Today I Am A Fig
It’s Monday which is ruled by the moon which is in Aries and I am feeling tender. The New Moon is soon - in Taurus. of the body, and of the values. These are entwined themes that have been showing up in my life lately and I am very troubled by them - not troubled by them in a real way like they are bad but troubled by them because this intersection is hard because my body is where my feelings exist but my mind is where my values are created and understood and there has been a dissonance between what I deeply feel and what I deeply believe and maybe that is because of Mercury Retrograde and all the old patterns being unearthed. I have needed so badly to be touched as often as possible in gentle ways. Feet on feet, hands on back, hold me while I’m crying but please don’t look at me because that is a secret key to make the tears stop and they really need to come out.
There is a rumbling aliveness to life right now. It is roaring under the surface, it’s path unclear at the wideness of its berth makes it hard to find the centre or the purpose or the trajectory. I am waiting for it to rain - literally and figuratively. The metaphor of release, of crying, of an emotional tidal wave, of the accumulation of things, of the anxiety of lightening causing separation and the bigness of thunder clapping it all back together again and I want to watch it from my balcony and not get wet and I am remembering the time of my life when thunderstorms really, deeply scared me and they would make me quiver and hide and it was a weird few years then. I want to turn away from this because right now I am scared of the truth - of the silliness of my own specific truth and how probably not scary it is but I am gently making myself stay here.
My heart has been aching, I think to hold that intersection of the body and the values. It is hot and it is inflamed and it is really stretching itself out and sometimes it feels good and sometimes there are crevices in it that I forgot about in some unknown compression that leak out spores of mistruths and I am finding myself with many stories pollinating themselves in my mind and they aren’t very good and they grow very fast and I am so scared and sore and feeling really bad about all the ways I am not really the self I think I am or trying to be or wanting to be and not really in the mood to try and make myself feel better because that seems kind of fake to me right now and if I’m anything in this moment it is real. I am so real and it is tangible.
Do you know the feeling, when you are in a dream, and you are peeing and you can feel something is off and you wake up and you are peeing or just about to and it is, aside from the shame, a feeling that is really deeply like forgetting something - like waking up and forgetting where you are or getting in the shower and forgetting to take your bra or socks off? I have been having that feeling a lot. Weirdly enough, when I’m peeing. And I get this sudden wave of “something is so terribly wrong I really have forgotten something like to take off my underwear”but I look and there is actually nothing wrong at all and there is a really strange sensation I get that my whole world has shifted and maybe I am currently living something that has in the past been a dream in which I was peeing but I can’t ever seem to find an answer and these things loom over me like the clouds. They really fucking hover and gather and darken and yes the release brings more greenery and I can sit and watch it from my balcony, maybe, without getting wet possibly for a while but it will permeate everything and I know it will and I am terribly sad about whatever is polluting those clouds that will touch everything. But maybe they are not polluted and I am just waiting which I know is not a very good state for me to be in.
The dryer is on and in it there is an old blanket that somehow smells absolutely worse after washing it which I am having a hard time understanding - like an old chest or closet - but I put in dryer balls with palo santo on them and the air from the dryer is pushed out back and I get a wave of the lingering sweetness and it is mixing with evening lilac. And now barbeque smoke. and also the smoke from the herbal joint I rolled because weed is giving me anxiety again but I really needed the comfort of a specific ritual of smoking just so I could lose the trailing thoughts of doom that have been following my mind for a few days for a little while.
The tenderness in me is deeply palpable. I have not said words out to anyone since 7:30AM. I did record a podcast I guess so that isn’t true in a way but it is true in a way because it was like pillow talk with myself. I don’t know if reciting a poem counts as saying words. I am trying my best to be gentle and nourish myself in the ways I know how, in the ways I know I need. And I wish that for those around me too. I really do need to be alone but feel so scared of it when I am like this because there is a hang-nail of a thought I catch myself on that says I am not entirely loveable in all my states. Or maybe that I’m not easy to love. Or maybe that I’m hard to love, or hard on the people I love. Or a chorus of all of those things. And I pick at it - because I pick at things, and I hate that about myself but it is the truth. I will pick at a scab, a wound, a thought, a memory until it is bleeding and scarring and I tell myself that this thing to pick at wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t something to remove but usually I just draw blood and a longer life for the scar. There is so much shame surfacing in me right now, like oil in a broth that settles on top when it is cooled and calm. The things I am trying to understand, heal, and hold are slippery with this grease and I’m finding it hard to do anything but wallow.
I have made one meal today to eat several times. Sometimes that is what I need, the same thing over and over. Tell me the same things over and over, I am a creature of habit and if something changes I will notice - the spice or the tone or the word. These are all ingredients to a sacred comfort I come to know, to yearn for, to find safety in. Tell me you love me simply, with your hands in my hair and your mouth in my neck. Tell me you love me gently, laying in a dark room entwined in some shared secret. Tell me you love me deeply, truly, wholly, fully, passionately and all the other words you use. I try this with myself but it is like making my mothers dish without my mother and it just is not quite right and I can’t bear to eat it so I must give it all away. But I’m trying to just see it as a different thing. I am trying to not let it all go to waste - not that giving is wasteful but I am recognizing I give away my nourishment hoping it will be given back and it often is but maybe not exactly when I need it or how I need it, which I can’t blame anyone for because I don’t know it either sometimes.
Things like this will pass. I am trying to let myself be in the beauty of noticing it all. How this sadness makes me sit very still within myself and my hours and my day. I am noticing that I do not want to turn away from it - no reading or watching or listening or interacting is changing this inherent need I have to be stunned by the speed and brightness of the oncoming headlights. I cannot see behind it, I am fawned into place and hoping it will stop or swerve or that the impact is quick and the death is painless. Sometimes I am deep in the foliage of myself, alone, willing those headlights to come find me and witness me. Sometimes an unspeakable fucking sadness permeates my being in an inevitable way like dew at dawn and there is simply no way to escape it. And I’m not quite tired yet so I won’t sleep it away, and I’ve already had many showers and my tub is broken so I will not submerge myself in water, and all thats left is smells and words. I am reminded in this mixture of figs - of a candle he brought me back from France that I burned too fast. Of a different candle I found in a flower shop I don’t like, of a conditioner sample he had in his bathroom last night when I brushed my teeth. It is all sweetness in the right way, it is heady and deep and lingering and alive alive alive. And that is how I feel - tender, deep purple, raw and seedy, specifically textured, sensual in a way that is utterly decadent and unsustainable and luxurious. Wrapped in something cured and salty. Not palatable for everyone except those who know but I also, as the proverbial fig, do not want everyone to desire me only in consumption but as something to be cared for as a whole - perhaps the tree and not the singular fruit. I am not really a singular kind of experience, I am vast in all ways that matter and don’t. I can’t help how I spread myself out - it is not of my nature to bind myself to things.
My grandmother called and left me a voicemail that made me feel so fucking lonely. Yet today I cannot bear to call her back, today I am too tender to hear her voice and fully encompass all the ways I miss her.
I am thinking about everything you said last night in the dark, I am trying to remember my own words, what I said when you fell asleep but I can’t.
And the day is now waning. I am trying to choose how to end it but the only thing that really appeals is laying in bed, in dusk.