Belated Entry: Moons

It’s 12:22pm on Tuesday April 19^th 2016. The full moon will be here in 2 days and 9 hours.

In 2 days and 9 hours I’ll be most of the way to Canada.

I’ve been in San Francisco for 9 and a half months now and there are about 9 and a half barely-started blog entries in the bowels of my computer; four of which are named something derivative of ‘9 months’.

What happened was I started tripping over dull metaphors of how 9 months is the standard gestational period for a human and how, similarly, I had reached an assured point of development and was ready to be introduced to the world (or something equally stupid). And then what happened was I unintentionally forced myself to wade through memories of when I really was pregnant and how I never knew that breed of loneliness existed. And then what happened was I shut my laptop and had a cigarette.

The cycles of birth and death and periods and pregnancy and tides and moons, they break me. They give me hernias. I just have to laugh, I guess.

So the gestation idea was abandoned (I fought myself not to write aborted, that would be uncouth, even for me) and I’ve started afresh.

Later, I’ll probably reflect on how caustic that is.

It was bullshit anyway. I realize I’ve been “here” for the entire 9 months. I realize, in fact, I’ve never been more “here”. And, yeah, I realize you can only repeat yourself so many times until you become your own cliché.

Today the sky was blue and the wind was cold and my hands were tucked inside my pockets.

In my pockets – fiddling – but not because I was anxious. Just because I like to rotate my pentagram ring around and around my middle finger with my thumb. I’ve done it to the point that I’ve manipulated the shape of the loop. Its kind of ugly and misshapen now, or perfect and worn down.

I mean, you can wear down any mineral with the warmth of your hand if you’re relentless and agitated. Fuck, you can wear down anything and anyone if you’re relentless and agitated. Diamonds are just carbon and people are just water.

Still, I should probably take better care of my jewelry.

The Libra moon and the coinciding eclipse was a fortnight short of a month ago, which means I’m 2 weeks short of being in the clear. I didn’t write during this time because I was scared.

The Libra moon was trickily meditative for me, and Churchill’s if-you’re-going-through-hell-keep-going was somehow fused into my very walk.

I thought a lot about the best friend I had that I last saw in person on the evening of July 10^th  2014; I thought a lot about the boy that I once loved and the zygote I once carried; I thought a lot about my sisters and how I am not like them and they are not like each other and how that’s okay and I thought a lot about how now when I dream of “home,” I’m not entirely sure what to dream of.

The marriage of these weighty retentions and muscle memory put me in hospital.

I writhed in pain with an uncannily clear mind and the doctor explained that my stress and willpower, coupled with a bad reaction to contraception, viscerally transported my body back to August 2014, back to the pain of the miscarriage. I gave myself a goddamn hernia.

Cerebrally, it was painful and not painful at all. I pondered how my mum says, “touch it and let it go, dolly.”

And I realized that the things I had been silently holding onto would eventually end me. Like I had tied a noose to a tree that wasn’t tall enough to hang me yet. Like I’d been kicking at its roots rather than lifting the lasso from my neck.

But I have let go of them: I let go of them the way you drop a letter into a post box or half-finished food into the trash.  

It is a terrible and beautiful thing to realize that you will be dead for a much longer time than you will be alive.

It’s 1:22pm on Tuesday April 19^th 2016. The full moon will be back in 2 days and 8 hours.

In 2 days and 8 hours I’ll be most of the way to Canada.

The cycles that are birth and death and periods and pregnancy and tides and moons still break me, they always will. And, actually, I want to break often – but like waves and not porcelain.

I am falling in love again.

9 Months Before by Daniel Valencia