Magdalena O!

I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.

    -The Hours

If one woman were to tell the truth about her life, the world would split open. –Muriel Rukeyser  How can I then write of truths? How many of us have secrets? Thoughts and experiences that devour us? I really wanted to go out to eat tonight but instead I stayed in and prepared some gnocchi in a grilled fresh tomato, sweet onion, garlic glazed with honey sauce mixed with fresh Pecorino and topped with tons of basil leaves. I bought the Pecorino as a substitute for a block of Parmesan, and it’s not similar at all when it’s fresh. Disappointed. I ate it slowly, with a fork that was much too small but I felt too lazy to fish out the clean cutlery from below the huge pans in the sink.  When you are in love, even the simplest activities, the most mundane become the greatest. Every time is the most important.  I wonder if I ate the meal in love, would it taste different? Would desire change the experience? 

when learning to fly, man started by falling, literally, off cliffs, to catch the speed to ascend.

I got drunk today while going to pick up a cheque at the restaurant. “Jager on ice” my boss asks me as I walk in and I nod. He knows where my love goes. My eyes are pissed off and want rest but Bukowski’s words keep teasing me.

Erica Jong writes about Anne Sexton:

…Once, when I wrote to her about my terror of publishing a second book of poems, she answered: “Don’t dwell on the book’s reception. The point is to get on with it–you have a life’s work ahead of you–no point in dallying around waiting for approval. We all want it, I know, but the point is to reach out honestly–that’s the whole point. I keep feeling that there isn’t one poem being written by any of us–or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem–a community effort if you will. It’s all the same poem. It doesn’t belong to any one writer–it’s God’s poem perhaps. Or God’s people’s poem. You have the gift– and with it comes responsibility–you mustn’t neglect or be mean to that gift–you must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego that wants approval.” But the ego must be fed so the gift can do its work…

How can I be a writer? A close friend of mine in high school who I only became close to after she admitted to cutting herself to me after reading my website and my stories, used to tell me, “People may think you are a bitch, but your striking honesty captivates me, please don’t ever change.” And here I am, still thought of as a bitch, but more of a bitch because my honesty has now become snootiness and not full of youthful perception.

How do you start stripping? How can I wash the soot off my heart and unclog the tar in my thoughts? So much hiding. So much actions and reactions and experiences written up vaguely, erasing the mannerisms of love but keeping… keeping what? Lies? I detest that word. It’s not lies I bear with me but enablers of memory loss, enablers of emotive dissasociation. How can I be truthful in my writing when I am so fucking scared to really, really get to the core of myself? Of my lover, of my parents? Will I be able to face my mother someday and tell her how I feel, or maybe even ask her sincerely what she really wants? My therapist says I think of too much all at once, making it all turn into one mess and that I’ll never be able to untangle my core this way. I’ll become so little and my “singular” problem so huge, I’ll become the pea under the princess’ bed. My anger will turn into rue, and then the princess. All my life will be the hundred mattresses all stacked on top of me, and me as the bothersome pea, me as the blockage to life. Me as the discomfort to happiness and peace.