My wild heart. Always pointing herself in the wrong direction. Always hungry, always following along where my body takes her, and my body is even more reckless and wanting. Still trying to prove to myself that men like me after a lifetime of hanging out with younger and cuter women (ah, the older sister syndrome). So comfortable in the land of the unrequited. Spinning in place, sometimes maybe taking a step or two toward some semblance of balance, of health, but then right back to it. How I love my own misconceptions, the stories I spin that keep me feeling miserably comfortable.
Brigid used to say, "Someday you'll just get tired of feeling bad."
Brigid used to say, "Writing will save you."
I brought the piece I'm working on, the infancy of my book, to the revision workshop with Lidia and Zinn and all these other incredible women over Memorial Day weekend. People were kind. They were beyond kind. They loved my work. They responded to it just as I hoped readers would respond. When I am there, surrounded by them, I feel so much more myself, so much more a writer, than I can ever muster here at the end of the road at the end of the peninsula. I don't care about men, or whether they like me or want to fuck me, or if I will ever love one for real again. I am consumed, but by something that is real and good and true. I obsess over the work and not over a beautiful mouth that I'll never get to kiss.
Maybe it's just a matter of pointing our damaged imaginations in the right direction, of digging a channel in the dirt to guide the water to the harvest and not the weed. Of knowing what to fertilize and what to pull out before the roots grow too deep. Remembering that you must plant every year, every season—that the work does not stop. Knowing that a wild-hearted seed might take root and bloom because the fertile soil is indiscriminate. You will be forgiven for burying your face in its intoxicating scent and breathing deeply before pulling it firmly from the damp earth.
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