i yearn to be the space you explore in and through

and it is terrifying

art by Alphachanneling

“You’re a special woman,” she told me. “You shouldn’t be putting green beans on shelves. You’re wasting your gift.”

That’s what she told me when the only job I could get was putting green beans on shelves. 

I always wanted to be more. That’s what I thought, anyway. More like the girls I saw on instagram. More like the people with the fancy looking lives in Bali and Greece and the perfect bodies and the hundreds of thousands of followers. More like I didn’t want to worry, like I thought they mustn’t. More like I wanted to enjoy life. Because I was special. Because I had a gift. Because I deserved to be seen. 

She told me she was fixing me. She didn’t say that. She said, “just sit back and breathe,” as she rattled something in the background and returned to the phone a few minutes later. I told her I felt different. Way different. Like my mind had been… usually I couldn’t think of the right words for the story I was trying to sell us on. 

“You don’t have to say anything,” she told me. “That’ll be $200. Will I talk to you next week? I feel something big coming.” Of course she would talk to me next week, and the week after. I wanted to believe it. But I didn’t. So I kept trying. 

I never did try hard enough. I didn't want to be one of them, even though I thought I did. It was my disbelief that was my problem. That’s what they told me. It was my disbelief that needed to be fixed. I didn’t value myself. That’s what they told me. 

Actually, it was my disbelief that saved me from becoming, well... you can infer the impending disaster.

“Don’t you want sovereignty?” they asked with dollar bills flashing in their retinas. 

They worried that I wouldn’t buy into the system. They didn’t get it. 

They were confused when I wouldn’t be blindly guided. 

No matter what “problem” they fed me, I wouldn’t give in. Not to them. Only to the feeling. The dark one. The one clawing her way out of me.

If only they’d been outright. There’s nothing wrong with you… you just like to tell stories. So… tell stories. But then I wouldn’t have paid them all those thousands of dollars, so I understand. Honesty wasn’t in their business plan. I forgive them. 

Being the woman I was, I wanted to believe all the women who said just trust the universe. They weren’t wrong, but they confused their terms. Egos for eros. 

•••

In my bedroom the walls are pink. Three soft and tender and one a deep hot orange pink. There’s a gold velvet couch and gold light fixtures and a gold flamingo standing amidst the black ornamental jewelry bowls. There’s a deep blue rug that feels like the ocean and a thousand pillows strewn just so for whenever and wherever my body needs to sprawl herself on the ground. All my clothes are arranged in rainbows but I can never figure out what to wear. 

“I’ll be a million different women.” That’s what I told him when I worried I wasn’t enough. The day I dragged a knife across my chest and let the blood pour out of me in paintings. 

I always wanted to be more. It’s the same as it always was, but I see differently. 

“You’re the smart one and the pretty one in the relationship,” he tells me, just whenever, for no apparent reason. 

I write poetry and worry it’s not good enough. 

I take self portraits and worry about the shape of my body 

and the angle of my face 

and if I’m showing exactly what it is I’m feeling. 

I worry. 

But not always. 

Usually I am terrified at the beginning and I keep going. At some point, I start dancing. 

Something changes with my breath. It becomes slower and deeper in my belly and all through my shoulders and the whole thing softens to that tender pink and I notice nothing can disturb the connection — the channel is open. 

Now, it hurts not to feel. 

What does hurt mean, anyway? Or pain? 

I read something that said “no evidence, but I feel.”

I feel who I am. I don’t know who that is because like I said, a million different women. All of them feel different except for one thing. The softest pink. The tenderest, most toothachingly sweet center.

When I was worried about the green beans, I thought I knew what would make me happy. I thought it was anything other than green beans. That’s when my gift would emerge and miraculously, everything would be perfect. I’d no longer worry and daisies would grow out of my toes and I’d never again be riddled with questions. 

How little I knew. 

When we started talking, he was in California and I was in Maryland and I was in love with him from the moment I felt his words jump into my chest. I asked him a question. The question asked me to dance in a flesh colored top and deep red leggings and show him the way he moved me. 

Would he understand? 

I started touching myself in the summer in my soft pink bedroom. Even though I worried, even though I learned I will never be finished and therefore always want to be more, I kept touching myself and telling him about The Miraculous Discoveries. The feelings, all of them. And especially the crying. How I couldn’t stop. How I was becoming a river.

“I yearn to be the space you explore in and through.” That’s what he told me.

How did he know I needed to be seen?

One night my lips really trembled. I showed him and it was terrifying. I don’t know how actors do it but I think I’d like to take some classes. A million different women. Of course I’m acting. That’s what you have to do — summon them. 

When I asked him what kind of role he saw me playing, he showed me a scene of Ophelia in Hamlet. She was going mad, apparently, handing out flowers punctuated with maniacal gazes and hearty laughs and she was singing songs the way a child does, unabashed, unafraid. 

They weren’t sure if she was actually going mad or if it was all a ruse. In the end she killed herself, so who was fooling whom?

There is a danger of getting too deep into any one character. 

There is a danger of forgetting the million other women.  

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