Reflection

What helps? There are purple irises blooming in my back yard. This is a good sign, I think, because they are one of my favorite flowers and they just grew there, wild, by chance, unannounced, when spring kicked in.  Were they part of a garden the previous tenants planted?

I feel like a child traveling away from home for the first time. A sensation of intense newness and separation. I feel encapsulated in a purple iris, in a cartridge of my camera’s film, in a fetal position on my bed, the burgundy flannel sheets. And i’m back. I’m back to me writing to me. Hello me! Oh hell. And someday I’ll show this to someone that I’ve begun to share myself with. There are so many inversions and repetitions in my life, yet they resemble each other only according to memory. The love i feel is unlike all the others which are unlike all of the others. These are lessons it is hard to remember because I organize my consciousness according to analogy and metaphor.  I often assess new situations according to what they resemble and don’t spend enough time trying to learn what the new situations are. But you know as well as I do, Suhail, that meaning is a multiplicitious subjectivity. There is a level under this one that I’m writing and that level is how Ireally feel. Where is it. Where is it? Where is it!

A grammar school teacher who made your life hell might remember you fondly. There are perspectives that I will never see, NEVER SEE, going on in other people’s lives and I want nothing more than to KNOW someone. To go through this process of knowing myself with others who want to know themselves. And then, the supreme endeavor, to try to know someone other than myself. I talk about being acquainted with yourself, about being able to stand up – to not fear your own solitude – and I vehemently advocate never being alone. Surround yourself with good people, community. “You don’t have to me a lone wolf to be independent,” Sean said one day. This makes a lot of sense when i’m alone. And it makes sense, even being perplexed like this makes perfect sense when I’m alone. Why does it become an argument, a proof, a conviction that elicits antagonism when I have to communicate it to others? Don’t answer that. We all want to be happy. We are all confused.