A HOUSE FOR HOMES
INTERNET LETTERS
Tuesday, August 27, 2024 at 12:00 AM
holding/ releasing/ surfacing
hi my dear ones,
this week i share with you a compilation of three journal entries from the last month: the first, a full moon reflection five weeks into brazil, another as i flew to la saladita for a solo surf trip, and finally, words from last night, as i journaled in my bed in mexico city.
in summary, the vibes of this one are very :’)
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07.22.24 : holding on, in fear of loss
I am taking this evening, laying in M.’s bed — what will tomorrow become mine (and T.’s) — laying in glowing red and two meditations, to observe this Capricorn full moon. This weekend in a Disneyland of white-washed Bahian beach paradise, I witnessed the moon. I looked up at her brightness, her fullness, her roundness, her pushing to her edges, her flooding light. I have observed many full moons, even made a brand of it, but this moon, I was struck by the fullness, the full glowing, firm radiance of a complete circle. Tonight I observe the full moon in me. Observe what the tides are surfacing in my emotional body, what stones are collecting in my stomach. I observe my own saturation, me filling to my edges, my body swelling. I’m looking at my fear. I’m looking back, back to the full moon I arrived with and forward to the new moon I’ll depart with, asking where I locate myself now, at the peak of this lunar cycle.
My body is bloated. I am so full of this city and its experience that I’ve lost my appetite for it. This city sits in my stomach, my body unable to process it, to digest and let it back out into itself. There is something I am trying to hold on to that has entered me here, or something is trying to hold onto me, to rest and reside with in me, my body expanding to new shapes as it wrestles with this unfamiliar cohabitation.
Tonight, I am saturated in fear. I feel my desperation and guilt shining, flooding my want and yearning with a spotlight on my errors. I’m afraid that people will see them, see my faults, recognize my humanity and then blame me for it. For not being cleaner, for not controlling my desire, for gorging on my personality and doing it all on display. Shame. Take that to the corner, hide it in your room, stay there and don’t come out. Better yet run away for a year. Or at the very least, move often and far away enough that people can’t follow, can’t trace the outline of your flawed being.
Am I afraid to be witnessed? To be around others long enough for them to recognize the errors in my programs I am still trying to debug? To rewrite and decode? There is a history in this body I didn’t ask for, lineages I don’t recognize. They fall out of my mouth and I pick the pieces up, spin them in my fingers, and stare at the unfamiliar colors; I have to question where I come from.
I leave and I move and I arrive and I visit, long enough for lovers to attach but not one to enter. Long enough for loved ones to see glimpses of my ghosts, to be spooked by my shadows, but not long enough for them to meet them. Not long enough for eyes to adjust, to see past the phantoms and see me in the shadows, me in my darkness, me and my faults. And so I’m afraid they won’t. That they will mistake my shadows for me, mistake mirrors for a truth I was hiding. Now they’ve seen and now they are full. Can’t have any more of me and my sour sweet. And so in fear, I’ve already lost. I continue on. I day dream of leaving, of meeting myself somewhere out there and building a life with her. In the meantime, I feel so lovesick for myself that I throw tantrums at difference. I compare my friends to a standard of me because all I want is someone I can be me around, someone able to be with all of this flesh, its before and afters. It’s gooey darkness and ick. All I want is for them to come closer and yet, I feel myself distancing, pushing them away. And so they go, and here I am, afraid of loneliness, intimacy, fault, and loss.
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08.12.24 : no longer holding. releasing, flowing. being with next to, on.
as i think about my intentions for this time in saladita — this surf trip, this retreat, this salve, this dedication, this experiment, this practice — I am thinking about how brazil was a time of holding. holding on to an idea of what that time would be, resisting the waves that pulled me into other waters, offered me new turns and tumbles. holding on to an image of a body, how it should look, and move, react to and process bahia and her flavors. holding on to shame and guilt — my nationality and language a weight i let take residence at the top of my stomach; hoards of food, bile and gas moved in too, trapped beneath, called in to support the tremendous weight of my shame. my longing and desire i held onto too, naively thinking they would be better guides if i caged them within. Now i see i can let that desire flow, that spiritual guide, release it and see where its river flows. I can follow its currents better as a guest than a host.
after an unexpected 24 hours in LA, where I called in the support of loved ones, leafy greens, and a laxative — after finally releasing — I feel my stomach settle lower into itself. I feel where the floor of my stomach meets the roof of my womb. I feel a sturdiness where these two cavities meet. A floor I can stand on. One that will rise and fall with the tides, as meals pass through me and my cycle flows within and out of me. I will no longer expect a rigidity, demand a stability. I see this surface’s fluctuation and patiently, I watch the waves form. I can ride this. I will listen with my feet, stand rooted in my core, keep a slight bend in my knees, I will feel into this rhythmn, this push and pull between intake and release, and flow with it, not attempt to regulate or control it.
And so it’s cheesy, and expected, and maybe a bit forced, but really I am prepared to surf this week in more ways than one. I no longer wish to hold on so tight. I am ready to release, flow and be with my self, my spirt, that erotic feeling of being with source. And I think it is that feeling of not holding to that self/source that can meet that yearning desire. If instead of holding within, I exist with and next to my self, my source, my flow, I can feel both its guidance and companionship. I can stand on top of it, let it be the base that supports me. Let that celestial source, erotic flow, earthly magic, ancestral depth be a base this body sturdies it self on. And so with my stomach no longer bloated with emotional and spiritual baggage, I stretch my body upward. I remember how Leila started our vinyasa flow. how she guided me to stand up, stacking the parts of my body on top of each other. now, in the image i carry of myself, below the length she showed me, i add earth. I cushion my toes with soil, infused with history, purpose and knowing, that richness of spirit and alchemy, feminine magic, the generations i root my own lifetime in.
and in standing on, rather than holding onto, holding in, I practice a presence and a patience. I look up, my head straight. I lift my crown and roll my shoulders back, my eyes gazing forward but always more so, looking in, feeling down into the soil and where it guides me. it is a practice of belief, of trust, affirming that my feet will know where to step. i recall lucas’ sage introduction to bahia: “if you step in the right way, this city will embrace you”. and so I do not scan the floor for an indication of a path, I intuit it, recall it, remember it is within me already. I follow the river in this body that hosts me. I flow along this earth, a welcome and embraced guest, tracing the shores.
it is in the same way I am hoping to be a partner. as i enter this relationship, I too am thinking about practicing a patient being with rather than an an indulgent consumption or attempted absorption, rather than thinking of our joining as her coming into me, becoming a part of me, as I did in previous relationships. I think of k. How my intense love for him boiled into a watchful scrutiny. I felt we were so entangled, our identities, persona, pursuits, social worlds so enmeshed. Because our partnership and collaboration was such a core part of me and my external presence in the world, I thought that, by extension, he too had become a presentation of my self. I became hyperaware of our contrast, our contradictions. It was in part about external perception, sure. How would his appearance, his behavior, his choices, his language shape how others received my own? But more so, it was an internal dissonance that haunted me. As my love grew deeper, I was able to understand more how his brain worked, his mind flowed; with each new understanding, he no longer fit into me so comfortably. I felt him within me, kicking at my sides — our chemistry reacting at the borders. Why did I think I had to consume him to be with him? Why did I invite my sense of him to come into, mix with, my sense of self? I see now that it was this metaphor, this definition of partnership that led me to eventually feel him in me like a parasite. Something unfamiliar, something foreign, external that I needed to get out of me.
Don’t worry, the story has a happy ending, or at least I think it will. We’re still writing the story, k. and I. Finding our way through resolution and reconnection after us both needing space for more than a half a year. I see now that space was a necessary severing. A removing ourselves from being within one another so that we could stand next to, be with each other, instead. When I accept k. for him, all his beauty and brains and quirks and curiosity. When I do not compare him to a standard of me, but see him outside of me, external but in deep relation, I am able to love him more deeply. To learn from him more earnestly. To love myself and be loved by him more honestly. I see our friendship as not an average of the two of us, an impossible mix of insoluble spirits, but instead as a summation of two inexplicably entangled companions. I remember the magic resting in our contradictions. I understand it is our contrast that allows us to be catalysts for one another’s spectacular reactions.
And so I look at T. At her looking back at me. I feel my stomach flip, my body exhale, feel into the softness she allows me to be. I savor the sweet flavor of us. I do not fool myself into worrying about how her day may look different than mine, will not bother myself with the worry that I need to mimic her to fit inside her or tame her to fit within me. I do not have to hold her within me. I can let her hold me here, pressed next to her. I am so happy to be with her, eager to explore the many shapes our Us will take, the several geographies it will likely take us, with me next to her.
And so I allow myself too to feel the pleasure of being with her, of not having to compete to consume one another — if I tried to consume k. in our relationship, I know previous lovers tried to consume me. with T. I am practicing an intimacy of being with, of giving and receiving.
and in the end, the bloating, the posture, the platonic love, and budding romance all underline this queer beingness — this strangeness within me.* Beautiful absurdity. What have I written about today if not my desire. My desire for this body, this lineage, this earth, this being, this friendship, this love. Am I not in constant prayer? Is this living then not a pledge of desire? Each moment I breathe, I say yes, I want this life and I will continue to want it, continue to shape it into something I can love more deeply.
*When I first wrote this sentence, I wrote ‘this strangeness is me’ which I also find to be true and revealing.
*
08.26.24: dizzying, resurfacing, trying to meet earth again and again
i am crawling up from the earth.
bahia took me into her stomach and i took her into mine. we twisted in the knots and bruises of each others’ wombs. not ready to be birthed, we kicked and tumbled in the dark, in a confusing mess of flesh.
bahia pushed at my edges, and if salvador was the first port, then i feel like i am crawling out of the womb and up the throat of empire.
i gathered my things, and carried bahia with me north to mexico where i could sit underneath my birth country, where i could sit and look up a nation, also knotted, lodged somewhere in my stomach.
in mexico i crawl out of the dirt, my ears pop and i get my fourth ear infection of the year. i listen to a language once familiar now rendered foreign in the context of portuguese. I am tired from the tumble, it takes me a week to wash my self, to scrub the dirt from the creases and see the shape brazil has left me in.
in truth its a similar shape. now that im able to digest again, to ingest and release in regular intervals, my body returns to itself. i remember my legs and my stomach, my chest feels higher, and i can breath deep without over thinking it.
E.: “its like walking out of the movie theater during the day and feeling how much candy you ate”
i feel like i’ve resurfaced into the previous day. i’ve returned into the north, and i feel displaced again. my mind is still replaying images of the movie i lived: waking, eyes opening to the sea through the window, purple and orange sunset stripes on the water, the drums and dance of candomblé; my feet on the tile. the soundtrack still lingers in my ears, but outside, the sun is up, an election is coming, bombs are dropping, and routines continue.
i say i want to travel slow but two months can not be followed by two weeks. i say i want home, but each place i go i make one. in each place, i take seriously meeting that earth, that place, that story.
ale and i talk about her drawings, about mar coming down from the mountains to ask the plants a question. i watch mars fall into earth, spiral into its womb, i witness her sit in earths belly and shyly whisper her truth: “i feel alone. i don’t know where to live.”
Drawings by ale butrón landivar, excerpt from her interactive comic ‘Mar and her fictional landscapes’]
ale talks about people who move a lot (we’re talking in indirect plurals but we’re talking about ourselves). people may misinterpret this movement as a lightness, a lack of attachment that allows our feet to skip across this earth. but its not. ale: its actually this deep meeting of land, and the repeating painful rupture of departure.
we are able to leap because we step onto the earth so firmly.
it takes time, energy, care, attention—soul opening, to meet a place. to really be in a place. and when my home, my residence is here, in this body, in these interfaces, in these relations, i can live in no other way than to be home in this place—wherever this place is at this time. so, to meet a place for two months (the longest i’ve been anywhere this year, and it seems, the longest i will be anywhere this year) is deeply non trivial. to be arriving elsewhere is dizzying.
this weekend the dizziness was visceral. i swung from euphoric joy to deep sadness and confusion.
friday the group chat couldn’t decide on a plan so i took myself and a book out on a hot date. that night, i danced and let eyes fall upon me. i came to dance, but maybe in the light of their gaze, i would see who i am, who ive become. all i saw was sweaty and pink, blurred and bouncing. it was great.
the next night, i reunited with all my friends: from high school, from college and post grad, from my program last year and those i met this week. the whole night I felt awkward and simultaneously unnoticed and watched. i felt unable to perform my role as socially entangled human. i came to mexico to reunite and deepen my relation with people i care for but now that i’m here i feel too afraid to be with them, to reveal myself as i am.
for a year i have been waiting to have time to return to mexico, to practice this language, be immersed in this city again, and reconnect with the dear ones i grew in deep intimacy with last year. but i arrive still digesting brazil, still coming to the surface, still fumbling to conjugate in the present tense. i feel tired. unable to fulfill the desire i had held onto and delayed for so long.
in my disorientation i ran away from you. you have been the most constant in the last month, the part most dizzying. i stepped away to find my balance. i’m still wobbly and wondering how to steady my vision without centering you…