tendernesses

tendernesses

sweet and soft

like your grandfather calling you darling

or her hands stroking your hair when you break

as you do when someone shows you the kindness

you have been craving

like the green touch of the grass as you run your fingers through it

or the spider crawling across the sky seemingly unattached to anything but it's own hope

like your father's voice on the phone

like the chairs set out around the table in the courtyard or

the friend noticing your absence like your grandmother

telling you she thought of you and picked the angel card

tenderness

darling

I love how my British grandfather calls me darling.

Darling, what a wonderful word.

It makes me feel darling, 

English, like I ought to have one leg lightly crossed over the other,

or be smoking out an open window 

or adjusting the shoulder tie of a long silk dress.

(Like this morning, Ananya telling me they are tremendously excited to come visit.

The sudden word so delicious that I let out a giggle when I see it pop up on my phone. Tremendously.)

How delightful language can be if we let it,

effervescent and vivacious, scrumptious and diddly,

vapid and intoxicating in its vapidity.

I love it even in meaninglessness, beauty for the sake of beauty,

and if something is said even better,

the luxuriousness of caring about something beyond survival

a political statement in itself

an adoption of one's right to life.

(And I am beginning to understand more and more that the worlds we live in are of our own creation.

Not everything is bequeathed. And I want to live in a world of tremendouslys, of rapture and iridescence, of darlings.)

I have always been a messy person but

I think kindness for oneself might be one of the hardest things to find

I search for it deep in the elementary school desk of my mind

shoved with pencils and chapter books, gum and crawling things,

shame, embarrassment, blame in the hair elastics, doubt spilled all over

the cover of my notebooks

And when I'm lucky enough to find it I look away and it slips away again

Leaves me frantically searching my own reflection on the metro

sifting street puddles for compassion, studying slight 

contortions of a stranger's face, or the way they hold their hands, or 

someone else's

gentleness in all its forms a practice I can learn that I am always learning

the city's rush an unlearning I will never finish

can I meet myself over and over again with nothing but this abundance

I think one of the reasons

I couldn’t do this again with E is because of how hard it was with A
Yet there are also so many other different things
E so kind and understanding
Our communication soft and clear
Not twisted and barbed and misunderstood

Last night listing the reasons she would want to stay with her boyfriend
Marina says to you
I can hear that it’s insufficient
And later
I just don’t know if we have what it takes to be each others partners

These truths we understand but do not want to
that we hope to mold like clay in our hands
into something new

(Who can blame us?)

this morning I wake up thinking of gentle things

falling asleep to the muffled sounds of my roommate having sex

waking up to a new day given like a clean folded towel in my hands

where will life take me? I stand at the metaphorical bus stop of the mind

looking back and forth for telltale round lights in any direction

and walk down the path on the thread of the journey

in between the voyage home and the voyage out

the ocean like a cloth sea in front of me

where will life take me?