of holy water

I want to keep talking

I want to get to the top of the mountain

I want clarity

I want steadfast assuridty 

I want certainty

I want to traverse the entire landscape of america

I want to make him breakfast

I want to wear more dresses and less make up

I want to be a better gardener

I want my parents to come over more

I want to protect my sister from the world

I want to save my brother from heartache

I want to know everything

I want to surrender my physical mobility over to a man

I want to be pupettered like a doll by someone who loves me

I want my mom to be spontaneous again

I want her to feel more loved

I want to run away

I want the truth

I want to stay put

I want to be as light as paper

I want to levitate in the supermarket

I want to merge with a tree

I want to be read to

I want to destroy the government

I want to scream

I want to instantly know surfing

I want to visit the oldest cave

I want to know what happens next month

I want a shotgun

I want answers

I want a clothes line and linen skirts

I want monogram uggs

I want an unvaccinated cocker spaniel

I want to meet more elves

I want to go off roading

I want to give roadhead

I want to be pure

I want to be stopped

I want to be encouraged

I want a venison steak

I want to ride a deer

I want to love and know love and never need or want anything

I am crossing a threshold of one home to another, occasionally wishing I wasn’t a human that needed so much, but rather some sort of sprite that wears flowers and feeds on clouds. The past week has just been boxes. There seems to be an unsettled air of anticipation about, between heavy, unnatural rainfall and earthquakes. The faultlines are waning and groaning beneath me, and I can see static dance around things and people. I have never been able to read minds, but I can see where peoples pain comes from with an acute agility that doesn’t seem to plateau. 

Adulthood hits you by force, and you recognize the importance of reliability, adaptability, the gift of being able to discern real human drama from those that are invented. When you are chucked out of stagnation by some external shift. You realize you want grocery store runs and not to run away, you want to fix your sink and people that suit up and show up. That you have to be your own genie, guardian, gardener- whatever.

My dad never kept to many friends, but the ones he held on to were solid. Statues. I spent my childhood surrounded by a rotation of musicians and painters while my neural pathways were soft like clay, still forming, absorbing some talents while others decayed. Home was always busy, loud, bustling, warm, chaotic, funny, dramatic. Musical. It created this unrelenting propensity and desire to be immersed in music, to become one with an atmosphere. To let it invade your body, creep into you- til you are it- and it is you, and you cant tell where it ends and you begin. A myriad of motions and colors. A symphony of cells, being seamlessly puppeteered to one fluidic rhythm. This is what separates good dancers from great ones. Surrender.

Youniform

I don’t know where I left my leather jacket, or tooth necklace- though I speculate. I have historically been careless with the material, too nonchalant and sloppy. My head tilted sideways, always speculating some much more refined and important otherworld. My imagination always holding  much more colorful and interesting contours than so much I’ve seen on earth. I used to wear a Maroon school uniform, in London. A monogrammed blazer, tie, beret, pleated skirt, wool tights and mary janes. Every morning was a scavenger hunt, as I followed my own forgetful trail in circles around my parents apartment. I am half convinced that I had hid these things from myself. My hollywood problems still seem minuscule in comparison to this impressive morning dance I recited each morning, eager to play a game with my own subconscious.

My mind hasn’t been the same since you charged through it, stomped through it. Dirty, profound. Like a uniform i left somewhere, I cant help but feel as if this dance is by my own hand.  My neural pathways stretched to new and unfamiliar banks, my walks no longer solitary. Devastating. You scare me much more than I scare you.

In the past year I have died, been resurrected, been important and unimportant. Wanted identity and sworn I would give it up.I walked my pain through tundra, dessert and moor. Tried to stomp it out, block it out, sus it out. Sent out eviction notices from my headspace. Revised, demonized, excorisized.  Prayed. Did all the things, the cord cuts, the medicinal purges, was silent, held solitude. Docked like a ship with no sail. I thought if I cleaned myself from the inside out I could scrub clean vignettes of my world. Change the omnipresent by clearing my own blood.

I bent over backwards and recognized you, the restlessness, the thinning patience. The hunger to consume and understand every molecule in the room, motivated by sheer survival. Your shuffling, pacing. That indecisive lament as you attempt to reconstruct and reconfigure your wild. Dress up your wild in some tight outfit. Package it. Make it digestible and approachable. 

I don’t hurt because I feel bad for me, I hurt because I feel bad for you. We could have had midnight in the afternoon, disney and deep state dissected cartoons,  You could teach me to be cruel like you, to be cool like you. To adopt apathy like a sick guard dog and shut down on command. I would have taken your sickness and made it my own, but as I said, you don’t like seem to value wild things. And I am bad with uniforms. 

Ireland

Something strange happens to me on this land. My eyes get greener, my hair stays in braids. I take on the appearance of something half woman, half creature. Giggling, dancing. Walking becomes an urgent rite, as if my feet need to reach all four corners of the country. I start to see shapes in the trees and bushes, trunks weaving into twisted waists, whistling in the wind like strange women. Nymphs emerge from lichen patterned bark, winking out at these bright distances.  Peering over babbling brooks, the water rippling in perfect spirals. An impressive reminder of the non linear nature of reality.

Ireland. My land.

Even in the streets, there is a beat, a drum, a beckoning. The rainwater, cobblestones and clapping feet seem to form an orchestra. Accompanied by the sing-songy voices of its inhabitants. We visit sides, fairy mounds, battle grounds, burial spaces. When I go to sleep, the earth seems to coddle me with a heavy tenderness.

The earth reconfigures in front of you, like a story that was never told. It’s language -an inexhaustible thread, weaving, creating, callibrating matter on the pathway ahead moment to moment. Shaping as it is told. Pastures of rumpled mushy volumes and brilliant greens seem to exist without beginning or end. Their indefinite distances peer back at me in an intimate complicity. Recurrent and immutable, unmoving, striking. Immune to the lies of man.This plain was once wilder than it is now, a place containing inconceivable power and majesty. Raised by Rebels. Pirates. Fighters. Masters of the Sea and Land. Run down by a war without conclusion-ongoing- its mystery shrouded by the solemn and cubic structures of the Church. This pain is felt like a nuclear ripple, sounding out from inside the earth. The non linear nature of time impresses a constant reminder of this poorly disguised mystery, every sacred site a stones throw away from the Roman Catholic Church. I heard they built over the oak trees, the elder trees, the holly trees. Attempted to form a monopoly over the inherent magic and its existing geometry.  These priests, and their Babylonian Witchcraft, promised this land salvation. Configured prose of half truths, struck down trees for steeples. Dressed in ostentatious tablecloths, turning bodies into food and wine into blood. Spewing lengthy descriptions of hell, sacrifice, and ornate exhibitions of the mutiliation of a savior. The irregular Sun, a blazing chasm, is infrequent, but when it impresses its light onto these hills, I swear, I swear they are singing.

holy grill

The Sun sees all of your best moments. The Sun has never seen your nighttime activities, your most debaucherous encounters. But the Moon has seen all of it- every drunken stumble, every flirtatious conversation, every scantily clad ensemble, every docile limp to grab a 2 am water.

Sometimes I sit on pure dirt, an actual hill of dirt, in beachwood, and I watch the clouds. Not in a romantic way, but in an attempt to detect which ones are manufactured and which are real. I’m getting very good at it.

They are like smiles, from people out here. I scan the skies quiet bruising as if I am detecting mutant kindness. Pacified, petrified, lacking sincerity. Who is a mutant? Who is gone? There is an invisible enemy. It came from another dimension. It hops, travels, jumps. But magic without real love is just technology, just external. It can’t be sustained.

 Magic with love can traverse all previous damage.

Sometimes I watch the sky, and I am comforted by the notion you are beneath the same one- however false. Like a distant bride of stars and sun, stifling through dunes of delusion, delirium. I am trying to extracting fact from fiction, erasing metals from every cell of my body, forking out grief, as if it is an incessant orchestra that enters every room. I believe in you and god equally because you both seem to be in every room I’m in. 

They say the best way to predict the future is by creating it. I am paralyzed by this,  immobile, incapable of drawing conclusions out of fear that they could impact something so important.I would like to think of myself as unforgettable. Not necessarily the softest, nor the easiest to digest. Ephemeral, seasonal, mercurial. But growing, improving, steadily. Loyal. Not the prettiest but the  most interesting. I owe you a kiss and a kick in the nuts. 

It’s been an apocalyptic year, a year of religious revelation, a year of unprecedented growth impossible to turn back on. I put a lot of faith in the make-believe. I may have macro dosed delusion. May have given in to antiquated paradigms of regret and mistrust. I have dislodged the succubus energy that was nestled in my sacral, harvesting male attention. Drawn the conclusion that male attention is abundant and of low value. 

 Women are seasonal and changing, and I hope you can forgive me now that I am growing up a little bit. . I think i loved you before I knew you, even.

Teeth

This liminal season is odd.  Revealing but quiet. The days shorten and the overcast sky hums ancient songs. Truth is billowing through the ether, creeping down sunset boulevard. Weaving its way through the labyrinth of characters. The buildings begin to look a bit uglier when they arent propped up by the sun. I want to recoil back, into that soft place of receptivity. Reflecting. Waiting and waning. Wanting forgiveness and resolution.

I used to think that being fast was more important than anything. I used to race the fastest boys barefoot on grovel, through battersea park, in London. Sporting grazed knees and notted hair in a maroon school uniform. A speedy, unkempt creature. A child of my mothers intermittent neglect and bouts of my fathers excessive wisdom. I liked to draw maps all the time of fairy villages, mermaid coves and pirate ships. I thought that quicksand would be a more common adult problem. I was obsessed with having a family and also with orphans. I had the unrefined knowings and quick tongue of a child forced to seek solace from more suitable imaginary world.

Turns out, being fast isn’t a trait admired in adult women. Quicksand is not a common issue, and no one really wants to see your weird maps. I still prefer my own solitude, enjoy having the leisure and freedom of following spontaneous nudges without being observed. I have mastered the delicate art of becoming my own witness.

I’d prefer, personally, to avoid the petulant impatience that arises when adhering to anyone else’s clock.

Other than a few people. 

I am better at conserving resources. I’m approaching my Saturn return, although I think I may have somehow delayed it, through a combination of

Boron

Iron

Good clothes

Magnesium
Salt

Oxcidizers

Moisturizer

Black Walnut

Clove

Wormwood

Celibacy strikes in Gods name

And not celebrating any age.  

I have clear knowings about certain things but never the things I really want to know about. I don’t want any credit. These clear knowings are stark, brutal, painful, and immense. They can only be accessed through love.  It’s never been about the things I want to know about. It’s never interpersonal or selfish.

You take one piece of this hologram, a microcosm, and if you love it enough, if it fascinates you enough- you get graced with a deeper understanding of the big picture.

I have been right about things I didn’t to be right about- and I’m working on not giving everything away.

Even if I sometimes see things from a place above time. Even if I know it to be true. 

Certain people for example- I can never tell if I am presently hated or adored. My capacity for invisible and imaginary correspondence is harrowing and unnerving, even for me. I have never been able to pick logical counterparts. Rich and famous men are devoid of soul, and now even the younger ones are balding. Fragmented. I am finely attuned to people god likes to scatter into my reality like bizzare holographic inserts.  The last time I lied was when I said I didn’t care, when I acted too cool to have feelings that have paralyzed me in complicated webs. my insurmountable pride is my biggest character defect. 

And I have extracted whatever was lodged in my sacral, that hunger for control.

 Avoidant and projecting. I forgive everyone who I hurt myself through. Excorisms and oxcidizers. I am like a vile of truth serum with legs, spurting out deranged, but correct, opinions.

There are only two roads: Power or Love. And you can’t ever maintain both. The power route is a pain path. It tricks you into thinking there's love to be gained from an epoch of status. 

The love route- it's harder. Involves communication, vulnerability, swallowing aforementioned pride, patience, restraint,

and of course, adhering to other peoples fucked up janky clocks. Even if you see from a place above time.