My voice is my own

My voice is my own.

As are my arms and my legs, yet all of these things can be taken. My home, my heart, my soul, these will never be robbed of me, even in death, for my home is within me no matter where I go, no matter the busy streets or the people I will never meet or the liquor I do or do not decide to drink. My home is within me and this is the truth, far and near and close to me.

I listened to a gifted reader, named after that goddess that brought me so much comfort within the trappings of a relationship I once found myself shackeled in. I listened to this goddess and reader tell me about how love will be finding me soon. I listened and I wished for it to be true. I listened as she said how there are some beings out there who do not wish to see me rise, to hear my story, to know what I have endured, to hear what I share especially within the contexts of true safety and intimacy. The power that will emerge when two become one. I wish to believe that it is something as simple as this, people praying for my downfall because the love I am bound to find is simply too otherworldly, too profound, too full and bright and expansive that it will burn through all illusions and false truths within its path. A love that savors the silence for it allows for patience to let the story unfold, loving, trusting, devotional passions, and simple slow patience. I wish it were this simple, and every part in me wishes to believe it. Not that others wish upon my downfall, but the fact that there is a love out there destined to find me that will prove all of the spiteful things wrong. It feels like something built within the fantasy books I read. It feels like something I know yet have only tasted within crumbs, nothing ever substantial, my fill never being satiated. I wonder if it will come to fruition for I have been patient for quite a long time. I know it very well, even when my mind says it does not know, does not want to believe, to hope, to dream of this possibility. I do know though, and I feel it like I have felt it before. Yet it will not be like before, for it will be and is something entirely different. Challenging to believe, yes, for my mind is only clinging on to what has been before, yet possible and destined, for sure. My throat feels closed off and blocked and I still feel exhausted. I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t really know and maybe I don’t even want to try. Try opening, try with trying anymore, for I have been trying for so damn long and I just feel so damn tired. So, so tired. I wait for that eternal sleep because staying awake feels unbearable at times. It feels pointless. Life is meant to be ,jived by others, and I will hold the ground and provide the means for them to thrive so that they may all one day build a better world, a better future. One that I will not be a part of for I will have already done my work and travelled to the other side of the eternal veil. It doesn’t feel this simple,  because I simply have not known, have not seen yet. Have not opened to it enough to know it will be true. Or I feel it will be true yet maybe many, many years off, more training, more patience, more work required in its becoming. And from here I say: what more must I do to be worthy? And am I not already ready and able to hold something so profound and powerful? My own downfalls come within my doubts of my capabilities, and the belief that love will only meet me once I am 100% there all the time. Yet this too feels fake and false. It feels like the illusions of perfection that are never fully attained. It feels like a way to keep myself down, small, buried within the rabbit hole, the scapegoat to tell me I will never truly be enough. I know, consciously that all of that is false, yet the doubt has lingered, for what else am I to do to make this true for myself? Live more? Brighter? Stronger? Fuller? I try, goddamn I try, and then I stop trying too, and I simply do the things I want to do even if others don’t wish them for me.

I know that I am okay, I am whole, I am complete without anyone besides me. I know that there truly isn’t much more I need to do other than keep embodying my truth, my deepest and highest and most grounded truth. I know that I will be okay if a love of this kind never truly finds me. I am okay, I am well, I am whole. I am content with the pain and I am content with the pleasures. I yearn for both sometimes, when I’m in it a voice within me starts to scream “more! More! MORE!” No matter which side of the coin it is. I hold the ground between the two, I engage in both polarities in their own time. I stay as present as I possibly can. I am whole, I am whole within and without. I am complete. I know love, I know myself, I know my sisters, I know others, my hands know the keys they press, my feet know the boots I wear, my mouth knows the food I eat and my lungs know the air that I breathe. I am content and I am whole as I am, I am fine, I am the only one that knows me as I do, and for this I am eternally grateful.

Then come the waves:

I feel annoyed and pisssd off and irritated and grumpy and everything is too soft or too sharp or too much but still I endure and somehow it will all be fine for I have trained myself out of feeling too far into these nuances for there are responsibilities that I have and here is work for me to do. The underworld to tend to, a home that feels true. I still feel the irritation, something is just not right. Something is just not as it seems and it feels unavoidable, these challenges that will face me and the love that will be given to me, that is already around. It will make me want to live and so then will I be asked to abandon my post? Leave my seat upon the throne of doom and death? Will I be asked to become something else entirely? Someone bright and cheery and full of sunlight and positivity or will I be allowed to keep my core, my seriousness, my integrity, my love and my toughness. My warrior’s spirit. Death by my side. If love asks me to abandon who I am then I do not want it. The sharp reality of what is unfolding in our world, the pains of the suffering, the grief of the dying, I wish to still understand it, and not just simply understand, but to hold ceremony. Not hold, just plain and simply recognition of, enduring through,. The common sitting in it. The understanding, the empathy, the necessary compassion of what the fuck is going on. If love asks me to abandon this, then I do not want it, for that kind of love feels hollow and weak and inhuman. It feels distracted and distant and not present, it feels like an escape rather than a true reality. I would rather experience and know the suffering and the lived experience of my kin, than to abandon them for a bright fix. My strength does not ask for solutions, for condolences, for the answers are all inside fo me. Found through necessity and grit. I will never sacrifice these for the comforts of some temporary buzz, even if it breaks me over and over and over again. Even when I think that I can no longer bear it, the weight of this fucking world, I endure. All of its horrors and its glory, I endure, I push on, I keep on raising my head and breathing into my belly and sending my roots down, because godddammit, kill me before I abandon my post, before I leave any last person behind. It feels like treason of the highest degree to wrap something up in a bow and pretend it is all fine. I have denied it before and it felt like pulling out my own teeth, yet still I did it. No more. No more. I stand on my own two fucking feet even if it hurts or I feel unsteady. This is the only way that I know how to rise. This feels like the only true representation of truth and justice for all. This feels like the only honest way to show up for myself and for all others. With truth, with integrity and with unrelenting grit. True devotion does not turn away. True sacred devotion says I see, I hear, I feel, and I know, and I am here with you and I am standing and remaining by your side eternally. And this is love.

If it is not this I do not want it, for within me I know, I have already made it here, and nothing will change for me to give this up again. No partner, no promise of some other story, not false narrative or white light future. Only the truth, rugged and hard, and unrelenting and real. Honest and wise and complete. Only the truth will guide me from my post, only the truth will make me believe in love again. Only the truth will set me free, for all of eternity.