Hello world.

It’s been a while since I wrote purely without thinking within this space. A rambling, spontaneous prose sort of deal.

So, here is my mind as of late.

ON METAPHORS

I’m drinking my coffee next to the open window, listening to an airplane fly overhead. The same white noise that serenaded my childhood. If I close my eyes, I am there still. Watching dust particles float through the hazy, sunburnt air. I can smell the varnish of our wooden front door as the morning sun hits it, can feel the metal handle already heating up in my little hands as I reach for it to go outside. I am right there.

But so far from it.

I love a good metaphor. I love when one thing perfectly contains another within it, an abstract experience holding the hand of a concrete occurrence. Sometimes it feels like reaching into the sky and tying strings to balloons that float over my head. Experiences are these fragile things that flirt with ephemerality, daring to slip from your grasp and leave the stratosphere of your control. I remember watching my ruby red balloon careen up into the sky as a child. I remember the finality of it, the sense of knowing that that was a thing that could not be undone. It was never coming back. But I also remember the liberation of it. How breathless it made me feel to watch that balloon grow smaller and smaller, defying gravity so gracefully. And then, how it was gone.

A good metaphor brings it back down to earth. As if through writing, I can reach up and tie a long string to each and every experience that feels so far from me now. I can gather all the strings in the palm of my hand and walk through the world knowing that somewhere in the sky, there is a giant bouquet of balloons following me, reminding me of my life. Writing takes hold of everything that has ever gone away and ties a string to it. Writers are hoarders of experience. We collect memories like coins, keeping them in jars like artists would store their paint, opening the lid when needed. Though usually, it bursts open on it’s own, spilling colorful acrylic memories all over the floor, one year bleeding right into the next. They make a mess of themselves. A real Jackson Pollock.

My favorite.

SWIMMING POOLS

Another one.

How about swimming pools? The ocean? The two things I find myself writing perhaps the most about. Maybe because for most of my life, I have been in either one or the other. My mother was a lifeguard and a swimmer. She taught me how to swim before I could retain any memory of it. I was simply in the water, from as early as I knew. I am also a cancer, a water sign. I feel most connected to something I cannot name when I am in a large body of water. Always have. The summer I went through my first heartbreak, I was either in that swimming pool or in the thrashing waves of the July ocean. Walking on land felt immense, but floating in water, being held by the earth in that way, it took the elephant off my chest.

Maybe that is why I write about water so much. I compare time to water as it slips through my hands. I compare nostalgia to deep-sea diving. The depth and lack of oxygen responsible for the delusions and distortions reaching that far back into time yields. But mostly, I tend to use swimming pools and the ocean as metrics. Things I can use to measure the parameters of an experience or emotion, if there are any.

Some things feels like aqua-blue swimming pools. They could drown you, but you know the parameters of them. A pool is finite. It is something contained. In theory, it begins and ends. It has an end. You could find it. You can measure it out. You can explore each and every square inch of it and even though you might think there is a shark lurking somewhere in a dark corner like your brother told you, you can know that there is not.

IF YOU LET IT TAKE YOU

Other things are not like that.

Other things are more like the ocean. Unconfined, unpredictable, and utterly indifferent to your attempts to understand it’s patterns. It’s force. You go to put your feet down and find that the floor has fallen away from you, that without even realizing, something has carried you farther than you ever planned to go. Whether you wanted to drift or not, there you are, on your own, far past where you can touch, wondering how deep the ocean is. How deep this experience will run. If you should fight it, if you should kick and scream and try to save yourself, or if you should just float on your back and remember what they told you.

You can’t fight a current. Best thing you can do is just let it take you.

That is what every adult told me as I grew up next to the Pacific and maybe that is why it became the way I move through life as well. I have been told that I am good at “feeling my feelings”. That I don’t try to ignore them or push them away. That is only true because attempting the latter is a futile affair at best for me. I learned from an early age that I didn’t much have a choice. Everything I felt was like a current, yanking me out to sea. We are taught to fear that.

But the thing is, if you let it, if you let the current take you out, you learn that there is place beyond the waves where the water is still. You can hear yourself think. You can feel yourself float. If you fight it, you will only know chaos. You will only know the thrashing waves and the feeling of sandy water gushing up your nose. You will grow exhausted from fighting, humiliated from losing, but relentless out of fear for what might be beyond it all. Like every tourist who runs into that water, you will look afraid.

But if you let it take you, if you give in to this thing that is so much larger than you, you will get past the chaos. You will be brought to a place where the water is glassy and quiet. And it’s there that you will learn everything worth knowing.

At least, it has been this way for me.

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