It is not original to moan about the heady frivolity of tertiary education but *disclaimer* I’m about to expose the privilege in my ignorance to tax filing and go on and on about the possibly entirely intentional injustice of their assumption that I magically know what to do with a W-9.

It’s also not original to point out that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that it all comes out in the wash and that it’s 6 in one, 1/2 a dozen in the other.

I belong to two hemispheres

and someone recently at some solstice ceremony I attended somewhere maybe on a Ley line in South Africa, pointed out to me that feeling fact makes me

a cross-pollinator

Are taxes different from consequences?

If I’m a product of of my environment, and I’ve seen that there is another kind of life out there and that the definition of success is

adaptation,

shouldn’t I do everything in my power to go and be in the kind of life that feels joyful to me? What are the taxes I’ll pay there?

What are the energetic taxes of being the boss’s kid? What are the energetic taxes of accepting big gifts from my family? Other than the HOA fees, what kind of guilt tax is on the apartment that my grandfather bought for me?

The tax I pay on my memory of you is what weighs on my heart when I look at the shape of the moon just after it’s new; it’s half-pipe character taxes me — in this way, tax feels different from consequence because while a tax can be burdensome, it’s an addition, not a subtraction.

It’s sprinkles on top.

The wind blows and

Additive

Sounds like

Addictive

The lingering memory of you in the silver moon sliver weighs me down, sure; but the sight still adds to my wholeness. 

As much as my recent passport debacle taxes my Thursday in late February, it’s perhaps not a subtraction somehow because of what I heard in the government worker’s laugh and what I saw in her flirtatious interaction with the white man behind the sneeze guard. I got to imagine their probably nonexistent workplace love story.

And simultaneous to that sight at my 10 o’clock orientation, just to my 2 there sat one couple’s three young girls not nearly as pissed off as I was to be there, one swaying to a song unheard to the rest of us mortals, her sister counting aloud ad infinitum

and so this tax gave me stories,

little snapshots into little stories that exist only because I imagined them. I saw a man take a mudra and close his eyes and breathe. And I witnessed a courageous young food runner in the café recommended to me by my friend from home, where I waited and worked for the passport agents to wait and maybe work.

I think I just saw a homeless veteran steal soup. Maybe we all saw it and said nothing because paying for soup is the tax we pay on the salaries we make. And our collective silence about the homeless veteran who gets to steal soup is the tax we pay and the homeless veteran pays other much more uncomfortable taxes.

The tax I pay on reasonable rent downtown is the mold in the dishwasher

And the broken washing machine

And the running toilet

Is there even such thing as an unequal equation? Is there such thing as a winner at the end of it all?

Are taxes just karma?

Are taxes equalizers?

What if it’s not what happens but rather how I experience, the presence and the joy of the happenings?

What if it’s not the luck or lack thereof but how I choose to tell the story of my great fortunes and to whom and how it’s received?

The inconvenience of obtaining a new passport is the tax I pay on the travels I take. And the hilarity of my expectation of ease in an endeavor such as internationally recognized and issued documentation demonstrates so clearly the ease of my existence.

Thank you, Goodness!

Plainly, one travel tax I pay is the drive to the Miami passport agency, its early wake-up and grumpy group of fellow hopeful travelers as well as its comfortable heated seats and lovely skies.

The tax I pay on owning a car at all are the various parking tickets I have accrued and what I pay to park it and

The tax my brother will pay on the task of selling the car he inherited from my dad are the various sub-tasks involved in changing a title and

well

I’m not really sure what else — maybe that’s something I wish they’d have taught me in college as well

Until You Know Better

Wait sit starve rest and see what pours cascades rushes out of you

Great Artists Steal

Olivia Dean’s “Something Inbetween” is a letter from my heart to the town I grew up in, the town I’m about to not leave, the love I’m creating space for. 

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