Being Nobody, Going Nowhere.

Finishing my yoga practice last night with sitting meditation, trying to find a place inside me that felt like home, trying to have an optimistic heart, I felt the familiarity of messages, loud and clear, from my body:  a tightening in my upper right shoulder, tight chest, pulling in, protecting.  And here I realized (if I hadn't already): I am terribly afraid. 

It seems opening up to the feelings and preparing the body to feel them don't make them any less difficult to feel.

This is about everything: What am I doing with my life?  Where am I going?  Who will be there with me?  Starting yesterday morning, I could feel the previous night's pillow talk wearing on me, my patience waning, my trigger finger heart shooting off all over the place.  My whole life I've been desperate for meaning, and even more so: desperate for love.

Maybe it's only now that I'm allowing myself to be aware of it do I realize: I am grasping the shit out of life.  My fears of not having what I want almost certainly prevent me from being able to notice if or when I have it, even for fleeting moments.  And what tells me is this: my body.  Even writing this, my brow is furrowing, my shoulders are tightening, my breath is shallow. 

What are we doing?

I'm looking at a dusty book shelf full of words, of bound sets of ideas.  At my desk with wilted flowers.  At clean clothes piled, folded, yet to be put away.  These are the things I've built around me.  Is this what I protect?  I sit with my hands drawn into fists, placed at my mouth; no words.  We're one place in our minds, and then the world happens, and it's only glancing at a small carved wooden sculpture of a man and woman in embrace that I remember the tiny gift shop in Assisi where I bought it five years ago; and those earrings that broke, and the incense that has been burned up.

Where does all of it go?

In four months the person I've built yet another life around will leave, go to school, to another city, go find the first few steps of a new path, and I'll be here, with the dust settling around what were weekends spent in silence or basking in the sun coming through the skylight.  My life will go on, regenerate itself around an absence.  I want to go with him.  But I want to go with me, too, and I don't know if the two fall in line with one another.  But is my life here?  In the mountains?  In a quiet house that no one visits, with nature that I am sometimes too afraid to be a part of in its immensity.

In four months that will turn into two, which will turn into hours on some teary night, some beginning of some end and some start to some beginning we can't see or touch or plan for, and I wonder: What are we fighting for?  Why don't we fight more?  How do people ever belong to each other when they never really do?  Why do we act like we have a choice when clearly, we do not.

When it seems so obvious on some days that we are all just trudging through sorrow and suffering, trying to release ourselves from the pain, and not be too attached to the joy, how is the world not full of lunatics?  How are there ever moments of respite, of laughter.  If it all just goes -- all of it, every moment dissolving into another -- how do we not just disappear, and dissolve into one another in our madness.