I've been slightly traumatized by every place I've lived in since college.

Hoping the next place will be different.

I've recently come to the conclusion that everyone is entitled to feeling good about themselves. Even if that means their world- or self- perception is to be distorted.

And it is a natural process of the brain to distort perception, memories even, in a way consistent with our self-image.

Only me with my hyper-awareness issues have interfered with that process, in favor of some objective (or multilateral) truth.

But, going back to allowing everyone to feel good about themselves - I think that has a lot to do with being forgiving.

Perhaps I am graduating from truth to beauty, in a sequence known only to myself and Moulin Rouge as freedom - truth - beauty - love.

***

I used to think that therapy helps you come to terms with the truth. That you come closer to that objective/multilateral truth.

But maybe it is meant simply to help you feel good about yourself, in a sustainable (no harm to self/others) way.

To my daughters, I need to say:

Go with the one who loves you biblically.

The one whose love lifts its head to you despite its broken neck.

Whose body bursts sixteen arms electric to carry you, gentle, the way
old grief is gentle.

Love the love that is messy in all its too much,

The body that rides best your body, whose mouth saddles the naked salt
of your far gone hips, whose tongue translates the rock language of
all your elegant scars.

Go with the one who cries out for his tragic sisters as he chops the winter’s wood, the one whose skin

Triggers your heart into a heaven of blood waltzes.

Go with the one who resembles most your father. Not the father you can
point out on a map,

But the father who is here. Is your home. Is the key to your front door. Know that your first love will only

Be the first. And the second and third and even fourth will unprepare you for the most important:

The Blessed. The Beast. The Last love. Which is, of course, the most terrifying kind.

Because which of us wants to go with what can murder us? Can reveal to us

Our true heart’s end and its thirty years spent in poverty?

Can mimic the sound of our birdthroated mothers, replicate the warmth of our brothers' tempers? Can pull us out of ourselves until

We are no longer sisters or daughters or sword swallowers but, instead,

Women. Who give. And lead. And take and want

And want

And want

And want

Because there is no shame in wanting.

And you will hear yourself say: Last Love, I wish to die so I may come back to you new and never tasted by any other mouth but yours.

And I want to be the hands that pull your children out of you and tuck them deep inside myself until they are

Ready to be the children of such a royal and staggering love. Or you
will say: Last Love,

I am old, and have spent myself on the courageless, have wasted too many clocks on less-deserving men, so I hurl myself

At the throne of you and lie humbly at your feet.

Last Love, let me never roll out of this heavy dream of you.

Let the day I was born mean my life will end where you end.

Let the man behind the church do what he did if it brings me to you.

Let the girls in the locker room corner me again if it brings me to you.

Let the wrong beds find me if it brings me to you.

Let this wild depression throw me beneath its hooves if it brings me to you.

Let me pronounce my hoarded joy if it brings me to you.

Let my father break me again and again if it brings me to you.

Last love, I let other men borrow your children. Forgive me.

Last love, I vowed my heart to another. Forgive me.

Last Love, I have let my blind and anxious hands wander into a room and come out empty. Forgive me.

Last Love, I have cursed the women you loved before me. Forgive me.

Last Love, I envy your mother’s body where you resided first. Forgive me.

Last Love, I am all that is left. Forgive me.

Last Love, I did not see you coming. Forgive me.

Last Love, every day without you was a life I crawled out of. Amen.

Last Love, you are my Last Love. Amen.

Last Love, I am all that is left. Amen.

I am all that is left.

Amen.

I've always wondered about the possibility of being an escort/call girl/courtesan. In the blogs and tv shows I've followed, the protagonists have been ones I've identified with. Moreover, I can envision myself in their position(s), that eclectic mix of entrepreneur/roleplayer/therapist/performer/feminine-wiles-wielder.

But thinking to what I've read or heard somewhere, that after the first time with a client, you always cry, it's like, well, I have nothing intellectually against the giving of my intimate self. But it is nevertheless your intimate self, and being the meaning-seeking junkie I am, if it can means something then I want to go there, and I want to explore the entirety of possibilities for meaning. And if that means I will incessantly wonder at the limits of meaninglessness (re: whoredom), so be it, but I can't be one to explore that.

Speaking of meaning-seeking junkies, I read somewhere that Israel is paradise for meaning-seekers, for all is symbolic, and holy, and earth-shatteringly historical. I could wish to be Jewish, but I can only be a visitor in this lifetime.

Which is what I feel about religion. That despite my meaning-seeking junkie-ness, I cannot forge what I have not known, cannot fashion a key to what I cannot grasp, want as I must, try as I may have. I have thought and imagined (not felt or known) God to be many different things at many different times, equally though never unequivocally. I have been breathless in my contemplation, awed by the beauty of such possible truth, but these have been concepts, people. That religion is more than shared concepts offends me, that my oft-unshared concepts are more to me than religion saddens me.

But that is me. Suspended in a limbo of ever-shifting meaning, onto which life's experiences have been superimposed, shot through with sliding scales of gradiented truth. Neither madonna nor the whore.

I just realized that patterns of thinking and emotional reactions are addictions of a sort.

If you're a pessimist, it means you're addicted to pessimism. Let it go.