The Year of Love

I choose love. I choose Paris.  

***

The only piece of furniture I keep from my former Austin apartment is a grand picture of Paris. The photo demands a full wall space for its noble residence. Size is a key factor in determining its placement in a home, but it’s the scene depicted that commands wistful adoration: a street shot of hot air balloons floating above the dreamy majestic rooftops of a city that is (and will always be) my first love.

I delight in the wondrous whimsy of such a moment. I envision a nonchalant passerby casually looking up and suddenly she’s swept up in astonishment to see a day transformed by the elegant release of vividly and boldly patterned hot air balloons into a brooding Parisian sky. And she just happened to have a camera close by, tucked in a purse or the pocket of a coat. The luck.

Every time I glance at the photo I feel lucky, too, because I am still rather surprised to own such a piece. This is the type of photo I’d hover over in awe at a friend’s house, not thinking I could ever personally possess a photo detailing such serendipitous splendor in my own space.

But I do. 

Tonight, I sit across from it in its new home, still enchanted and intrigued by the scene, and my mind gallops across the landscape of this past year and how I arrived here – in this bungalow in Austin with this picture of Paris. Instead of feeling lifted and soaring high like those peppy hot air balloons, the review pops my feel-good mood, and I am grounded by a flood of remembrances.

My twenty-sixth year I christened as my year of love. Love emerged as my spirit-word, an intention planted to see what a year with love as my guide would shape out to be.

In retrospect, the year of love doesn’t sparkle with sweetness, lightness, foot-popping romances. The romance is gritty, complex, challenging.

The year of love leaves me heavyhearted with lessons and heartaches, fiercely committed to my tribe, bit more broken and a bit more secure, brave and capable, traumatized and shaken to my core.

The year of love comes to a close at a time at a time where I am afraid to even say love. A warped side effect of trauma. This irrational fear seizes and squeezes and stamps out joy in the attempt to keep me safe, because if I tell you I love you I am vulnerable to the unexpected, forceful gusts from the Universe that can send me tumbling and falling.

For weeks I’ve been racing away from saying and even writing “I love you.” I’ve pirouetted around love and adopted honeyed-expressions to express the depths of feeling I hold for my dear ones.

How can I end the year of love petrified to voice and live love?

The lesson is to let go of expectations. My years with spirit-words typically reveal the back roads, push me to forge new tunnels of understanding into the vast depths of being, of soul.

Perhaps it’s only timely that the most traumatic experience of my life happened during the year of love. This is the real test to choose love.

Love is the remedy to the fear. Love is the answer to how I will proceed, to how I will wrap myself up in softness and sacredness and security. I love myself through the post-trauma. And the fear hovering close to telling my dear ones and writing “I love you” in a text fades. This is no way to live. Life is precious, and if the bravest decision I make all day is to tell my dad or my listening friend in Lexington that I love them, then this is enough.  

Love frees me to live without fear.

Freedom, the spirit-word eager to sprint and rush into the vibrancy of life, will continue to be informed by love.

Love feels like freedom, freedom feels like love, so my lessons with love continue as I step forward into my twenty-seventh year.

Freedom blooms and rises like those hot air balloons taking flight.

As I look at this photo, I think of how it carries scenes of love and kindness outside its frame. My best friend, my lighthouse, my Britney Spears sing-along companion, witnessed my magnetism to the scene and so she bought it as a house-welcoming present.

I think of the two guys who helped me move out from my former place, which wasn’t so much a move-out as it was a race to flee. These kindhearted gentlemen gave their Thursday evening to assist in packing, and after I made my decision to keep the photo, without a complaint, they struggled and succeeded in pitching and tying the photo to the top of the car, so Paris accompanied me on my breakaway.

I think of my new roommate who rearranged her living room to make space to debut and hang the photo, because she knew the photo was dear to me, and she wants her home to my home, and her warm generosity and graciousness humbles me.  

Love ensured that the hot air balloons would be present on the ongoing journey toward twenty-seven, toward freedom which will be fueled by love, and liberated daydreams. I am free to shine brighter in radical authenticity, and deepen the love for the woman I am constantly becoming. And she may just want to go see the hot air balloon festival in Albuquerque and perhaps, even venture to Paris, too. And she will proceed freed to love and be love. 

When I Can't Speak, I'll Move, I'll Write

  Sweep me up in poetry. The current of words serves as an instant remedy.

***

I orbit around the pain point. In my mind’s eye, I see this point of pain, this collection of stagnant fear, as a circular stone, stuck and looming, and holding a weight that will grow heavier and heavier with passing days.

I am by nature expressive, communicative, open. I heal through words. I speak. I remedy the wounds through language, by sharing stories with trusted listeners.

For the first time, I cannot dislodge this stone-cold fear through language, through words. I am too frightened to speak. I struggle to accept this physical shutdown, this post-traumatic protection response. I am frightened to silence.

There are my loves who rise to embrace me in tender, great care, asking me how I am, telling me they are here, do I want to talk?

No, my loves, I want to speak, but the words race away in terrorized flight.

I feel my face grow pale. A cloak of fear pulls across my chest. I cannot speak, and an empathy carved from experience is born.

Now I understand how speaking about a trauma can be physically impossible. The terror seizes and clutches the vocals, dictates the diction, changes the topic. Protectors charge into response, leaving me swirling and selectively choosing words that trapeze in an elaborate dance around a fear threatening to break and wreck ugly, damaging havoc.

I’m afraid of answering “how are you?” I fear the bottom will fall out of the day and swallow me whole. It has before, and I reel with the burden of knowledge that life can change with a glance, a split second alters the course.

I feel anxious about telling my tribe that I love them, because my lizard brain concocts wild catastrophes and irrationally halts the “I love you, too” because it may be my last “I love you” to you.

I avoid the phrase. I desperately and cleverly seek and craft sentences circling around the “I love you,” like the way my life circles quietly around the stone. I craft colorful, affectionate phrases and spell them out in texts, on social media, bubble them out over the phone into the ears of my tribe who rise up and patiently listen to the rants, rumbles, and rushing narratives racing further and further away from the incident.

And they listen, and they know that my life force is stuck in my throat, like a butterfly fluttering anxiously and madly to find an open window, to release into the light.

I took flight. My spirit flew from a scare reverberating in tiny trembles underneath my skin, the think blanket of conscious thought, the bloom and fade of feelings. This world doesn’t feel safe. I don’t think I ever felt too safe in my skin, in this body, in this world. 

That’s why yoga was a saving grace, a home to be made in my body, a trust to be formed with my feeling, my intuition, my intelligence communicating through sensation, flashes of insight, a word spoken from the inner depths, in the back of the heart. I’m listening.

Yes, I’m still listening. Feeling saved my life. I now need to reconfirm a connection with my feet, with my body, with my power.

I heal through movement. I ignite a healing awareness to stream back into a body yearning to move, because it was born to move, and so was I – forward, expanding, evolving.

Punch. Kick. Sweat.

Walk. Dance. Skip (just a little bit).

On the mat, vinyasa coaxes my spirit back into my body. 

Stillness will come later, when I am ready to be still. When I am ready to walk into the pain point, and press into the center of that stone which will melt away and reveal a wound desperate for air, and I clean it out through salt water, through sweat and tears. 

The tears are violent explosions of a grief I do not even attempt to check and control. This is an exhausted cry washing clean the bare floorboards of my being so I can stand and move forward.

I move through writing. The words trace and gradually smooth the jagged edges of complex thought. The words flow around and finally through tangled knots of fear, so there’s an incremental opening for a river of understanding to cascade through and out into a page I can claim as my own. A safe space.

I write to heal. Not for attention. Not for pity. This sharing of this portion of my story is part of my healing.

“Are you sure?” she cautions after reading a post.

Yes, for all that I publically publish emerges from a place of intentionality. Thoughts cleared. Feelings rinsed. Experiences lived and mindfully shifted through for the gold glimmering in the chaotic mess of gritty living.

I may not be able to directly speak, but I can write around and softly into the pain, and there are small cracks in the stone as I begin to illuminate the dark silence in metaphors, in scenes, in moments linking back to lessons encouraging a grand expansion of wings.

Writing satisfies and sustains an aliveness thirsting to race untamed and brilliantly bright in the various chapters of this life. I don’t feel vulnerable, I feel emboldened and strong when I finally write a truth that has been humming in my mind all day long.

These words are the visible particles of my healing, mementos of a coffee shop sitting after work in a place I unexpectedly found in a chase for book shop that no longer exists.

These impromptu, little adventures around the city are not as carefree as before. A thread of this narrative will always course through my system, a permanent shift. The stone won’t be there forever, but it’ll leave a mark. 

For now, I trace my awareness around it, and through movement, through the downdogs and updogs, through the writing and spontaneous ventures, I’ll slowly reclaim a body, a heart and mind that is completely and utterly mine to reign. 

And I’ll know when there’s been another shift, another passing phase, because then the words will flow like honey, and I will tell you that I love without a flinch of fear, and I’ll tell you the highs and lows of my day with whatever language nonchalantly decides to take the stage.