R e l a t i o n s h i p

When you are little, you have boyfriends and girlfriends, and you call this a relationship. You go through that, think it is fun. Perhaps you will collect multiple of these? So you have another, and another, a relationship in the wholeness of the word, the beautiful simplicity, the non-dissectedness of it. Relationship. Fun!

Then you have another, and you are larger and have another, and the word grows—and becomes scary. It's growing bigger and you're growing bigger and relationship needs to mean more, but it is still just one thing. Just one word—so why this opening and closing, and then a deeper closing because of the deep opening, and then the deepest closing you didn't think you were capable of? Because you haven't figured it out yet, you haven't learned the secret. Relationship is playing with you now, because you think you have met it, but it has been giggling at you from behind its secret the whole time, Wizard of Oz-like.

And then one day you meet someone. And you realize.

You look at the word again. Turn it upside down, with him. Spread it out, spread yourself out further than you thought you could. There are things inside you never saw before.

Now you see an r. And an a. And a ship and an elation. And it's all there, and it's so grand and powerful that you are so small on this ship with your elation, and your ions and your re. And you look around at this new world, and wow.

Relationship.

This is huge.

And fun!

There is no such thing as a grown-up

Today I was working on my computer at Whole Foods and someone ran up to my table. And stared at me. And giggled. And stood there for 10 minutes smiling, marveling at me all the same whether or not I looked back, whether I hid behind my laptop or popped out from behind it, whether I told him not to touch the dirty strawberry on the ground or complimented his neat cookie-eating style. Sometimes he'd wiggle a bit, still smiling.

Ah, to be as close to the heart as he is.

Happy New Year, everyone

My Intentions

Don't be afraid to be a beginner at something.

Keep learning about yourself.

Develop a consistent spiritual practice.

Be open to romantic love.

Speak your truth. To everyone. Most importantly, to yourself.

Scents of crumbs of days of lives

I’ve always enjoyed smelling people as they walk by, generally inside modes of transportation. Tight spaces, forced hallways. On trains, buses, planes. I inhale the waft of themselves they leave behind, the layers of their days. Their mornings, their showers, their indiscretions.

I generally like the smell of women more. When an intriguing woman walks by, I make my nostrils sive-like to distill her smell and form an opinion about her. Not so much men, women are the ones, licking at my nose, apple sweet.

There was a Scorpio man I was in love with who was not in love with me, which at those times of my life was the only kind of man I could love.

I could smell him before he came into a room or after he left it. I don’t mean his cologne; I mean him. His being, his incense. His life, what he showered with, what he shaved with, what he left on him from where he’d just been. I loved it. I loved feeling so in tune with him, using a sense we hardly ever use to recognize someone. It made me feel poetic at a time when I used my writing very little.

Once I was walking down the hallway to my office and I smelled him. It always made my heart gymnastic; I went in, blood cooling after the swell. He wasn’t there.

Then I said, out loud, “I could have sworn he was here...”

And out he popped from under a desk. Hiding. Found.

“Hi Amy!” he said. I was embarrassed. He was not supposed to know I knew his smell. That I could track him. It meant I studied him too much. It meant countless things he already knew, that I just wanted to stop proving.

People are like that. They say they want to be known, but they don’t really want to be known. They want to know, but they don't really want to know. Everyone wants a cliff, a stunning view, a palpability but a mist, too, a part that is untouchable. A foam, a snow globe.

Two years later I was on a plane with another man, another Scorpio I’d known for eight years. He had just woken up from a useless Plane Nap and he immediately leaned over and sniffed me. Really sniffed me, staccato-like but lung-deep, like he was breathing in something vital. Like he was trying to break a boundary because he knew I could not put walls on my scent, despite wherever else I put them.

What is this need to inhale someone? Isn’t being inside of one human body enough?

A pottery kind of life

There’s a smile that I only have in Colorado.


I see it in photos; somehow the smile has both widened and sucked in any fat on my face and I am left with slimness and truth. The wrinkles are thinner, lighter, but more dam-like, standing strong against the others to hold their own.

There is a brightness, a reflection of this state on myself and on the state, and all of it melding to multi-colored fluidity. We are blues and reds and greens and tans, smooth silky tans against a ragged mountain backdrop. The sharpness of the mountains makes an angled complement to the curvy, waviness of me and my yin energy. We are juxtaposed, we are missing puzzle pieces, found.

My jaw is both rounder and pointier, as if it were becoming more feminine and yet more focused at the same time. Focused on her path, her goals, yet exuding what she can along the way. Peppering it with love, spicing it with sensuality. Molding and being molded a la vez.

What does one do with the
half-borne glimpses
of another potential life?

Balloon-thread ends
that fray, unrealized
unwoven

I will breathe it all whole,
supple it with intention
until I can no longer—

and let them fly away

and fly the
other way.

through me through me through me
the light, the colors,
you, deep spine of myself
do do! do?
and yet i'm floating
not backwards or forwards
in a purgatory
i never think of staying
in
and now maybe, maybe,
do.