My heart was filled with too many questions--like are timelords born as babies and will we be in love forever--that I forgot to ask myself what it was I truly wanted. I had grown used to seeing myself like the seedlet of a milkweed pod, tossed to and fro between happy chance and miserable fate. I kept finding myself places, unsure of the reasoning that had led me there, and confused because I thought I had been meticulously matriculating. Sometimes you are meticulous and the results are still surprising.
I had this friend once who said that life is not about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself. I thought this meant destiny. But part of me always believed that destiny was something you picked up off the floor and took home with you. You didn't create a destiny, you just realized you had it. It is like blowing into a fan. You exhale and the world exhales right back at you and though you feel the force of it, you cannot see its projection and it is hard to catch your breath. We are created by what we decide to do.
So when I fell in love with you, I felt the thick stir pot of creation mixing everything up. When asked how I was doing, I said, "All the left heels of my shoes have fallen off and I've recently learned that I am held together by stars." I was drawn to you like a siren song and though I saw those rocks, I wouldn't have steered myself away even if I had wanted to. Can you imagine how confusing this was? I don't believe in starcrossed lovers. I don't believe in everlasting love. I believe in friendship and good sense. I believe in relativism and the unbridled beauty of resistive female friendships.
Cowgirl interlude:
We were those who wanted to hear our hoof beats pound familiar streets into wilderness and our shouts turn mist into cumulonimbi. We were taught that the buddy system would protect us from strangers and it was possible to know things by learning their names. They wouldn't teach us how to build fires, only how to ask for money. Sadness was something we understood, and passion, but not reproductive anatomy. Books were tailored to our exploration of both. As we grew, we came away from and into our own power. We began to see that our power lived in relation to other powers and began to take witness of the intersections in which we lived. We grew distrustful and we nurtured solidarity. Each of us, everyone of us, learned a new language.
It is with an unsure happiness that I have discovered you are a part of me. With you, I have drunk deep of beauty and of grief. I have been unmade by you and yet still I feel myself made more. With you, I feel the lick of oceans upon deserts and the echoes of some tolling bell. Together, we have tossed a coin and slowly does it somersault above us, not yet landed, not yet home.
