Northern Lies Vs Northern Lights

The aurora borealis is migrating to the states. Hues of magenta, emerald and violet are mingling with the northwestern air, diluting magnetic storms. People are driving in herds  to catch a glimpse. They are moving as far as the Sierra foothills, anointing the bay in symphonies of color. The Northern lights whisper a language, above music, even. I have a light that replicates them in my bedroom, and sometimes I pretend I can become one. , flickering and dancing in color, a flush of light, irregular and strange.. A spatial oddity with no fixed location. 

One myth is that they connect us to the Otherworld, a dimension of unreality, of immortal beings and valiant armies of dragons and warrioresses. Others say they form an arch, a rainbow bridge, that transfer Odin’s chosen people towards valhalla. I imagine they are doorways, to different places in time

I hope this strange celestial song becomes a time stamp. A marker of when I made lasting promises to myself, to stop leaving doors to the past ajar, hoping the light will creep in. If I knew how to become the aurora bourealis, I would have anointed you with clarity. Brushed away your doubts, the thoughts that didn’t belong to you. My teacher said, Good Women with Pure Hearts can Time Travel. If I could traverse time and space, I would make myself little again, maybe visit you. Prevent anyone from ever hurting you. Try and prevent your heart from hardening. Ask God to work through me. Cloak you with a northern light. 

I never got to be delicate, like I can be. Devastatingly soft.  You didnt keep my secrets and you are lucky as shit that I kept yours. But that's what I am good at, holding onto peoples pain for safe-keeping. I am just a girl who seeks answers, who tries to fix everyones pain. I carry other peoples aches and I listen and try and let god pass through me. These lights are going to reach into me and burn up the past with a hungered velocity, and maybe make you my background actor, a terminally unique side character, who serves to hold contrast to someone with braver moves and kinder words.

Your mouth is massive and you have opinions you don’t pair with action. You say things about me that boomerang back to me through the grapevine, striking me in the heart. Cruel. It makes me feel sick and like a little girl. You talk a slick, quick, game about genuinity and then won’t look at your feelings without assuming they are trying to control you.

You have eyes that look like crazy frog eyes and you can’t be still. You are “crazier” than me. You have weird hands. You are good with them. You could’ve been a good sculptor, or good at finger banging. Wouldn’t know though, don't think we tried that. You can carve and play and type. Your fingers point in alternate directions and you flail your hands around with the velocity of someone who knows he is right. 

You can continue to call me crazy, which I will continue to interpret as  shorthand for:

Nuanced,

Interesting,

Nonlinear,

Bold 

And 

otherworldly

 and I won’t say anything else about you, ever. When I open my mouth to speak about you I am feeding that invisible cord. Maybe it has supplied you with the most interesting lore, as you let my personhood be butchered as dinnertime entertainment. But discussing you left me with nothing. It may have taken a miracle, but I am being propelled forward. Towards the kind of certainty that deserves good time traveling women. 

The Northern Lights are in California. 

Dorset

When I return to England, I am revisiting a timeline abandoned. I feel almost betrayed that it hasn’t stayed frozen in time. I don’t know if the land should apologize to me, or I to it. The English countryside is very different from America, its pastures hypnotically repetitive. America is varied, its country folk considered crass or uneducated-whereas a country home in the uk is a staple of class. Town cars and land rovers follow narrow roads across vast manicured expanses. Each neat landscape, a panorama of vivid green, kept enclosed by dotted tree tops and church steeples. It’s fields of daffodils and buttercups briefly interrupted by looming manors. These aristocratic renderings of stature and prestige serve as a harrowing reminder of what could have been. Stately homes guarding impressively kept secrets, whilst their tongue tied inhabitants collect dust.

I was raised throwing sticks down babbling brooks, wishing on their safe passage way through unfixed streams. Walks up hod hill, collecting mud and lilac flowers. Arches in trees became secret passageways, and the wind carried symphonies of petals and leaves, trailing behind me as I catapulted through fields.   I woke up to the sounds of alarmist birds, listened to cautionary tales of misbehaving children and Beatrix potter.  These stories never curtailed my tantrums, nor my propensity to collect tangles and bruises. I learnt how to walk with books on my head, and how to indicate I was done with my meal using the angles of resting silverware. At times, my spine would be tied to the back of a chair to ensure I had good posture. Christian values, with an overdeveloped understanding of Shakespeare.

Perhaps there is a timeline where I stayed in England. I would garden and bark at a chorus of dogs in a stern bun, wear cashmere vests and Wellington boots. Go hunting, hike at dusk and hold court in a antique of a home. Dress long wooden tables in Cath kidson and ornate candelabras, collect floral placemats and antique China. I would cook game and dote on a man lying to himself. I could marry like my mother or her mother, trade in my hunger for truth, my conquests for adventure, over to the predictability of an entertaining tyrant. Study his ticks and temperaments til I forgot my own. Maybe never feel, only think. Have a metaphorical or spiritual lobotomy and spend my days chasing amnesia.

The Dorset countryside always acted like a magical opioid, almost powerful enough to subdue my rebellion. It’s sleepy thatched cottages, pastel painted hobbit holes, and open air traverse time. It is a toy town. I don’t tell my grandmother I have been visiting her garden in my head for years, or that I know her favorite bird is a Robin and that her parents were murdered.

These manicured pastures, trimmed and tame, don’t seem to match the geometry of my soul. I am unkempt, doing guerilla investigative journalism at my grandfathers funeral. I say the true thing. Inciting, catalyzing. Making everyone second guess inviting.

I let my grown up knowing’s leave impressions on the chilly air. Imagine sending them backwards, then forwards, and all across time. I build freeways of ultraviolet light and go into the past, casting an orb over myself, give my younger self love, peace and protection. I have been so many things. So many ages, so many moods and octaves in frequency. I imagine sending love to them all. I find snail shells and think they would make better clocks. We always seem to revisit old energy with clearer understandings.

private part

 My street is an alcove of impossibility, carved from the shell of an opal. A Los Angeles Lagoon, a miracle molded from this noisy enigma of a city. Shielded from the eagerness of everyone else, and their galleries of falsehood.  It is something I scribbled into a journal sprung to life, like a holographic configuration of a teenage daydream. God lives here. Curtained by lush greenery, its threshold tended by blue singing birds.The cathedral, the church, the cunt and the club. My street means, “protected one” in german, and I live next to Odin and Alcyone, a Nordic Viking God and A Pleidian Stargate. In the morning, it is so still, I feel suspended. Impossible.

My 8am probably feels like your six am.

You unnerve me and amuse me. You are impossible to hate but your choices infuriate me. Even in silence, there are subterranean somatics that ripple in all directions.    One look and I am back, hip deep into you, on the verge of rapturous electrocution. When I look at you I feel the permanence of everything. An explosive fusion of two chromosomes, of atoms. I see the future and the past all at once. Forever waves of an inconsolable ocean. I fell in and I don't know how to come back.

If you were here, and not there,  I would offer you protection. Be your holy place, ignite you. Curate reverence inducing beauty, and eradicate your hatred. Heal your wounds, grant you warmth. A fireplace in the evening, lit to ensure you would never be blacklisted for your bravery. I don't do cocaine anymore, but I can restore your health. Unlike her, the flowers I keep are always alive. My bed sheets are egyptian cotton, and they will safely escort you, in a gondola, towards the right kind of dream. I vacuum in high heels and I cook gourmet dinners. I get my self esteem from hauling my ass up the mountain, and I match make garden snails. The only conflict we have would be resolved by mud wrestling. I could get on my hands and knees and help unearth any remaining genius.  I could swaddle you in faraday blankets and be promiscuously honest.  Extinguish your doubts, surrender all of my agendas. Swallow your sins. Bow down to you in servitude, with innocence. I don't make music, but I can listen. I would eradicate your fear, resurrect your wildness. We wouldn’t need any spectators.

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.