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