Patches of Sun

For Jasmine

I vacillate between dark and defeated, a general ennui, inured to the violence of the indifference and rejection I face every day and amused and excited by people i find dear, endearing and inspiring.

I have always been a painfully sensitive person. A callous has grown over that sensitivity with the passing years. I still feel the pain of others deeply. I take notice on the street when i see suffering especially when I see another sensitive soul, young or old, in pain just from trying to navigate this difficult word.

It is strange to me how my younger self feels like another person, someone who died long ago. I sometimes sit and mourn his death. He was a slight boy with a lisp he had from teeth made crooked by sucking his fingers as he slept. He had few friends as he was not the kind of boy that boys were supposed to be. He liked warm patches of sun where he could find them, on the floor of his bedroom under the window, in a little meadow in the woods behind the house. He looked for those patches of sun in the street on the way home from school where he could close his eyes with his face pointed toward the light and feel the warmth caress him.

Now as I grow older and another layer of rejection is added as middle age settles in on my face and body, I feel most beautiful as lay on the beach with my eyes closed forgetting the gaze of others just feeling the breeze of the wind off the water and the summer sun on my bare skin.

Sometimes I meet people who feel like those patches of sun to me and they radiate a warmth I rarely see. For a moment when they are close and we connect I feel beautiful and warm looking into their familiar eyes.

I feel as if I have been searching for my tribe all my life. We were separated long ago in prehistoric times and we are all different shapes sizes and colors and sexualities and we are warm loving people, little patches of sun, floating around lost in this cold world, a lifetime spent looking for each other.

Here is a piece of poem is being rehabilitated but none the less pertinent:

I have fought with my and legs long enough

Prayed my face was good enough for a pair of bare arms around my waist.

Now I pray for bleached bones and green glass worn lonely and content

Their hourglass figures long broken,

No trash bins or fingernails tapping at their necks,

A new life as impotent beachcombers trading the nightclubs for hot sand and cool water.

I have been like them all along

Wrong places wrong body

I will trade all my starvation for tender fingers for this

I will lay face down in the surf rushing toward the sand

As long as it takes to be like them

Smooth and glistening

Taken hard every day by the waves, washed asleep for hours.