I REMEMBER HALLETA ALEMU
To those who understand me the most,
To catch you all up to speed, I left Los Angeles 10 days ago in pursuit of a life I do not know the name of. I am following my writing and I am following myself. However, in this in-between of leaving one place to inhabit another, or really a sense of nowhere, a sense of having to become a home inside of myself — I have felt criminally lost. Disconnected from my center. Prone to intense anxiety and crippling inaction.
But something happened as I was writing yesterday.
Writing had felt so clunky and unfree. So I took a deep breath and settled into the root of the feeling. Why was I micro-managing each word and thinking of how it should fit in the societal order of things? When have I ever really cared what people thought of my writing? Why start now? Thus one by one, I freed each word. From expectation, judgment, and greed. As it bubbled up through my subconscious and out through my hands. I let them be untouched, bare. And in this freedom, leaked another freedom, onto my own self, onto my own body. And I began to understand, my words will be free, only when I allow my life to be free. And vice versa.
I was living in fear because I did not want to accept my not knowing. Now, I understand that in the not knowing lies the eradication of my fear.
Here is what I had written.
I missed you.
I write. I sit outside of myself. I write. I sit inside of myself. This oscillation is what affords me the rhythm of thought, sentence structures, and sublimity.
If I could only land myself here, to know myself, here. My mind is drifting with its manufactured wings. Isn’t it time for a rest? Isn’t it time to remember everything lives here in this One? This one paragraph, word, space, utterance. Don’t you remember when you learned this was everything? Is it too late to remember,
and go back?
no.
never.
I left myself months ago. At the peak of this drama, and it has been so hard for me to get back. But backwards is just forwards if you run long enough, if you get up and don’t quiet. If you remember you are the prime circle.
I’m scared. I think I’m coming back. I feel the field of pure potentiality opening. My words have no destination only a volatile reckoning of surprise and annihilation. Otherwise known as Joy. They are upheld by scraps and bolts of metal. Like, myself. As I take off my own restrictions, my words undress, too. Their confinements missing. Their love apparent, sublime.
Who am I to be this free? I don’t see anyone being this free. Which is why I bent myself back into containment. The word, like my body, like the world, like my mind, is to be voraciously unkempt.
I have to live on the edge of complete and total insanity, and free myself of it at the same time. I don’t hold the world’s titles. I simply am the world. And if I simply am, only my words will tell me so.
I am directionless and divine. I hold everything without a grasp. I am remembering what came to me as a power. Yet, it requires me to sit on the ledge, sit on the ledge of my humanhood. I’m twirling my feet over the edge of the cosmos. In between the sitting and the rush. In my body I prepare to jump.
That is what writing is.