The Language of Love

Truths that we experience without speaking.

A synthesis of our kisses.

The emotions expressed in the color of your face.

In the push of your lip.

In the crinkle of laugh lines around your eyes.

You say so much to me.

My heart swells.

The over arching expression of wholeness when I am held by you.

A bubble of time and space that is infinite.

Expansive.

Delirious.

Sometimes I catch you looking at me and I lose my breath.

Sometimes I look at you.

And the wilderness of joy that breaks out inside me.

Well.

It is wondrous.

The opulence of you.

The shine.

Your comeliness makes me swoon.

And your charm.

It is lavish and magnificent.

Our language is poetry and magic.

Music lyrics.

And.

Laughter.

Great big guffaws of it.

You make me sing with laughter.

It spills from me like sunshine.

And sometimes.

When you are far I still feel that you are speaking to me.

I feel it in my body, an ache, incessant, in my bones.

That you touch me without even being in the same room as me.

Your love overspills the boundaries of time and distance.

It kisses me on my forehead.

My cheeks.

My tender face.

Glowing for you in the dusky light just after sunset.

Glimmering at you in my own language of love.

That you may decipher in codes ancient.

A language that needs no words.

Only the smile of you to unlock the meaning.

And I know.

All the way through my body.

How you cherish me.

And you must know.

Yes, you must.

Love.

How.

I.

Cherish.

You.

 

 

 

Sometimes

Music makes me sigh.

Releases some unknown tension and I can relax.

I put on Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach Cello Preludes and it was like I was melting.

I heaved a big sigh and just sank into my chair.

My body hurts today.

My shoulder is a nuisance.

Apparently I pushed too hard in yoga on Monday or maybe it was carrying the baby as much as I did today, but ouch.

Ugh.

Getting old.

I’m sure I will look back at being 44 and laugh at myself thinking that I am old.

The fact is.

I don’t feel my age.

Oh.

I suppose my knees feel twice my age and my shoulder feels like a baseball pitcher being put out to pasture.

But.

Feeling my age?

No.

I don’t think I feel any certain age.

Although I do recall a time when I realized that all people below a certain age annoyed the shit out of me, I don’t subscribe to any particular feeling when I think, “I feel this old.”

The little girl I watch is four.

She likes to ask me about my age, “I’m 44 honey, eleven times older than you.”

And that is intense to contemplate.

I remember being four.

Pivotal things happened.

Then again.

I don’t remember a lot of being four either.

Um.

Pivotal things happened.

For the most part, however, I have an extraordinary memory and I’m good at replaying scenes as I have taken them in.

If I can hone in on a detail I am suddenly filling all the spaces with colors and sounds and emotional movement and music, with narrative, and it is as though I am watching a movie.

As I have gotten older some memories stick more than others.

Certain scenes, images, smells.

Oh.

A smell can carry so much weight in it.

Or a taste of something.

Tomatoes with salt from my grandfather’s garden.

Raspberries and milk with sugar in a green plastic bowl, raspberries I picked with my grandmother.

Apple cider.

The top sweetest part of the 2 gallon milk jug that we would pour the homemade apple cider into after running it through the press.

My grandfather unearthed an old apple press and rigged it to a lawn mower motor and we made cider using that press for years.

The house in Windsor that I moved to in 7th grade had an apple orchard, 4 Red Delicious trees (to this day I always wonder why the fuck they planted such boring ass apples, fodder for the press, all of them, we never ate them they were just such plain Jane apples) and 8 Courtland trees, plus four pear trees and one Golden Delicious–the animals and birds ate most of the Golden Delicious before they could even ripen, they were such amazingly sweet apples, almost translucent with sugar, you could see through the skin in the sunlight.

My mom would pour the cider into milk jugs and then freeze them in a giant freezer we had in the basement of the house.

The sweetest part of the cider would float to the top when it thawed and my mom tried valiantly to not let us drink any of the cider until it defrosted completely, but my sister and I often foiled her.

The cold, achingly sweet, syrupy juice taste will always stick in my memory.

Sometimes it is the smell of strawberries in the morning, reminding me of a very late night that became an early morning and it was warm and summer time in Madison and I was walking home from closing the bar and the after bar and I stopped by a vendor at the farmers market and bought a basket of strawberries and sat in the grass, kicking off my shoes and luxuriating in the feel of the soft, warm, dewy grass.

Sometimes it is a way a certain person smells.

Euphoria.

And I am smote with longing and love and desire.

Or the way someone’s skin feels against mine.

I think too, sensory, I’m going for the senses here, of a warm night, not many of them in San Francisco, a few years ago, when I walked down to the beach and the sand was still warm and the beach was deserted and the smell of bonfires wracked my memories.

And I was suddenly four-years old again, at a beach bonfire, with my mom and sister, who was already asleep, and my mom’s boyfriend, and there was the smell of driftwood fire and sea and that smell is some embossed on me, that to this day it really is one of my fondest smells.

Smell and memory are very tied to each other.

Riding my scooter to work this morning I passed a tavern on Lincoln that must have a popcorn machine, the smell was enticing and it was real popcorn, cooked in that oil that old-fashioned machines use and real butter smell.

I was suddenly in a movie theater, the old 99 cent movie theater on the far East side of Madison, that was probably actually the suburb of Middleton, that only had one screen and I was watching Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Which I didn’t get at all, but the movie was 99 cents and that’s why we were there and the popcorn was cheap and plentiful and I sat in that air-conditioned movie house and happily ate popcorn and watched a movie that I was too young to understand, but I remember the feel of the back of the movie seat in front of me on the bottoms of my feet and how I would press my feet hard into the seat to stretch and then curl back up into a ball and eat more popcorn.

Sometimes smells startle me too.

One day not too long ago I was riding up 7th and I smelled the smell of a tree, a tangerine tree in my mind, although I have no idea if it was tangerine or not, but my mom’s boyfriend had an apartment that had a tangerine tree outside of it and I would pick them and peel them sitting on the back cement steps while they got high smoking pot.

I was suddenly a little girl in a sundress with sticky fingers and bare feet and I could see all the tangerines in the tree and felt satiated with the ones I had eaten and sleepy from the sunshine.

Oh.

All the memories.

The best part of getting old, accruing all these luscious things that I get to stock pile in my brain.

In my heart.

In my soul.

All the amazing things.

There are so very many.

And I am grateful for them all.

Yes.

Yes.

I am.

Grateful beyond words.

Things That Are Taboo

Wanting to have sex with your ex boyfriend.

Or maybe, you know, just um, cuddle.

Yeah.

That.

My motives are shit right now and I know it and so I won’t be seeing my ex boyfriend any time soon.

It’s just in the air, the fog, the mist, the shiny, slippery streets–it’s so foggy out there that when I left the Sunset Youth Services a few moments ago I thought at first that it was raining.

But no.

Fog.

It’s lovely though and put me in the mood for snuggling.

I choose to snuggle with myself this evening.

Being in communication with my ex has been interesting and I have done some more work around me and how I respond and feelings and all that and why, gosh, it just turns out that I am human.

“You obviously had a strong bond,” he said to me over tea at the Church Street Cafe, “girl, you too were electric, there was chemistry there.”

“And that doesn’t necessarily go away, connection is connection, it’s when the instinct gets blown out of whack, that’s the problem.”

Yup.

So.

No calling up the ex, not inviting him over for a late night cup of tea.

If I were to see him it would best be in daylight across a table in a busy cafe.

No touching.

Ahem.

God.

I miss being touched.

I met someone tonight who I have seen around a little and we recognized one another from a different part of town.

He shook my hand and I just stood there.

Human contact.

Such a small thing and yet, so necessary.

I think about the failure to thrive orphanage video I watched in psychology class years and years and years ago, about the babies that had everything they needed, food, nutrition, a bed to sleep in, clothes, but no love.

And what happens?

They die.

I mean.

That’s serious.

I’m not there.

And I love myself enough to know that I won’t let myself get there.

But I can still get caught up in the what to wear thing and the being attractive thing and I was going to head out this evening after work and go straight to my place and do the deal in my pajamas after coming home from a long day at work and taking a smashing hot shower, but I got it in my head I would bump into the ex and boy, I better look cute.

Thanks brain.

Now I need to wash off the makeup.

But.

In reality, it helped, I like looking cute and you never know who you might run into, who might take your hand and squeeze it tight.

Of course.

I don’t remember his name, but the kind eyes were bright and the hand was strong and the arm covered in tattoos.

I like all of these things.

I like that he said he was in the neighborhood too, 48th and Kirkham.

I like that my brain also wondered, is he gay?

‘Cause I can pick ’em like that.

I like that he said, my class is done, I’ll be back here on Wednesday nights again.

Good.

So.

Something, someone to look forward to.

That’s been the other thing.

With the exception of someone from absolute left field who as it turns out, though attracted to me, though someone who has had a crush on me (!) reached out to me, he’s not available and I haven’t had anyone that I have been crushing on.

I haven’t had any zing.

Anything or anyone that makes me get all a quiver and excited.

I miss that feeling too.

That nice shiver of anticipation.

And kissing.

Oh.

I miss kissing.

I need to be kissed.

For reals.

It’s been four and a half months since the breakup.

There’s been no kissing, no sex, no snuggling, no cuddling, no nothing.

My bicycle seat’s been getting all the action.

And I look, good damn it.

In fact, I look better than when I was with my ex.

I dropped about five pounds and tightened up a bit, all the extra bicycle riding, went down a dress size, got my hair shaped up, and colored a fabulous pink, and I haven’t gotten any play.

Granted.

I could have.

That whole trying Tinder for a day was enough to let me know there are plenty of guys out there who have no interested in whether or not I can read a sentence in a book or carry a conversation, as long as I can bend over and lift my skirt.

Please.

You have to try a little harder.

I ride by Good Vibrations every day on my way back to my house, the one on Valencia at 17th, and I keep finding myself wondering if it’s just time for a new vibrator.

Sigh.

Nothing wrong with a new sex toy.

Let’s be adults here folks.

But my dildo can’t kiss the back of my neck while I play the soundtrack to Amelie and listen to the whisper of the fog horns off the coast herald the misty night swathing the neighborhood.

I wonder then if it’s time to climb back into the dating websites or if I just hold steady for a while yet.

See what happens when I’m not looking, just keep going about my day and my life and someone will notice, step forward, and say, yes, let me kiss you in the door way, press you against the orange painted gate of your house and run my hands though your wild pink hair.

I will here Yann Tiernan in my head and sigh and melt into the air and the fog will swirl my heart away out over the ocean.

I don’t want sex.

That’s the real taboo thing.

I can talk sex all day long, and I do want sex, don’t let my words mislead.

But I want the courtship first, the date, I want to pick up a book and hold his head in my lap and read to him and I want to be wrapped, tucked tight, really, in the crook of a man’s arm and held, guided, led through the mists out to the beach, where the love smashes itself on the sand and the electric blue jellyfish flay themselves on the sand, melting into the tide line like mermaid tears.

That’s what is taboo.

Wanting love.

To be loved.

To want romance.

That is the real deal breaker.

I wait for it.

The carousel will stop turning and I will grab the brass ring and sail around the perimeter of the square, while accordions play and the sun sprays on my face a calliope of desire and love.

Until then.

Another cup of tea.

A few more words on this page.

I open my heart to give and receive love.

I shall start with me.

Happy

I just said it out loud a lot today.

“Happy.”

And I was.

Nothing special.

Nothing new to report.

Unless you count the fact that I wore a sundress in San Francisco.

I was pushing my luck, two days of heat and the third usually means cooling off and heading into foglandia.  But I risked it and though I did have to don my sweatshirt for the evenings bike ride home, I was able to go through the entire day with a summer dress on.

Happy.

Happiness is a state of contentment for me.

I used to believe that happy meant excitement, expectation, exhalation, high highs, roller coaster emotions, drama.

Not so much anymore.

Happy.

Sitting on a fresh painted green picnic table in Alamo Park Square just below the tennis court surrounded by old trees, rose bushes growing profuse and decadent, with my little girl Thursday in my lap as we watched the butterflies flitting about the sun.

Happy.

Riding my bike to work in a sundress.

Make that really happy.

I did joke earlier that I was tempting fate, that it would probably snow since I had decided I could rock out a summer time frock.

Practice for the trip to Wisconsin.

Practice for the music festival I am going to over Memorial Day weekend.

Need to get my ducks in a row for that, camping equipment, arrangements, and details.

My friend is out-of-town in Canada on a family matter and I have not heard back from her yet as to when we will be leaving and what I need to do to prep for the festival, but having been to Burning Man a few times I am certain I will be able to piece together what I need.

Happy that I am allowing myself to go out-of-town on Memorial Day weekend for a girl road trip with one of my dear friends.

I get to listen to music outdoors for four days in a row.

That is really happy.

Very happy with my hair cut.

Calvin must have taken four inches off and I was a touch sad at the loss of length, but man, it looks so much better and prettier.

So much so that I ended up giving a Solid Gold business card to one of the mom’s after today’s music class.

We have similar hair and she loved my cut.

Happy to get a hug from the Music Together teacher.

It’s nice when your presence is acknowledged by the person running the class and it’s nice to have mom’s that treat me well and it’s so lovely to have little children crawl into my lap and share with me their joy too.

Happy.

Pushing the stroller in the sunshine through the Pan Handle park to and from the music class, walking through dappled shadows, smelling fresh-cut grass, which always reminds me of summer.

Happy to have brewed extra coffee this morning so that  I could bring some in a glass Mason jar, with my tea cozy wrapped around it, and make iced coffee at work, to sip on the way to music class.

Happy.

Today’s music destination?

France.

We sang lullabies in French and the free dance was to Edith Piaf.

Lovely.

Happy.

The smile of the barista at The Mill who took my order and made my iced coffee for the walk back to my charges house.

Happy.

To hold the door open for the disabled man coming up the stairs and to be patient.

With myself and grateful to wait, to know that there is nowhere to rush off to, nowhere that I needed to be except right there feeling fine.

Happy.

That I am not going to get up early tomorrow and try to start the scooter to take it to work and rush about if I can’t get it started to ride my bicycle to work in the Castro.

Nope.

I am going to wait until Saturday to deal with it.

I don’t have to get up and try to force a solution when I have all day Saturday.

I really mean all day.

My early afternoon commitment was cancelled, she’s off to New York for the weekend and I don’t have to be anywhere until 7p.m. on Saturday.

I will take the time to address the scooter when I am not feeling rushed.

Happy.

To hear the laughter in my life.

Happy.

To laugh at myself.

Please show me who I should be with, popped out of my mouth this morning in my meditation and prayer time.

You know what I heard, which caused me to burst out laughing.

“You’ll know when he asks you on a date.”

Oh Jesus.

Duh.

And moving on.

Happy.

To not care right now I am so relaxed and softened and pretty exactly where I am with who I am.

I don’t know when I have felt this free and easy in myself.

I suppose it’s the culmination of a lot of different things, a lot of work, a lot of surrender, a lot of following other folks suggestions and ideas and a lot of taking action and not living in fantasy.

Happy.

I don’t have to figure it out.

Happy.

I am getting myself to embrace my authentic self further and have some fun.

Yes.

I am getting my hair colored soon.

Hehe.

But I am not going to do the big reveal yet.

I did, however, share with a dear angel of mine what I was going to do.

“Oh my God, that is going to be amazing,” she exclaimed, eyes wide.

Yes.

I think so too.

Happy.

Butterflies, blue skies, begonias, bright eyes, big hearts, robin’s eggs in the grass, beauty all about me, love, beachy skies, overblown rose bushes, pig tails and sparkles in my hair, summer dress, and travel plans, Burning Man in three months, friends going to Burning Man for the first time, getting to live in San Francisco, faith, godliness, trees, the smell of cut grass in the hot sun.

Hot sun in San Francisco.

Happy.

Happy.

Joy.

Joy.

Repeat.