Not The Mind; Feelings

If not most of my life, the recent months have been full of difficulty in finding the right words that feel or felt weighty enough to produce the exact emotion I have been enduring during the course of situations that came toppling over me since early February. And it still is but, I’m trying to whack away the weeded moss and limbs that have crowded my thoughts and ability to process, in hopes that through this rambling, something becomes clear and clean enough for me to openly ruminate on within the course of actions that have happened.

We’re all trying to feel our bodies; what it means, to feel, to be alive in this organism that provides such rich lives.

I rang in the New Year with the “everything must go” sale from my uterus, shedding out the could-be to make space for the new cycle of other possibilities.  As much of an inconvenience (but always a blessing) it was to be bleeding during the rambunctious occasion and simultaneously be seeing my long-distance boyfriend at the time, I managed as all women do, and cleaned out the space for the new year ahead of me. I felt secure, happy, vibrant in my womanhood; to be a woman, however I have decided to fulfill that title, and to be comfortable in my body’s natural progress with someone tender.

It took me a fair amount of years to recognize and be appreciative of myself and the sexuality I identify with. I began my sprout into puberty at what I considered a pretty early age compared to others girlfriends throughout school. And from the beginning, mine was murderous; then with one blimp of a dropped stomach and a vacant uterus to be rented for the next nine months, the space was cleaned and ready for a new season for a visitor.

As a person who identifies as a woman and carries the biological essences to being a mammalian specie, I always held the knowing (as we all do) that any moment of being sexually active was my RSVP to a potential being occupying my body. But my body felt to be my own. That is before I really began to feel what it means to own and inhabit this mysterious, beautiful body of conscious, emotions and ability of myself, of all women.

There are so many ways and words you can conjure when resolving a situation through a prediction; telling to your girlfriends before every period that if you came up pregnant, you’d do what was best and get an abortion. It’s easier to conceive thoughts of ‘what if’  but you never really fathom it will happen to you...that’s why things, before they embark a mark of eternal significance, are done unto us; we can walk this life with easier steps.

You think it’ll be easier the third time your heart is knocked with a hammer, but you never fathomed this would be the one to leave like the others.

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I have more love than ever.

I’m constantly hungry for those around me, friends and foes and newly arrived strangers

To feed me, hold me, shove me to the wall and embrace with such filling desires.

My family needs to be greedy; a room full of loud noises, spills, sleeping over the surfaces of my life.

I’ve had burns and bruises and bumps over my knees to my knuckles that eventually (always) scab to scars to forgotten marks of life's past fuck-ups; the broken heart mends back in time, too.

Body, body, somebody tell me have you really taken the time to feel your body? And no, I’m not talking about the smoothness of a hand making spirals over the moon's shadow through broken blinds or that creaking ache that pops in your toe when you stand up too fast.

Like that of the tap tip Tippett’s words towards becoming wise, that “bone-deep love, heartbreak, the ‘hardened heart’ of Pharaoh — I taste, touch, smell, see, and hear, and my mind intertwines with my senses and experiences — therein, I become. We’ve become divisions of compartmentalized words that describe the very physical reality to our beings; tethering ourselves now to the very mystery we’ve made to a more fluid understanding.

Baby, baby, oh my baby to be — I felt my body dissolve under the hue of blue surgical lights as they released that heavy aroma through my veins; felt it crumble as he walked across the green hued to blue carpet of Portland’s airport. I saw a light through the tightening of my carcass that caresses the muscles that stretch like silly putty over my dense bones; my body no longer a frame but the miracle of once-was and once-could-be.

Some words we acknowledge will one day hold no use, but never forgotten.

Scrap of the vein; elasticity of the body pulling to a new form.

Invisible to the eye; a flem of lost love coats the lining within.

I wrap myself with a blanket tonight, immensely grateful for the love I’ve felt and what I’ve lost. The great thing in life is not the mind; feelings,

 Oh, those I have; hauntingly becoming stitches upon my body.