(May it be sweet.)
I feel lucky, that’s all. Tonight, I feel lucky. I have a cloud-like pillow on which to lay my head, I am sleeping well these days, I am nourished, and I am stretched—literally and metaphorically—on a daily basis. I live in an original, sparkly, quirky city. I have honest friends, friends who write emails entitled “Fuck this,” friends who value authenticity as much as I do. I have real, generous friends. This means everything.
Dinner with Gabriel tonight. Mediterranean fare, oranges and pomegranates in the Castro (always). He came in looking flustered, looking sad. Many of my friends seem a bit flustered and sad at the moment, really, and that is more than alright. Friendship is long; it spans lean seasons, and lush ones too. This is the gift of getting older, I suppose: the deeply-felt sense and realization that this, too, shall pass … and come again. All things come and go: insomnia, summers by the sea, new motherhood, new love, loneliness, disillusionment, health, beauty, lust, excitement … all of it. We are all on this tilt-a-whirl, tilting and spinning, rising and falling, and memorizing each others’ astonishment and shocking beauty. It is just right, even when it makes us dizzy, even when it makes us sick.
Tonight’s journal entry, pre-Gabriel:
“A deep practice tonight, and the dawning realization that it is not only the teacher, but it is me! is me! is me! I moved (easily) into postures I didn’t know I could do, into sanctuary places …
I miss the little Catholic church in Peschici, the candlelit one on the square, the one Riccardo loathed. I miss the bench outside, where we lapped up lemon gelato and surveyed the human traffic, tapped into the underground current between us. I miss the bench on which I grew sticky and sublime, no-longer-alone.
He’s left me, but he hasn’t. He loves and misses me back. I can feel that, even in times of density and insecurity. And he loves Nicole too. Maybe he has even chosen Nicole. I sense that he has. Life is complicated, that’s all.
Our time together was medicine. Can’t I just let it be that? Soul-plumping medicine that cured something that needed curing? Medicine that expanded my heart a little more and revealed an important truth to me: that I know how to BE in love, that I know how to love quite well. And that this, too, shall pass … and come again.”
