How is everyone doing today? I am just fine, thank you. I got an A on my math test! Oh yeah! I am incredibly excited about this since this is the same class I failed my freshman year. It reminds me that I have come a long way since then.

Do you ever come across something, a letter say, that you wrote years ago but thankfully never sent, read it once again, and realized that while it was perhaps poetic it was very overdramatic? And then do you wonder if this makes you an overly dramatic person? For example, a letter I found:

Your beacon strikes out
in circles of rotation, steadily
it will without you even trying
with respect
you are very noble
I love you so much and that's why I don't understand
some things
and I have to be okay with that
thank you for touching my life
and I'm sorry for ruining yours

I cannot wash the heat from my body
and it burns my skin
everything that I touch gets too hot

last night was the closest the earth was to the sun
the closest the moon was to the earth
the solstice
and the full moon
the first time in hundreds of years
my mother told me so as I slobbered all over her dress

I had to say this outloud to you
for resolution
but certainly there is no closure in life
resolution is only in death

goodbye

ps- I know the last part sounds suicidal but it's not. Everything I said is as true as I can be. I don't want to leave but I know I must.

Then, after you re-read it and muse about it and post it on your blog, do you wonder if perhaps you are divulging too much of your personal treasure? Do you wonder why you are such an exhibitionist? Do you really want people to know that you ever felt that way about a person? That you were ever so silly? Would the person you wrote it about-- who you still cherish-- appreciate being so exposed in your tangle of exhibition and your cheap sensational charade for attention?

This tidbit certainly captures a moment in my life, and I'm glad I have it with me still, because looking at it again makes me at once happy and sad. I really miss that person to this day...he was a great friend and it is hard to believe I let a certain jealous freak (BABY'S DADDY) force me to choose to lose contact with him. It's hard to believe I let a certain jerk control my life for so long a period of time. NEVER AGAIN will ANYBODY tell me who my friends can and cannot be.

I was such a whimp--and my previous whimpiness has affected my entire future--or at least it will for a while. As of right now, people meet me and think I'm a cool person and then I divulge the history of my past and they start to think twice, because a prerequisite to being a cool person is that you cannot be a pathetic masochistic whimp. I promise, I'm not anymore! I am a self-actualized person who harbors no intrigue with pain or suffereing or being told what to do! I just want to be happy...and now I actually believe I deserve it. I am happy now. Deep down in my core. I love it. I allow it. And this has made all the difference.

I find myself internally pleading with people not to be afraid of my past. I have journeyed an incredible path and now I am on top of the mountain. Asshole Mike has gifted me-- I have become sure of myself out of my struggle for independence from him. I have become sure of myself in a way that is unshakeable, undoubtable, out of living through abuse and choosing to say "fuck you--I am worth more than this." I know I will never be abused again. And if Mike was able to be such an asshole that he could teach me this in three short years, instead of a long and depressing lifetime, then I am thankful for that gift he brought to my life. Because the truth about me is there was a time when I thought I wanted to be abused. And I'm glad I didn't waste my life discovering that I don't.

If it explains anything, my acupuncturist says that the gate to my heart chakra has a tendency to malfunction. In the past, it wouldn't close when it should. It would stay open far too long, enduring abuse, listening and compassioning with the pleas of the brokenhearted and pathetic. She poked needles in my feet and wrists to mitigate the effects of my defunctional gate. Though at the present moment my heart-gate is functioning well, it continues to run the risk of opening too wide or slamming shut prematurely and never opening again--though I doubt the latter will happen. Mine is the heart that remains too open.

Masochism is inherited in my family--it is the legacy that they have left us despite the many happy memories I am blessed to carry from my childhood. Despite all the goodness in my family's legacy,despite how subtle it is and how difficult to discover-- pain is the dominant emotion, the domineering theme of my family who is careful never to smile too wide or laugh too loud. You will be scorned if you are too happy, if you refuse to carry the ridiculous burden that they have each lugged and hauled on their backs for centuries. FUCK THAT. I'm leaving a different legacy for my son, for my family. One where my children will know that God most loves a happy heart. One where my children will not be able to recall a time that their mother was not singing. One where hearing the word "love" doesn't make my children cry but makes them giddy with laughter.






These Teeth

Your teeth are made of only truth
and it has been reflected
I have found no other such jaws
none like porcelain.

You ride me like a swan
if I am Leda, I too am Agamemnon
in the most dreadful of battles-
It is not even wartime
and still I cannot whistle.

My bones are straight and upright too!
Oh, the loss! I feel them grinding!
It is bitter pain, and I
can only bite harder.

I have been hungry so long
for white feathers
But birds have no real tongues,
they would only swell

And cry "Just One Drop!"
So downy and pretty
Such dreadful lies, and who could refuse?
That's why birds are toothless
with only gums.