Dogwood Motel, Idleyld Park, OR. North Umpqua River, June 3, 2010.

I am alive in the night, the night is nothing but rain.
The rain takes its time coming alive, it is a steady motion
and soon as it is living it comes apart. It quarters itself,
and I dive back again, driving along side the river, I jump in.
Umpqua Valley distraction, land without dust. The river runs high,
the rain runs the roof line it drips in the gutter and out back still
the coy fish silently swim. I swim, I swim silently, I imagine the body

of our bodies, I imagine
traction, I imagine depth, I imagine bodyless motion inside the waterless
sea. I imagine what must already be a dream, what must already be night
what must already be nothing. But rain. I imagine a hand, the hand of your arm,
it takes my chin, adjusts me. I imagine being pulled in.

I planned a trip back to where I was from.
I planned a trip back to where I was animated.
I planned a trip back to where I was drawn to life.
Land of moss on trees. The moss laces deep things out of me
I will never know. The moss drapes from trees and curls itself
into my toes. The moss dances down the stream. Dancing stream comes
from high tops of mountains where alder trees and first growth haven’t been born.
Sunlight stays there in the grass at the tops of mountains. Peregrines and hawks live
and shriek in circles imagining the sky. In the middle of the forest deep the air stays
under canopy, has a dream of sunshine and a meadow it never sees, it does not realize
it is dreaming itself. It does not realize it is dreaming nothing. The night is not animated
with anything but the night, the reflection of itself on itself. Voidless. The void with void
makes it without nothing, makes it without itself. Makes it eat itself, devour itself whole.
The night eats itself, because it is nothing, so too the dream dreams itself and makes it go away.
The meadow eats itself, eats elk, eats mice, eats snake and small beetles that burrow in dry dirt,
they never see the sun. The water makes its way all back to the yellow flowers of sawtooth.
Bath of river, bath of moss, bath of lichen and green algae so dark it looks like blood attached to,
dancing from the stone.

The same nite as our friend M’s death
I set the map about me on the counter. It was a map with lots of green.
It was a map I had little trouble trying to read. It was laid out before me
like a broad highway with easy lights and no traffic and the places to stop
already computed in to my autopilot vegetable mind. The mind part that knows,
knows how to drive, knows how to switch gears in rain coming down no matter
the foreign town, the mind part that knows how to ease up on the gas, slow down
with out brakes, how to make room for other drivers on the road. Molly died.
She was a sailor, a sailor, alone on the east coast, on an eastern shore of an east coast town,
a poet, a poet alone on a wordless continent in a voiceless town, she was a sailor poet magi,
a sailor poet magi god who died alone because she didn’t think she could die alone.
Is she dead? The bird outside the harbor asked the sea. Is she dead? The yellow sawtooth
from the high desert somewhere above Willamette poured out the side of a flat mountain wall
and asked me.

I went down to the bay, Winchester, to see for myself.

Molly, are you dead?

I lay down, see, your heart floats out on to the top of the sea.

I imagine being pulled in. I followed the Umpqua up from the sea, I followed the river up from the bay,
I followed the bird down to the harbor the harbor followed my longing out to the sea. I imagined you,
I imagined us, I imagined us naked as one string of water endlessly running inside the stream our bodies twirled together like sound, like invisible light that only water can see. I imagined you glowing, I imagined you naked, streaming and twirling alone inside of me. I imagined you hard, hard like mountain, hard like stone, hard like the hole the water pours out from on the side of the road. We were invisible to the other because only invisibility can see itself, can see the nothing in itself. We were invisible to the other. I came here came back from here back to where I was drawn to life. Water poured out from me, water poured out from the sky. I poured out from me, you were there. You were not there. I asked myself where you were, where you went. You said where I do not know. I came alive then, to the nothing, I came alive in the nothing in you.

Or the one you said you'd hold on to for dear life.

It's early--not early as it could be.

It's early like 7:30 early, I've been up since 4:45 Sam texted at 5:15 to bring my laptop in so she could play me new music.  There is weather coming no doubt, the water told me so.  It wont be much though the birds are still crying and yesterday there were squirrels running through the dead woods.  Tyler is here, Sam, me.  He hasn't slept since last night, fresh home from Bmore as of a half hour ago he rolls hard like I like to, we're talking TV series she's defending Lost, he The Wire and there is music on my laptop which I am taking in like gulps of air.  I had no comprehension of how cut-off I'd be from the Muse when she went down--my laptop that is.  No music that I love, no poetry no links no blogrolling and most of all, no room for Kel fast as I can to spondown and get it all out.  The journals, they're full, but nothing to fill me back up with no music.  It's a process.  Reciprocation.  I HAD No IDEA.  I sat on the bed for three hours just listening to Pandora and my ITunes, feeling the life come back on deep inside me.  The poems finally emerged then, I spondown'd on here then pulled out the leather back journal Erika overnighted (with her most recent adv copy Hem's Girl which I can't put down--word!!!!) that was waiting on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and I wrote a full, whole poem in that.  I am re-setting my ways as result of not having this my core sustenance.  I have learned something yet again the necessity of filling up, and the absolute non-negotiable:  having a place to fill with the words, a place that remains the same.

Sam played me her man's music he is Philly local soon enough I played her Josh just one song an old one it's the first time I'd done that in a very very long time and that was enough.  We work together Sam and me long hours ten hours at a time and so she is on to me as me to her: we hold the other's stories already, having known each other less than a month.  Some of them anyway, a single bone or two but skeletal-enough. So that with sparing details or so many that they come out in mouthfuls a few bursts at a time we know what flesh were giving the other, which bone on which to hang this part. This was a new twist.  This had new gold.  Little light flecks on the skin.  Long shadows from underfoot aura big as the aururaborelias in the western sky.

I'm seeing my friend Laura Walsh tonight I told her, I play her Walsh's music.

And soon enough there is the response, I feel the throes of the words from somewhere inside my chest and had to get on here it was a matter of health.  Sam and Ty humor me, roll silver and we small talk and cut sidemouth cracks on one another especially about me on the clock.  Here it is the skeleton I am yearning for the one o holy loss the lac of which leaves me with out structure or faith, and happy enough to deny that even a boneyard exists.   How Charles Simic said.  Who can not howl will not find his pack.

I am sick.  Being packless sucks.

It's Been A Good Year (but dont make her lift her skirts or I'll be pissed!)

It's been a good year.  I am sitting in conversation with this guy at the door of a coffee shop in this place called Severna Park and I have not seen him since no shit 1995 (oh my god, how funny I just remembered we were Class Partiers together in the year book, that's why he was explaining so bummedly and borderline apologetically about having to quit smoking!  Holmes my dad's got lung disease c'mon! We're grown up now it's alright...) and all I can think is it's been a good year.

I am kind, and ground myself and remind myself to be present.  It is genuinely good to see him: he is one of the only people from my high school, or the one near where I worked as a teen, that via facebook or some other networking means hadn't been found and labeled: Married, Divorced, Parent, etc and I tell him as much.  I admit I do, now I can check him off in my head.  Our funny little ways of keeping track of one another that get complained about but that at the end of the day matter, afterall.  Me, I have a Mama-Soul as part of my spirit, and a tight-knit tribe of Family which marked me deep in the place that gets marked by how we are nurtured, so knowing where and how people are adds to my security.  I grounded in this, and was happy to connect again to this guy.

But It's been a good year, and that is the line that has the little wick attached.  It's the line that when gionng through my head while walking out of Brian's house this morning in desperate strides towards the nearest wifi-having local coffee shop, triggered the light inside to tell me the Muses are near.  There is no other way to explain this to you if it is not your experience--the best I can do is what I always do when I sit down and write.  Just tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth and follow that little feeling of light.  I do not know when it started but I do know that it is real, it is the most real thing I know.  It is a feeling that comes on inside that alerts me to the inner creativity the boundless place and my duty, my calling here on this earth no matter what else is to bring it to the surface, to midwife it and breathe in to it the life it needs to fly.  And when I disregard it I get short and turn in to an asshole and so help me if you cross my way when I am in the middle of my dance with the Muse.  So help me, that is, should you make her lift her skirts and high-heeled or bare-footed run away.

But what a superstition that is, too?  Writing involves discipline and the most clear lesson I learned in the past two years is to not underestimate what happens by simple alchemy of action. Showing up, not bitching, and doing what the hell's got to get done, which almost always is what's right in front of me. It's more than just saying ahhh yea I will start with It's been a good year because that is where the little light is attached.  It's also bringing in to the coffe shop two books that really turn me on and reading a while this morning, and even more it's about sitting down especially when the light hasn't or doesn't feel like it's going to come. 

It's been a good year.  In November it was the Harvest New Year and starting out--the first week of the new year!--my bank account was in the red.  So what was in front of me was get a better job and get your finances re-ordered, no matter what. So I did because after the last two years of my life dont ever underestimate my hustle.  Turns out now I get to manage this way hip, way mellow local coffee shop in the Pines where I live.  It's brand new and the boss needed someone with experience in community building and coffee-shop culture, which has nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with supporting and growing your local tribe.  Even the business model functions that way and I brought to this my barista-ing for Peggy those years back at Play It Again in Chestertown, as well as the local art, food and music movement we grew around The Oregon Dialogue.  So far sooo good.  It overlooks the Bay and River on the west side of the inlet of Ocean City.  I watch the sun come up every morning and breathe and exhilarate in how fucking rad it is to be alive. 

And I am writing, and chilling a lot outside, and that is that.  It's been a good year.  In November 2008 I left my relationship of 6 years.  Right after that Josh and I tried to be lovers after a decade of being Muse to one another.  I still believe he was a true love, but we ended too because just because something's true doesn't mean it's meant to be.  Losing him, and leaving Brandon and Chestertown and Anngar Farm all at the same time was the single most painful part of my life and from start to finish it lasted until around the middle of this summer. 

It's been a good year.

I worked for Chesapeake College when I left Bran, I was one of four people who started the GED and community English program that now serves all five counties on the upper and mid Eastern Shore.  I worked my fucking ass off while I was there, and stepped down in May after living in isolation for a year out on the Choptank River and licking my wounds.  I was lonely and needed family and friends. I went on a month long sabbatical in the Pac NW in May and June and while there had more than one other-world experience of being Called again.  I moved back to mom's at the beach after that and partied like a rock star all summer long and still found that I had one more hall to cross to transition my life from Brandon-Josh-Chesapeake to the one that lay beyond.  This stuff cant be made up, you know?  The light within is real, what if that is our only choice, to surrender to the myth of what could be and give it our all to bring it to life?  How about learning that the only way to do this is to do it!?  And what about the struggle of being a woman and feeling this is the work you're meant to do?  This is subject matter for another post (or a whole damn book, ehem...) but what about that?  I know plenty of artist men whose art is their main and only priority.  What about when you're a woman with the same compulsion, what happens then? When the pain is that bad I know now that actually it's my only choice, to believe in this mid-wifing and keep breathing and trusting in the birth about to come.  The pain is my spirit--not a religious thing I am talking about the place inside of I AM--calling out a red alert to listen the hell up.

It's been a good year.  Tuesday night I watched Candace, Jessica, Shanika and LaShae walk in their caps and gowns and receive their Maryland State High School Diplomas.  They were four of 43 graduates from Chesapeake in just the last six months!  And at one time I held each of those girls hand in hand.  I hooped and hollered from the audience because I dont work there anymore so now it's okay for me to be wild and exuberant and un-professional even if it seems I'm acting a fool.

It's been a good year.  I dont live in fantasy anymore about a man who's love will finally change or set me free.  I dont dream of someday when I get to do.....all these millions of different passion-fueled things.  For the first time in my life I wake up now and just live today.  Seriously.  It's the first time in my life I've ever done that, you dig how crazy that sounds?  The passing from then to now was long and great and so dark at times that I often forgot what path I was on.  But I am me today and at peace with who I am.  All I need to do now is trust in her day to day. 

And pay attention to when the wick-light comes on, by listening and more, taking action on what's right in front of me.  By practicing what I learned in those two years which is easy to say but takes a while to get the footwork right. It sounds silly maybe but what the hell is there other than saying yes ok, the next step is just be present that's how right now that I can Show up, and the peace is inside knowing that the rest will be what it will be. 

It is pertinent as hell. Words.

I don't remember the year I spent at Choptank.

I don't remember anything specific, it just sits more as a memory of sense, gray and swirly with the occasional feeling of peace thrown in to the thicket of my reserve filed back then.

I moved from Anngar Farm the first week of November 2008, it was a Friday and I stopped my car at the edge of our 400 acres of feed-corn and soy to talk to two flannel-clad surveyors parked on the side of the road. The farm, they confirmed, had been sold. For all I know it happened that very day.

I talked to Brandon on the phone for about one minute. Then I called mom. I cried most of the way to 301.

Choptank was an hour from Chestertown by the backroads, which are the only roads I traveled back then, it was something about the soothing lay of the road against my tire tread. It was calming, all that farm country, all those trees, the changes of fall seizing the land. I was working for Chesapeake and had roughly ten sites in two rural counties spread out between well over 100 square miles. It was the something I could count on--I'd been on the Eastern Shore for a total of eight years of my life by then. I counted movement by the markers of farmhouses, wide turns in the roads and fields.

Besides leaving Brandon, I left behind a town of friends. A movement of local culture centered around both homegrown food and music, one that I personally worked hard to motivate and set within a momentum. It was sudden, to all of them, my departure. It was sudden and wrecking to him. It was like death, a numb whack of shock to the chest, to me. It was a miracle those first three months that I could even breathe.

I can say only that I was depressed back then and that is why I had to leave, and in a large way this had to do with being incapable of stating what I wanted. I knew what I loved but was too frightened to cultivate it or own it. I really believed it was something I did not deserve and so I went back on things all the time. My truth was changing because so much of my truth included lodges of fear, no dissipating no moving through, therefor no knowing for sure what I thought I thought for sure I knew. For months after I left Anngar lived in me with a filter of dull over it, but the fall is here now, the geese are calling and the trees have that certain subtle whisper in their departing leaves. I remember now so much. The fields that shivered purple at dusk. The yellow light on the barns and the half-there outbuildings and the way the birds carved the air inside. The sounds my kitties used to make in the high camelia bushes right out front. Old time records through the speakers at night, night after nights of dinners and the high chaotic laughter of our most amazing friends. Unannounced drop-ins from Sam. Coffee in the morning hot on the throat and cup hot on the hands, on the weekends the cool side-porch view of the shady hardwood trees against all that green. The quietness there with my love. Holding hands.

Last week, or maybe the one before that, I found my journal from the year I spent on the Choptank River, out in isolation renting a room in an 1800's farmhouse, talking to the water and laying in the grass. Over the years, since the early 2000's anyway, I've kept a practice called morning pages--writing three pages of longhand mental minutia download. Just getting the crud out of my head. It's something, a trick I've relied on with consistency that came my way via two different helpful books, that simply is the one true tool that's led me through. But I forgot about it: when I took up writing a novel morning pages were replaced with stronger doses of honesty on my blog. How I used my blog changed then, for sure. Literally this became the place of truth-telling, of writing my way through and thank god for it. It's helped codify the process, helped me shave down at the edges and in the great balancing act of writing for self versus convening with the audience, it's been the primary vehicle of me establishing how best to tell what I know. So it shocked me anyhow, discovering the hundred or two pages of writing my way through while at Choptank. Page after page of the same old horrible stuff, literally so much grief. Some of it ancient, some of it pity-pot, some of it contextual and some of it nameless in ways that kept me deep in the dark hole. Oh god the bravery it took for me to write all the way through! I had no idea, literally no recollection, of those pages being there.

There are loads of things I would different if I had the experience to do-over, and aint that the funny thing of it--I'd do it different now because of who I am now, but becoming who I am today had everything to do with going through those mistakes and casualties the hard way. Ultimately it comes down to that's just the way it goes. I stand poised in her today though, the woman who didn't know how to firmly say who she was or have the strength to stake her claim in the world. It is my own tiny miracle, my own heaven that is mine and mine alone and meant for only me to understand. It is pertinent as hell. It is the ground beneath me and it is the country of wild within me labeled not only what I want, but who I am. I hope the people that I hurt through it have forgiven. It has been a long hall, that one where forgiveness is gentle and blame retreats itself and lets open the next door, that one dark eddy of grave self-sin. I hope they all know how much love there is within. I am moving on from the chapter, the words falling like clean rain or leaves funny and quiet, but imminent, all the same. I am trying to convince myself in my most silent parts that the words are worth all I have, are at least as important when translated in to what I've come to give, from what I've lost and equally come to learn I own.

Sorta Kinda Letter-Poem. Indirect Light.

Let us sit a while, I say to you again, in this good breeze.

There is sunburn from September sun on the top of your knees.

The yellow light highlights the sunbleach in my hair.

You ask me a question, it is a long while before I raise my words

to answer. Right now Vinca is my favorite flower,

for how she sits quiet in the pot on the corner of the porch

& doesn't need for drink or sun. She is light pink, strong.

She issues from herself. It is glorious, and always has been

at the edge of the backyard.


I want to buy you a garden you say. You make noise.

Shift in your seat. I can't see your eyes. My face beams

reflected in your glasses: I am all I see. Or at least

you continue, provide for you the land.


When I move to the city the streets will test me.

I imagine this will be the time I need you to help me grow.

A butterfly flies by--really it is a moth. Paper-wings.

To be a butterfly, so much more romantic.

They both, however, start as worms.


We both, of course, eat ourselves. We disintegrate

in to other new, same things. Have you always worn

or mostly, only black? I wonder. I rack my head

for all the way back then, when we used to be

or still were kids. I dont remember clearly too much

of that.


You stop listening, you always do. Your way of pretending

not to care, to act like you dont hear. You always will, too.

I love the precision of light back here. How easy it is,

how good it looks. I will pick this flower for you and lay it

down. I remember now. It still will grow.

What hungers you. In quiet.

I can not count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers... (M.F.K. Fisher)

Dawes is up there singing.

The only thing scarier than dying is not dying at all.

There is wetness on my eyes, I have been in a place for the past two weeks of protection and keeping close ties on my heart, trying to be with it as it goes through its ups and downs, and now I am delivered. I am in my heart again, of it: the drum pounds the bass keep my beat and courses out in my blood all the way through to the nerve endings, the guitar's my spirit stretching out past my body. Taylor Goldsmith's totally American boy singing is finally giving me words.

It starts to go through my head, it's just a muscle. The heart. To this I can submit, I can revel in the beating wonder of getting to feel it. To just feel it, the greatest gift of all. This is wisdom: to know I'll look back on this time with gratitude and reverent longing.

My girlfriend whispers to me during set break. She tells me after her last relationship she'd completely lost all of her music interests but didn't even realize it. Her man criticized, or at least disapproved of the indy stuff that turned her on...so she let it go. Who knows how that happens? Silently, in little increments. That's how you give you up your soul. How you turn your self off. Piece by piece. Until you're so absent that you're used to feeling like your taking part but not really, only just a little. Dull, sort of looking in from the outside.

The band is less than five feet from us and I am relishing the show. I forgot how much this spot defined that time for me of naming, of recall. The time just behind me in Easton, in my first and only glorious space all of my own, when I called myself, bit by bit, detail by detail, hunger by blessed sacred hunger back to myself. The Nightcat, its black high ceiling with the exposed beams, the way the air runs in light circles back there, the red lighting. I was grinning all day in anticipation of seeing Sonia Leigh and Dawes, but I forgot how gratifying the venue is. How important place. The intimacy of the fifty or so of us having such visceral experience together. The catalogue of signed indy CD's, the pictures, I have to show for it. How much music is was and continues to be a map that's drawn me back to my own life.

In the parking lot I hugged my girlfriend goodbye and stayed extra long in my cousin Collin's arms. It was cool out but still so you could feel the weight of air. He is mind-blown, totally, by the show. Earlier, over dinner, he told me that he wants to move to Brooklyn Park where our Grammy lived, where his grandparents on his dad's side still live. He's been canvassing on a political campaign there all summer, dust and sweaty and I envision him, freckleface, blond and golden, is he in a button down? I am reminded of our hike in the fall, me and him, and talking so fervently about the GED and English students I served. About the unquestioned nature of class that so securely underpins racism. About my belief that many of our GED students I was certain had undiagnosed learning disorders, because the money for those resources just wasn't there in their neighborhoods when they were young. He said to me then that though his major was government he was thinking of focusing on education policy. Because when I talk about government I have to think about it, but when I talk about education it just comes right out of my heart. I remember my footing when he said that, stepping over the wet dark dirt, feeling my heart bottom out over the wisdom of this teenager who I've known since literally birth. Last night he talked about moving to Brooklyn, impoverished, crime-ridden Brooklyn. Brooklyn, because that's where the people connected with his heart when he bangs on their doors. They are the ones who made him feel equally fired-up.

When I left Collin and my girlfriend I met the girls from my old work for a late night catch-up. It was already 11, but the server at Applebees let us close the place down. We literally stayed til 1, cackly screaming laughter, the greasy food, couple of tears, the updates on Adult Ed and on my own life (I read a lot, I sit on the beach. Poetry--big self-conscious grin at this--I'm writing a lot of poetry. Tomorrow I will sleep late. My stresses include I wonder if my table needs more rolls...Coffee? Coffee here? And hmmm do I have another little black dress as sexy as the one I wore last week?) It was all put wholly, and gratefully in perspective for me. But I realized too how passionate I was for Adult Ed. It was a justice thing for me. Making opportunities available where they weren't before. It turned me, greatly, deeply, on.

In all things there are tides, and I for one am quiet and amidst a tide of great still. Life's cycle right now is on the long slow retreat and how I so love this time of year, the thick buoyancy, the savory greens, the dark yellow slanted light. The shadows in contrast. The feeling of heavy breathing that makes you so aware of the intermittent shafts of air to highlight the stillness. I have been submitting to it, which is not easy for me this Aries full of fire and passion and heat. Humbling myself again and again to the larger nature of things, allowing the silence, the stillness, trusting towards the inner-listing, the tiny hungers, to in stillness eventually speak their fisted minds. To become the palm, flat-opening. Allowing. It is hard. But that sweet unanticipated space, that wild curve within, fleshless and still, is there. And this is as beautiful as anything else: this does not mean what hungers one is missing. It means only that in full satiation there is quiet in the bliss. There is message in the silence, when one surrenders to wait and hear.

This one thing... Telling the truth.

This is Erika, quoting Hemingway in my head and it's what happens to me any time I sit down and start to write and cant get started. Tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth. Usually it's followed by me asking myself Kelly what are you trying to say?

There is a song it just came on as I finished that last paragraph and it made me smile and pull the comfort sheets of my self up tight around my heart because of the tweak it put in my chest the second I heard it start and the immediate smile and hush of breath it drew. It is one of those serendipity songs and one that always no matter what makes my spirit emerge from whatever tight little haunt of me in which it's hiding. It's one of my fighting songs, and it is the song of songs that would of course in this instance speak to me.

I thought that pain and truth were all that really mattered but you cant stay here with every single hope that shattered. Big Country. Oh this song. The one that Kelly J put on the CD when I sold my shit and went travelling in 2004--it played as I pulled out of Chestertown and left my disillusioned past behind. The past. The past? Let me say this to the past. It becomes you, shapes the you you become. For many months I have worked to heal my associations of me, and my patterns of my past that became patterns long before I had the mind awareness to know any better. I have begun to live motivated by one idea: we regret not what we've done, but what we have not. I have had to ask myself again and again, and sit quiet surrendering to me, to the long inner road towards peace and silence within to hear the answer: years from now what will I look back on and say because I did not do this one or two or three things, I regret? It is in this way I've submitted to me, to following my truth and being brave and strong enough to stand in and go towards who I really am.

There is one area--love, men--where I have a backlog of mess. I am in the context, here, now, ongoing, of forgiveness and peace in that area, it's a constant motion thing for me. And as to this, as to regret, and to telling the truth. There was one, a single real regret that clung to me and went something like this:

I should've been true to myself. The moment, the second I knew I was in love with him--and no longer in love with the one I was with--I should've been honest with myself and with everyone involved. I was so in love with him. I should've gone forward and to him, and not looked back.

I should've. But that's not what happened. And so how does life unfold--how does it mark you, and push you along when there is indeed this one thing that you look back on and did not do?
What happens is you quantitate, you consider. You loop over and over again in yourself and become lost in your self and hate and even further have more and awful disbelief in yourself. You become deeply deflated, hopeless even and don't know why, because often times regret hides itself if you are lacking in a certain capacity for self-honesty in some areas in your life, so that's what happens: if you are like me and you have hurt in a certain area of your life, old hurt, old covered-over pain from long long ago before you even really were you yet, than being true to yourself in that area comes out all slanted and sideways because to really be true means first to have to re-live through the old pain that's still there. And that's fucking hard. Especially when that part of you's always been broke.

Then, one day you wake up. It's a half-waking, but I'm a fighter, so you grab for it. And you realize god damn it, this is my life. This is my life. And perhaps this regret was the one, the one key to the door that is finally, for real and completely, going to make me own me in my entirety. That is going to make me stand up, and be true as I can to myself.

You start to get honest then, about your wants, your needs, about your past. About who you are.

I've identified the things, the couple of them. And I'm going whole-hearted after them. BUT MORE IMPORTANT. I get it, I get me now. I know me, and love me, all of me. I know how to be true to my self. Get it? I know now how to be honest to me. And to tell the truth, and not miss opportunity. I have healed from the early fucked up shit and abuse, or at least have self-awareness that is full and complete, and real. Not sideways and slanted and blind or numb in some parts. I have broke parts you know, who doesn't? But those are now the places I learned to nurture and be gentle with myself instead of denying and hating and refusing, because of denial and numbness and self-hate. Those are the places I have medicine, real virtue now. Where I can be even more gentle and loving towards me, and others, as result.

I am real now. I am whole.

This is my life. And I guess that one regret is no longer on my list because the gift that came from it is absolutely nonexchangeable. I hope that he--the lighthouse guy, the one who led me here to this deep and dark well of my self, the one who suffered at my hands and who I ultimately pushed away and forced to walk away without his own looking back--I hope he is well. I hope he is well: is full, is whole.

I am being true to my self, to my heart. It's all I ever really wanted to learn how to do. That part I don't regret, not at all.