The World Will Pour Into You and There Will Still Be More
The World Will Pour Into You and There Will Still Be More
let what you capture be as free as you
Malibu, CA
I inhale the ocean through my window as it swirls without inhibitions in my room. My room for that evening, that is. The temporary enclave I found myself in. This burgeoning self, this maddening self, this quick-witted monstrosity. All of it tumbling in circles through the air and around me. Kissing the ocean, kissing my tongue.
The cars run like water whooshing alongside the waves. Their currents forceful and constant. Every time I’m by the ocean I feel like I’m on the edge of the world. And maybe I am. Maybe I like that sensation. Feeling superimposed onto something that will be falling.
The road grew quiet as these thoughts festered out of me. Was I to understand that I was playing some sort of role? That the edge of the world was really just the edge of myself — how the ocean and my mind grew parallels within this instant.
I grabbed whatever thoughts I could and made my way outside.
Descending the spiral staircase, I rush to break open the glass doors. The sounds of pacific coast highway surround me as I draw in a breath of fresh air. Taking small, bovine steps I enter myself into the goldest hour.
There was something here that was a reminder of a once-living self. So much of her that was left here. How much of her did I still have? This truth, I was not brave enough to know.
I would be leaving Los Angeles and I needed to remember this moment. It both thrilled and angered me how escaping my apartment for the weekend could already inspire so much new in me. A prelude to my big move ahead.
Was I really to leave the room I built behind? The one which I have been, for all this time, calling my home?
These were answers I could not decide. Questions I needed to live. so, I threw my mind into the water and let myself float.
What was it that made the ocean move with its profound movements? It’s calculated yet free rhythmic agitations? In this cosmic apathy, where was I to be? The invisible force coursing through each wave, pulling each movement — was that same force coursing through me, shaking me through my life?
I let my thoughts run onto my black journal. I had no room to keep these entities inside of me any longer. The rubble, the carnage of this sunlight. It’s beating onto this page. This warm shine bathing me, and my cheek, and my fingers. This pen spilling its fresh ink.
How to be someone new in the same place at a different time? Or someone free. Yes, that’s it. Someone free.
Someone built without appendages. That’s what I’m looking for.
Though freedom mistakenly might seem like something you run to. A home you run away from. I don’t agree. and I’ve lived enough of my small life to understand that. To understand such an incomprehensible notion. That freedom, in itself, is a shedding. It is not that I am losing a home, I am releasing my belief that I am stuck to one. That home is not a singular entity that cannot be taken with me. This might sound oversaid, but the truth is so apparent in it — home lies within the heart.
Where was my heart? It was here, beating out of my chest.
There’s an old story, but I swat it away. I tell it I will only let it live if it doesn’t make a ruckus. If it doesn’t burn my year. She obliges. She being me. Stories need hands, and handlers. Take the story away — whose palms do you see?
I look down at my crouching fingers. Their bare beds, skin fresh with moisture from the humid sea. I unlock my gaze and send my eyes upwards. Flurried orange now sedating the skyline. My hands, in gold, reach for them.
In time, cotton candy blisters through my fingertips and erupts across the sky. I open my irises like bright black marbles. Bluish-pink reflecting like fire above the greenish waves.
Oblivion.
It makes me so angry being met with and trying to capture all of this beauty. My hands filled with atmosphere, my pen bloodied with ink. My page wet with thoughts. Nothing could hold this much power. I was powerless to the beauty of the world, again.
Defeated, I lay in a chair. My eyes filled with pink fire, I take my journal and hold it to the edge of the world.
In my own little ways I try.
I try to place this incomprehensible beauty, this gigantic world, through these curved lines. This practice which I devote to. How could a piece of paper give me something that is free? Or how can I write this world in a way that is untethered?
It appears the same goes for me. Who am I to ask for freedom if I do not let the world around me be just as free? How can I clench the sky and ultimately decide the parameters of its size and meaning? The sky, the world, has given me a beauty I am the audience of. It is not up to me to scrounge it up and dole it into a package that comprises it all. I take a small whip, a mere dosage of this total, cataclysmic wonder, and let it run like water through me.
I simply drench the page.
night falls.
Sopping wet, I return inside.
My journal dripping with the world.