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Spoken word poet Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai who I met in D.C.

"You know that I love you, boy
hot like Mexico, rejoice
At this point, I gotta choose
Nothing to lose" - Lady Gaga

I look back and realize how writing has been like a religion to me, almost a savior. It's an act of confessing and confronting the thousands of fears, insecurities, joys, pains, confusions that I hold as a human.

If life is full of "ebbs and flows"/ "peaks and valleys"... I guess through writing I can realize that from ages 16-20 was a dark place that I've always tried to confront, however unsuccessfully I may be. I realize it. I don't run from it because that was what I did then and who I was. Thank goodness it made me pick up a pen and write poems, letters, diary entries, stories, opinions so religiously that I began to figure out my heart.

But what is different between going into 22 and those 4 years was that no one else then was invested in my heart or knew how to deal with it and how to make it stronger. Junior year I've been blessed with people who push me and see me even when at times, I don't see myself. They've made me cry, laugh, and speak; they would push me open when I would be enticed to closing up. I've had this fear since I was 17, understandably, that people would leave and never come back. But today some of the people who can't stay, who I met and who know a piece of me that people in Portland will never know, I feel have invested in my growth and in my heart by prying, not taking the easy road and by not only hearing but listening.

Thus, even as lonely and depleting as Portland is and always has been, I feel that I have them (from Fall Semester at Colby, to NY, to IHP) here. Going into 22, I write more about my journey to grab onto and hold onto the strength, care, and inspirations that have helped me move forward with my happiness and my passions even when physically these people aren't here to hold my hand. Still a lot of puzzles and confrontations but I think I'm going through a peak.

Some Free-Writes from the past month:
---
"One"

I get chills as my vessels miss you

The songs we sing to the earth through our
melodies of making love,
with our tongues as the harp
And our lips the guitar sending vibrations of passion
into the horizon and hoping

mother earth absorbs our fire
And spews back love
when you’re not near
---
"Run"

If I were in a perfect world
I would
run back to hindsight and change our limelight
from what was to what could’ve been
and make the shiny silk spin into a fantasy of a girl
ready to run from her clingy friend, Lonesome
Which she lets tower through the fire
of persistence and desires
though resistance

springs

like a trampoline depleting the emotions
which would fulfill a wholeness in a perfect world
Where the desired desires
her
---
"Greed"

Let it drift
the way hair flows to the wind
and opens up pages of my diary
that now reads...

"what if I don't miss you the way I once did
and what if the body caressed with no substance
and what if the soul
confused lust with "us"
fabricated by our lonely ventures into
the unknown"

so I
held your hands and connected those fingers
to my heart
but what if
that once needed comfort... I no longer miss?
And what if, without fear,
what I felt
was platonic?