Alone

I am slowly discovering what it means to be alone with your dreams. I haven't been this alone since my early 20s, when everything was tortured and simple and wrought with danger and possibility. So much has changed within me, but mostly time has passed, my time, and I can feel each day like the running down of a meter. My life.

I am not afraid of the alone. I like it. I keep my own unpredictable hours, my idiosycratic habits, my wet towels and stone cold mugs of over-steeped tea. I am never bored, and not really lonely. But sometimes the vastness of my own life looms cavernous around me and I am cowed by all that I am, all that I must do, and the fear, of course, of missing that gold ring as it comes around again. How many chances do we get? Will I even know it when it comes? What is it? What am I here to do?

I have run from this mission for so long. Hidden in the warm, uncomplicated embrace of past loves, most of them unworthy. I knew on some level all along that they were mostly there to protect me from myself. The enormity of this space in which I now sit. I did not have the tools to navigate in the dark, I had not submitted to the tyger. I would have done anything to hide from myself.

But no more. I want to be here. I want to be here in this difficult place and I want to find out what it is, what it really is. I have to focus, breathe, be here. I have to discover what it means to live in the forest of the night.

I hate rules

Just saying. I may be frequently inappropriate and pay only passing consideration to social morays, but wouldn't the world be a better place if we let go of those ridiculous games, those rules, and just said what we think?

Back

I'm back.

Back from the extended dreamland that was the last eight months of my life. I feel like Keats as the nightingale disappears over the hills leaving him standing, dazed, in the summer darkness.

I don't know anything. I don't know where I am going, or what my life is going to be like, or what I will do. I just know that the decision I made was no decision. I could have tried to compromise my heart and my soul but I could not have sustained it. I would have become increasingly insufferable, betrayed by my own flesh that would have risen up in revolt against my feeble capitulation to comfort.

"The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul and walks smiling at its funeral." -Khalil Gilbran

I choose love, always choose love first. But it cannot be love that owns me, restricts me, prescribes itself to me like a self-medicating doctor diagnosing me with his own illness. Because I can't, no matter how much I might desire it, be confined in the safety of a loving cage.

So it is off to Los Angeles again. One less ligament in my hip, a few more months on my body, but still able to sit on my own head and making remarkable progress with those cursed handstands. It's time to open up all the way, cast off all doubt, plan, believe, and be free. I am not fearless, but I will rest in the palm of my fear and feel the warmth of its skin and know that I am alive, for now, and I will not be crushed.

Drinking Vodka on the Rocks

is something I should not be doing right now.

But I don't know how else to cope with what is moving into me, through me, right now.

Tomorrow, nice and early, I will be submitting my source of my power, the center of my strife and struggle, to scrutiny under Magnetic Resonance Imaging. My hip. My darling hip. It shakes, it quivers, it bends and undulates. Why does it betray me now? Why this pain? Why does it make me stop?

What will I do?

How do I cope with this? What do I do with all that is inside me, clamoring to escape? Who am I, without my movement? Who am I without my dream? Who am I if no one understands the depth, the profundity, the pain, of what it is I am losing?

A painter I heard about quit painting because he said that no one cared if he kept painting. Six months later he started painting again because no one cared that he stopped.

No one cares about what I do except me. But I care so much it is tearing me apart. My dreams are me, and I am them, and they are the reason for my sentence in this slowly deteriorating flesh. If I can't pursue them with every fiber of my being, I do not know what will become of me. Except vodka. Vodka on the rocks.

Hip Troll Sighting

So I just got back from seeing the superduper grand poo-bah of injured hips at Stanford. He immediately dismissed my vastly inferior x-rays and had me get a set of new ones. Much to his surprise he found a small troll crouched atop my femur gnawing irritably on the bone and making rude gestures at the technician. This explains the problem, of course.

The troll is in the shape of an impingement. That means that I was born with a little trolly knob on the head of my femur (see, it IS all my parent's fault) that, in most normal human beings, probably would sit unperturbed into my decrepitude. Alas, because I am crazy (that is definitely my fault) and insist on doing improbably things with my joints, my ligaments, particularly on the right side, have loosen up like overused bungee cords and now the femur is rattling around in the socket and the troll is gradually wearing away at my cartilage, labral tissue, nerves, and other important and tragically fragile bits. This is more pronounced on the right where the ligaments are sadder, but I also have the problem on my left hip, along with some calcification (baby trolls?).

While physical therapy may help by supporting the joint with muscle instead of the sad ligaments, if I want to resume my normal abnormal range of motion and avoid the long term risk of arthritis or (ack) hip replacement, the troll has got to go. This means surgery. The extent of the surgery will be determined after a really unpleasant MRI in which they inject dye into my hip using a needle that makes me flinch just imagining it. Recovery time is 4-8 months depending on how much troll has to be scraped off the bone.

I think I can still do handstands throughout. I'm going to start training handbalancing with Angelo next week. Hopefully the troll with not object overmuch and it will keep the tyger from gnawing at other delicate bits for the next... how many months?

Grrrrrrr....

Says the tyger. It's been long enough.

Long enough spent resting, eating, feeling safe and cozy. Now I can feel the pacing beast inside me and it occurs to me, not for the first time...

Maybe I'm one of those people who will never "grow up". I talked to my mother on the phone today and she is shoving writing jobs down my throat, assuring me that I just have to find the right job, something really interesting, and I will be excited and passionate about it. She sounds a little desperate when she says it, desperate to convince me, desperate to believe it herself?

But I don't believe it. I may end up working some job type job for a little while right now to facilitate the healing of the hip, but passion? For writing about other people's lives, other people's dreams, for other people's publications? I used to think that being a journalist would be such a fabulous job, but that was before I found this life I have now. And I can't go back.

I can deal with many of the recent changes. My gym for instance. Only a few months ago I was aerobicizing away amidst herds of lanky models, carefully tanned actors, and grizzled producers. The Hollywood sign floated tauntingly outside the massive plate glass windows and everything was gleamingly fluorescent, new, painfully trendy. Up and coming DJs set up their rigs to spin dub step and mash ups for the hip hop and stripper pole classes taught by professional dancers. Half the breasts in the changing room had surgical assistance in maintaining their buoyancy.

Now the creaky hand-cranked windows in my gym look out onto a quaint bagel shop and a used electronics store with a broken neon sign that flashes intermittently. My fellow fitness-seekers are mostly dumpy Chinese housewives and retired cops on crutches. The one set of loudspeakers was, during the brief moment I removed my earphones, playing Lionel Ritchie. The pace of the average workout taking place around me is desultory that I frequently wonder why they come to the gym at all. As usual, I stand out a bit, which isn't necessarily a problem, but when combined with my broiling frustration it makes me feel a bit like the high school kid I used to be. Testy.

I love my home now, it's beautiful. It is far more beautiful than anyplace I anticipated living in the near future. I have a boudoire, and I sleep in a bed fit for royalty.

So I find it odd that I am so restless. Who wouldn't want what I have? And yet deep inside the tyger paces and growls and I have to get back to work soon. I have to get back to the struggle, the birthing. It's the only way I know to get this thing out, and if it stays inside me it will chew its way out through my ribcage, eviscerating me along the way.