The Beginning of A Very Long Dream
The Beginning of A Very Long Dream
an ode to summer
It’s the summer of senses. I peel back the layers that grew these winter months and let a nakedness run through my body. It feels like a window has been broken in the center of my chest and a cool, refreshing breeze exits and enters through. An open earth inside of me. The ruptures of my heart. The bold, breaking incident —that let in, so much air. So, much more breathing that needed to occur.
I let the heat attack me in slow strides as it circles my perimeter. I, eating a red tamale on an apartment stoop in Silverlake, unknowing that summer was seizing me at that moment. The heat thrashed and my skin surrendered. Opening itself to be used by the baking sun. Adding lethargy and sensuality to all of my movements. The people sticking closer together. Gusts of wind that slowly peel us back. Spring had entered our systems and just a mere few weeks later, summer has appeared to glisten in our minds.
Like a psychic, I run through the probabilities and inevitabilities of what these months may hold. I slick into a groove as I enter my car, playing songs that loosen what I kept locked up. For so long, for this moment. Just to open.
It’s begun. Pleasure is with us.
I hear people talk about getting older and like summer, I think we are in our prime. Rotating throughout our lives. Seasonal beings.
I draw my hand on my lips. Traces feel like the innocence of a small child, fragments feel like the intimacy of a winded lover. The intersections of woman and child. Love and beloved. Creator and witness.
I experience myself with a sense of completion. Of only opening the door if there is someone with fruit I want to bring inside.
The colors are ecstatic. My love is willed. The windows have opened, and will remain so.
It becomes easier to surrender.
At home, I pour myself a cold glass of water. Parched, I raise the glass too frivolously and spill on my bare stomach. The chill seizes me and sends an ecstatic terror through me. Fission. I knew the chill would be temporary. That in only a few months, or a few days, the heat would enter my home and the frigid water would feel more like a necessary reprieve. Less of a jolt and more of a balm. Many things become opposite when the temperature rises. I become a shade of myself free of all the others. Fewer things to hide because the heat cannot accommodate them. I am seized at my essence. Naked, in body, in mind, in speech.
The heat in Los Angeles wouldn’t take its peak until late summer but these quick glances in late spring are enough to soothe the city into sedation and elation. A cool re-imagining of who we were just a few months ago. We click into place these summer months. We become who we naturally are. Our prime.
I like it when I take off a tight tank top and my body frees itself. My skin wrapping itself in nude warmth. I like being hugged in that manner. My relationship with my body is changing.
Love is so good. I believe in it.
It’s important for a person like me, a person who has an unnaturally divine connection to the summer months, to remain aware of every second. Time as a key to perception. Not fear or flagellation, but rather, the understanding that the moment I have been waiting for is here. Dressing and draping over me. I stare at my sheer white curtains that gently flow in front of my wide glass windows overlooking the sky. There have been so many windows, yet for now, this is mine. This is the one I look out to and towards. Who strangers peer at me through. New strangers. Secret strangers. People I once knew. People I will meet. People I will never know exist.
I play an artist who reminds me of the secret divine. She also has the potion, too. The elixir of sitting, waiting, watching — transforming, alchemizing, becoming something other than what you are. Some people change by infliction. Others, like me, change by sitting. By staring at something long enough it begins to transform. Which then begins to transform you. I would say that is a kind of magic, one certainly many in the world will not know how to speak of. Many people think change is something you dramatically run your hands over. I think it’s something you open your hands to receive. I’m a receiver. I am given things. That is how I will change.
Summer is now being given. In light doses and partial heat strokes. It is the beginning of a very long dream. One we’ll look back to and think — wow, we lived.
There is a certain tragedy in the air during the winter. The knowing that something must die. Knowing that rebirth and reset must take place. Spring sheds these signs. The work has mostly been done. Next, is to live it. To embody it. This season’s warmth searches for me.
And certainly, it is during this season that there is a blossoming and a throwing. A death and a life, round up in one single action. In the fruit lies the carcass. So again, and again. And in my delivery, my chance at life, I arrived at the conclusion that I was changing. That what had rotted and fell to my feet was being swept away by the hot air and something new within me was occurring. This newness so foreign, so sacred, so earned. Winter was so long. Winter might have taken four winters, this time. Winter might have been my whole entire life.
I slip into the sticky weather and wear the least amount of clothing permittable. I start becoming a person I only envisioned in my dreams. Things start happening to me, that to me, are out of the ordinary, but in essence, are planned. They always have been. I have been on the belt of change for a while now. Here, I am coming to a stand. Movement, is now slow, and evocative. Sensual. Erotic. Unconfined. Moving like hallucinations, the body etching graphs, motioning to itself, creating accordions of wonder.
The heat gets to me. The growth gets to me. My brain melts.
I have become my body.
Beautiful text, beautiful!