anta ruuHii
“The truth, my dear, is that life, the world always bends to our decisions.”
Dear Simone,
I've purchased a set of colored pens and a notebook so I can write with my hands. I need to be more effortful in how much time I give to the screen. I worry about things that do not need my energy, and my focus is a bit tainted. If I were to choose a color, it would be orange. I am burning inside, and my gaze is on the skyline where the trees tiptoe toward the sun.
Rio is a majestic city. It sparkles at night with the multifacetedness of an angular stone. I won't say diamond. It is too colloquial. My skin itches from the bugs and my shins are bleeding. I enjoy sitting outside in the dark and watching the hillside flicker with the stolen electricity. The bugs arrive in their tiny cars, park alongside me, and stick out their tongues. It's the flies, tiny black with red eyes. They rub their palms together before sinking their teeth into my skin and no matter how I slap-slap-slap, I can never catch them all!
Cha Cha worries that it's bed bugs. My bed is smells clean though I know it is not. The apartment is dirty and I am not naive in thinking the filth does not extend to my bedding. I will do up everything in the wash today and the only reason I haven't already is that the machine was not hooked up.
Another reason I know the space is not clean.
I have all these tiny bug bits on my ankles and wrists. The flies focus there because they're the connective joints that give me mobility. My hands express generosity; the feet are for reverence. My first act of rebellion was when I took a pen and set it on the page.
I could be the rebel of one face. I am using purple eyeliner to make my eyes pop. Without the color, I looked like a dazed fawn. I am remaking myself in the jungle, and when I reappear in the desert, my lover will not recognize the wrapper. The heart must be strong to withstand the changes we each undergo, willingly or not—evolution insists.
I entered this gateway from the cosmos of crackling stars that flash like the lights of the favelas. I am still the same person I was when I was pushed from the womb. Alive, so much so- that I risk the wound of wanting.
Trust is earned over time, and I've skipped so quickly through my life story that I haven't given enough of that one thing to any one person. I give myself with ease to each person I adore and my friends say that I don't ask enough questions.
The sentiment I've been sitting with is, why ask the question if you feel what is true? I know what it's like in my body to be loved, and I also know that love is not enough to sustain any one thing.
The nuance and textures that ripple outward from each experience add the layers that tighten like a cotton web around the writhing thing that is your heart. Reaching outwards, that energy moves up and out with such magnitude others feel it even if they don't let on that they do.
There is no one way to do things, and there is no sense in protecting your heart from it all. There is room for multiplicities and split personalities. One way or another, the situations that arise will consciously provoke some small creature to whistle from the corner where you kicked it.
Everyone wants influence—power continues to thrust its horns into the dwellings of those without doorways. Boundaries have become a sales point, and I insist on languaging that expands instead of contracts.
The differences between you and me are many, though we are not so different at the center of all of it.
It's the wrapper that puts it in different piles, not the stuff on the inside. Cha Cha has more bites than I do because she is sweet, and I am a bit sour. I think this is why she's been robbed twice and myself none at all.
I've found stains on my sheets that are not mine. The white sheet covered the couch with dried blood. A large patch in the left wing, like a poppy crushed in the bush. Someone stepped on it and the petals bled out onto the white grass. If you grind a leaf, what is the aroma? Crushing the velvety soft petals to death is the scent of decay or of the sweetness it exudes?
I am that one small petal ground down by the weight of what occurs around me. I will hold tight to the essence, the juice that seeps out when I'm put under pressure. All things bleed when forced to open. Even rocks.
The mountains pour their tears through rivers that run dry when it's too hot. I'm too hot right now and begging for a thunderstorm. I need to be cracked open; I'm too itchy to be contained.
I miss Morroco for its dryness and burning sunsets. Morocco is purple, whereas Brazil is red. I would be the blue spot in the middle, attempting to blend these incongruous halves with my motor and masher.
Petals and pestals; I am submissive and strong.
When the Great Mother visited me in the Uk, she showed me black lines that wriggled like long angular snakes without eyes. Long tongues and toeless, the snakes led me to the desert, where I sat in a cave of stones that were wet with dripping water. I could hear the ocean and was confused by the sound of it, being situated in the desert.
Stay here, the Mother said through the snakes. I sat on the stones and the reptiles wound around my ankles and wrists. The bugs have brought me back to this memory with their biting. I was bound- Christ-like- to that cave in the wet desert as I am to this bed-bitten bed in the jungle.
The bedroom feels heavy, energetically. I smudge the space in the morning and evening to clear the conversations, though the residue from past guests in on my skin and hair. I can taste them in my body. I want to know what they say- I want to feel their pain and their joys. If I stay here, which I must, I will use this time to converse with the ones who traveled into the jungle and slept here before me.
All things occur for a reason. I am meeting the demand of speaking the truth and what is on my mind. I am developing a deeper expression of connecting to my instincts. Intuition is always there, though as any muscle, it can be strengthened for a greater sense of embodiment.
I left Elise in Barcelona; I did not confront the situation. My lack of direction in taht situation has led me here, where I am being forced to look at and reconsider a similar event. I will wait. I will be patient and kind. I will be considerate, AND I will state what is observable and make a request.
I will make things with my hands and make music with my body.
I will light incense and speak to the spirits that linger in the peeling paint on the walls and the doorknobs that clatter to the floor when I touch them!
The Mother will take care of me- she said to be here. She is in me and I must trust that there is a reason for me to be where I am right now.
The disquiet in my body is so loud! I am cracking open like the fat beetle I squished with my shoe. Its wings spread wider and wider until it nearly snapped in half.
I will not be spread and split into two parts. I will keep the two poles within and widen them to a point I can sustain. I will not be the bug that is pulverized, or the petals ground to a pulp.
There is a way to contain the sweetness without being destroyed.
Photo source.
