once more, with feeling

What nobody tells you about life is how important it is to know what you want. To have a vision and then to pursue the pieces that make up the vision until that vision becomes your life. I spent most of my life without a vision. I had only a muted longing for a feeling. I think I was moved by love—wanting to love, wanting to be loved. I still think a lot about something Céline says in Before Sunrise: “Isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?” Isn’t it? I love being loved. I love loving. I’m not sure anything better has ever existed, or ever will. And maybe you can find your way to a beautiful life even if the only thing you know you want is love.

Eventually, I began to conceive of the pieces that might lead me to that feeling. That feeling became my vision. In my twenties, I admittedly valued relationships too much, probably at some cost. But it led me to Tom. There’s much that can be said about him, us, but I won’t say them now.

More recently, the process has been unearthing my dreams—the ones I’d forgotten, the ones I didn’t know I had—and then choosing the ones that could still belong inside the life I’m living now. The pieces began to come together. Life began to feel deliberate.

There’s a feeling that stays with you after certain experiences and encounters. When I close my eyes, I see it as a comet’s tail, a trail of light that lingers, that imprints. I think one way to know whether you’re getting close to your vision is how often you find yourself in the presence of that light, smiling in that afterglow.

I’m not sure I can always make sense of what I want and I don’t want to explain myself. I want, instead, to change my mind, to be occasionally inconsistent, to live many lives in one. There’s a certain freedom to holding contradictions within yourself and to let those contradictions be in peace. We don’t have to find the answers because it’s uncomfortable to sit in the not-knowing. We don’t have to over-intellectualize every thought. Sometimes, it’s just a feeling.

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all the flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
and death i think is no parenthesis