I already forgot how I used to feel about you.

What a curious life.

Something searches in me for nostalgia when my neighbor hangs up strings of colored Christmas bulbs from his gutters, but I come up empty handed... the seasons are changing in a place where I have no memories. When I leave work at 6 am, hollow-eyed and completely mummified in a knit scarf, I stare up at the enormous, sparkling tree that has been erected in the middle of the shopping center and forget what it feels like to be impressed by anything.

I can only be moved by the white noise that permeates my dreams.

cuticle slaughterer, object of child and dog stares, 3 pm cigarette kiss atop a torn couch cushion in Safehouse where I lied about how often I replace my shoes, post-sexist hiss taunt on Congress street, ceiling scurries, pretending I didn't remember your birthday, blaming my slippery, Piscean soul, in the words of Kanye West, am I that douchebag that never takes work off?

Buried Shoebox Love

What is there to a Saturday night in my misty world? For starters, I sit cross legged to keep my toes warm because I don't know how to turn on my apartment's rusted, moderately dangerous looking heater. When I realize the spiders have begun to spin long strands of my hair into their webs, hours are spent defensively scrubbing the darkest corners of my living space (which I strongly suspect may be the most action those baseboards have seen in years). After a good amount of harassed brooding, I realize it's time to concoct an exit plan... as colorful and far-fetched as my mind can possibly make it. Even when my energy levels are at their most threadbare, it's my restless ambition that always seems to hoist me up and into the tangled, unknown fray. That's what brought me out here in the first place, right?

Onward.

Thank God you see me the way you do, strange as you are to me.

October begins, and I start to wander. One night finds me in such a tunnel, I finally work up the courage to dial the number of a spiritual healer I found via search engine some time ago. That's right, a spiritual healer. I found her somewhere in between my research on chakras, homeopathy, and a fascination with nimble wrists weighed down by piles of beads and foreign, tattooed inscriptions. After a brief, breathy conversation on the phone, we agreed to meet upstairs at my favorite yoga studio downtown.


Some people you meet and immediately feel a communion with, and Petra is one of them. She is all motherly smiles, jade jewelry, and precious insight. After unloading what felt like a semi-truck of problems onto her, we decided to balance my chakras. It's a difficult practice to describe, other than to say she cupped my face like a child's, breezed her feather-like fingertips from my inner arms outward, and meditated her thumbs in circular patterns across my skittish upper stomach. After the whole blessed exercise was over, in which I was steeped in a chaotically imaginative series of dreams, me and my nest of hair rolled over and up. She told me that my resistant chakras were located in my root (connection and comfort with the earth/your surroundings), my naval (power over one's choices), throat (ability to communicate), and least surprisingly, in my heart (security, validation, love). After feeling rather hopeless upon receipt of this information, she grins at me and said, "It's not too late to feel good again. For such a young person, you are full of depth, and this will be your greatest gift to yourself and others. Its important to nurture yourself."


Walking outside was like being born. The shift I feel is subtle and subterranean; a feeling I can only describe as tectonic. Restlessness begins to open inside of me like a flower, and I catch my reflection in a mirror, and I can see my face like I haven't in... months? Years? My irises are bolted with brown, absolutely ablaze with an awakening.


Suddenly, I can sense the normal smells of weed and saltwater lacing themselves into the breeze that drifts down State street, and a lackadaisical mentality reflected in the faces of those who amble down the sidewalks. It's a constant rotation of tourist families by day and buttoned up men by night gravitate downtown for beers and a sense of unhurriedness. My feet carry me to Rusty's, a greasy sort of pizza parlor where 13 year old boys flock in territorial droves, their blonde curls askew beneath sun-bleached caps and skateboards buried in the crook of their freckled elbows. They like it here because they can leer at the female cashier when she leans forward to collect change, and because they can use the word "fuck" without retribution. I let myself order a pizza, and after months of organic nosh, it bursts open in my mouth like a sun. I suspect that the amount of water I drank has emptied some rural pond, and when my stomach makes noises, I take pleasure in feeling and place a hand on it lovingly.


When I can see others clearly, it is easier to see myself. A sweet man who sells me a sham set recognizes me with a smile and asks me if I work in the area. I tell him I do, and cry when I leave the shop because someone has noticed me. 

I dreamed you were carried away on the crest of a wave

A good woman will pick you apart

a box full of suggestions for your possible heart

but you may be offended and you may be afraid

but don't walk away, don't walk away

The only constants are the feelings.

"The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love."

-Alain de Botton

In September, I begin to buy items of both religious and pastoral reconnaissance. In a New Mexican marketplace on a hot, dusty afternoon, I dig a wooden bracelet bearing paintings of Guadalupe from a tangled web of roughly hewn jewelry. Around the corner in a small boutique, I add a beautiful cross of hammered tin to my growing collection, and feel touched by a set of Milagros meant to help heal wounded limbs.

In Santa Barbara, I continue my quest for irrelevant beauty. My hands sift through a bowl of ludicrous rings, electing a dome shaped knuckle-duster bearing the image of a Mexican peasant couple locked in a swooning embrace. I pick through spinning displays of postcards, selecting vintage looking photographs of coastal sunsets and maps of wine country. My final selection is a necklace made from twisted thread and glass beads whose cloudy stillness remind me of the moon when clouds pass over it.

I like to pretend that these items aren’t completely meaningless and that they will be the conversation piece that gains me human interaction. Logically, I understand that I would be very nervous about anyone who strolled up to me and announced that my beaded necklace reminds them of their stargazing childhood, but my loneliness hopes that someone will at least pocket that thought and in turn, become curious about me.

I was unprepared for my trip to the museum. Something about the oil strokes of Edvard Munch’s “The Kiss (On The Shore),” still slick after nearly one hundred years, triggers a tender reaction within me. Dizzyingly recorded was the image of a couple smeared together as one; the sunset as a mere afterthought. The accompanying placard, a quote from Sigbjorn Obstfelder, went something like this:

“Through the microscope, under X-Rays, everywhere I see a plexus, a design… Do you see the temple reaching out over all space, the tabernacle of the universe? Just look at those long straight threads linking member to member, those most visible to the human eye… When they embrace and couple, seize hold of each other, fusing two into one or two forming thousands… Everything out there is within me. My soul, my body emerged from the volcanic eruption of the worlds.”

Perhaps it is my art student’s knowledge of Munch’s lonely existence that causes me to view this scene as sentimental. It’s also possible that I have completely overridden the artist’s intent in order to inject my own, but regardless, I was left feeling rather lucid and painful in that moment. The Kiss is the most sublime representation of where humanity’s existential values lie; in intimacy, connections, love… and I, with my latent love, distant friends, and concerned family, feel the gaping hole of it’s absence. Standing in front of that painting felt supremely authentic, and in the words of a friend, I remembered I was young. 

467 Miles

Lots of time for letters.

What are you talking about? It's perfectly normal to write long-winded letters to far away friends and family, littered with informative illustrations of foul-mouthed queens and my nail polish collection.

At a Fundamental Crossroads

The Quiet Life

Summertime on the coast is almost everything I imagined it would be. I've been shopping for bikes painted in ice cream colors, eyeing women on the street who dress as deliciously as they do on my inspiration boards (feet colorful and patent-heeled, eyelids dewey and glitter-swiped), listening to music so wistfully nostalgic that it recalls a life nothing like my own, taking sunset walks through my enthusiastically blooming neighborhood, and picking some of the stems for the lonely vase on my coffee table. 

It was so wonderful to have a visitor in my tiny place, if just for an evening. We watched an episode of True Life about sugar mamas and ate pizza while sitting cross legged on the carpet. He looked through my postcards while Julian Casablancas crooned in the background and I lit my Jesus candles. Just as swiftly, those precious hours passed and I was back to my early morning treks to work and he went back to sleep in a marvelous house perched next to the sea. 

It's hard to get your bearings after such an emotionally charged weekend. We drove across the state lines so that I could tie the sash on my second bridesmaid dress and watch one of my dearest soul sisters marry her beloved. Musicians played late into the night and the string lights were refracted through my constantly teary lenses. Sublime. 

Midnight Afflictions

"What compelled me to move to England in the first place? A more self-possessed person might have explored this question before she brown-boxed the contents of her apartment in Manhattan. Before she sublet the only home she knew in exchange for a rented room that grew dank at night when the garden snails slipped inside to consort beneath her bed.

At twenty-seven, I was not that person. The facts of my life still seemed largely beyond my control. I felt steered (or rather, flung) through the world not by intention or foresight, but by some uncontrollable force (my own subconscious, which I knew as "fate"). The question--Why did I move to England?--hits me only in hindsight, as I sit heartbroken on a homeward-bound plane.

The short answer is easy: I moved to Brighton for love, or at least the possibility of it."

-Koren Zailckas

I have always been a firm believer (foolish, I am) in the fate of certain books falling into my hands at the exact moment I need them to. Fury appeals remarkably to my bleeding heart.

Sans.

Tonight I kept my distance from the throngs of people headed to the west beach, arm in arm, wrapped in and clutching spangled banners. Even though I ache for that sort of dumb companionship, I avoid it. Despite my usual haunt being closed, I parked in the nearest neighborhood and tiptoed through the trees and into the sand. New sounds take place at night; thousands of frogs, the sweet rustling of trees, silverware clinking through yellow-lit windows of cliff homes, and the boom, crack, sizzle of far-away luminaries. After a few minutes passed, I watched in silence as a tiny firework show from miles away took place close to the horizon. It's spectacular to see something so grand be minimized by the vastness of the ocean and sky, blending seamlessly at the horizon. I could've pinched it's grandeur between my index finger and thumb.

Soledad, toes to foam.

These days I am as sensitive as the rainbowed film of a soap bubble. The tiniest hint of negativity, and my cadence bursts into a million frothy tears. To avoid these spells, I have become acutely aware of doing anything someone might find odd. It is a curious line to toe when all of my lonely compulsions are of the oddest sort. As I wandered through a closed shopping mall tonight, the inane recorded piano music searing into me, I had my excuse ready for any concerned security guard... "I was shopping for a father's day gift. Looks like I've finally taken procrastination too far."

Before my empty-handed, locked door shopping trip, I traipsed through the cold sand of Arroyo Beach to try and catch the sunset while it still burned in the sky. Too late, the sky was already fading into a dusty blue. Instead of comforting me, this spontaneous trip seemed to freeze my grief to my bones. Wrapping myself in salt and biting winds only conjures up contrastingly warm memories from beach trips long gone; a wet bathing suit snap, the bitter taste of the wet ends of my hair, a toddling version of my sister, standing tiny and puzzled next to a motor boat, skin glowing with youth and too much sun.

On days like this, I begin to forget what I look like. After work, I strip my uncomfortably eclectic clothes off of my body and put on unidentifiably drab sweatshirts and jeans. This is the uniform most suited for comfortable isolation... no one's eyelashes whisper in my direction, and below the radar I fly. I go hours without speaking, and when I look in the mirror I am often surprised that I haven't transformed into the drooping, stagnant creature my self esteem is convinced of. The same dark eyes stare back at me with their hardened gaze, my lips are terse, and my cheeks are still faintly dusted with this morning's powdered blush. 

Thanks, Anabelle.

It's true.

Thanks, 3eb + Hayface.

I tried typing something meaningful and true to form, but nothing does this electricity any justice.
Life is splendid these days. What more can I say? 

Taking it back.

I've been staring at this Peter Doig painting for the last month. How in the hell has this guy figured out how to tap into intuitive beauty so wonderfully? I think I am so drawn because this image reminds me very much of how I would have viewed the night landscape as a child... a vessel ripe for my projections of hope, happiness, and the mysterious nature of the life I'd just begun. I think it is so easy for adults, me especially, to counteract fear of mystery with meticulous planning, therefore eliminating the possibility of being open to intuition and childlike wonder.

That's been the theme in my life lately... the struggle of letting go and opening up. One professor went as far as describing me to have an "aura of tension" surrounding me as I painted. Am I really so tightly wound that others have begun to sense the chokehold of expectations I put on myself as they pass by?

"If you're not the best, you're the worst."

I am both terrified and intrigued by the freedom and hardship that await me, and I want to figure out how to tap into it creatively. How do you keep your spirituality afloat all of the expected logic and responsibility of adulthood? With graduation approaching, I'm extremely interested in the lifestyles of the happy ones who have experienced years not divided into semesters.

I wish we were magic.

Currently listening to Dead Man's Bones, obsessing over typography, overanalyzing life, setting unrealistic expectations for myself, and forgetting to wash my hair.

Born to multiply.

Oh, 2010. You tumultuous beast. I am so enthusiastic about moving on from you and into this new adventure we call your successor. 

At the end of every year, I like to humor myself and think about the lessons I've learned. Normally, these lessons seem as effective as the frivolous resolutions that accompany them, but I truly feel like I may have earned myself a few survival badges this time around.

So, what have I learned?

Making an art series about coping mechanisms does not mean you are anywhere near meeting your healthy match just yet.

Friends and family are brought together and drift apart based on convenience.

"Forgiving doesn't necessarily mean forgetting." Thank you, wise friend of mine.

Fiercely loyal people can't demand the same from every single person in their lives.
However, those who rise to the occasion are for keeps.

The Shins' Wincing The Night Away album is bloody brilliant.

No scarlet-faced insult or intellectualized re-telling will ever temper old wounds the way lovely words from a new possibility can. Did I just say that?

Cheers, to a year of growth and resiliency.