Howdy.

How the heck are ya?

I’m bubbling with inspiration from some things that have happened this week. So today I want to share some words that spoke directly to my soul, what a four year old taught me, and the most authentic conversation I’ve had in a while about growing up.

THE BEST LOVE I EVER HAD

This wonderful thing happened. I found a super interesting book called A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon under my bed. I bought it for my poetry class last term but we never even looked at it (a crime) and now I am savoring it’s pages like candy. Maybe that was the point. Maybe my professor just wanted us to have it in case we happened to look inside and find God himself hiding between the pages. That’s what I did. Here’s what I found.

“What is the best Love you’ve ever had in this world? Be quiet while thinking about that Love. If someone comes along and starts talking, quietly shoo them away, you’re busy, you’re a poet…Be quiet, so very quiet, let the very sounds of that Love be heard in your bones.”

–A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon

The best love I ever had? He had red hair and a crooked smile. I was fifteen and he told me that I was wonderful. This was a guy who everyone loved and hated. Loved because his humor was infectious and his smile contagious, but hated because there was nothing that he didn’t excel at. And he knew it. The first time I ever saw him was when I whipped my head around in physics class freshman year to see who the asshole was that kept shouting out all of the right answers before my artsy brain could even make sense of what the hell inertia was. The first look he ever got from me was a death glare. And it must have really done him over too because we somehow went on to become friends. Or, he became my friend. He was never shy about being hopelessly in love with me. And I of course loved him for that because I was fifteen and the idea of boy liking me was still new and exciting. We used to stay late at track practice, stretched out on the football field, talking about all of the things we could never say to anyone else. He was the first boy who ever made me feel beautiful and interesting and desirable. And you don’t ever forget that. Desire was still a little flame that I nursed, that we all nursed, long before any of us got burned. And that made us brutally honest and vulnerable and open with each other in all of the ways that we did not yet know we would have to fight tooth and nail just to embody again one day.

I didn’t know it then, but there was real love there and it was perfect. It was precious. It was the kind that you look back and laugh at while tears form in the corners of your eyes because was anyone ever as young and sweet as we were then?

And because of that, because of that raw, honest, way that we showed up for each other without even having to think, it was the best love that I have ever had.

FEELING FORTUNATE TO KNOW THAT MAGIC IS REAL

Words, and the feeling that you get when you find an especially beautiful collection of them, are how I know that magic is real. In a world any less hyper-focused on romantic love as the love, I might say that they are the best love I’ve ever had.

Here is a page from my journal where I scrawled some lines that spoke to me from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon for no reason other than to feel their beauty coming out of my own hand.

PURE LOVE & WHERE THE HELL WENT

Every week I babysit my neighbor’s four year old daughter for a couple of hours and it has become a sweet little ritual that I look forward to. This week we went down to a little park and played for hours. There were other parents there with their kids and I felt like I jumped forward ten years in my life, getting a glimpse into a world that I am still miles from.

The coolest thing about kids is that they just say stuff. They say whatever they want and they don’t hold back. I was pushing this four year old on the swings when she suddenly said “I couldn’t fly if I didn’t have wings but I think the wind could carry me”. I stopped pushing and smiled. This was poetic brilliance and she didn’t even know what poetry was. This was proof that we are born with magic in our hearts. Here was this kid, putting all of her love and trust in the world. Swinging through the air, she felt safe and held by something as transient as the wind. She was so innocent that she believed that if she fell, the earth would sprout arms just so that it could catch her. She believed in something that she could’t see, but that she could feel. She could feel the wind against her skin and therefore it must be holding her up. Would we ever feel lonely or unlovable again if we all thought this way? If we felt that no matter what, the earth would be here to catch us? To hold us up? Sometimes I don’t even trust the ground beneath my feet to hold me, let alone the wind.

Later, while we sat under a tree for a snack, she told me that the trees were waving to her. The earth was simply saying hello. To be in her world was to be in a place where nothing could ever hurt you, where pure love was the only thing. When did the world stop feeling that way?

REMEMBER?

The other reason I love my babysitting dates with this kid is because I love her mom so much. After our rendezvous with the park, I took her home and her mom asked if I wanted a cup of tea. The answer to this question is always yes. So we sat down and while I marveled at her stUnning bookcase full of Hemingway, Miller, Cather, Didion and other goodies, we talked about real stuff. Inspired by discussing Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, we agreed that coming-of-age narratives have a certain magnetism about them that we each felt we were too old to feel but felt anyway. I say this all the time. I know I’m only twenty and it was all still pretty recent, but sometimes I feel like all I do is write about my adolescence, perpetually telling my own coming-of-age narrative long after the curtain on that period of my life has closed. I told her that I think it’s because those years are just so intense and saturated in emotion that they feel like a never-ending source of art. Her response was beautiful. She said that teenagers get a bad rap because they are seen as melodramatic, hormonal beasts with nothing truly valuable to contribute to society, when really, they are feeling more authentically than anyone else. I felt so understood to hear this. I remember being a teenager and feeling afraid to tell anyone that I was depressed or going through anything because I didn’t want them to tell me that I was being dramatic. I just expected the world to not accept anything that I did or said as valid, for no real reason other than my age. I think somewhere around seventeen I realized that that was bullshit and that I had a hell of a lot to give this world. And the older I got, the more I understood that adults are not mythical creatures of perfection. They shouldn’t get to monopolize the stage. The youth has a hell of a lot to say and their experiences are every bit as real and difficult as anyone else’s, if not more so because the have never been through it before.

I was talking about this when she said something that broke my heart and made me want to hold the hand of my teenage self. She said that teenagers feel things so intensely, and that that intensity should be savored because it doesn’t always last. I had never really heard anyone say that before. All my life, I had been under the impression that those heightened emotions of adolescence were something to escape, not revel in. That’s what the world tells us. It teaches us to fear emotion, that feeling things intensely is a weakness that you should learn how to control if you want to be taken seriously. And I’m like whAT? Emotions are power. They are how you know that you are alive. What is adolescence other than a collection of moments that make you feel endlessly alive? And I’m not talking about cliché moments like football games and prom night and wild parties, I was never interested in those. I’m talking about how the world felt. Like it was on fire.

I remember finding this one website in high school that expressed something of all of this. It was a godsend for me because it was one off the few things I ever found that depicted adolescence as something beautiful and profound instead of embarrassing and dramatic. Why? Probably because it was created by teenagers themselves. It’s called Pure Nowhere and it’s a masterpiece. (I’ve linked it here.) Their opening page reads:

“If I hold my breath, I feel like I’m sixteen again, seeing everything for the first time — before I knew the world asked for just about as much as it gave. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, if we look hard enough, we might find something that brings that feeling back. 

That’s how you know it’s powerful; art that makes you feel. Makes you forget realities and focus on idealism, on small pockets of stillness and rage that bleed together into something called youth growth. 

I wish I could hold on to it forever. Maybe that just means I’ll have to live in it.”

-Pure Nowhere

Every time I read this it makes me want to cry. It gives me chills. And it’s what came to mind when my neighbor was talking about feelings losing their intensity as you grow older. I cry when I’m walking downtown and see an especially interesting piece of street art. You’re telling me I’m just going to walk right by that one day? That would be tragic. But at the same time, I know what she means. That story I told you about the kid with the red hair? He wasn’t the best love I ever had because he was some soulmate of mine. He was not god’s gift. He was a fifteen year old geek who thought I was pretty. That’s what it was on the surface. But when we were inside of it, when we were swimming through what was just the beginning of our own coming-of-age, it felt like the entire world. And that’s the point. We were able to feel that fully. That’s the thing that happens when you are that age that probably never happens quite like it ever again. This doesn’t mean that other, intense, more beautiful things are not on their way for you. It just means that those intense and beautiful things have gone away. And I think that that matters. I think that those moments of life deserve to be validated and remembered whenever the hell the fancy strikes you. If you ran barefoot through the streets of Ocean Beach with your best friend at two in the morning with peppermint schnapps on your breath and flowers in your hair, remember the hell out of that.

GOOD FOR YOU, NOT FOR ME

We also talked about comparison and how to neutralize the toxicity of jealousy. I was explaining how because my college experience got so scrambled by the pandemic, I often get jealous when I see other kids getting “normal” college experiences that I know I will never have. She told me that when she feels that way, she says “good for you, not for me”. I thought that was brilliant. It’s in the same boat of “someone else’s beauty/success/happiness, etc. doesn’t take anything away from your own”. We all need little mantras and these are some of the best I know, especially now that the internet and social media rule our lives. It is so easy to compare our lives to a projected snapshot of someone else’s. And that’s a poison that will kill you from the inside out. So I love this. Good for you, not for me. That’s your path, not mine. I can see and accept that this is a good thing for you, but that doesn’t automatically mean that it would be a good thing for me. If it were meant for me, it would have been.

I mean, that’s good shit.

Go write it on your bathroom mirror or something.

& thanks. As always. -m

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