Like Asphyxiation

My heart is pulled taut,
like an erected marquee.
Perhaps is it my sternum, she says,
“perhaps it is your lungs” -
those things that flap and falter sometimes,
like two deceiving fiends.

Wheezing and grappling for air,
like a six year old in a swimming pool –
My arms are flailing, heavy breathing,
I wait for my wings to grow.

No man is all, so, ipso, they were nothing.

"There must have been some reason for getting into a situation where there was nothing to do but be final and obvious. Probably it was because I was too intense with one boy after another. That same horror came with them which comes when the paraphernalia of existences whooshes away and there is just light and dark, night and day, without all the physical quirks and warts and knobby knuckles that make the fabric of existence: either way, they were all or nothing. No man is all, so, ipso, they were nothing. That should not be" - Sylvia Plath

Unsent letter - a 27th birthday tribute

These words come to you at 9.14pm, suffering from excess consumption of low fat ice cream. I question my mental comprehensiveness, considering it’s cold outside (and inside - my heart feels like it is working hard, albeit, it may be from missing you) and my fingers are pink and pruned like cherry blossoms. It must be because sometimes we’ll suffer just a little bit to consume what we love. We always do what we must to have what we love.

And this is the foreground - the bricks and mortar of this email – a stream of consciousness from far across a water-coloured, sketchy sea, overindulged and undersatisfied (this is not a word, by the way), because you’re not here to hold my hand when I’m cold to the honeycomb of my bones.

I wish for you this year, as you approach 27 years of age, fulfillment of the most wonderful kind. I wish you richness of indecent proportions – cream-filled cakes, an overflowing heart, canvas sacks full of coins to share with those who make you feel so affluent, and most of all, the fullness you feel in your heart when you wake up and are overwhelmed at the magic of the morning. May you always feel that no matter how many times it multiplies, at the nucleus of the atom, it is a blessing to be alive.

27 usually dictates a time in your life referred to as The Saturn Return - an astrological phenomenon that occurs three times in your life (the first at 27) coinciding with the time it takes the planet Saturn to make one orbit around the sun. It is believed by astrologers that at this time a person crosses over a major threshold and into the next stage of life.

The first Saturn Return is famous because it represents the first test of character and the structures a person has built their lives upon. According to traditions, should these structures be unsound or that a person is living out of touch with his or her true values, the Saturn Return will be a time of upheaval and limitations as Saturn forces him or her to jettison old concepts and worn out patterns of living. It is not uncommon for relationships and jobs to end during this time of life restructuring and reevaluation.

But the Saturn Return is not all about painful endings. During this time goals are consolidated and people tend to gain a better vision of where they are going in life. It marks the true beginning of adulthood, self-evaluation, independence, ambition, and self actualization.

During this time of inward self-assessment and overwhelming change, may your lessons be gentle, and may you always feel that you have someone to rub your back when your tummy starts to hurt from the confusion.

Happy 27th birthday, cute. If you close your eyes tight enough, or breathe in deep enough, you’ll be able to feel my wishes – after all, I’m only just across the sea.

"There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes..."

I am strangely dissatisfied with my currency… so lackadaisical that I lack the heart to measure my lacking. So feeble and filled with apathy that I have developed a desultory hunch – an inward, clenched gait that reeks of an expired emotion that I left behind with all the other nonsense and traces of discarded heartache.

I remember the abandonment well.

There were tiny flecks of light, but it was so dark that morning.

I grabbed the thinly haired monster by the crown of his misshaped cranium and thrust him into the irregular spasms of the oncoming rapids. The water gurgled, salivating, equally demonic and ready to abort the unwanted.

This time, the ugly mass of raw emotion plunged, unresisting into the wrath of movement – only to reappear in a less approachable form, years later – hairier, uglier, scabbed and wheezing from lack of air (and oh so ready to steal my oxygen all over again).

Random post-alcohol malaise

Wondering and wandering - simultaneously. I think about the women in their stiff waistcoats with their flowing hair and flourishing hands, leading feverish folks through the crumbling walls.

It makes me ache. Can you see that it makes me ache?

It reminds me of that time I hurriedly swallowed a stone because I heard a gypsy woman once talk about the falsified art of staying grounded. It scared me to tears, so my fumbling six year old forefinger and trembling thumb clasped the closest pebble in sight, and I swallowed hard. I wanted to be bound to the earth. The nomadic life and her mauve headscarf made me breathe as heavily as that Summer wind storm in the North.

I choked a little as my eyes sparkled.

But most critically, sweet..

"But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better."

— Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)

New York (from the sidelines)

"She listened, as if she were an emigrant hearing her homeland's language for a brief while." - Ayn Rand

I am tracing the idea of New York with my index finger. It follows the broken clock and hazy mirror, until it reaches the edge of my bedroom door. The paint is flaking off in all the wrong places, and as I damn my non-responsive real estate agent to hell, I smile at the idea of New York.

New York burns like a lynching. It explodes in my backyard (sepia-coloured, of course). It sets itself off like a warning - a self-indulgent, overly protective burning mass so warm that it melts my winter heart.

It reminds me of a flaming sea, and I sit on the shore, arms around huddled knees, waiting for it to come home.

I know so little about the places I've been. The places I've been only teach me about myself. I read Rimbaud and Kundera and then find torn pieces of paper to write the lines that resonate as loudly as a church bell.

In this place I am Rimbaud and Jonathan Safran Foer and Plato and Kundera and Murakami and Baglione and Plath. In this place I am old shards of paper, covered in treacle-coloured mess and peeling at the edges. In this place I take the detritus of my life and make it magic.

In this place I come to know what I want.

I want to wake up with a glorious red wine induced hangover, fists unclenched, and have "i love you's" scrawled across the alabaster skin of my palm.

I want to drink luke warm, stiff, melanin-coloured coffee, served in stained yellow tea cups and served to me by a woman double my age.

I want hair the colour of "ripe orange rind" (Ayn Rand)

I want to swim in a bowl of molasses, and I want my convictions to be as strong and as binding.