it’s a quiet corner to practice in with no one really listening in. it’s a large, serif font, which for some reason encourages me to scatter things with consonants. also, thought journeys, mind wanderings, those are one of my favorite things about this human experience. i am compulsively inclined to share mine.

i’ve been getting my space in order, which is a frantic morning endeavor on weekends when my daughter goes over to her dad’s. my day of order is destroyed within an afternoon of her return, a massive art project spread across half the living room floor but who the hell am i to deny that process?

she’s eight now, and her latest passion is drawing sacred geometry mandalas with compasses and rulers and coloring them in and so that just lives in the living room and i am okay with that, because that makes so much sense. by all means zone out on that, kiddo. heck yeah.

but on the other hand, disorder outside reflects disorder inside and I have lost the balance between responsibility and recreation because the most responsible thing to do, really, is to enjoy life and make art and be outside and have water running over your dusty and sunbaked skin and also you gotta work, mama, and you gotta study, and you also need to see every single long-lost friend that passes through, because people always pass through in the summer and it’s good to connect and reconnect with people and so here we are. and if we enter the system we are trained from the start to struggle with working during the summer and then eventually there we are, thirty years later, going crazy on an afternoon in june while the world comes alive and the flowers start to bloom and i’m sitting in a windowless office with fluorescent lights.

no.

i am resilient but in a different way. i strip down to my skin and spread my legs in the sun.

everything is a cycle and it flows like that, the rise, the rise, the rise I got and then that great release or maybe death, and this cycle, for me, is also changing and behaves now as it never has before. It is always new. It is all so intense, from the various places my body presents discomfort to the little sensors on my skin, to the way I handle it all, yes, all of it, and form a state that is just another little layer of barrier because of the hypersensitivity that presents, because of the set of tasks required. i can handle these things with a toolbox.

But this is who I am: I am made up of things that bubble up and pour out of me when their names are called. This blood drips out when i stand, copious and dark, and the first time it came out like this it frightened me. i thought i might be dying.

i’m not, but the crones are waiting for me, so now that i am alone again i take it out to the garden. there are plants out there that love the moon and this land is still so starving and dry. this is now the chosen duty of my womb, this metallic and irregular offering of gratitude as this process and i prepare to part ways in the coming years. we will learn new rituals for these 3am journeys when i wake up with the moon shining into my bed, but the moon will always kiss my face gently, she’ll kiss my face like she’d fucked me blind just hours before. wake up, wake up, that was so rich. let’s do that again.