Mirror Mirror of my Mind~

For all the fabulous experiences I find in my New York home, it also seems that it is when I am outside of it that I slow down enough to experience another kind of encounter. Where in Manhattan, I often happen upon surprisingly inspiring people or places, in my Connecticut or New Hampshire homes, I knowingly create them.
Neither mode of stimulation is better, but there’s something to the intentional manifestation of inspiration that really stays with a person, perhaps more than the revelatory quality of magical Manhattan’s many mysterious characters and the lessons they regularly offer up. Or maybe it’s just that New York is in such a constant site of meaning and motivation that such becomes old hat and commonplace, impersonal for it’s ever-constant flow and impartial impartment.
Perhaps I’ll never work it out, doesn’t matter really…what does matter are the experiences I find in each place and the cultivation of my capacity to tell their stories. Today has yielded one such story, with many parts and no real point, aside from the peaceful easy feeling it has left in my heart.

This morning began blustery and with bursts of rain, splattering drops upon the windshield of my mom’s hybrid as it whirred along on the way to Weston CT, carrying myself, my mom, and two of the people who’ve known me the longest, characters I call my family. We were on our way to a memorial service, a gathering of friends at the home of one of the decade’s most noted architectural talents. I wandered through his family’s home, a house of many windows, each of which ushered in light, despite the dreary day. In each pane I saw myself reflected and as the afternoon wore away, full of tears, wine spritzer, and mini quiches my mind became another mirror, at times reflecting reality from the perspective of someone looking at me, a vantage from which I saw myself, sitting in my steam pressed suit set, and watching people feeling the inevitable loss that life entails. I watched my mother’s best friends, people I love, stand up and speak about someone whom they had loved. I saw that person’s thirteen-year-old daughter stand there with them, in front of fifty some odd people, all of whom had loved her father. I furrowed my brow, wondering if she knew, wondering how she could know, that her father was gone and her life forever changed. In that moment, I was an absolute observer of unfiltered life, and in that moment, I felt myself more alive than I had in some time. I touched my own fears and felt myself a woman, and I know now, that no matter what, I’ll be all right.

Later today, after the service, after we’d driven home in a fog of four o’clock traffic, I had to get out, had to move. Emotion was clustered in my core, not uncomfortable, but congealed and in need of some shaking up. I drove fast and with the radio loud, window down and cold air on my face. From time to time, I watched my eyes in the rear view window and smiled at the light that danced in their blue reflection.

I went to a movie and was one of two people in the whole theater and found it fun.
I went to the beach long after the sun had set and the Moon sat almost full in the night sky.
The clouds had cleared and several stars stood out so brightly that I wondered if they were planets, or moons, or just sparkling reflections of my own eyes in a much larger mirror. The high school sweethearts cuddled in their cars watched as I sat myself on the abandoned swing set and pumped my legs till I flew towards the Moon, laughing for the perfection of the moment, and my capacity to feel it so fully.
I am exhausted, the day has passed, and with it, a myriad of emotions, all of which I’ve allowed to flow through me, watching them just as I watch myself reflected back by multiple mirrors, each of which changing the way I look at things, and by extension, the very things I am looking at.

When I was a little girl, the Sun seemed to stream into my family’s house from every window, casting wide and asymmetrical squares of light onto the Oriental rug and embracing my little body in warmth and protection. That rug saw a continual parade of action, like my daily dress up parties during which I flip flopped across its surface, decadently dressed to the nines and toting along the family dog on a leash. Or each night’s bountiful dinner, be it between my parents and I, or including the bouquet of boisterous characters I called family.

When those days disappeared, so too did the sunlit squares, replaced instead by rain streaked window panes, slamming screen doors and angry voiced against a background chorus of chirping peepers, singing me to sleep from the woods just outside my bedroom window.

But when I wondered what would protect me, there was always the Moon, the feminine. She who rode alongside me through the darkest of nights when I couldn’t sleep, and through the long car rides home when I leaned my forehead against the cold window of the family car and found her peering over my shoulder, keeping me company as my family tensely traveled through time and the silent spaces of dark winter nights.

Tonight I lay on my back on the same Oriental rug that served as stage for my childhood theatrics. Out the glass doors of my mother’s house I saw the moon. She is there for me now, and in her nurturing, protective gaze, I think I have found the Sun.

Perhaps nothing is ever truly lost so long as you can hold it in eyes of your heart and mind.

Watching raindrops fall down the windowpane and splash upon the sill
They are a tease to the tears I can’t shed
Droplets onto the sizzling hot heart of my pain

I crave crying and cannot muster it
My tears are displaced and turned into resentment of laughter
If I can’t access pain, why can’t others feel it for me?
Take my pain; take it from me, please, as I have always done for you

We are in one room, one conversation, and worlds apart.
And I wonder, who is stronger?

I find myself frequently comparing the men in my life to characters from Sex and the City…is he a Richard or a Smith? A Steve or a Big? Which category he falls into somehow seems to dictate how I treat him. Oversimplified? Perhaps, but certainly a fun way to weather the constantly changing climate of my current sexual storm. So as long as we’re playing this game, where do I fit? That was always an easier conclusion to come to, simple really. I place myself somewhere in between Samantha and Carrie, a fusion of one character’s curious and questioning approach to herself and her relationships and the other’s uncomplicated independence. At least with the close of the series, all ends well because of not despite each character’s respective trials and tribulations, mistakes and moments of happiness. I can only but trust that my fate will be similar and venture fearlessly into the future…

After a few months apart, my dad and I met up today. Finally. We walked for a few hours on a windy Connecticut afternoon, over the terrain of our mutual past, getting ourselves on the same page, and turning a few in the process. Our relationship is one of extreme closeness and too long away from dad’s conversation and company leaves me feeling stuck and unsure of my purpose, a sentiment that has felt somewhat exaggerated of late. Codependent? Maybe, luckily, we talked about that too.

The older I get the closer to my past I become. I am aware now of emotions that I have never before been present enough to feel, a testament to a tumultuous year full of change and courageous confrontations.

But it’s also painful. I watched my dad pull away today in his company car and felt cold with the knowledge that I have no idea when next we’ll meet. Almost instantaneously my mom arrived home from a daylong artist’s workshop and I turned my eyeballs skywards, thanking the great whomever above me that my parent’s paths had not crossed. My reaction to her return felt out of my control, as if I was watching myself become angry and withdrawn in response to her presence, a default response of pure emotion with little else to back it up. For years such was normal protocol in all areas of our relationship, and is thankfully no longer so, but transition between my parents still incites irritation and impatience.

Attempting to dispel the frustration I felt with my own anxious anger, I went out for a long drive, flying down 95, listening to Hartford’s number one for hip hop and R&B and watching the sun set like a blood orange in the sky, spilling it’s juicy soul all over the blue shoreline horizon. I shifted into the soft blue of the evening, and drove long into darkness. When the radio went fuzzy, I put Mariah Carey on my Ipod and shamelessly sang along, slipping over back roads, and past the landmarks of my childhood I once thought gone forever.

Funny how one can learn
To grow numb to the madness
And block it away
I left the worst unsaid
Let it all dissipate
And I try to forget

As I closed my eyes
Steadied my feet on the ground
Raised my head to the sky
And the time rolled by
Still I feel like a child
As I look at the moon
Maybe I grew up a little too soon

As I sang, as I related to the music of a much teased lady songstress, I eased myself into acceptance, and thought a lot. Not the conscious sort of consideration, but the kind couched in music and in the speed of the car through the moonlit darkness of a starless night.

"I Want to be a Part of IT, New York , New York...."

As I walked into Grand Central Station today, a thought walked across the forefront of my mind – a thought that was at once a question formed on the framework of feeling unconditionally in love with New York City and the ever-present curiosity surrounding such a soulful and comfortable sentiment.

And again, after class, as I walked across the main floor of Bloomingdales, smelling my sample of the new Channel parfume, swinging my medium brown bag satisfiededly from my fingers, and feeling myself a veritable goddess of my Manhattan, I was again struck by the city’s sheer power to transform the attitude with which I walk through it. Where before I was slumping, now I was skipping.

Maybe it was the shopping, but I doubt it...I think it’s this – New York is a world unto itself, full of stories. Broadway at 6 p.m. is a veritable buffet of bodies, flowing in seemingly endless abundance, providing ample opportunity to disappear within them, or to stand out amongst them. My mind matches the mass of Manhattan’s streets with a plentitude of words, a constant stream of language, bursting to be written out, so much so, that I stopped beside a Strawberry’s on 43^rd and Lexington to scribble all this out, purging my mind of the fear that I’d forget the sentences that were scrambling to be freed.

And yet, I love the country and find parts of myself, inaccessible when within the city, on the shore, looking out on the Long Island sound and discovering in the crevices of my mind memories long forgotten. Or at the barn, where every smell recalls to me semblances of self, forgotten on the city street. But in the end, it's New York that pulls from me the creative fruit of each place’s past. Lessons learned long ago, and memories of my childhood, are recovered by Manhattan’s movement and my place within it. New York is like my Hogwarts, I move through it magically, meeting full on its many faces, and seeing myself reflected in its ever-open eyes.