Vivify

To make radical choices has always been my basic instinct. In our family’s dysfunction, my brother took to the fantasy computer games. He’s an easy going guy who avoids drama as much as possible. I took to expressionism and hypersensitivity. I sat had no friends in preschool, I preferred to observe the lives of ants. I had acute compassion for live bunnies sold in China town for butchering

One afternoon at the Catholic girls’ school I attended, time came to a sharp metallic halt while my surroundings tumbled into a raucous whirlwind. A student from the biology class room next door came parading in my history class holding a dead piglet soaked in formaldehyde and pressed tightly in a clear plastic bag. “We cut up it up and now we are going to throw it away”, was the girl’s summary of the experiment. The classroom laughed as she told us more gory details as the history teacher made bacon jokes. The piglet looked at me with her soft slit eyes. Her feet were stuffed against the pressure of the plastic bag, and I imagined how that same piglet might look lying in a patch of sunshine with a beating heart. My spine felt an electroshock jolt as life pumped through my veins and I began to sob.

Oh to be sensitive; to light, to sound, to wandering energies of nostalgic sorrow. I’ve been chosen to breathe in the fleeting cellar spirits. I’ve been chosen to swoon over their gestures of exquisite pigments rushing through my brain.

I hear the distant children laughing and running through a sprinkler, the rainbow glint of the hanging crystal in late afternoon. I see a topless homeless woman scowling on a street in downtown L.A. and lines of cardboard houses against a backdrop of gleaming skyscrapers and ornate art deco hotels. The vibrant rush of hip art galleries and cafes replaces the ghosts of the 1970’s.

Oh to be chosen to feel; beauty as acutely as pain. To breakdown sobbing because the sky is brilliant blue and the Mexican men are selling animal balloons and cotton candy by the Echo Park Lake, just as they did when I was four years old. When I was four years old I was pouting munchkin, keen and selfish. I sometimes still feel like a pouting munchkin.

Life pumps through my veins and my heart reaches out for more. I want panic from the whole world at once. I want hysterical screaming and sobbing and lovemaking, at the bank, in the grocery store, under the trees and against the blazing sunset. An organ is booming under my heart and I think I will spin out until my layers of rainbow paper are fully unbound. I will be rational once the whole world has gone stark mad in the face of this horrifically beautiful life we’ve been given. I want someone to catch my thread and hold me tears disintegrate me.

I will write until I extract someone’s love. My sentiments are deep and sparks of beauty attract me more than I can keep count. I find warm fascination in people and I swoon like a wildflower in fast motion super-8. I write to find love in the midst of thunder-weather. I am writing to extract the essence of realization.

I am risking not having it all together just yet. White curtains blow in stop-motion over a sea-shore and I can’t help but myself from beaming and diving like a 1950’s bathing beauty. Who will love me as purely passionately as the sharpness of life herself? I am human and I need to be loved. I want us to laugh and like children running through a field of milk thistle and fireflies at twilight, and fall asleep in each others’ arms. I want to be vivified and sensuous. In my eyes, in her eyes. ...Are you awake?