Nothing more than the ordinary
I've had this window opened and ready almost two hours now and the words simply refuse to form. Maybe becuase I am still slightly afraid, becuase I am still gathering and forming and holding this resolve to me. Perhaps because there are so many things to say today, so many things and so different that I know not what to say first.
Something worth writing happens every single day of your life, something extraordinary, spectacular and beautiful. Something... worth writing.
Life has been blissfully calm these last few months and I have struggled to find the meaning in that calm, to find it's own particular light. Now I have something, something that is painful and harsh and ugly to write about.
I have a girlfriend. Her name is Marissa. Do I love her? Not particularily. I like her very much, I enjoy laughing and spending time with her. But what made me say "yes" this Fiday to the "Are you dating?" questions was a far more selfish reason. I wanted to know. I wanted to experiment. I've been considering bisexuality for a long time now, some two years I think. I've never actually had a girlfriend, never kissed a woman and never particularily desired any of my close friends.
This is harshly enough, an experiment, one that I was happy to make. With that feeling of accomplishment and hope I told my mother.
It didn't come out as a surprise to her, my doubts hadn't been a secret and she had never even given me a clue of what this would do to her.
She was griefed, she was in pain, she told me I had shattered her heart. It did not happen at the same time but through the night she made it perfectly clear.
My mother isn't a prejudiced person. She has gay and bisexual friends and loves and respects them. My mother is a rational womand and I always thought a strong one. Whenever someone was wrong in this house it was almost exclusively me. I was the wild one, the irrational one. I was the young thing that had much to learn about the world and herself.
In years this is the first time that my mother has been dead wrong, has been unjust and horrible, has been weak and disappointed me. And at the same time it wasn't. I love her, and though it hurts me that maybe this will mark a time in which I will be the strong one, I know, that I want to do it. I knwo that I will do it and I know that this IS growing up. This will make me into a better person.
And though my mother has told me it is a tragedy for her and that she is tired of bearing the burden, and though the social stigma can and will be painful I can loose no respect or love or awe of her. She is human and a wonderful human.
I wanted to write my pain here, my resentment and all those little things I wanted to scream to her last night. "I hate you" "I needed your support tonight and you betrayed me" "You have hurt me more than anyone ever could" "I HATE YOU". I wanted to write how horrible it was to sleep by her side because she had demanded that I do so, that she demanded me to hear her complaints and her pain, that she kept whispering that I HAD to stay awake becuase she might die because of the sleeping pills. The terror, the pain, the impossibility of a second alone with myself to simply cry for MY pain.
I have written them. But they are not as important as all the rest.
My mother is a soft spoken woman. And I am thinking, of all the possible scenarios witha mexican mother this was a beautiful one in all its purity. In all its honesty. Because I won't stop trusting my mother and I won't hate her. She is a soft spoken beautiful human being. She has raised me and loved me and I will be with her.
It is not my fault I must repeat to myself in this next days. It is not my fault I told her last night. Because I have never and will never fear the social barriers and the prejudice. They don't frighten me. My friends know and love me, my friends understand and know of this from long ago. I am not afraid.
She is and this pain is for once HER problem. For once I will have a breath of peace and knwo that I have done all I could.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Saturday, May 08, 2004
In the beginning
My father woke me up today, he was on the phone.
All day the wind has been a constant presence, it sways the great tree behind our house and makes the wind bells ring, eerily prophetic. There is a sort of haziness now, to the gardens, both front and back, a certain golden halo of sunlight that encompasses the bushes and grass and wood of the deck. I went to look at the flowers because I'm thinking of the midnight garden I want to make. I wanted roses but ours are not as particularily glorious as the other ones I'd found around the neighborhood. I was looking for that brilliant coral red in small buttons, but I found more. Violets and blues and deep crimsons in strange and beautiful shapes.
It seems I have entered a creative rampage. I grabbed the old sketches and colored them and got rid of the ones I don't really want. I'm looking through the two magazines I own, looking for something, anything that might catch my attention. I don't feel much like writting now and therefore I come here to force the writting out. To recount the deeds of the day.
I'm still in my pijamas and it's 7 pm, I have been awake since 12. I am listening to HIM and I am thinking of doing a pairing portrait, unsure of how to proceed with the man's face.
I look out the window, a crack between the white linen of the curtains, the gold has exploded into an irradescent glow this afternoon and I feel much too lazy to get up and take a bath which I should do. I don't feel too keen on staying home today, maybe I feel like calling someone. I feel strangely detatched.
My paints and sketches and other things are strewn all over the floor as the room darkens. There is a point in the day when you cease to notice the passage of time, you are suspended and every minute is very much like the next. You seem a picture frozen it time. It only happens in weekends, because the afternoon moves breathetakingly fast.
I stop the music, the world suddenly echoing of singing birds, the light is coming from the west. If I go to the kitchen door it will open into a strange vast view of the world, eternal and beautiful like the Great Garden. It's strange to think that it once was like that, that it was the cities and not the gardens that were contained.
I've been thinking of God as always. For someone who claims not to believe in the Big One I spent entirely too much time thinking about him. I was thinking about him in a strange Jungian line of thought. I was thinking of how each of us is a world contain, how it is the individual view the only one we can see and therefore it is the only truth. Are we God's Truth then? We are his world, made in his image so therefore he must have an internal Truth, unlike the world around him. Are we that then, a reflection, a flash of intuition, an imagined world in the flicker of some ancient's eyes?
There, I have gone full circle, I wasn't thinking of echoing the Revelations of the Dark Mother but I did.
I feel like showering now, wrapping this last up and getting ready maybe for dinner or a movie or something. Boredom. I should work on things pending.
Tomorrow we go see the whales maybe.
My father woke me up today, he was on the phone.
All day the wind has been a constant presence, it sways the great tree behind our house and makes the wind bells ring, eerily prophetic. There is a sort of haziness now, to the gardens, both front and back, a certain golden halo of sunlight that encompasses the bushes and grass and wood of the deck. I went to look at the flowers because I'm thinking of the midnight garden I want to make. I wanted roses but ours are not as particularily glorious as the other ones I'd found around the neighborhood. I was looking for that brilliant coral red in small buttons, but I found more. Violets and blues and deep crimsons in strange and beautiful shapes.
It seems I have entered a creative rampage. I grabbed the old sketches and colored them and got rid of the ones I don't really want. I'm looking through the two magazines I own, looking for something, anything that might catch my attention. I don't feel much like writting now and therefore I come here to force the writting out. To recount the deeds of the day.
I'm still in my pijamas and it's 7 pm, I have been awake since 12. I am listening to HIM and I am thinking of doing a pairing portrait, unsure of how to proceed with the man's face.
I look out the window, a crack between the white linen of the curtains, the gold has exploded into an irradescent glow this afternoon and I feel much too lazy to get up and take a bath which I should do. I don't feel too keen on staying home today, maybe I feel like calling someone. I feel strangely detatched.
My paints and sketches and other things are strewn all over the floor as the room darkens. There is a point in the day when you cease to notice the passage of time, you are suspended and every minute is very much like the next. You seem a picture frozen it time. It only happens in weekends, because the afternoon moves breathetakingly fast.
I stop the music, the world suddenly echoing of singing birds, the light is coming from the west. If I go to the kitchen door it will open into a strange vast view of the world, eternal and beautiful like the Great Garden. It's strange to think that it once was like that, that it was the cities and not the gardens that were contained.
I've been thinking of God as always. For someone who claims not to believe in the Big One I spent entirely too much time thinking about him. I was thinking about him in a strange Jungian line of thought. I was thinking of how each of us is a world contain, how it is the individual view the only one we can see and therefore it is the only truth. Are we God's Truth then? We are his world, made in his image so therefore he must have an internal Truth, unlike the world around him. Are we that then, a reflection, a flash of intuition, an imagined world in the flicker of some ancient's eyes?
There, I have gone full circle, I wasn't thinking of echoing the Revelations of the Dark Mother but I did.
I feel like showering now, wrapping this last up and getting ready maybe for dinner or a movie or something. Boredom. I should work on things pending.
Tomorrow we go see the whales maybe.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
The Hours
Virginia Woolf is something that passed from my mother to me, a woman that frightens her and inspires me. The kind of writer I want to be. Becuase she built new beautiful things, becuase in so many ironic ways she is a writer of light who spent some great parts of her life in shadows. It's amateurish this reflection, it's simple, but it comes from a detail I remember from the biography I read of this woman. That when she and her sister Vanessa Bell left the parental home they made a house flooded in light.
Light is there for me, now that I do not find darkness. Light floods my life as I stand today of all days in the deck of my backyard. The world is golden with sunlight. I draw, I make I gather beauty from the world around me, from Kyle who sits besides me in Psychology and shares my distaste of disrespectulfness. From that class and history in which I soak in the ages past and the Civil Rights Movement and the Middle East of today. I learn I see I am alive.
What defines me? Writing, yes but something else and it si my capacity for the analysis and the individual thought, becuase I take things within me. i take the world within me. I called myself an impressionist once, someone who captures the light in the leaves of how I see them. That is what I do with my writing, what I shall always do, even when as now I do not need the escape so much that I would die without it.
Watching a movie reminds of the old days, nostalgic and melancholic yes but not nearly as distressing as fear and anticipation. I relish this remembrance. It makes me, it defines me into a person, it tells the story of who I am.
I've been there done that gotten through. I know what it's like to hide in a bathroom so that no one will hear you cry and more than brutality this is the greatest pain, more than any other it is to close your eyes and conform your pain and your anguish to the wishes of others.
But I also know, know now and here, what it is to close your eyes to a brilliant sun, what it is to take in the pungency of flowers everyday, every second of your life. I know what it is to look out the giant windows of the art studio and stare, stare at the canopy of trees in the distance and think, how beautiful, how right everything is. You walk through the streets and stop becuase the grass is a brilliant green and becuase there are roses, gorgeous luscious roses everywhere. And it is the midnight garden and the desire again to make and celebrate this life.
I told my mother, I want the good and the bad, I want strenous gushing streams of it. I want the dark in my life to see the light better. I want this moment, to embrace this moment, to take in all I did, all I talked about. I want to enjoy everything and everyone and I want to make beauty of this happiness.
God, it seems we have come full circle and I can see the pain and that strange dark hole overpowering the people I love, this is for me as much as it is for you. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel, there is always life, there is a moment when everything will make sense even though the moment fades.
There is always a way out.
Virginia Woolf is something that passed from my mother to me, a woman that frightens her and inspires me. The kind of writer I want to be. Becuase she built new beautiful things, becuase in so many ironic ways she is a writer of light who spent some great parts of her life in shadows. It's amateurish this reflection, it's simple, but it comes from a detail I remember from the biography I read of this woman. That when she and her sister Vanessa Bell left the parental home they made a house flooded in light.
Light is there for me, now that I do not find darkness. Light floods my life as I stand today of all days in the deck of my backyard. The world is golden with sunlight. I draw, I make I gather beauty from the world around me, from Kyle who sits besides me in Psychology and shares my distaste of disrespectulfness. From that class and history in which I soak in the ages past and the Civil Rights Movement and the Middle East of today. I learn I see I am alive.
What defines me? Writing, yes but something else and it si my capacity for the analysis and the individual thought, becuase I take things within me. i take the world within me. I called myself an impressionist once, someone who captures the light in the leaves of how I see them. That is what I do with my writing, what I shall always do, even when as now I do not need the escape so much that I would die without it.
Watching a movie reminds of the old days, nostalgic and melancholic yes but not nearly as distressing as fear and anticipation. I relish this remembrance. It makes me, it defines me into a person, it tells the story of who I am.
I've been there done that gotten through. I know what it's like to hide in a bathroom so that no one will hear you cry and more than brutality this is the greatest pain, more than any other it is to close your eyes and conform your pain and your anguish to the wishes of others.
But I also know, know now and here, what it is to close your eyes to a brilliant sun, what it is to take in the pungency of flowers everyday, every second of your life. I know what it is to look out the giant windows of the art studio and stare, stare at the canopy of trees in the distance and think, how beautiful, how right everything is. You walk through the streets and stop becuase the grass is a brilliant green and becuase there are roses, gorgeous luscious roses everywhere. And it is the midnight garden and the desire again to make and celebrate this life.
I told my mother, I want the good and the bad, I want strenous gushing streams of it. I want the dark in my life to see the light better. I want this moment, to embrace this moment, to take in all I did, all I talked about. I want to enjoy everything and everyone and I want to make beauty of this happiness.
God, it seems we have come full circle and I can see the pain and that strange dark hole overpowering the people I love, this is for me as much as it is for you. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel, there is always life, there is a moment when everything will make sense even though the moment fades.
There is always a way out.
Monday, May 03, 2004
Fields of Innocence
I stand in the wind, with a wish to remember all that I have lost. There was a moment when smiles were real, there had been a time when I knew love and it knew me in return. I close me eyes to the sunlight I feel the gray descending, like a great bird it tears through the sky and flaps its monstrous wings to erase all that had come before. When? When had I been happy and had dreams? Why am I so afraid to return to that which I know as familiar? Where have all the illusions gone? When did I grow up?
More importantly, where do I go now? Where do my tired feet head if I feel so old even now? I have been through flame and come out into the rain, blessed rain.
Everyone seems to be going somewhere but me. They are all approaching their great destinies. Everyone has a dream… everyone has something to do. Why does God not give me a purpose? Why is the world rushing ahead? I am suspended in this dream of brilliant colors where nothing can ever possibly go wrong. What will become of me when I step back into the stream?
Do you still love me? I touch my face and feel it’s tension. Do you still love me? Lorena, Adrian, Andrea… What have I become? Where am I? Will you still love me when I am back? How do I find the place I left? Will I hate when I am back? Will I be miserable in school and at home? Will I be in pain as I was? Will I hate you as I did sometimes? Or will the half-hearted absence make us drift? How do I find my old life…
I haven’t started and I feel as if all is done already. Nothing is new, nothing is special. Where is my passion, where is the will to go on and the focus for the mind? When did the truth leave my tongue? It seems there are no more tales tonight, there are no more leaves to fall, there is only the wind and it tears at my flesh. Why go on? When all the great plans are futile lies why go on? I am not in pain I am happy… but it’s empty, everything is empty.
I stand in the wind, with a wish to remember all that I have lost. There was a moment when smiles were real, there had been a time when I knew love and it knew me in return. I close me eyes to the sunlight I feel the gray descending, like a great bird it tears through the sky and flaps its monstrous wings to erase all that had come before. When? When had I been happy and had dreams? Why am I so afraid to return to that which I know as familiar? Where have all the illusions gone? When did I grow up?
More importantly, where do I go now? Where do my tired feet head if I feel so old even now? I have been through flame and come out into the rain, blessed rain.
Everyone seems to be going somewhere but me. They are all approaching their great destinies. Everyone has a dream… everyone has something to do. Why does God not give me a purpose? Why is the world rushing ahead? I am suspended in this dream of brilliant colors where nothing can ever possibly go wrong. What will become of me when I step back into the stream?
Do you still love me? I touch my face and feel it’s tension. Do you still love me? Lorena, Adrian, Andrea… What have I become? Where am I? Will you still love me when I am back? How do I find the place I left? Will I hate when I am back? Will I be miserable in school and at home? Will I be in pain as I was? Will I hate you as I did sometimes? Or will the half-hearted absence make us drift? How do I find my old life…
I haven’t started and I feel as if all is done already. Nothing is new, nothing is special. Where is my passion, where is the will to go on and the focus for the mind? When did the truth leave my tongue? It seems there are no more tales tonight, there are no more leaves to fall, there is only the wind and it tears at my flesh. Why go on? When all the great plans are futile lies why go on? I am not in pain I am happy… but it’s empty, everything is empty.
Sunday, May 02, 2004
I only write here when the feeling is indefinite, when something that has been nagging within me is reaching out for the open, I only write here when I am giddy with words as I am giddy with music now.
Something bothers me, and it's the inminent threat of return to Mexico. What will I do there, when it is here that I have learned to be at peace? What will I do back in my cage with my father and the implications of friendships and chats long overdue? What will I do there with myself? How do I live... how do I talk and see and feel? How do I return to the place I called home?
Almost three years ago th epain in my life was so great and so omnipresent that I wanted simply to disappear. Not to die but to not be me at the time. I wanted to run from everything and everyone run as fast as my feet could carry me into some other place, some other world that would have the purity of solitude. I said to myself, take me away God, send me far far away from this place that causes me so much pain.
I dreamt of France and Greece, places I could live alone with no one to know what had been of me before. No one to question the shame or the doubt or the person I had been. I dreamt of the chance to start anew.
Santa Cruz has been that, at a time when I was ready to embrace it. It has been a wonderful beautiful exhalerating new chance to discover life and the beauty of the human spirit, of all that is me and all that surrounds me. It has been not a journey perhaps but more of a quiet moment under some great swaying tree, somewhere I can sit and rest from life.
I'm going to try and draw now. My mom is away in Santa Barbara at a congress and I am alone at home... it shows. I went out today becuase staying alone at hoem would have simply been too much. I went out with Gin and met Maya at the cinema. I bought art stuff I hope I can use now, I bought myself a new bag and I was happy and had fun.
How much more of this? How many more afternoons like this one or the other ones at Daniel's house? How much more can I take of this creeping fear that when I go back misery will return to my arms?
I don't feel like crying, it's just a cringing disatisfaction, just a feeling of anticipation and things I cannot quite control. I am struck in a strange place a strange crossroads... what do i do with myself now?
How do I live?
Something bothers me, and it's the inminent threat of return to Mexico. What will I do there, when it is here that I have learned to be at peace? What will I do back in my cage with my father and the implications of friendships and chats long overdue? What will I do there with myself? How do I live... how do I talk and see and feel? How do I return to the place I called home?
Almost three years ago th epain in my life was so great and so omnipresent that I wanted simply to disappear. Not to die but to not be me at the time. I wanted to run from everything and everyone run as fast as my feet could carry me into some other place, some other world that would have the purity of solitude. I said to myself, take me away God, send me far far away from this place that causes me so much pain.
I dreamt of France and Greece, places I could live alone with no one to know what had been of me before. No one to question the shame or the doubt or the person I had been. I dreamt of the chance to start anew.
Santa Cruz has been that, at a time when I was ready to embrace it. It has been a wonderful beautiful exhalerating new chance to discover life and the beauty of the human spirit, of all that is me and all that surrounds me. It has been not a journey perhaps but more of a quiet moment under some great swaying tree, somewhere I can sit and rest from life.
I'm going to try and draw now. My mom is away in Santa Barbara at a congress and I am alone at home... it shows. I went out today becuase staying alone at hoem would have simply been too much. I went out with Gin and met Maya at the cinema. I bought art stuff I hope I can use now, I bought myself a new bag and I was happy and had fun.
How much more of this? How many more afternoons like this one or the other ones at Daniel's house? How much more can I take of this creeping fear that when I go back misery will return to my arms?
I don't feel like crying, it's just a cringing disatisfaction, just a feeling of anticipation and things I cannot quite control. I am struck in a strange place a strange crossroads... what do i do with myself now?
How do I live?
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