The new routine

Finally, it's not as sharp as knives. I'm learning to live without my best friend. The routine is going back, back to a time when I didn't know her or need her. I talk to her ghost less and less. I pretty much stopped journaling and poeming in. 

I feel void. 

I haven't been back. 

Magenta

Getting up at 5 a.m. for the gym rarely has its immediate rewards, but on Monday as I was flipping through the channels of hideous morning TV, I caught an episode of the Golden Girls.

If there is one thing you haven't learned from my blog of reflections and rambles... It might be my love for these ladies. The death of each Golden "Girl" felt personal, for example. I grew up watching them, but I also own every season (along with the Lifetime Intimate Portrait of each actress). It sounds like I'm bragging. Kind of. 

Anyhow, it was the episode where Blanche began being friendly with Dorothy's ex, Stan, and in turn, she and Dorothy had a bit of a blowout. At the end, the two made up in their cheesy sitcom way, but then Blanche said something pretty spot on.

I'm always using colors to describe how I'm feeling. Not sure if it's a painter thing or just the inability to give words to emotions. 

"Magenta…that’s what I call it when I get that way. All kinds of feelings tumbling all over themselves. Well you know, you’re not quite blue, because you’re not really sad. And although you’re a little bit jealous, you wouldn’t say you’re green with envy. And every now and then you realize you’re kind of scared but you’d hardly call yourself yellow…I hate that feeling. Just hate it. And I hate the color magenta. That’s why I named it that. Magenta. No way to really explain it, but fortunately between friends you don’t have to.”

 
I suppose today I'm feeling "magenta." But not so much in a bad way as a confused way. A little hot, a little loud, a little chaotic. I don't know.

What color are you feeling today? Do you ever feel magenta?

Just wondering if I'm the only goofball (along with Blanche) that puts colors to feelings.

mt

Feeling lightning

You ever just look at something, a scene or an object, or maybe just the colors of light crawling through your window and get a feeling? A big feeling?

I can't really explain it, but in an attempt to capture what it is I'm feeling, I write poetry. Sometimes poetry doesn't make sense, people may think. It's "obscure," or "cryptic," or "hard to follow." For me, though, poetry is a way to conjure a feeling in me and in others... And sometimes those feelings are neither logical nor linear. 

A good part of my academic writing career was spent trying to untangle it all, to make phrases and terms more everyday, to put a story or narrative to it (the feelings), but what I have allowed myself (post-college) is to just... write. I have silenced the committee, somewhat, and learned to trust what I write. But this isn't just poems. 

A couple years ago, a barista friend of mine from Starbucks asked to use my friend and I as her thesis project. She came over, made us doodle or color or paint, all the while allowing us to just be, just emote. Before that moment, I had rarely given myself the chance to draw or paint from me—instead I copied and mimicked the world around me. 

Now don't get me wrong, I have loads of respect for those who can paint as detailed and realistic as a photograph, but this is the very thing that kept me from painting and doodling more. I wasn't pressured to create an exact replica, but permitted to explore my own creativity. Wow! 

I can only assume this is what happened with my writing. Once I was able to transcend the lines of reality (along with my own version of it) words became completely unfettered for me. It seemed boundless. 

Today as I left my office, that 8 to 5 home-away-from-home, I caught a feeling. It was something in the way the sun, lower than usual, hit the glass door, the golden-orange of it. I don't know how to explain the feeling. A cup of nostalgia. It took me somewhere. It reminded me that the world isn't so linear, isn't so black and white.

I can trace the world around me with a sharp pencil, memorize inches and hues, or I can take all that lightning in my chest and use it to shake the world, make it my own. 

I hope you do too. I hope you wrangle your own storms and stop trying to chase everyone else's. 

mt