lust for life

I want a new tattoo, a big one, and I want to go places and have adventures and live an interesting life. I want to be with someone who will pick up with me on a whim and get on an airplane to anywhere without doing the laundry first or making sure the weather will be fine on the other side or that the hotels aren't all booked up already because of a cycling race. I want someone who wants me around all the time, even if there's nothing much to say, just so they can look at me and know that I'm real and as much theirs as anything is anyone's. I want someone who knows what they want and will make sacrifices and take steps to get it, or at least to try to get it. You must always try. Life does not fall into your lap, all neatly wrapped in ribbon and bows. If I've learned anything, I've learned that you have to work and work and it never really gets any easier and no one can really help you all that much and you have to want it and never stop wanting it and -- often most difficult of all -- keep on wanting it after it's yours. I learned a long time ago, too long ago, that you don't wake up one morning and suddenly enjoy doing all the chores, big and small, that make up the hard work of living, you just get up and you do it anyway and that is what is called being a grown up.

I want to make my own traditions and rules and feel however I feel about them and stop doing what doesn't work. I want to climb things and then jump off of them and I want to live beside the ocean finally and I want to dance and swim and breathe. I want to look into the faces of my babies knowing they are the first thing that has ever truly been mine and that they will never be mine at all and that's okay; that's as it should be. I want to move through my life in this world as a force to be reckoned with, as the star, as the heroine, as the main event.

I don't want to sit in the back. I would like to sit in the front, alongside someone else -- sometimes driving, and other times holding the map.

the weaker sex

I woke up at 5:00am from a horrible nightmare. Blinking in the half-light of early morning, I wished fervently that S was lying next to me, so I could simply grab onto him and feel grounded again. But I was at home, and alone, and had to find my own way back to reality. I rolled onto my stomach and opened the shutters above my bed, trying to remember to take deep breaths, and watched sunrise slide across the front yard, the sidewalk, the roses.

Don't be afraid of shadows. It only means a light is shining somewhere. Don't be afraid of shadows. It only means a light is shining somewhere. Don't be afraid of shadows. It only means a light is shining somewhere. Don't be afraid of shadows...

This was not as comforting as I hoped.

A whole murder of crows descended upon the neighbor's evergreen, their grating voices drowning out the cheerful robins that perch in the cherry tree outside my window, and I found I was deeply irritated by their brazenness. But they don't know or care what I think -- which only brings me back to the root of all my horrors. That innocent and lovely can be so quickly overpowered by selfish and loud.

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I am getting ready to move into my own place, with no roommates. And I'm scared. I wasn't before, but after the dream I had, I am now. The world is still not safe for women, not anywhere, no matter how liberated or equal anyone tries to say we are. It breaks my heart.

Sometimes I think I don't need to be scared, and other times I wonder if I am not scared enough. In my dream, I came home to find my apartment ransacked, and was then beaten and assaulted by the intruder. My brain was unfortunately able to supply many grisly details from memory.

I should not be so foolish as to think that there is a cap on Bad Things. There isn't one. There's no scorekeeper, no limit. I just don't know if I can survive another Bad Thing. I think one more attack would break me. And while there's no reason to think it will happen again, there's no reason to think it won't, either. I don't want fear to rule my life, but after all that's happened to me I have no excuse for naiveté.

I feel safe with S, every minute we're together. When I stay at his house, not only is he there to protect me, I also have the dubious reassurance of knowing that the gun he taught me to use is lying heavy and formidable in the nightstand drawer. I always hated the thought of shooting someone, even non-fatally, regardless of the circumstances. But today, for the first time, it crossed my mind that maybe I could do it. Because if it came down to it, and it could only be them or me -- I'd choose me.

I can't afford to be broken. Not after I've come so far.