~
Just a breeze,
Passing through—
Nothing more, nothing less
Than what I want it to
Be.
~

“Most of the time…”

I attempted to write this post a couple months ago, as I was preparing to leave the state I’d called home for 12/13 of my life. Was right in the midst of attempting to put a dent in the mounds of junk I had inherited over the past 26 years of my life. Unfortunately, staring at the mounds didn’t make them any smaller. Darn. The process of sifting through and deciding which items to keep and which to toss was at once cathartic, nostalgic, humorous, and slightly painful.

Amongst the mess were those notes where wE wRoTe LyKe DiS and folded like this:

Then were are all those precious Bio notes I so carefully took back when straight A’s still seemed like a possibility. And piles of clothes I hadn’t worn in years but couldn’t bring myself to get rid of, in case I wanted to wear them again one day.

Traveling light has never been my strong suit. My friend Jane confirmed this when I visited her in SF several months ago. She laughed at me as I precariously balanced my duffel bag, tote bag, purse, and shopping bag on my way out of her house. “I can always tell it’s you because you’re carrying so much stuff,” she said.

There’s something comforting about surrounding yourself with all this STUFF–junk that is no longer a part of your life but which you still find difficult to part with.

Even though I knew how necessary it was to do so,
I always had the hardest time letting go–
Of dashed hopes and past betrayals,
Old feelings and moments of epic FAIL.

HA.

It’s funny how we surround ourselves with such varied trappings–from obvious ones like accomplishments, abilities, and possessions to more subtle ones like memories, expectations, and old versions of ourselves. Before long we find ourselves TRAPPED by our very own trappings.

The strange thing is that, as I have stopped trying so hard to LET IT GO and given in to the REDEMPTION that has been forming before my very eyes, it seems that Jess 1.0, with all of her hangups, fears, and anxieties has slowly been fading into the horizon. As though someone has been running a disk cleanup in the background as I have been going through the day-to-day of my new life.

I left behind a lot of stuff when I moved. It would have been hard to throw it all away, but now that it’s gone I don’t miss it at all. My life feels more real and truly full for it than it’s felt in, well, ever.

In the fight for freedom,
Something tells me that
Flightiness is not the same as flight.

Refusing to flee from the forlorn,
Making resounding excuses
And forgetting I forgot.

Taking a leap—
Choosing to feel—
Knowing that I’ll be caught.

I do not belong to you.

You can search me with your eyes,
Take me in with a gaze that tries
To pry below the surface
With a thinly veiled disguise.

You can consume me like some greasy bag of fries
you bought on the street corner because you were
too cheap and lazy to pay for a real meal.
Click, save, add me to your image gallery of lies.

Oh, didn’t they tell you, it’s not nice to steal?
Didn’t they tell you? I’m the real deal.

[Originally written by hand in my journal]

What to do when it seems there are about a zillion things to write about, but not one of them seems to make its way from <3 –> paper?

Pens seem to be safe territory. This is rather a nice pen. Was at the store recently–one of those Morning Glory-esque stationery stores that will forever remind me of high school girlfriends and generic birthday gifts. Was there on a whim to purchase an air freshener for my car. One of those things that it always seems one ought to do as a civilized Asian person but never quite made it to the top of one’s to-do list in spite of that fact.

After sifting through the store’s various fragrant offerings, I settled on a bright orange “tropical” scented cylinder and made my way to the register to pay. On my way there I passed a display of hundreds of colorful pens and pencils and quickly flashed back to the days when I would actually pay for pens. As the young Korean salesgirl rang up my purchase I strained to figure out how it was that I hadn’t paid for a pen in so long.

To be honest, I still can’t quite pinpoint how the free pen came to be such a fixture in the background of my life. A job fair here and there, random giveaways, a few hotel pens (like this one) thrown in for good measure…I honestly don’t know where else. I guess my Chinese instinct has served me well to alert me when free pens are available. Perhaps it’s become so second nature that I don’t even notice anymore.

In any case, free pens (the good ones) are the unnoticed, unsung heroes of my life. You don’t really realize they are there, but what would you do if they weren’t? Pay for pens? God, what a horrible thought. You don’t expect much (after all, they’re free), but when you find a good one you’re pleasantly surprised. It’s like having a new friend whose smooth familiar, strokes give shape to all of your best ideas and most heartfelt ponderings until the day it’s forced to retire. A good pen–one that releases just the right amount of ink and doesn’t interrupt your thought flow–is hard to find.

My new air freshener, on the other hand, is turning out to be somewhat of a disappointment. The stout, translucent, carrot-colored little guy sits neatly atop the dash of my car’s all-black interior purporting to be a beacon of freshness amidst a cluttered and musty wilderness. I’m not sure what I expected. After all, it’s doing its job well enough. The car smells like the tropical fragrance I had first sampled at the store. But maybe I don’t want to smell “tropical” all the time. Maybe the duration of a car ride in my friend’s car was as long as I could stand such sweet bliss. Maybe I just need to clean my car so it doesn’t smell both musty and tropical–a bit disconcerting. Or maybe I just prefer to smell things as they are.

PS: I have since cleaned my car, diminishing the aforementioned juxtaposition of smells. My new friend and I have agreed to disagree; we have learned to coexist, at least for now. Also, my friend Madeline sat in my car recently and alerted me that I needed to remove the plastic layer between the fragrance and the top to experience the air freshener’s full effect. Verdict still pending…

After grabbing a few standout titles from the limited selection on their shelves, I asked permission to share a round wooden table with an elderly lady having a field day with a stack of do-it-yourself-type craft books. Being unfamiliar with small-town library etiquette, I took extra precautions to ensure I didn’t offend anyone unnecessarily. She smiled and said something to the tune of “of course” and returned to her reading, leaving me to my own devices.

I began to sift through the books I had picked out to gauge interest level and had a meta moment when I came across this line in Anne Lamott’s latest offering:

“You never knew for sure who would be there, someone you’d been missing or were trying to avoid.”

Cue rabbit trail of thoughts…

I was struck with the immediacy of life, of people and place, in a small town like Globe. Particularly in contrast to the built environment and alternate reality of this highly digitized and regimented “Matrix” world we are all “connected” to yet not quite connected to. Even if I wanted to avoid reality, it would be hard to ignore the lady sitting across from me who interpreted my meditative pauses from reading to be the physical/mental lapses of someone who needed a nap. Or the notion that the random musings of this man at the coffee shop were touching on some very real truths and possibilities for the world.

On the path to (re)discovering and tapping into a grander scheme of connectedness that reaches down and satiates an ache that feels so very primal…

“Love is all around, no need to waste it / You can have the town, why don’t you take it / You’re gonna make it after all”