I miss you, but I haven’t met you yet…you are gorgeous, but I haven’t met you yet
When your life has become a Bjork song, you know you’re blessed, just in a peculiar way. You are the misfit wearing a swan dress to the Oscars while everyone else is dressed in Dior. You know you’ve got something pretty fucking rare and beautiful but everyone still thinks you’re a dork. You’ll end up on everyone’s worst-dressed list, but you don’t care because you just know. You know, and they never will.
Writing is how I reconcile myself to the world, how I pay tribute to beauty and pain. How I honor the past, how I tell myself what certain moments meant. I write, as a good friend once said, because I can’t shut up.
I’ve honored that past time and again here, little stories from my life, from the past. But what about the present, what about the future? After enduring the twelve labors of Hercules, my life is opening outwards, and suddenly I’m afraid to say anything, lest the gifts of the present disappear. The stakes are raised. I place my bets and suddenly, because I care, the possibility of losing constrains my breath. It was easy when everything just happened to me, I just held on, I took it. Now I am happening, I am happening upon the world. I want to tell you, because you’ve stuck by me through the hard shit. I want to show you what happens if you keep fighting, if you stay in the game.
I want to write on and on about the space monkey. I want to replay every sweet word, every kindness, every moment where I’ve thought “I’ve been looking for this. I’ve been looking a long time.” I want the world to bear witness to this falling in, falling towards. Against all odds, even misfits get loved.
But to say it out loud. I don’t want to hear a word of warning or cynicism, I don’t want caution or well-meaning sabotage. Haven’t you figured it out yet? I’m a pitbull when I know what I want. I bite down and I won’t let go. See that fighter above, see the man with the boxing gloves? That fighter is me. I’m strong and I’m patient. I’ll swing my fists and then I’ll wait, for the next opening, for the cynics of the world to show me their chin.