Well, I'm here, back in the 'big city' and all of that. It's nice, too, being in Austin with friends that were fast becoming mere images from old films than actual flesh beings from my year living in Texas. "This is where I live," I whisper to myself, "this is my home now."
After being welcomed at the airport by H, J, Z and N I felt like nothing could touch this chapter in my life. That's what it feels like, too, a new phase. Sure, some of the same characters reappear in my life (some have been imprinted in my own flesh for decades) but there is still that smell of spring, that smell of wandering blossoms and wild lavender in the air that makes me think something's up. What will it be? I don't know, and oh! how I rejoice in the unknowing!
I had a very anchoring conversation, while on my summer hiatus, at a lovely coffee shop, sitting outdoors sipping an iced coffee with my spiritual equivalent of the Dalai Lama. She can be tough, downright brutal, really, but it is her ferocity for truth that reminds me that it isn't just that I seek answers with her, but that I seek them in myself. I think I can say, unabashedly, that this is one of my greatest qualities. Even when I smother truth with pillows filled with naivety, I still keep it alive, even if it's barely breathing beneath my weight. This can also be an obnoxious quality to have, one that is unrelenting and forces you to see far uglier things than you wish. But, in the end, I do believe it is truth that will set you free (and so I use cliches when they are epically appropriate).
When I think of truth I like to picture a photograph in black and white. It looks lovely enough, demure and classy, but if you look closer you see there is one part of it that shines with color. There is that one bright hue that lashes out, drawing you into it, and you know that is where the beauty is, in the realness of what you are. It is a blue door in a dull landscape, telling you that this is where the juicy opening of your life stems.
I am hoping that this next year will be lined in truth. Like the inside of a plant cell, I will guard my walls with impenetrable honesty about who I am and what I want. I will not let people make me less than that. I will teach as best I can, while quietly unraveling all the ways I can improve (while hopefully gently avoiding any emotional masochism). That I can love with everything inside of me, knowing I will get hurt badly, scraped across highways of human relationships, because that is the absolute only way to find the sum of what I am capable of.
Austin can be a very tricky place to find truth. At times it feels as though you are plucking petals from a flower, asking truth if it loves you or loves you not. Everywhere you look there are those that are lying about who they are and what they want. Their clothes alone remind you how desperately people hope you can not see through them. Perhaps a vest, from 1976, can make them look unique and worthy of film class, or that a tattoo weaving up an ivory back can be a shield against people claiming you're uninteresting. But we know better. And I can feel that flurry of city bringing me in already; the drinking, the partying, the men........It is a very vibrant call and I will remind myself what the truth is inside of me, for that is the gravest stance of all, not knowing one's self well enough to have conviction. If you can not fight for yourself, how can you expect victory?
I will read my own words, in months to come, (or this very same afternoon) so that I can at least try and make them true. For, as I write, I know that it is I that am most worried about being those dishonest things than anyone else.
So here's to a fresh start. A big white glob of paint stuck on my life, reminding me I must actively search for the colors that make my heart delight.
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