I am afraid of girls who fall in love and let it turn to hatred. They  ruminate, dissect, analyze, stalk, deflect, and eventually become bitter. Their chests cave in and their lips get sour. Their posture fails them, and they tell the same stories about men, til they look old and sour. I think of all the heartache that turns women into bitter monsters, medusas, sea creatures. I imagine it collects in the earth like a swamp, waiting to be processed. I think about my Mothers unexpressed need for spontaneity, swallowed, that bled into me like a ticking time bomb. Her appetite for adventure, starved.   I am afraid of shutting my heart down, or of sedimenting into stone. I would prefer to let love destroy me, or animate me. I would prefer to go mad than turn catatonic. 

If we didn't have phones, and I hadnt heard from him, I could have found him using my feelings. I could have tracked him down, because he was closer to me than I asked for, beating out of me like an unwarranted sun. This psychic hunt has no resting place, and it both destroyed and animated me. Drove me around the world. I stopped remembering who or what I was moving for, instructed by some invisible force. Propelled forward like a marionette with astral strings. It was no longer about my elf-lover, or even me. I was trying to heal the original heartache. Following my omnipresent, absentee boss. 

I follow the Magdalene Ley Line to Rome, it's tattered ruins a placeholder for my grief, the vatican, it's thief. 

Italy is burnt orange and brilliant pinks, it's crumbling terrain boasting of golden ages, coral wallpaper peeling off in the citrus infused heat. Ruins of temples and holy spaces scatter the city, like crumbled yellow bone, prodding out like golden teeth. Amidst them, blush watercolor restaurants and bars light up, like a magic carnival, appearing to be resurrected from dust. 

Rome feels like sex, and love, and violence.  Sacrament and sacrifice. I think of demigods, gladiators and goddesses, draped, their generous bosoms cleaving way to dishonest empires. Oracles, nymphs, sprites, and emperors.  I imagine time above me, like a vortex, and all moments occurring at once. I envision braids of light years, weaving together, curving around the dripping grottos and fountains. 

Rome rings with amber light. I am achey. The day time is almost uninhabitable, and my clothes cling to my body. I spend the whole day sparkling, pulsing out big beads of sweat. Glittering, burnt pink and iridescent. I glow, like a lantern. As though I have swallowed the sun. There is a dense wildness that trembles up, through the earth, entering my body in a pillar. It is erotic, but not quite pleasant, nor satiated. I am high from the heat, and the chiseled statues appear to peer down at me. My impulses pull me through the coves and coliseums. If everything wasn't so beautiful, I would surrender to my lethargy. If I didn't honor primitive reflexes, I would be burnt out. 

I pass vibrant markets selling opalescent milks and pungent spices, sweet liqueurs and neon fans. I weave past knobbled caverns, past fountains that spray jade waters into shimmering basins. There are altars carved into stone walkways, saints and angels nestled into eroding walls.  I imagine Vestal Virgins, with flowing botticelli locks, who kept candles burning for years on end. Priestesses, who used their bodies to marry the land to the men, and pull the war out of them with the thrusts of their hips. Italian men are filthy, and I like it. It makes French men look like women. I don't touch any of them, but I can feel their eyes burning holes through my summer dresses. I imagine being grabbed and stolen away. 

In the basque of the new moon, we follow cascading vines and rotting mansions. Tilted up the cobblestoned streets, til dusk hits, and the sky turns amethyst. The city still rings with an amber glow, even at night. The streets hum with crickets choruses, and the buildings seem to heave a sigh of relief for the setting sun. There is a busker, pranging Oasis, outside the keyhole to St.Peter's Cathedral. I envision sending my spirit under it's floor, and retrieving the keys to my soul. 

Vatican city is shaped as a replica of a heart, with perfect anatomy. The steps around the cathedrals, built like ventricles, the passageways, valves. The vast gardens, libraries and galleries, its cardiovascular chambers. It beats with stolen power, like a haunting drum. Not heard, only felt. I follow the Ley Line, like it is a vein, and I am blood. I trace cathedral floors with salt,  urgently oblidging a silent rhythm. Adhering to invisible instructions.  I am plucking out toxins from the earth, extracting monstrosity from the belly of the feminine. I want to untangle this meridian, clear it, like water.  I pray for help, and outline the outskirts of the Vatican. 

I wear a lightning corset and metallic skirt, and parade my fury through it's halls. Each gallery, dotted with sickly looking cupids, and cold statues of roman gods and mean marble men.  My anger rises up, volcanic. My grief, opening up my throat like a flower. These atrocious thieves hoard miles of stolen artifacts.  A mafia of collectors , skeletor, cloaked, doing strange rituals with strange instruments.  I wonder if there are children under the ground. 

I walk, despite my pain, sprinkling salt. I charge forward until I am limping. My feet and legs dusted in sea salt, my braided hair, sticky, like woven honey. I am stealing everything back and giving it to God. And to Ireland. I read poetry to the premises, wash my feet in a fountain. 

We find sanctuary in a restaurant, it's shiny wine bottles winking in the twilight, tea lights strung precariously into vines overhead. There are emerald jars of olive oil and rich cheeses, fat, like miniature moons. Marionette puppets hang off the stone walls, lined with the pearly busts of lost emperors. The food is rich, almost hallucinogenic. We sip champagne cocktails, and I don’t speak about why I am doing what I am doing. I untangle spaghetti, melting into a table, my heart, pranging.

Paris Site

I have a healthy fear of Parisians, a logical skepticism of any city built over tunnels of bones. I  believe the monuments act as giant conduits of energy, the arch ways, portals. The towers and obelisks act as tuning forks to something peculiar. I can respect a city that honors the sky, with it's neatly manicured rooftops and long windows. I hear Paris used to be inhabited by celts, long before its catacombs. It has uprising in it's infrastructure, in it's appreciation of protests, and the way the dead seem to rise out of the narrow streets. It’s sly snobbery has made good art. I respect a place that overthrows monarchy, and I used to think God would never ordain Kings, but now I am not so sure. 

Mary Magdalene's ley line runs thick through this city, and it's felt.  Like a great beating artery. It wakes me up early and keeps me up late.It runs beneath the Lourve, reaches Rome, extending all the way to Rose Bowl Pasadena. I believe it begins in Northern Ireland. Monuments to her are resurrected in great detail with eerie subtlety, and if you weren't looking, you'd probably miss it. These prominent statues feel unclean, misunderstood, bitter.  The energy is so feminine that french men act like bitches. Empathic, so everyone eats facing the street. Thick with unprocessed grief, so everyone smokes. 

We stayed next to a crypt for religious matyrs, a tomb for the priests who died for rebelling against the vatican. Purely coincidental, of course. I break in and ask them for help.  There are statues of lions and fountains that seem to bleed secrecy, gold plated angels and ceilings that tell stories. It's humid, as we slip into a lul of predictable debauchery. The boys in their little outfits, me maniacally resolving to trek through every religious site and speak to it. We wear wreaths of jasmine and chainsmoke outside ancient buildings. I am asking for help. I imagine congregating an army. I work for an omnipresent absentee boss, and I listen to intuitive nudges with the astute certainty of a skitzophrenic. I make mistakes that work in my favor.

 I weave through old fashioned perfumeries, religious galleries and underground sex clubs. Past fruit vendors and vintage markets. With the diligent footsteps of a devotee of heartache. Everything is haunted. Including me.

I hurt you once, and it hurt me too. To be fair, the night I did , you had a threesome while flinging around an AK47, and you were bringing stuffed animals to bars. I ran off with your friend, and you told me he would hurt me, and he did. I wanted you to be wrong. 

He told you, “you dodged a bullet”, one that you certainly bear now.

All of our pain grooves into each others pain like tangled celtic knots, brooding out of us at bars. Shining out of us, in our weird little outfits, with iridescent irresolution. Some would call it homie hopping, but I think of it as sacred geometry. We all keep reeling back to one another, all of the sacred special people, reeling back with different understandings.

 You are my bodyguard and my mistress. You put up a solid fight against the machine.  I want to kidnap you and take you to Italy and pull out the irritants from your bloodstream.  I like you because you hear me and you listen and you understand. You have retained a newfound calm, and you draw things that predict the future, and write in languages before languages. Something reignited within me, watching your calm, as we tried to tie down the military tyrant hands and feet to earth. As we speculate on whether we are targeted, whose hand this operation is drawn by. You apologize to me and I to you.

You demonized me, like he did, the aforementioned and silent enemy. His girlfriend told me she loves someone else, and it made me want to cry. He demonized me, but you had more reason to.

I recognize you can fall in love with someone for what they represent. But ultimately you have to fall in love with the way someone sees you. Fall in love with what they do. What they confess. How they approach you. The small measurable actions that comprise a life. As time passes, I prefer devotion, yearning, attention, over anything else. I require steadfast assuridity and brutal kindness. I require omissions of love regularly, sometimes too regularly for the capacity of one man. 

I want you next to me but I sometimes don’t want to be seen. I want to be your medicine.

My pattern of love triangles has accelerated into 8th dimensional pyramids, which we’ve determined, are Irish. You invigorate my revolution and I don't want to hurt you. But my own nonlinear decision making feels like fate, and shocks even me. My fear and hope are the same. That we will repeat the past.

Spy Wife

It was an evening that begun unremarkably, just like any other. I hadnt left my bungalow in days, inhaling information bout Ireland, piecing together some sort of quantum time map- determined to prove the ancient Egyptians were druids. The first Pharaoh was buried in County Meath, my grandfathers village. He was ripped off of his farm at age three by the British military. Forced to move. I am angry about information lost. My heartache, longing, at peak capacity, for more reasons than one. The hum drum of los angeles traffic lights coat sunset blvd in it's usual pharmaceutical haze. I want to avoid the internet tonight. Anointed with perfume, step out, dressed up like Sharon Tate (Pre Satanism). I want to incite a revolution but I have reservations for a girls dinner. 

Behind the curtained alcove of the Chateau Marmont smoking section, I am cowering. My heart is hurting. I have made resolutions to let go. I have a lethal case of the “fuck its” again. Trying not to assign paramount meaning to the learned map of Los Angeles. Wanting to forget who I know.

He’s in the smoking section.He bears the kind of beating unpredictability of a man whose actions you cant quite predict. My favorite men are all like this, non-linear. Fast.  He looks Irish. Blue eyes. Handsome in a John F. Kennedy kind of way. 

I need a light and he whips out a zippo. He is skitzophrenically suave. He mentions something about saving the Ukraine and I am dismissive. I tell him the war is about biolabs, and he doesn’t know what hes talking about. He talks fast, quick, but quietly. Hes intense. Possibly crazy. Definitely Irish.  I tell him the first pharoah was buried in Ireland. He looks crazy. He invites me up to room.

So naturally, I oblige.

Everything is neat. He has padlocked suitcases and is talking to me about things that only I know about. We discuss real estate inside the earth, solar flares, pole shifts. He tells me hes a billionaire. His family are involved in pharmaceuticals, blood trade, and agriculture. I tell him I think hes nuts. I sit on the balcony of the chateau, and he pulls me off of it by the waist. Tells me he doesn’t want me to fall. 

He collects antiques, and hands me an aztec coil. Then old coins. Then a bottle of Dom Peringon. Opal stones. Sapphires. A rolex. We dance to Glen Campbell. Slow. I rest my head on his lap, his cowboy belt buckle cold on my forehead. He strokes my hair. He tells me I am intense, and powerful. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling. Says he hasn’t been able to relax since “he was kidnapped in Copenhagen” and describes himself as a “rogue agent”. He says my energy calms him down. Makes him feel at home. He likes me but he loves someone else. I say, thats fine, me too.

He sends me home with his driver and a rolex. I anticipate never seeing him again. Wonder if he is a spy. He calls me his spy wife still. And now we're engaged.

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.