What do I remember? The first night, week, moments: images rise up behind my eyes.
Everything is the same and everything is different. This has been my refrain for the past what? Month, I guess. But what is the same? And what is different? My heart tightens even as I try to give it a name.
I am different. I am different. I have a nose ring and a new dress. I wear tang tops without an over shirt. I have orange and blue yarn around my wrist. Sometimes Spanish comes easier than English, and I find myself saying “chivo” or “va, pues” without thinking. I dream in Spanish and sometimes my fingers have a hard time finding quotation marks on a regular US keyboard … and all of these are real, but there are a million things in my appearance, speech, mannerisms that are ever so much the same. And these visible concrete things are symptoms rather than the root anyway.
What is at the heart then? What is at the heart of my hearts? Right now, in this moment: tears. Tears and this bittersweet ache that wants to shy away from naming this because to name it is to know it, to name my love for my samedifferent self and to own that love, with one month left, one month before returning to the states where everything is the same and everything is different, but it is a samedifference that will make me more the same and more different. Sometimes I wonder which way is down in DC, where are my feet? What are they grounded on? Do my samedifferent feet have a home in my life of last semester? Of course not. That was last semester and neither my feet nor my heart can return. And that is scary. And relieving.
When my mom and sister were here, we went to the beach. My sister and I stood side my side in the waves. With each gentle crash, our feet were buried deeper and deeper and deeper until one crash, one not so gentle crash, knocked me into stepping back, my feet away from their home, sand and water filling in the space which had seconds before held my feet. I couldn’t go back. And in a new place, new sand and new water, I stood. And again my feet put down roots and I laughed. I laughed with the waves while watching them more carefully, so my feet would not be knocked back again from their comfy, though rocky, home.
I can see the next wave coming, and it is giant. I am in its shadow, and in this wave the sun is shining through and swimming in the wave are sharks, shining in the sun as the blue water sparkles. And it is coming towards me and it is beautiful and terrifying. There are 30 of us here now, our feet in the sand, holding hands, grips ever tightening, in love and in pain, some with eyes on the sun, the waves, the sharks, our feet, each other. All of us knowing the wave is coming. And we will be crashed over, our feet uprooted, forced to find a new home on a beach that was once wholly known, but now where the sand and water and sun are both familiar and strange, our previous foot homes long ago filled with water and sand, though still visible by an soft shadow.
And that big wave, the one with the sharks, beautiful and terrible, casts its shadow over the fish at our feet, the birds, the smaller waves that crash before us, our gripped-tight hands. And it is here where the secrete lies: do we close our eyes, ignore the shadows and bury ourselves in the sweet singing of the birds, or bury ourselves in the overwhelming sight of the shadow, the darkness, the terror? Or de we see the fish, hear the birds, and the people laughing, while we stand in the shadow. Do we let the hands holding the knots in our hearts stay? Do we see the beauty and the terror? The shadow and those other waves? And those sharks shining in the light of that grand wave.
Fear and suffering are part of life, side by side with hope and joy. Now. Right now: do we live in a world that allows both to live together, as hands clasped one to the other, fingers intertwined? Or do we live with minds and eyes and hearts half open, in realities where suffering and joy are mutually exclusive?
Irony. That cat of blood and roses. The crucifixion and resurrection, suffering and joy, tears and laughter.
And I yell and I scream, my feet in the sand/hands gripped tight/eyes on those sharks, that I am more.
I claim my fears and my pain and my tears and my hurt. I claim my struggle to feel all of these things.
I clam that I am the daughter of my parents – and the smile that that brings and also the fear it implies.
I claim my depression and even those desires I have had to stop existing.
But these here I do not claim alone because alone they is false, and if these fingers are not intertwined with those of the other hand, I reject this as lies, because to be true there must be more.
And so I claim my hopes and my joys and my laughter and love. I claim my faith and my strengths: the goodness that is in me even when I forget.
I claim my desire to love and be loved and the hidden fear that I don’t deserve it. and so I claim too my friends, my family, the people I love and the people who love me, proving my fear a lie – and I claim myself as a created being and so made to love and be loved.
I claim my heart, the way it leads me to love, the way it overflows sometimes at the drop of a leaf, a crash of a wave, a hug, a kiss, a wink.
I claim that I am the daughter of my parents and my love for them and theirs for me.
I claim my sister as my friend and sister and confidant, there in laughter and tears.
I claim my fire for life, my wonder at being alive. The incredible fact that i AM.
I claim myself. A pilgrim, a lover, a beloved, a friend, a sister, a daughter, a woman, alive.
And all of it, my hopes dreams fears and pains, all of it leads me to smile and sigh, and hold my heart, my broken dirty dusty beating wonderfully alive heart, as that bittersweet ache grows and grows and yearns. As the waves and sharks, the sun, beautiful and terrible, come closer. Eyes wide open and watching, heart beating waiting and loving: loving and knowing and so seeing where I am. And so being scared that I will break when it changes. Eyes and heart seeing and loving where I am going –this summer next year and the next. And so being afraid for I am fragile yet, and I am the same and I am different –everything is the same and everything is different. And this samedifferent me, my samedifferent love, I worry that it, that I, will not be enough. That my words will not make sense, my heart will not be seen, and my samedifferentness will not be –in me nor in the world – or at least won’t be together, that it will be the same or it will be different and so it will be a lie, those fingers untangled; that the irony of cat of blood and roses can exist only in Annie Dillard, only in my Thursday morning philosophy class. #(but I know this isn´t true so I end in the hope of a return and of something completely new -- this same different hope)
#(but to end here, to end in fear without hope...then those fingers have already begun to loosen at my inability to live in irony. and so i hope and i dream and the life and the love and the friendships i envision (and not just envision, but live in) when i return...i hope that has it´s roots here and now in my own liberation, in the growth in relationships countries away, and my faith that God is good, my new understanding that i am loved (my God myself my people) and that I love. Therese says there is no greater vocation than the vocation to love...and love is here there everywhere...in el salvador colorado dc...and that´s just the beginning of the list!)
#clearly ive been having trouble ending this one... so it´s a choose your own adventure type of close :)
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