Streams of Consciousness: Reflections on Love

A reflection on love, impermanence, and the passage of time through intimate journals, exploring how nature and love reveal the transient beauty of change.

June 26, 2024 

We sit in the cool of the morning, sharing coffee and literature—my literature—recently arranged by my lover to now resemble a rainbow. I find it easier to locate my books by color. I pull out the dulled white Little Prince book and ask you to read it. You spend the morning almost finishing it, showing me the letter a former love left for me within its pages. I graze the words, rereading 2015, nine years ago, how many forms have I become since then, and what does it mean to imagine forever and now be strangers. I still remember the cool winter morning, working a christmas market in union square, my former lovers eager face bringing me coffee to warm my fingers, we were only friends, but he stood there hoping for more, I smiled, smitten by his dedication, never knowing where he came from but always happy for his presence. I was 21.

I am 31, the Oakland sun is high, “Another perfectly blue day”, I have said this before when I was 25, freshly moved to Oakland, stunned by the endless blue skies of the Bay, I painted stacked mugs against theses skies on a wooden canvas and gave it to an old lover as a gift. I say, it's almost as if we’re in some constant loop, like the Truman Show, as I reach across to my newest lover, asking how they’d like their pancakes. While we read, with hot coffee pressed to our lips, our legs are crossed into one another, we gaze at each other periodically, playing out a scene we've lived before. This play of love: the gentle caress of your hand, the slow morning, the canceling of plans, of work, for more hours to touch and stare. 

Have we lived this before? In how many ways have I been another name, and in how many ways have you? 

June 22, 2024 

It can be both real and now dead. I am allowing it to flow, not forcing this river's force; these boulders formed and paved a path long before me. I sit on the boulder and watch the rush of water completing its course, never ending. It has felt real, deep, magical, and fantastical because that's what we were: real, deep, and magically fantastical. The constant knowing of its passing is all that is granted. How can I be present for the constant flow of change without limiting myself or becoming jaded? I imagine myself watching the burst of water at the Nakalele blowhole in Maui. The rainbow forming for the ocean's great dance in the air, and all at once, it is gone. That is us.

May 26, 2024

I want to feel the graze of my wedding veil on my fragile skin 

I want to feel myself as something worthy of worthiness 

For someone to meet my presence with their own completion. 

I no longer long for the tales of infatuation, 

I am searching for something deeper. 

May 24, 2024 

On New Mexico 

I received love in the form of a body and land, simultaneously. The rasp of their throat, the piling adornments in their car, the sound of their red boots on the sandy pavement. We feel like rushing waters in the desert, oppositions in balance, like death and life, tranquil in their embrace. The sun is high, and I am kneeling on the dirt, red paint spraying on my brown skin. The brown gauze rubbing at my fingertips, rocks placed gently around the corners of the gauze, keeping them reluctant to the winds. The winds keep picking up and swaying natives my way, engaging in familiar dialogue. This man has the same name as my dead grandfather, the same rasp, the same interest in my craft. We speak from different times in similar curiosity. I never got to say goodbye to my grandfather, so I use our hello as a reason to greet and release the remnants of him somewhere in the hot breeze of the desert skies.

Where the horizons are endless, and nothing breaks my eyes from the far stretches of infinity. I am being called from inside, “Demi, my love, can I have your eyes?” I pull for them and roll them inside to you, gladly offering parts of me for your amusement. My body is lying in the sun. That’s how the desert works, like a painting you have to look at twice before you realize the subject is missing their eyes, because they have given them to a muse for their enjoyment. My body lays half burnt outside, covered in red spray paint, the gauze now softly grazing my skin, loose from the rocks that bound them, forty feet into the clear horizon, mimicking the patterns of currents across the desert sky, which has now become our ocean. We backstroke in our dry insanity. I bless my hands with your blood, scorpion eyes meeting in slow rise. No need for words, I sacrifice myself for your amusement.