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Morning Without Venus

October 9, 2018 in Age Matters, Art Matters, Astro Matters, Queer Matters, Spirit Matters

Detail from “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dalí.

Sad and lonely, that’s how I wake during this Venus Retrograde in Scorpio. The regret of what should have been said, could have been done. How love was failed, how missed opportunities loom–that dropped ball, unacknowledged joke, declaration unmade. How doors were shut and labors were lost and hopes were shattered. Again. Again. The so so so many ways we missed each other because of scars already sustained, burdens already borne. The clock ticking-ticking-ticking–no time, no space for the messy, complicated ways of wounded people who still want love. To give it, to receive it. To improve, to learn. It’s not just you. It’s not just me. It’s just sad.

And lonely.

I open social media despite best intentions and a Yuseff Lateef quote gleams:

Loveless moments are to be avoided.

I nod twice, fast. Then fight back yet more tears. Because: how? Love thrives in kairos, not chaos. I flash on the first time we had coffee. In his 1940s rasp, chewing gum no less, he’d said: “We’re all broken!” And that foxhole solidarity, so cheerfully delivered, made me sure we could fulfill the promise of our shared smiles.

When will I learn? We cannot protect our hearts by protecting our hearts. The only way forward is to open, wide.*

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* There’s a joke in that.

I’m Healing as Fast as I Can (Neon Sadness)

October 1, 2018 in Age Matters, City Matters, Essays, Queer Matters

The phrase had been blinking in my head all day like a neon sign. I saw it as I woke, it kept flashing as I wrote.

I think, I think, that you carry heartbreak until it carries you.

Don’t get me wrong. I worked on my book today as promised–1300 words, thank you very much. B even says they pass muster. Then I had therapy–can we say it simply ran its course? But when I came up for air, I felt sad knowing the Legend was back in the neighborhood and we no longer were in contact. Until this week we could just pretend we were just in different places, on different schedules.

Not different frequencies.

Just as I was starting to feel really rudderless, K pinged for coffee, so we met up and ran into a friend and then another and another, and the conversation kept bobbing along, one thread into another like that last luxuriant day of school in Dazed and Confused.

K is a legend in his own right. Continue Reading →

Buggin’ Out in Boston and the BK

September 2, 2018 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Essays, Queer Matters, Ruby Intuition

It began with bug bites. Actually, it began with an infestation of flies, a nearly literal pox upon my house. My kitchen was clean–I mean, as clean as an un-rehabbed 1940s kitchen ever gets. (See: rent control.) Which is to say things were scrubbed and put away but a film of age and general erosion prevailed. Yes, there was a tiny hole in the window screen but, again, it’s a hole that’s been there for forever and a day. And, yes, temperatures were soaring that day–the kind of grueling heat in which only pests seem to flourish–but it had been nasty hot, slap-you-with-a-dirty-boiling-towel hot for weeks.

So really there was no reason for my kitchen to suddenly be infested with hundreds of flies on that particular day, but that’s what happened. I swear, as I type this, a fly just landed on my computer. And now another one, as if to remind me this story doesn’t already have a moral wrapped in a pretty little bow. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy