passing back through in november

okay, i went back to school (twice, maybe three times) and i missed you! and i remembered what i forgot, forgot what i remembered, and came back to visit.
i wanted to tell you about how i spit recently, in a rehearsal room;
i wanted to tell you about the deep feelings of failure i wrestle with;
and about how i went into the woods and then came out to think about the woods.
there's so much i want to tell you!
i took a class last year on art as political change, like this: http://artaspoliticalchange.blogspot.ca/
i have seen a thousand thousand things since i have seen your faces
i have gotten lost a hundred times.
maybe getting lost is my artistic practice.
maybe i'm not lost at all.

i wanted to tell you about how my mom is getting older, and my grandmother has dementia,
and i made a solo performance piece about how i asked my grandmother about slavery in our family history because i am trying to think and fight my way through whiteness and my own personal history, how whiteness happened to us and to whom i owe reparations yet somehow also acknowledging an inherent worth...anyway, i made a piece about it.
i wanted to tell you that i am living in toronto! in a second-floor apartment that isn't a commune, but it's nice, and it's above a vacuum cleaner store.

i wanted to tell you about my dreams and how i'm scared of getting older and i'm a kid forever and i have like these waves of nostalgia and i also try to thank my way to falling in love with the world just about every day, or every week
i'm taking a break from falling in love with a person; i have fallen so hard so many times and for now i am flying solo and it is strange and different;
i'm reading papers on queer ecology and books with titles like "why we dance" (ha) and "research theatre: the ecocide casebook." i'm studying performance ethnography--like how to know people by making performance with/about them. i'm reminded heuristically of my obsession with communalism and my love for making things with friends.
i notice being older! like, seeing people in their early 20's and i'm not there!
that is another post.
i made a zine about being 28; but i think i lost it. now i'm 29!

things i still love: cooking, love, patches, edges, exploring, laughing, sitting on the kitchen floor
things i'm trying out: graduate school, institutional affiliation, living closer to my parents, menu plans, making soup stock and freezing it, having a smart phone, not going to therapy, being 'single', cycling back to posting on this blog.

desire: to create a third, a fourth, a fifth woman out of shadow

problem: buttered potatoes in tupperware for days, a tax bill, a paraphilia for my alone body in high ceilings

desire: everything should be beautiful and glass cut and fine

problem: the front facing camera

i have snatches of it - coming over late at night to tickle me in my bed and complain about my elbows digging in, trying to remember any of the names of the characters from how to get away with murder. a fast morning and my lungs pushing up against the day at the beach feeling. the sun in everything. but what if i don't get to own myself?

"like, i’m a poor mentally ill person whose life seems like it’s lived on a different planet from day to day and whose goals and future are dependent on a million precarious factors beyond my control. i don’t think people like me experience ‘fulfillment’ in the same way as other people?"

the mosquitoes are huge this year but i'm not covered in bites. i'm surrounded by people wanting so much all the time. and i want so much all the time. 

desire: to belong only to me

desire: to never be alone

desire: to never need temperature regulation technology

i wrote a photoessay about communes i've lived in

feel free to read it if you want; but i'm posting here to let you know that you might be in a picture or two in the early parts of the essay. please let me know if you want me to blur out yr face, happy to do it. but let's not forget that yr face is beautiful, as elz would say.

https://medium.com/@elialbert/adventures-in-post-scarcity-capitalism-d9919f06d1af#.jubhpibk7

resolve

1. make no hot baths out of misery when you run out of your own.
2. so don't try to reach for god for other people.
3. getting what you want is a reaction. 
4. women women women oh women
5. let your body lead you into prayer. it knows. it can speak the fluttering, the thin sheet of glass, the immovable wall, the silk dress on the chaise lounge, the stubbled knee, the breath stealing icy wind, the cornflower sigh. you don't have to.
6. keep your promises, keep clean, keep going.
7. deep Emma Goldman jewess
8. it simply has to cost. no way round it.
9. speak up but not over.
10. godly and ungodly AT THE SAME TIME.
11. stop performing when you're fucking. ugh
12. the dreams fantastical don't make you good.
13. when a person tells you that you hurt them, you don't get to decide that you didn't.
14.  hummmmmmm ahhhh mmmmmmm
15. get towed under by beauty once a day
16. not so many things quite matter as much as you think

i.
mira, my gerald ford landscape
the wide out flat kissing the fingertips of hurricane season
far from the shadowy wingspan of gargoyles
pricked by the spines on fallen palm fronds

there's the possibility of children in my body
who leave home too
and the diaspora rings its way back round the globe
wouldn't that be funny.
some child high above the Pacific, eyes looking to China
hoping to get away too

funny, i guess, if you believe that's where it started

ii.

she's got our names curled into an old piece of vellum
tucked into her fist as she strides down to the river

and on that mud-caked bank
she tosses us high in the air
and we sink and we sink and we sink

some royal Wilhelm gets an idea

iii.

grains of sand piggybacked on an old hex
make me
violet at the throat
salmon in the head
white for all my bones
where's the first cocking of the fist?
nor you nor i can say what sun shone on the first slip

iv.

a few months ago, i started thinking something like this. if we all repeat enough together, we're bound to hit something that works. it justifies all the bad. or it gives it a place. now, was i being charitable? most of all to myself? because i am no longer in motion.

"Poor little sausage- dedication, passion, beauty, empathy, emaciation, lack of self worth, desperation and abuse. Exploitation from men and jealousy from other women...poor little sausage... but is this exposing the dark underbelly of what it is to be an extraordinary young woman in a misogynistic world or is it glamourising and eroticising it? Is it exploitative itself? Lets see shall we, its a fine line."

"she leaves one cage for another with gilded bars, she must excell or be forced to return to that monsters clutches, poor little dove...I do hope they don't break her tiny wings, here's hoping she finds her strength and doesn't end up becoming some old rich guy's play thing"

and with her hand on my face, again "are we liberated or are we...liberated"
kissing her fingertips, strands of hair in her face
oh god

v.
it is hard to be alone with myself, though i am practiced at it

Um, hi

so I've been thinking of you. It's a quiet day so, of course I am. I don't think of you everyday anymore, but on the quiet days, definitely. I'll try to be plain. I'm less jangly nerves these days and I've gotten tired of wrapping myself in big, bright words to say what I want to say while maintaining plausible deniability.

I've been thinking of you and what you're doing and how you look now. Your faces have gotten a little fuzzy. But I still remember clearly the patches on your coats and how each of you smelled, though your mannerisms are beginning to fade too. I haven't seen enough of you and some of I out and out ran away from and some of you I didn't honor enough in the first place. I was unkind. I am sorry about that. You were my so many first everythings. So I was scared or else not paying attention. I now sort of know that's the way of things, that that is always going to have been the way things shook out for me, but it doesn't mean I like it. You were all big and important and amazing. For a while, for a very special while, you were all that mattered. I was surrounded by you and it was beautiful. So I'm thinking of that.

You know, some friends of mine from college (acquaintances of yours? I gotta be honest, I'm forgetting who you looked at that wasn't me) got married this past weekend and their whole little crew showed up. And I realized that we will probably never all get together again. That's okay and we can't be anything but ourselves and we can't do anything about the fact that we all wanted things far away from each other, but it doesn't mean I like it. I hear that they are also trying to make sense of what they meant to each other, but I don't think it's the same.

I'm still struggling. I have a hard time not lying about doing more than I am. I don't call my family enough. I try to shut out the world. I have to really work to not assume the worst. I'm building the childhood bedroom of my dreams. I still have all sorts of ideas that I don't do anything about. I misplace my love and stop myself from loving, to stop myself from hurting anyone. I think I moved to a place that everyone is destined to leave again. I don't entirely trust myself and I am still so afraid. I have shrunk from the big thing that came from me being around you. I've gotten small. I'm still flinching at everything.

But I am a little better than I was too, in a million tiny ways. I want to show you, but that's more for me than for you, so it's not entirely fair.

I think I'm looking for permission to move on and start building something new.  It's a cowardly thing to do here, you're all separate people, and you all deserve your own reckoning. But I'm not ready for that just yet. Most probably though, I don't even need permission at all. But you have mine, if you need it. I've got my fingers crossed for you.

So I guess, I miss you and if there was any doubt that I loved you, I did and I'm sorry.

mary oliver reminds me

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before, 

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb. 

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings. 

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or not.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves. 

A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life. 

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance. 

In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling. 

Live with the beetle, and the wind.