Little Weirds(38)

No stores or restaurants are open yet, although I am sure there are people baking already, in the places where the other people will go inside, hungry and wearing their Tshirts, with their babies, with their loves. I am here, in this time of the morning when nobody is apparent but myself. I now look so forward to this time before the world is on. I wake up and I am tired but once my feet hit the ground and I know that it is still very early, I feel relief.

The kettle waits for me. I open all the old windows. I am a young woman still. I have cropped my hair to my jaw. I am not taking any more nonsense.

Outside now everything is shifting shades as the day sweeps in. The first thing to go from blue to green is the grapefruit tree. Then from blue to fuchsia are the bougainvillea, then from blood blue to juice red are the geraniums that I require. They fill boxes. They make a fringe of fire around my house. The peppermint geranium, which is only big furry leaves (no blooms, only scent), switches from blue pads to green-gray fans of fauna.

My small tidy breathing, soft thighs on the chair, my hands touching each other, my eyes open and steady, my life.

It was not necessarily a choice at the outset, but now it is certainly a point of pride that I functionally dwell in realms that I was once afraid of. The darks and the in-betweens. They all fortify me. I am a citizen of many dimensions, and now I slip between them easily. I never slip away from myself by simplifying myself. I can’t become smaller to fit into a crouching love in somebody else’s meager world.

I don’t do that anymore. I have calmed down. I have consolidated. I have come through the reckoning that I required.

I have crept into this blue hour so gingerly as to not disturb it or bounce the sun up into the sky. I can travel from an early-morning world of still blues into the clip-clop of this green daytime regalia without seeming like I stayed too long at the dark party and now I am in the day by mistake. There is a time of the day when there is no light, did you know that? I never let myself know that before, but now I know it and I face the day when it is still dark. I face the darkness with the faith in the light, without any rush. I shift and slide with the time as it flows forward. I am not a wandering spirit, I am a walking woman. I have a place in the shifts. I don’t have to wrangle intimacy anymore, because I am engaging with it constantly, with the intimacy within, so that I can be a part of this chill flux.

I didn’t feel like this before, when I was more scared, but now I wake up when the dead are walking their last loops and the newest drops of dew are pouting on the persimmons. I don’t have to wait to be here anymore. An animal like me lives all the time, everywhere. I didn’t feel it before but now I do.

All of these times, the hours where you can’t see anything and the ones where you can see your whole form, and all of the ways that the shapes and shadows fall in between, these are all hours during which I have given myself permission to keep time. I am that mysterious stranger that I hoped to meet. I met her at a dark dance. We came here to live together until I could stay by myself.

The place is here. The time is now. This is all my lifetime.





From me to you, from me to everybody

I look up to you because I love the heavenly bodies of the universe, and the way I see it, your heart is a planet.

Your heart is factually a part of the universe, which is a miracle of endless force and boundless beauty.

There is literally no way that you are not part of that.

Despair can force you to turn your eyes away from this fact, but it is the real truth and it will be waiting to be with you when you are free enough to turn back to it.

Your heart is a planet. I can see that you are from the sky.





Acknowledgments

Thank you to the people who encouraged me, assisted me, bolstered me, listened to me even though that must have been very irritating at times, loved me, hired me, fired me, took me in, and let me go. Thank you to Ron Slate, my father, who sat with me and read everything. Thank you to Nancy Slate, who receives my teary phone calls from the other side of the country, who took me straight from the airport to the alpaca farm when I asked her to, no questions asked. Thank you to my sisters, Abby Ciampa and Stacey Slate, for saving my life many times, for being the kindest women I will ever know. Thank you to Mike Ciampa and Johannes Epke for being my real friends and dream brothers. Thank you to my grandparents, Lester Gilson, Connie Gilson, Rochelle Slate, and Paul Slate, for giving me so much joy and an education and many Barbies and potato chips and Jell-O. Thank you to Barbara, Rich, Emma, and Anna Rollins for walks in the woods and many good meals. Thank you to my friends, who have never once shut me out or shamed me, and who I will love forever: Quinn Lundberg, Zach Galifianakis, Gabe Liedman, Daniel Zomparelli, Lang Fisher, Sarah Taylor, Nellie Killian, Mike Barry, Grey Brooks, Max Silvestri, Leah Beckmann, Mae Whitman, Jane Levy, Mallory Wedding, Dean Fleischer-Camp, Gillian Robespierre, Elisabeth Holm, Jennifer Schwartz, Anne Nicholson, and all of the Camp Tapawingo Girls. Thank you to Rebecca Dinerstein and John Knight for caring for me and having fun with me all over this globe, for endless encouragement, patience and tiny wooden animals. Thank you to Claudia Ballard for her endless support, and to Jean Garnett for her guidance and kindness and incredible skills as an editor and general human being. And to Ben Shattuck, the person who I might thank forever, for so much. Thank you for letting me be wild, and for giving me a home in your heart. Superlatives are dangerous, but I’ll put it in writing: You are the best sweetheart, a dream love, a true weirdo, and the biggest and best surprise of my life.