Love, Life, and Memories: My Memoirs

i can’t tell you the exact time or place

     i can’t tell you why or how it came about

i can’t tell you what i was wearing

or even the words that were said.

     i can’t tell you if we kissed or even embraced.

However,

    in that moment something filled inside me

that i didn’t know had been missing…

    an inner sanctuary of the heart

a place to hide within those moments of reality

   you wish would cease.

a place that has the capacity for beautiful pain,

   and horrific joy,

                fused together

in a life miracle

       that no physical property can define.

   you can’t touch it

you can’t taste it

   you can’t smell it

and yet it is the closest thing to real you have ever experience.

   it’s pure and simple all the while complicated.

it’s passion and angst,

   it’s food and oxygen,

       it’s whole.

            It’s you and me.

A moment can change everything without allowing you knowledge.

    My moment is so, my moment is when I fell in love,

                                                                                           with you.

    At the moment we are given life, we exist in the same way that a new canvas does. With each experience, thought, emotion that define our outlook on life a new color is added to who we are. When you look at art the most complex and extraordinary pieces are those that blend so many meanings together to provide a larger concept, blending light and dark, good and bad. That is the same for individuals. In order to be extraordinary within you must have those good moments and those bad. Those beautiful feelings and the most painful. We exist as our own canvas, bringing our internal messages to the surface through who we are. Each color creates that complex, extraordinary message. No one enjoys going through misery. And those painful experiences can feel like they are suffocating you and you have no idea how you’re going to make it to the surface again and breathe. But without those moments we would have no way to define happiness, to know serenity, to know love. Aristotle wrote in trying to understand the  concept of happiness and life,

“We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.”

     What I believe he is saying is that happiness and life are not defined by perfection and those perfect moments but by the imperfections, the feelings, the thoughts, and how you approach them, how you let them affect and define you. You can’t ignore them, they are part of you are, but you can’t smother yourself with them either. That is the complexity with embracing the past all the while letting go and taking in the now. 

     Those moments change the outcome of our beings in ways that many refuse to acknowledge and embrace. Some choose to ignore, some choose to forget, and some choose to drown in them. As an individual we all carry our own personal histories with us. They weigh us down and rise us up without our knowing, and define who we are. With another year of my own approaching, I am beginning to accept the importance of my past but all the while realizing more importantly the brilliance of my now. I have always been a person who lives embedded in my memories. The what was. Over the last year I have gotten lost between the what was and what could be, rather than embracing the what is.  This obsession left me in the dark, scrambling to hold on to something, anything that I was familiar with. The beauty in existing in such a dark place is that at some point you will feel the light on your face and the warmth and comfort that comes from that moment is beyond anything you could have felt before. Its like climbing into a warm shower after spending the day in the bitter cold.

When you stand outside and you look up to the sky, you are looking towards what was moments in the past. You are you seeing the beauty of nature in its brief moments before. Like a snap shot of memory. The stars are the pictures after they have been taken, and yet the beauty is still real. Our memories are very much like that. No matter what changes in your now, and no matter for better or worse, the beauty that existed in those good moments will still stand strong. So why waste so much time trying to relive them rather than creating more. They will always be there and they will always hold that same exuberance they did the first time. What isn’t certain is what you choose to do today, how you choose exuberate your life now.  What ever the moment may have been that pushed you far back into the fantasy of the past, searching for a good moment to get over the painful one, you can’t hide from the pain in the past. You have the let pain in, soak it into your skin, because no matter how long you distract yourself with the past, the pain is still waiting in the now, and until you take it in you wont be able to move past it to good moments again. Until you take it in you wont have the ability to know happiness, because the happiness that comes after those painful moments isn’t the same happiness you’re familiar with from before. Because the pain adds a color to your canvas and the happiness you desire will be completely different because you are completely different with each color added. After what I would say was a good 3 years of trying to cuddle up in my blanket of the past. I have finally stepped outside and started walking, rather than waiting for those great moments to come to me, I am going to them. I am embracing my colors and looking for new ones.I have never been so excited for what is ahead of me.

It’s another Tucson sunrise I watch this morning from the roof right outside of my window. There was no need to not sleep last night just the constant noise occupying my mind deep into the night. It’s been a while since I have had one of these nights. One of those nights when no matter what you do to bring yourself to that safe spot, that warm spot, that no worries carefree spot, you can’t reach it. I can feel the sun slowly igniting my freckles, the bright rays piercing into my eyes through my glasses, but I have no desire to go back inside and crawl into bed for the short few hours I have until another day starts. I can hear the people around me starting their day. The jiggling of keys, the slamming of doors and the starting of cars. I would love nothing more than to scrape my ass off this pavement, put to rest my chaos of thought, and like everyone around me jiggle my keys, close the door, and walk to my car. I know that is what I need, and what I will tell myself I am looking for. And yet right now all I want is to hold on to you. 

I can feel the memories slipping away, the change becoming my reality and the process of the ultimate goodbye setting in. I’m afraid. I’m afraid if I let this process continue, now on cruise control, that I will finally loose you. I can see your name and not keel over in pain, I can hear the songs surface while on shuffle and not run to the player to turn it off. Those moments of fantasy and memory are becoming fewer and fewer. That is why the sun is up and I am still staring off into the day light afraid of going to sleep. I sunk back into the past tonight. Thinking of the all the things that have changed in the last year, all the things that are different from what I expected. I slipped into the question of what could of been. I felt those emotions come flooding in again, those same emotions I have begged myself to let go of and to move forward without. And now I am sitting here desperately wanting to hold on to them. To feel the tears running down my face, to still miss every detail of you. I drove passed that hookah bar tonight on my way home. I didn’t mean to or even think anything of it. But when I caught the name out of the corner of my eye and I realized where I was, I couldn’t help but cry. I don’t know if the tears running down my face were because I missed you, or that particular memory, or if the thought in my head was “that’s the moment, the time you threw yourself into the fire that led to the unpredicted need of self medication on the burns you walked away with”. 

I spend so much time wanting to know what you think about. If I ever cross your mind from time to time, or if there are places and songs you have had to struggle with. If I meant as much to you as you meant and mean to me. I can move forward, I can’t let go of the memories, but I can’t let go of what I felt. The safety, the excitement, the sense of home I don’t know if discoverable again.

     Sitting here, in the silence of my backyard, I’m searching for the means to describe the thoughts gliding in and out of my head. You would think while in a state of mind that has constant thought, the ability to write those thoughts out would come naturally. And yet I am having the hardest time finding a way to drain my brain. I find myself lost,  lost in thoughts of how incredibly unreal it is thinking about time, how quickly it moves, and yet how slowly it can feel. When you are in the moments of your life… they consume you. They become the most intense situations, and you believe that nothing can be greater, in pain or happiness, than those individual moments. And yet before you even have time to realize, they are gone, and you have moved on to the next moment. It isn’t until you sit back and allow yourself to slip backwards into those moments that you realize how truly fast everything passes you by and begins to change. Even after you have those realizations, and you begin to see the truths in life, you still can find yourself allowing those small moments to consume your every thought and feeling. I can remember fighting with my mom, and in irrational thought running out the door crying like i was dying, and sitting on the corner thinking about how horrible my life at that moment was, truly believing that there was no solution and that my world was over. Yet now, and I have no idea why my mind went back to that moment, I couldn’t tell you what the fight was about, or what made me think my world was collapsing. Yet the intensity of that moment is something I still find myself feeling in the dilemmas I encounter in the present. I find in life, we loose sight of the simplicities, and the big picture almost everyday. Nothing is truly unresolvable, because the truth is, even after our “worlds start collapsing” we are still breathing. There is still a tomorrow and the next day, and we still have this beautiful thing called time.

My new challenge right now in my life, is to find a path that will lead me to independence and what i believe to be the beginning of my next chapter and the beginning of the rest of my life. I spend most of my days unhappy with the fact that I am still trying to figure it out as opposed to living it. I sink into depressed moments that consume me to an extreme that shows no way out, rather than realizing I am already on my path. I am already moving forward in the direction my next chapter will take, I am already living my life.  I am letting those moments slip away without remembering that before I know it, I will be looking back realizing how fast time has gone by. Is it really necesary to let those moments take over?  To allow yourself to sink into that spot where you feel like your world is crumbling down? or that your life is sitting in a stagnant pond? I don’t know. I guess without those moments I wouldn’t be granted the realizations about life and time. But simultaneously I am at battle with the thought that as individuals we spend too much time worrying and not living. Most of what I find myself worrying about 1. is out of my control, 2. never actually happens, or 3. ends up leading to another problem.  I was feeling nostaligic about my childhood a couple of days ago and picked up an old book of poetry I used to read when I was younger. I am sure most of you are familiar with the author, Shel Silverstein, but there was one poem I read titled “Diving Board”, that I found myself looking at completely differently:

You’ve been up on that diving board

Making sure that it’s nice and straight

You’ve made sure that its not to slick.

You’ve made sure it can stand the weight

You’ve made sure that the spring is tight.

You’ve made sure that the cloth wont slip

You’ve made sure that it bounces right,

and your toes can get a grip -

And you’ve been up there since half past five

doin’ everything… but DIVE.

 We spend an irrational amount of time trying to make sure we are living life the way we ought to be. They way we are taught life to be. Making sure everything is in just such an order at such a time in such a way. In search for this sense of perfection we actually end up loosing time and forget to actually live. There is a keen balance between living strictly in the immediate moment and having a sense of reality, but even with that in mind we shouldn’t forget what the point of having air in our lungs, blood in hearts, and energy in our bodies is… to live. Those moments we allow to consume ourselves, when we think everything isn’t in the right place, should exist to reminds us that in the end our lives are still moving forward. We are still breathing. “Do no dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment” - Buddha.

Movies, Books, Television, Art, Music. Everywhere you look society crams romance and companionship down your throat. Its inevitable that most females in their 20’s spend unforgivable time wondering when Mr. Right is going to come. “When is it my turn to be loved? Cared for? Fought for?”, “When does someone rush to me pick me up and twirl me around?”. This swollen concept that the media has fed women about love and romance, and how it is supposed to be is I believe I can fly, a pumpkin turns into a carriage, rub the magic lamp, make-believe misguided hope. I do truly believe that at some point in every person’s life they will feel that incredible movie like rush with another person, but the reality is that is order to truly discover something of that magnitude with another person, you must first reach it within yourself. What the media should really be encouraging is self discovery. Now I am only of the age 22 but from what I have gathered in my own experience as well as what I have heard from the women and men surrounding me in my life, true love is a feeling within yourself. It is not a concept or experience that another person can give but rather a reaction within yourself from the combination of self confidence and pride, with another person confident enough in themselves to truly and willingly see their colors blend with another. And the color each individual has cant truly shine through until they have discovered themselves. How do you reach that level of discovery? Fuck if I know. God knows I have spent endless hours pondering that single question, and still swooning over the “prince” whom I have yet to discover. I meet people everyday in my place of work whom are still discovering themselves, and most of these women are 30 years or more. I’m not sure what the answer is. I know I sit back most nights lost and confused. I have been in and out of relationships and love enough to know that people are meant to care for one another. My biggest struggle with all this is the feeling I have when another romance doesn’t work in my favor. If the problem truly is that I am too young, or too lost in myself to work well with another, then how does one know when it truly is real? How do you know when your ready to let someone else in? and when that person is ready for you as well?

As made clear by previous posts, I have spent a good year and a half trying to find my self. I got to a level where I was happy. I felt that I was ready to throw myself, my whole self back into the world and see what it had to throw back at me. And it did, it threw life at me strong. I saturated myself into the new experience… allowed my wounds to reopen, and prepared myself to feel again. About a month into that world, it all came crumbling down. So I sit here now with the same questions, looking for answers again. I am beginning to think the true answer is, there is no answer. Maybe we are meant to suck life in like a sponge and filter the good with the bad. Take steps forward and back continually and remain in constant change. Maybe that is the acceptance we need in love  and in life, that the world is constantly changing, personally and outwardly. With each hit our outlook changes and becomes who we are. Maybe that is self discovery, the idea that discovery is accepting change with the ever blowing wind. For now that belief will have to do. I want to be able to trust what people say and what I feel, I don’t want to become suspicious in doubt of every word and every experience. Keeping the hope and sanity in trust and truth and myself should keep that perspective alive. Tears, breaks, and wounds all come and go. The beauty is that through it all, as a human being, and with the miraculous minds we are given, we have the ability to heal, to recover, and to move forward. The ability to brace ourselves for the next battle with confidence that no matter the outcome we can pull our heads above water and keep breathing. Nothing is the end of the world. In keeping that perspective alive, as an individual I keep myself alive. And that is what I believe must be self discovery.