Still Breathing After All This Time
I don't know what's coming. Tomorrow. Next week. Next year. This week-end made me feel a little bit like I did three years ago: hopeful, calm, at home with myself. It's almost exclusively because of my house and garden taking shape into the place I imagined it would the first moment I saw it. I can do anything here. The garden is full of things we don't want, as I mentioned, and soil conditions that are pitiful. Kind of like how I felt when I was seventeen years old and facing the rest of my life which I didn't think would extend beyond thirty years old. I looked at myself and I thought "Angelina, you have a lot of potential, if only you could get a few hours of sleep and laugh a little more."
Just because I felt so good this week-end doesn't automatically mean that the universe is going to take it all away. Just because I noticed what a wonderful house I live in and have started putting roses in the ground (which is like burying my own bones in the clay) doesn't mean I will have to lose it all tomorrow. Necessarily. Right?
I don't need fame and fortune because I have my family, my garden, and my hens.
No stupid New York princess* can take my hens away this time.
Stupid New York Princesses are pains in the asses.
I don't need fame and fortune because I have arnica in my garden that will collect dew and heal all of our bruises. Because I made it past seventeen years of age and lived through child birth. Because I have walked the streets of San Francisco at three in the morning and still known who I am in the morning. Because I have blessed dying pigeons and walked into the pacific ocean with complete understanding that she might claim me at any moment. Because the first time I heard my son laugh I thought I might die from the way it ripped open my chest to touch the place where senseless happiness exists simply and without conditions. Because even though I have been plagued with endless visions of death and wishes for it to take me sooner than later, I continually choose life.
I don't know what tomorrow brings. I admit to fear. I am human.
But today was perfect.
*This is a very specific person, not New Yorkers in general. I hope she's surrounded by chickens right now. Morning noon and night. Bawk bawk.
Just because I felt so good this week-end doesn't automatically mean that the universe is going to take it all away. Just because I noticed what a wonderful house I live in and have started putting roses in the ground (which is like burying my own bones in the clay) doesn't mean I will have to lose it all tomorrow. Necessarily. Right?
I don't need fame and fortune because I have my family, my garden, and my hens.
No stupid New York princess* can take my hens away this time.
Stupid New York Princesses are pains in the asses.
I don't need fame and fortune because I have arnica in my garden that will collect dew and heal all of our bruises. Because I made it past seventeen years of age and lived through child birth. Because I have walked the streets of San Francisco at three in the morning and still known who I am in the morning. Because I have blessed dying pigeons and walked into the pacific ocean with complete understanding that she might claim me at any moment. Because the first time I heard my son laugh I thought I might die from the way it ripped open my chest to touch the place where senseless happiness exists simply and without conditions. Because even though I have been plagued with endless visions of death and wishes for it to take me sooner than later, I continually choose life.
I don't know what tomorrow brings. I admit to fear. I am human.
But today was perfect.
*This is a very specific person, not New Yorkers in general. I hope she's surrounded by chickens right now. Morning noon and night. Bawk bawk.