today is a day whose minutes are passing lightly, bouncily. I record a voice memo and it somehow measures 3 minutes and 14 seconds and I could have gone on forever more and maybe it’s because the person on the other side makes me feel like she listens or maybe it’s the caffeine, the sunshine, the tobacco, the waves, the album in my ears.

the same way music sounds best on ears in the morning, after a restful and quiet night, Restraint says that food tastes better on a fasted stomach, one piece at a time; and caffeine hits the head best after some days withdrawn. Or in the afternoon kind of morning, after a night that turned to dawn, in a perfect stranger’s perfect mug

black coffee and potential hypothetical maybe love — this is the highlight I did not mention. Because it’s mine and only mine.

drain the sea and burn the matches and cross the ocean within, I don’t care what it takes

which of your art dies for the sake of audience?

what is the difference between restrain and repression?

I think Guilt

by way of Expectation

anyway

today is a day whose morning peace should be bottled and sold. How can I capture it? How can I stretch it? How can I hold tightly to it and find it each and every day?

I let my coffee get cold and for the first time in memory, I’m not maddened by it. My motivation to do things that don’t matter is at an all time low today and yesterday. I woke up craving to do with my day as I wished, without the guilt or the shame of should and screen time (for which I get paid, by the way) and that is a conundrum to me — the way money motivates me some days and not others.

It seems I need my work to be shown my working is meaning something to someone and when I told that something to someone whose opinion matter to me she said,

“you’re chasing instant gratifiction. things aren’t alwayts that easy,”

and I feel unheard by that response because

I am not afraid to work hard

quite the opposite, actually. I know that I know how to work hard.

I am afraid, very afraid, of working hard at nothing

and Humility said to me, so clearly yesterday,

I am tired of swimming upstream, against the current.

Humility admits in the opposite of weakness that she is no longer interested in wrestling with the current, the fluid and wise and tangible flow toward

where?

She admits, too, she knows not where

I am wandering and I am also lost — this is true. Utterly lost, for sure. And also wandering, certainly.

Time is on fire and by that I mean

I thought that I was meant to figure out my hormones so that I could settle into a life that would mean a forever love and even children – -I thought, just weeks ago, that I wanted to be like my pregnant friends and I was sure that internal knowing was the origin of my sudden impulse to sort my PCOS but now, weeks later, I am thinking it’s not about my unborn children.

There’s money waiting for me, stored away by my family for my education, thank you, mom and dad and giddi and sethi, by the way. I thank you. But I thank you from me. Not from my kids. Because when they told me it could be mine or it could be my kids I was astonished at the audacity of that woman, who herself I assume is a mother but who perhaps is not, to sit in front of me and say, in essence,

choose now

is it for you or your kids?

I left that cold office overlooking the bay, MY bay, with a tense jaw

and it’s been tense ever since at the idea of growing up and grown ups forcing wannabe grown ups into big decisions

What if I told you you’re running the wrong race? Humility would never tell you that. She would smile as she swims past you. The magic thing that happens when

no one is coming to save you

finally settles

is that you hear Humility when she says it’s not your job to save anyone

because, too, no one is out to get you. They’re mostly too worried about their own place in the race. They don’t have the space. And if they did one day create the space, Compassion would land and gracefully dampen Greed’s fleeting flicker of need need need, alchemize it into

turn around

depart diagonal

jump fly and shake

do something different go some place new there is enough for you and me and everyone else, too just, please, make your own way, Brave and Courageous You

I met a man here in Muizenberg who flies gliders. He told me from across an ovular table and over a glass of grenache that gliders have no engines and that once you get up there, you only have to hear the wind. And his eyes lit up and I gathered that the quiet is something he, too, craves.

And a woman today as I sauntered by her flat in the little gated community where I stay, just one main road between us and the beach, told me

time flies, my girl

and so, I’m thinking of flying

and landing

and letting it land

Until You Know Better

Turn on ESPN2 — it’s NCAA’s weekend, ladies

Learn how to roll your own damn cigarette

Listen to Obviously by Lake Street Dive — no skips allowed

Spend all of your money!

Great Artists Steal

Mary Oliver’s Upstream, specifically “Of Power and Time” if your voice needs a voice