a feather drifting in passing

I want so badly to believe that I can live a life without knowing, but my mind is sovereign. And there is so much more out there. There is so much more that I don’t know. It is an insatiable hunger, an appetite so particular about what it wants, that haunts me. A persistent craving for all of it, for omnipotence. When I hit my first decade, I promised myself that I would never feel naive again. I fear that I am only here to know, and though I know a lot, there is so much more out there, there is so much more I don’t know. 

I want to be able to walk in a woman’s body and think like a child, forget what nurtured me into this self-sufficient being who’s unable to connect. I stand next to them as they look at each other, allowing themselves to believe they are saying something meaningful. How different my life would be? If only I’d been raised by ignorance and chosen to believe in it. 

I want answers: How light could I be? A feather drifting in passing? A brush of winter air? Bliss, with a consciousness? A soulless entity? The sound of teenage laughter? The hollow cry of a baby? How careless? How free could I be? How long until? 

I want to forget. When I shut the blinds and dim the lights, she’s standing there. It all comes back to me, loudly. Everything I did and didn’t do. Sometimes I remember. Sometimes I recall her love as my biggest accomplishment. And there is nothing like the burden of knowing I failed. So she comes back every now and then. I remain a prisoner of my past, but a much more devoted prisoner of hers.

I want to remember what it felt like to find peace. I could tell why people did it, the insane adrenaline rush of being nothing, no one. Having no responsibility other than breathing in this moment. To live in synchrony with the land, to awaken next to the sun and take the moon to bed. People tell you that nothing matters, yet you try to avoid the truth. And the truth is that it doesn’t, I finally understood that at Makapu’u.

I want to be a good person but I want to be a better daughter. For a long time, I’d convinced myself that there was something wrong with my home, but could it just have been me? I rejected it for most of my life, I resented the spirit that fed me. I tried so hard to detach myself from its roots, until that December. I’d been away, seen so much of the world that home– in meaning and place– went through this transformation where I could finally recognize it for what it was, what it is: a loving mother. One that continues to forgive those of us who’ve wronged her.

I want to feel the same numbness they all relate to. I want to make it clear to you that it is not that I cannot understand what being numb feels like. It’s that somehow my numbness is for all the things that they feel. I’m afraid that, no that’s it, I’m afraid. So here I am again at 2 a.m. in my pitiful confessional prose piecing me whole. Trying to shake the urge to relate, to be the same, to make things simple. So I apologize, for I have lied, there are still twenty minutes til 2. 

I want everything life can’t seem to loan, whereas he enjoys the mundane life has to offer. He feels good. A feeling I haven’t been met with before, he is everything I would not think of myself and I think there is hope in that. I have this vision sometimes, my ambition and his gypsy dancing to our silence. Our truth can’t be spoken and even if it could, I would not choose it. This vision of our differences intertwining in physicality, breaking into sweet inner song, keeps me going. He stays sacred inside the realm of my longing.

I want to stop thinking that friendship threatens my being. To give yourself, to allow someone to have power or any kind of authority over you. To lose a bit of yourself with every single one of them. Gaining less than you ever give. I’m not a best friend and I am not a good one either. I am a lone being and it is in me to live like this. It is in my DNA to take after this loneliness. I find a connection to everything but the people around me because in that, there is sacrifice. There is a loss of autonomy, a loss, one I cannot endure any longer.

I want to fight back, but this ever-present feeling of being left behind pursues me like hunter does prey. I pray, every so often, for some star, a god, to show me how to leave this con act behind. But behind my friend's backs, it dawned on me that I do not trust anyone. Anyone, including the corners of my own mind who have access to all of it. And it is a different kind of pain not trusting anyone but believing everything they say. People tell me I should say what I feel. And I feel their love, but what even is love?  “A concept the poet rejects,” that was rule number one. But one night I was walking by myself through what I recall to be 18th Street, mid-November, the week before my birthday, and I was lost. Lost after two years of living in the city, I couldn’t make it home. I haven’t made it home.

I want to stay true to myself but he stands at a distance, waving a white flag, asking for me to surrender to his ghost. 

I want to know what it's going to take for me to break the wall between thinking and writing. I asked my favorite author for writing advice. They said I should write what I am most afraid to write about. I have been thinking about it a lot, last time I tried to write it down I lived in New York and the sadness of November and the soon-to-be holidays was starting to eat me alive. Sydney is getting colder, and it's now May. I can’t think about what I fear the most nor can I think about what I am most afraid to write. I wish there was a test I could take that pointed me in the direction of what I truly fear, but that would go against the author’s philosophy.

I think my biggest fear is that I don't fear the things I should. My biggest fear is that I can come here and tear myself apart, disregarding my own privacy. I guess I do fear. I fear that I am giving up ownership of myself. Is that a valid fear? I don't know. I let go, I become someone I don’t recognize. I think, I write, and I have a fear of looking back and sensing this excruciating intrusion that my higher self has allowed. What I am scared of the most though, is that I am writing this and much more worrisome is that it feels good. Am I scared of how good it feels to say everything I think? No.

I think I am just afraid of writing.