I fell asleep the other night with my headphones jammed in my warm ears listening to KBOO. I had stayed up until midnight just to listen to someone who before I met I knew I was in love with and always would be. It’s hard to be certain of things sometimes love is so frightening…I think lately I have feared the future, I feel somewhat like I am part of an orchestra but put on mute. Or just someone’s tapping foot keeping time, I’m nothing really, just a tool. India is different then where I am now, and I feel like it’s slipping away from me, only tangible through my memories. I saw a National Geographic that showed a train trip through Udaipur, India in 1984 and it looked so familiar. The monkeys, the different colored street food being passed through windows, the two-leveled bunks filled with people, the people.
In my reminiscing I wrote this:
There are so many other places I’d rather be right now
Sitting at the edge of the farm in the forest, nakedly 16 years old, looking out from my sit spot. Not knowing the world and finally declaring I belonged on it. It was a fresh and heartfelt age.
Standing on that bridge, a river never reached beneath, and the tropical haze - a foggy paradise. Hearing my brain say that jumping would be suicide and deciding to follow my feet anyway. Most of my better decisions have been made this way.
Under the blankets in Vipassana, my body prickling with sensations, where I was conscious of even a drop of water sliding down my leg. I was miserable, I felt hopeless, lonely, lost, lusting for home. But little did I know I was being trained to be and have the kind of love that fills you and bloats you till it seeps out of you there’s too much of it to be able to hold it all in.
Under the blankets of the fort Sadie and I built on Flanders Street.
Wrapped up in love. That moment staring into his eyes so intently that reality shatters around us.
In the arms of every man I’ve let hold me because no matter how much of a feminist I am, I still feel the safest in this place.
In my dream last night where I jumped off of a roof and landed up, I was flying, out of necessity.
In the first tree I ever climbed, I got high enough that I got too scared to go down.
At that waterfall in Rishikesh where we made up fairy names, grown teens, wet with nature’s natural pleasure and quenched with its freedom.
On the stage, with a microphone in hand, the black dress on that showed my shoulders, after I sang the song Black Coffee.
On the stage sitting next to the other cello players, with the lights off and only our bows that had glow in the dark stickers visible.
On those stages in front of all those strangers.
Not here, right where I am, walking underneath this umbrella that keeps out those dribblings and droplets of positive encouragements in life. Its pouring outside this umbrella, it rains college loan debt, buckets of wet soaked fear of unsuccess, lethargic lightning bolts that induce depression, and a wind whistling that’s risking the normal healthy balance of things.
