thresholds

Monday, August 3rd.

Today is a ceremonial day. A sacred day. A person who feels deeply alive day.

Alarm went off at 6:15am and the sky was dark and souls might have still been sleeping, or maybe making coffee, or tea, somewhere, quietly, without any sound, just like the cockroaches that overflow every apartment in this city but stay hidden. Today I start class in an hour and fifteen minutes and for the first time in a long time I feel scared in a good way. In preparation, I spent last week regulating my sleep schedule, reducing alcohol and weed, seeing friends that needed to be seen before entering my hermit era of music-making and studying, and bought nice notebooks and pens because I needbeauty to function. It has been two years since I stepped into this large building. Two years. My navy sweater and navy pants and navy socks and navy bag have been waiting since yesterday night on the chair as if my garments will offer protection of some kind. Maybe I do believe a little they will. That’s why I call myself agnostic. I realize that over the years where I have been able to buy my own things I have acquired everything blue. Navy blue. Deep blue. My dad’s and my favourite colour, which I confirmed last year when I saw him for the last time in April, right before he was deported. An unconscious choice of color made by my brain when I was a child. I said it reminded me of the sky right before dawn. He told me that’s why he loves it too. He was a marine.

I arrive thirty minutes early and wait inside the class. Still dark. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes pass and nobody is to be seen. I walk down all three floors and go up again. I get worried because usually this is when the students that actually care arrive and now I am afraid I have the wrong class. Wrong. This particular class starts next week. I laugh to myself and order an Uber back home.

Tomorrow I really start, really. What else is there but to smile and sit and write. Today is a sacred day. I move to this beautiful apartment with a big terrace at three. I still have eleven days till I get out of here and thefirst and only thing I’ll bring today is my entire bookshelf. I might stay, I might not. I might perform some ritual, I might not. Endless possibilities and I feel blessed. It is now almost nine in the morning and I resist the urge to sleep by dancing to African ambient music and preparing my first coffee of the day.

It is only seven at noon and I remember how that hawk saluted me earlier the moment I entered the new apartment, when the sun was up and the clouds, the big white clouds were bothering it, laughing with feathers and doe eyes, making the day look a violet gray I think I’ve loved before. The host greeted me and left five minutes after.

My friend M helped with the bags and then rolled a joint, played Marvin Gaye and watched the sky from the great windows. I couldn’t stop talking and being a bother, I said. You said I couldn’t possible ever be a bother. Impossible. Then pinched my cheek. Then the hawk, oh, the birds. Are we friends? All the common types were to be seen from above. A not so common one too. Forty minutes of distant eyed Mia looking through the big rectangle that now are big windows of a renovated black container with a patio. Then, I realized there was no internet. Fine, I said a bit angry, to be frank, tomorrow they’ll come, the guest says. I shrug it off and look at my Practicing The Power Of Now by Elkhart Toll copy and remember about acceptance and gratitude. This is the book I come back to when I get stressed and don’t want to do hard drugs. The patio is immense and there is no restriction or policy about parties. Hermit era. I have many dualities. I count twenty different cactuses around happily and a hammock that is now inside due to the light rain of the past hours and days that now gave birth to new buds and clear green leaves. The Sun rises from the East and all that portion to the West is visible to me. Water, water. The cooler is now suddenly scaring me, making a loud electric sound that becomes bothersome, and then becomes unbearable. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I disconnect the apparatus and thank god I hadn’t gone out for groceries. I watch the sunset, listen to jazz, wrapped against him, M, and we look at each other and realize this is the first of many lonely nights. The first time in a while that we go separate ways.

But change is cruel because it is slow. I’ll slowly take away my things until the room is empty of my things and mess, and we already decided it was sad and something to talk about, later, and I didn’t wanted him to leave. I promised I would sleep tomorrow again but now I needed sacred loneliness. I am a slow transition type of person I guess. I have trouble with change he said.

Arranged the desk with my favorite books and first copies I finally got out of storage. My first copy of The Little Prince, remembering when I was eight years old and read it entirely in one sitting and cried and realized things about decay. I order food and now I’m alone. A joint is rolled and the curtains are down by nine.

Sweet dreams

Xx