summer of 2009.

i will rewrite this paragraph a thousand times only to once more leave it to you to fill in the blanks. you were there too. some version of you. so i will not make you remember it any other way. anyways, i was telling my boyfriend the other day about how any placename ending in kill is indicative of the existence of a small river there, somewhere, at some point. it's a dutch word, kill. and so when i see a sign that says kill i always want to go looking for the water, i've found pleasant surprises here and there doing just that. that's how i found it in the first place, anyway. and i like this memory but i am going to walk away from it. but there are things for me there still, you know? at normans kill. but it is too far to go walking or by bus, and it is not a trip worth asking for. it's one of those things, of which there are many, the sort of thing i've always felt i had to do myself when i have the means even though i wonder too, and somewhere in there's a feeling i don't want to name.

a pen lifted, an addendum to some old note. and starting a new one when the energy just seems too rife with so much useless old bad pain when i need to be focusing on that new old good pain long since forgotten, working on my site just to get away from everything i just mentioned, though the work just seems to consolidate all of it. and trying to figure out if maybe that's what i want anyway. and all these actions taken just seem to smoke out that story avoided, unwritten, in each one of a million ways. but i am still waking up inclined somehow to write my life's story until those waking moments, too, fade and all i've got left is all i know and nothing i want to talk about. is it just me and all these things i hold onto? the numbers: 4, 12 and 64. the summer of 2009. every diagnoses, every friend lost, milestone missed engulfed in my own unattached world, and i am still losing. is it ever enough to justify what i will never say? all of my unspeakable.

i am convinced that some day i will be able to sit with all that and more but most days i am trying to deal with all that is still coming, all that is yet to. some of it equally conflicting, like the smell. my god that smell. the things i shouldn't have done even if i wanted to more than anything i've ever wanted. in all of this sometimes i get so angry, and desperate, i get so wrapped up in this that it seems more reasonable to wish to be anything else. like a breeze. the bubbling of creeks, the sound of a train rumbling as it passed. but instead the tendons, i watch extend, and i know desire now but i am still confused by want. and the word "need" makes me sob so violently that i don't all know what to do, ever, but still rejoice somehow in the ability to feel after all of this, all those autumns spent as a boy. it is hard to gauge then say how much i love this version of me in spite of all these imperfections. i am in love with my hair dark and long and it is loved and the more i write the more i watch it take form, i watch myself become.

i am no longer teenage poet and this has been of great concern as of late, though i find myself alienated from the concept of adolescence each and every day. your friends laugh when you're all 19 and you say you cannot stand teenagers but i can't really say i cared for them at 17 either, though i can't say i was any much less of one in the slightest. and that doesn't mean that i wasn't drunk on a playground not two nights ago making friends with the kids loitering around having a smoke and we swung and slid and climbed and laughed about the ways in which the world felt new. it just is what it is, that i do not mourn my adolescence but i might mourn my youth forever.

i get pretty mad when i see people throwing bread at the ducks in ponds but that's about as beautiful, curious about the world, maybe even smart as i can feel at times. that kind of thing lasts only for a second, happening only in spite of some greater truth about what it is to give the world a piece of ourselves. and me, as in Me me writing this... well i am not ready to want to talk about.

and there always seems to be something i cannot seem to talk about, but these are the memories i do not get to rewrite, much less forget. it really is in the space between them, the lack, the necessity, that i find what exactly it is that i want, or what was lost. this one was about finding a place that could hold on to it. beyond photographs and posts, and of course that long dream. beyond words and i told someone once that they are only boxes, they restrict and distill just as much as they leave room for error, misunderstanding, more to be desired and said. but if my desire would ever fall asleep, i would sure would like to lay down next to it. 6 may 2025

how do you even start something like this off? i ask myself this question instead of choosing something, a real something, something i can hold onto. something to bounce off of. i find that there is often a subconscious need to police ourselves that lives within each of us in some way, and i call it a need even though for some it may manifest as more of something like a want, a desire, or just a thought.

which is all to say that we limit ourselves in more ways then one. in a sea of other people, the things we could do together if we acted as one big force for good, i want to talk about you. i want to think about you and all that you are, because i often find that maybe you are an extension of me, maybe everyone is. i suppose i've gone my whole life thinking that way. i see the best and worst in people, whether i like it or not. i often feel like in that process i watch you happen to yourself, and i can do nothing about it. i watch me happen to me, and i watch the world happen to itself.

it often feels like in spite of all the space we occupy jointly, the time we spend together, the means through which we are connected, there is a spoken and unspoken distance between all of us. in the age of the internet, a plurality of us have found ourselves at times feeling closer to those hundreds of thousands of miles away from us than we do our own neighbors, our families, our peers. what good are all these resources if not to be taken advantage of? if not to follow their lead, to accept our advancement into modernity, to let it happen to us?

a part of me wants to tell you every part of my story, to go into detail about every bit and piece i'm made of, to tell you every person and experience that has made it so evident for me now that we are here to be good and love one another and to aspire to that in the best or even only ways we know how. as though somehow this will justify this thing i feel, as if it were proof that i am worthy of loving you. that you should care to love me, or be loved by me. and yet i will allow myself to stop there and be only this for a second. these words you're reading on your screen.

because i find myself often concluding that the message is simple. that the key is there for everyone who gets it or wants to. we question our morals so often, look at the macro of it all, that we often forget that we are animals. which is not to excuse our wrongdoings, some more easily agreed upon as such than others, but instead as an ode to the you that wakes up afraid. the you that wonders "why?" all the time, knowing that the answers are there, they're just wrong. wrong like the day your first adult tooth falls out, your first gray hairs, love unrequited, random tragedy, breaking something old.

and yet i don't say that to scare you. because you will happen to yourself and i will happen to me too. but i hope that if there is anything we can do with our human experiences, it's happen together. a year ago today i found myself wondering what i wanted, if anything, to do with my life. i reached my lowest point, and instead of giving up hope i found an immense strength in the prospect of starting over. woke up and started with the little things.

i want to do with my life: go for a walk, look at the sun. smell the grass. taste the dew with just my senses. there are places i want to see. that is the start of a dream. listen to a song while i'm at it. get lost in it, get lost in a dream. there is a home i want to make. i don't want to be there alone. i dream a long dream where my friends and i stay up late laughing about it, laughing through it, laughing to laugh, we dream a dream together.

we limit ourselves because you ask yourself if i love you, and i do not tell you often enough. but i hope that at the very least, we are dreaming a dream where we both feel it, in the permeating and persisting love we all have for one another. i look at my friends faces and i know that we are love itself. our persisting human tendency to dream a dream that starts with hello, and ends a lifetime later.

i want you to dream this dream because you'll find that it is easily a reality. maybe we are here for a couple reasons, maybe one of those is to question everything, to pick up every stone and look at its underside. to wonder about one another because it will never be enough to take each others words for certain things that are too much, in our minds, for others to carry too.

but do not question the good in this world. i find time and time again that if we have the choice to hold onto anything, and we do, it should be the little good, the bounty of good, the slivers and pockets of good, that we find in our lives. i hope that when you are rummaging through all the things you carry, whether i know about them or not, you're finding sweet memories, big and little dreams, reasons to smile.

i gave up questioning whether i'm loved or not a long time ago. i found instead that there are so many ways to know. to accept it is one of the most effective ways to be love itself.

i will not tell you that everything happens for a reason.
life can be fucked sometimes.
i'm sorry about that.

but i hope that you know that for all the bad things that happen, you can remember that you too, can be the good arriving randomly on someone's doorstep. that is the good too that shows up when you wake up in the morning and receive blessings into your life, the love that comes around the corner when you practice love in your life. be intentional with your love because it is the one thing you carry with you that is always in abundance, never lacking, the thing that you will carry always. so long as you are love, so long as you do your best to be the good you wish to see in the world, trust that you are love, and you are the good that people see in the world. trust that when you love others, it is out of recognition of the love they are reciprocating back to you. do not question the existence of love itself, if not the ways in which it abounds in diverse forms. it is one of the most important things you can learn for yourself and others, because just as the individual is unique, so is the heart. so is the unalienable soul of you, i, and any other.

there are things we are not meant to understand about one another, but i will not live in fear of you. i may never understand the entirety of your existence, the path that lead to you. but i hope that someday you will be happy with the stories people tell of you, the you that exists beyond yourself through which we hold you in high regard, because you are love and you are loved. and you may love others for that but do not forget that you are loving you too, loving your every footstep in the sand, your writing on the walls, the pictures of you, you standing still in the mirror even after you walk away.

i love you
-you should love yourself more often, because you are love and you are loved. uli