I Cannot Separate Myself From You

Sometimes it is necessary to get far enough away from something to recognize what it is. I'm not talking about looking at hairs on the leg of an ant and then zooming back to reveal the whole little armored body. I'm thinking more about familiar things I see everyday.

I am thinking of those things that I choose to decorate my life with. The songs, the colors, the patterns and stories that become my favorites for reasons I cannot understand.

Some people claim they come from past lives, others that they are in the genes. Still others think we are programmed to like these things by our culture and family and will even go farther to say that we choose to like them after learning about them in our studies.

I submitted some lines from one of my thots to the new site "I write like" tonight and it said I write like Vladimir Nabokov. Having no idea who he was I looked him up and I was surprised at how much his life resonated with things I have dreamed, or thought about, or been intrigued with, but of course those could be things a lot of girls growing up the way I did might have found familiar. And the idea was to submit lines that exemplify your work. I'm not sure there are any one set of lines that do that for me, but I used:

I cannot separate myself from you.

You came into my life, caught me up and carried me away, taught me the futility of drinking weak tea, watered down until it had no real taste, tepid and muddied, leaving me wanting.

My tongue prefers to be scalded, to suffer the sting of blisters whose presence remind me of the intensity, the full bodied flavor of you. I want to inhale your fragrance at our peak. I want each tiny scar to stay here where I feel its presence and remember what made me who I am.

Of course I also took a picture of my kitchen with one of the plates I bought. I love these plates. The colors leave me feeling very creative and yet free somehow. It wasn't until I looked at the photograph that I realized it is reminiscent of some plates my grandmother used up in Minnesota at our vacation home. I just had to be far enough away to see the colors without seeing the actual pattern.

The point is that right now I am feeling as if my life is calling out to me with a familiar voice.