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I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting here and wonder if it was me—I mean, this happy and balanced me, who is now dozing on the deck of this small Indonesian fishing boat—who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years. The younger me was the acorn full of potential, but it was the older me, the already-existent oak, who was saying the whole time:
"Yes—grow! Change! Evolve! Come and meet me here, where I already exist in wholeness and maturity! I need you to grow into me!" And maybe it was this present and fully actualized me who was hovering four years ago over that young married sobbing girl on the bathroom floor, and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl's ear, "Go back to bed, Liz..." Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me.
"Yes—grow! Change! Evolve! Come and meet me here, where I already exist in wholeness and maturity! I need you to grow into me!" And maybe it was this present and fully actualized me who was hovering four years ago over that young married sobbing girl on the bathroom floor, and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl's ear, "Go back to bed, Liz..." Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me.
My capacity to feel has been stretched and molded with each piece of your souls that you reveal to me. I offer this in return.
Dedicated to whomever's worn, warm afternoon hands come upon these pages—wherever you may find them—and that you may remember that the world is conspiring for you and to act in a manner as such.
That's why poetry, or even having the lyrics written down somewhere, is strange for me. The act of singing gives the most mundane words and phrases reverence and glory. You can make a shrine out of anything. The song has its own personality, and is bigger and stronger than I am. With more to say, to just write something down and let it stay there, on the page, seems to me an enormously vulnerable thing. And that's why poetry has in many ways turned out more exposing.
The years saw me grow long-limbed awkward inexplicably maverick. I sought my kind and found none. How you rescued me. Your peasant hands reaching through time wrapping my young heart. Your poems, found in a stall by the greyhound station I dogged dreaming of escape, were my ticket out of my cloistered existence. Words I could not comprehend and yet, deciphered by blood, illuminated adolescence. Armed with you I fled the rural suffocation of southern New Jersey past the streets of our forefathers to New York City of poet rats and public transit. I wrote with the image of you above my worktable, vowing to one day trace your steps dressed in the watch cap and coat of my present self.
