Wednesday, March 28, 2012

collateral damage

That's what I am every time I'm caught standing next to a person the moment they decide to self-destruct. 

rolling with the punches

"Fig. to absorb the force of a blow"

March is almost over. Given the last three months I'd say 2012 is shaping up to be a year fraught with personal difficulty. I'm certainly not shaking my fist at the sky, taunting God to bring it on, but perhaps I can accept this as a challenge all the same. Can I hold the center? Find my place within the flux of everything changing. Do I have any stability with me? Can I feel loss, can I suffer and yet hold fast to the knowledge that these are impersonal - these are natural, they are bodily, they pass. 

Prevention is a pretty word. It's a word you seldom hear in Western medicine. Over here you don't worry about a thing until it hurts. This is not how we treat our hearts though. I can't make time for my yearly physical, but I'll make damn sure no one has an opportunity to break my heart again. You lose something or someone and it becomes easy to wall up, to begin viewing your attachments with suspicion. Which one of you will leave me next? We demand an answer and when one doesn't come sometimes we make one come. 

In my experience, energy spent obsessing over prevention and protection is energy wasted or worse. Pain and loss and suffering happen and will always happen. They are part of the deal. If we try too hard to protect ourselves from these inevitabilities we run the risk of shutting not only the bad, but also the good out of our lives. And, though it may make us feel a little safer or a little more in control how effective is it, really?

the golden rule

It is impossible to violate another person without also violating yourself.

possession

How could you know you'd remind me of my godless days? Those days when I'd stopped singing. His hands around my throat. His fist in my mouth. My happiness choked completely out. I was the farthest from myself I've ever been. This is not a metaphor. It happened. First I was a lover, then an object to him. Objects don't suffer, they don't hurt. You take what you want and discard them. No part of me left untouched, unmolested. No part of me too sacred. By the end his reach had gone so deeply in, I never thought I could feel safe from it again. And yet, here I am. Here I am. Here I am.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Friday, March 9, 2012

what I know

I know the jasmine bushes on May St. are in bloom but, there's nothing quite like catching their scent from the back of a motorcycle after an evening of darts and drinking at the King's Head Saloon.