leaving & coming

In the end, I found my prayers…floating candy wraps on heaven street. I learned too late.The sinners are bored with me. I am bored with me. I talk of men the way I talk of cities I’ve traveled through, lies on lies on lies. It’s in lying I know and in the sinning I live. I leave those Sunday mosques and daddy’s hands, that white house and the pissed stained goats. I trade books for trouble and black veils for nothing. A pair of green eyes and an ice cream. A moment to be wanted shape against the crowd.

But I live my life on paper, sinning in my mind and only there…

I loved deeply men who held no depth. And in loving them, I lost the only parts of me worth keeping. There was them, and behind them, always, was a woman waiting for their absence. I wanted her more. I wanted love too, and in a desperate desire to have it, I abandon what is possible to love in me: the wildness of my spirit and my childish joy for everything, my independence and stubborn insistence of living life uniquely… the restless sailing of every day. I become heavy in their arms. I forget my promise to stay free and loyal to the woman who always comes back to me in their absence.

There’s a child beggar in me who is always searching for pieces of bread in the eyes of men. Arid men, with nothing to give. Empty enough to fit all of me inside. And when it ends I linger on, begging not for their love but to be put back inside. To be carried. Not tenderly, not with feeling, just carried.

It is easy to love me as a moving image in the distance, like Lebanon from the sea. Enter the harbor, pass the performance of her beautiful shores, walk towards Beirut and you’ll find behind her coastal road a lonely woman with no money and no intentions. She lures you in with the image of what she once was, but past her show is wilting line of balconies and emptied apartments, quiet salons and shuttered dreams. I too have used the past version of myself to call lovers to me. It works, for a moment. A month. Then, the inevitable happens. How could I have known, how could Lebanon know, that there is beauty to our bombed interiors, that in the loss of what is beautiful there is beauty.

It’s not that I write of love often because there’s often been love. It’s the opposite. I am trying to extend the brevity of what was beautiful. Those hours need to live longer than the loves I’ve passed through. Some days, it’s enough for me to have those handful of moments, impossibly tangled on a fishing net.

Cul-De-Sac

Not long ago, I would have spilled paragraphs of nostalgia on the death of yet another love. I was south and pacing back and forth in the slim corridor between two men I loved. During the day one of them would be on my mind, and at night, the other would come to take his place. This went on until a question began to torture me: what does loving these men keep me from? The chaos of them, the distractions they generously gift me with, what is all keeping safely far from me? It must be something I fear (and want) so strongly that the war of them is easier on me than the pursuit of what they’re keeping me form.

I’m reminded of something Julia Cameron said The Artist Way:

“The next time you catch yourself saying or thinking, “He/she is driving me crazy!” ask yourself what creative work you are trying to block by your involvement.”

So, what is it? There are moments, short but powerful, when I catch sight of the woman I am across from my side of the river. It’s like spying on a timid woman in her room and finding her dancing or screaming. It alters your perception of her forever. You’ll never believe in her timidness again, or her timidness will always look different to you. That’s what these fleeting sights of the other woman across the river have been like to me. It becoming harder to believe in the wounded child that I become in the company of love. The time I’ve spent alone, as a truly single woman, has been very short, and so I know very little of her. The men in my life, their bodies and their trouble, have stayed in my life for such long periods of time. But the love was brief. What they gave to enter was a lot, what they paid to stay was hardly anything at all. Crumbs of crumbs. Enough to pass for giving, though what they tossed to me was only air.

She counts her escapes like mints in a tin can.

When running was good for me, God gave me plenty of roads, and money too. Somehow there was always money to leave. And when it was time for the big departure, a beat up white ford van came into my life and carried me through the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. It’s in moving I survived that man. I wouldn’t have made it had I not broken up those years by months of running away. And I would have run back to that man if I didn’t have a van that seemed to have a mind of its own, dragging me north. God knew my pain needed wheels and air and he was generous with both. But now, it’s as if He’s telling me my pain needs anchor. Needs sitting with. Needs a camera and a pencil and less movement. As if there was a time when running was good for me and He helped me run, and now sitting’s what I need and He’s making me sit by taking away the only thing I haven’t lost and can’t bare losing. My van.

Today I found out, as I’d been expecting to and avoiding to hear, that my van is in terrible condition and the list of things that need fixing is endless. It would cost everything I’ve saved so far and more. I’d have a van and hardly any money left to move it west. If it gets fixed that is, because it’s always been that one thing gets repaired and another thing fails.

But I wouldn’t trade the mess of my life for anything. At least the mess I’ve made, not the more to come. I understand now it wasn’t the men I’d love so much as the places I’d found them in. Nablus, Vieques, Brooklyn… The wild life of the Oregon man on the island, the thrill of photography with the artist in Brooklyn, the endless adventures of the troublemaker who lived on a mountain. I’ve wanted a part in all of those places and in all of those lives. Those men were doors, maybe nothing more than that.

But what would it be like to enter a place and life I love, not through a man, but through my own audacity?