meditations under moonlight
warning: pre-valentine's day entry ahead
The idea of writing a sappy piece every Valentine’s Day appeals to me: I love the continuity of it, the way I can dip so steadily into the waters of the relationship that sustains me. But love was not soft and malleable this year. It was gritty, sea glass worn down, proof that the tidal waves drawing us near are in the same breath pushing us away.
The story of this year is lined with cracks and crevices, not so much a desire to whip delicious meals out of thin air as it is to just keep surviving, to keep wanting to feel any sort of hunger in the first place. But here we are, all the same.
Everything I know about love, I learned at the age of fourteen: that love was tucked into the corners of math notebooks, under the flap that delineates one quarter from the next.
It’s similarly stored in the creases of a love letter opened too many times; in the swirling, swooping ink that separates the I from the missing, the you from the wanting.
All the relationships I’ve had since then are mere offerings at the altar of that bruised and battered girl, the one who just wanted somewhere to curl up without needing to explain or defend or even define herself at all.
How much have I changed since being her, since leaping from that point in time’s spiral into this one? And is the point really to change, to abandon all the old ways of sinking teeth-first into love like nothing else exists, because there is no other way to go about it?
Every morning, sleep-slow, I wrestle with the ache of wading through the muddy present, the hours threading my consciousness and yours. I try to set the day in order first. I fail. Still, I sit and peel the orange-skin hours off this bright and brutal world, line the curls up on the sharp angle of my desk, all before you open your eyes to scoop up the last shred of hope at the bottom of the bowl.
The years pile on top of each other, each one lined with the hope that whatever plagued us yesterday will have dissipated into something shiny and new. I find myself, not faced with new problems, but standing in the reverberations of the old one: that of staying grounded in the present moment, of trying to find something to be grateful for when everything seems so bleak and leaning on the future seems so much more appealing.
But what comes next is always just out of reach. And what is left behind glimmers with its own unexpected beauty, though you cut your hands sifting through its shards, though you feel “the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth” (Naomi Shihab Nye).
The soup and the salt water, the orange and the paper peel, the moon watching over them all: I’m mixing metaphors again, I can’t help it. They populate the chairs in front of me and won’t leave until they’ve had their turn. They are the only way I can articulate the twins of love and rage that have turned my throat into their home, lodged so firmly I can’t tell where I end and they begin.
And finally, we have come to the bloody heart of this piece: that the love radiating through me, from me, into me, is not just mine, and never was. I come from a long line of women whose love cooled their rage, turned that righteous lava spilling forth into the cracked foundation of their home. Lonely, they cry out, their voices a tidal wave pulling me in to hear them speak, just once, before pushing me off into the world they could have never imagined for themselves.
I was born nostalgic, the daughter of a New Wave audiophile and a relentless scrapbooker. I was born to feel so many aches peeling at my insides, all those oranges offered up, seeds and all. I was born swimming back and forth through the many tides of time, always missing what just passed me while reaching for the contours of whatever lay ahead.
I was born to start something, born to end something, born to say something, but what? Every day that I write is an attempt to answer some question I can barely parse out.
The only place my mind finally quiets down is when I’m near you again. Such brief interludes don’t feel forced or constructed, not like the thrashing sea creatures of my daily tasks, such slippery things I’ve long since wrestled into submission.
Those moments with you feel both fragile and fragrant, paper-thin and rock-solid, sea glass worn down into something I can hold on the nights I feel the loneliest, the most adrift.
You are always asking me, even through the long silences, if I want to keep weathering these storms with you.
I don’t answer. I just dive right in.
this is so beautiful, always a fan of your writing ❤️🩹 happy hearts day!