On Love and Death

JUN 8 2013

My struggle is always between when I should be acting like the person I want to be and what parts of myself I should to keep. I recently fell in love with a tiny Greek in a blazer. I also met her girlfriend that night.

Mya Angelou is slightly over rated since slapping her linguistic brilliance on Hallmark cards. You can’t blame her in the least, I would sell my soul to a Hallmark card at this point, but it does create a hipster’s conflict around her undoubted intellectual genius and the retarded likes of consumerism. Many of her words have personally resulted in the definition of who I wish I was as a human. I once heard her tell a story about growing up and moving out of her mother’s house. Her mother had all the financial, emotional and physical room for her. Mya went to her and said that she and her baby boy were leaving. Her mother told her that when she crossed over that door to remember she had been raised. She knew right from wrong and to do right. Her mother left her at the train by telling her she was one of the greatest women she had come to know. Standing along the sides of Eleanor Roosevelt and her own mother. As the years went by Mya went home every time “life held me down and made me call it uncle.” When doctors estimated a short window remaining in her mother’s life, she brought her home to live in her house. She lived for a year and a half. In the end of that Mya said she remembered her mother freeing her years earlier by the train. Telling her to go. Telling her that she had no doubt that she was valuable to others. Telling her she loved her whether she was here, whether she was in China, whether she was in Harlem. She would like to be next to her but in that moment it was not possible, so go, I love you. Love does not bind it liberates.

She went home that evening and told her mother, as she understood it, some people need permission to go. And if that’s the case here, I liberate you, I love you, go if you need to. Her mother died that night.

How does one remain unconditional and unused?

I am certain of very few things but the things I’m certain of, I have not an ounce of possible doubt. I know it with all of my being.

In my life I’ve sat at two separate bedsides of the dying. I’m on my third now. When I sit there beside Nan I feel washed over by the irenic thought, ‘Go. I love you.’ When I sit beside the tiny Greek, I think, ‘ Fuck. I love you. I would like to be next to you but I love you. I love you if you’re in China, if you’re in Harlem, if you’re in LA, or some other bitch’s bed. But I love you so maybe I should go.’ The next trick is to stop waking up naked in the same bed together. But I am so certain of how good it is.