Friends

paisleycat

11:33 pm - (A stranger's photo)someone else's face at an anonymous wedding

Sometimes, particularly at night, I am haunted. This haunting isn't unusual or supernatural. It just so happens that I am bad at forgetting myself and have, what seems to me, incontestable proof that other people do not have this difficulty. I distantly know a beautiful woman who is ferociously smart and neurotic and weird and intense and probably even more beautiful than people are allowed to be without consequences (seriously). I see photos of her in absolute self-forgetting abandon, and she glows: held by a lover, alone in a church, curled around a labyrinth of brainwork, or just stepping through a friend's doorway. These aren't all photos of bliss, but they are photos of her life rather than her being photographed at various events. Maybe it is a skill and secretly she is just very good at being photographed while looking like she remains totally unaware of the documentation and her own presence. It haunts me so. When I see photographs of myself I see and remember and I look often like I'm awkwardly ignoring the camera or stiltedly attempting to be lovely. What I crave is the loss of self(maybe self-consciousness or awareness of self) in favour of total immersion.

But this is not true all of the time.


Sometimes there are small unhonored transitions. I treasure being aware enough to catch them every now and again. I watched one of them tonight and I broke the rules by reveling in it openly. Smooth Tonkabean mist with nouveau curls of wind. As my mother and I began the last of our three daily circuits around the neighborhood to walk Puppy the cold rain turned into wet snow. We saw and felt the whole thing. The sky was hazy and very light (while also still dark). The sounds quieted as drops turned into flakes and a slow smile of recognition from across the street. It was a very wet earthy cold kind of magic, and I loved it. It felt so sweetly illegal to take joy in this small turning of one substance into another. I like to celebrate, to be mindful, and to honor the things in my world (in my life), and somehow thinking about moments allows them to be celebrated and aesthetically plumbed even as the same awareness keeps me so fully anchored in my deeply flawed self.

There we have it. Two different ways of being, each with their attendant advantages and sorrows. I don't even know if we chose between them. I am tempted to say it is the difference between a holy fool and an initiate, but the two are very much the same.

For now I will take my wet winter moment, sift it like cake flour or gold, and follow where it will lead my dreams tonight.