When the Stars Don't Catch You: Falling, Flying, and Everything in Between: Part 3

Tears stream down both of our faces. We're standing with our foreheads against each other, rocking back and forth and holding one another. We’re the only people who exist in the world. It’s just us, nobody else has ever existed or ever will. It’s us against the world. 

“You die, I die, we die together.” It’s April 2020, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’re sitting on a big boulder that juts out like a little peninsula, a creek flowing around us, full with the spring snow and rain propelling it fast down the mountains.  

“I love you,” I said to them for the first time. “I want ALL of you. Even the frustration and the distraction. I want to see it all! Your anger, frustration, sadness, fear, excitement and happiness. I want it all. You are so beautiful. There is a whole solar system in your eyes.”

The craziest experience I ever had was falling in love with B, my brain dosed in the chemicals serotonin and dopamine: I was high all the time. They could do nothing wrong and they were perfect in every way. I could never imagine them doing anything bad.

However, I noticed that when I put them on a pedestal, I found myself cowering in fear—what if they found out that I was imperfect? What would happen then? Once they found my demons, those monsters that sit inside my chest gathering smoke and tension, the tension in my shoulders and in my hips, that feeling of ache that manifests because I’m not good enough and I work and work and work as a way to fight and run away from those demons, the demons that tell me that I suck. The anger that arises from that fear? It explodes sometimes. But when B saw those demons, they didn’t run away. They stayed and deeper in love I fell.

But then one day like a slap in the face, I plummeted down to earth when I realized that B wasn’t perfect either, that B has flaws, some fatal flaws, flaws just like me, just like all of us, flaws that tell us that we are human.

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I used to write in order to create and share, to play with versions of infinity. As a way for my spirit to dance, as a way for my spirit to dance with other spirits. As a way to inspire others to find, feel, play and realize their own spirits. Like others showed me the path, I wanted to show others, not by telling or lecturing nor teaching directly, but by being and sharing that spirit, the spirit of play and creativity. 

Writing was a way for me to learn and improve language and mind as one tool for play and creativity. A tool to share with the collective consciousness. To contribute to the collective consciousness ideas about how divisive categories are not optimal, that there is another path to a better life and a better world. To share knowledge, being, and spirit for the collective benefit of us all because stifling and silencing hurts everyone. 

I hoped that all beings may find a way to dance with their spirit and with other spirits, so we all may find an even better way to communicate and create, love, and connect in a way that celebrates and honors the spirit of life.

Those were my dreams and my ideals. 

A lot has happened since I dreamed those dreams and held those ideals: friends lost, jobs ended, books rejected, words deleted, money dwindled. 

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My balloon of pride and hope and expectation did not pop all at once but slowly let air out as I deflated. And I distracted myself. With love and sex. With drugs. With food. With alcohol. With work. With anything that would not allow me to think about the fact that the reality of the world and our human-made systems constrain all of us: Time is limited. Resources are limited. Energy is limited. 

Maybe in our capitalist upbringings when we are falsely taught that energy in the form of oil and electricity is unlimited, we mistakenly absorb this message and think that all energy is unlimited. Human energy to produce and consume. "Money doesn't grow on trees," everyone likes to say. Ain't that the truth. But leaves do, and still there is not enough to absorb the carbon we keep releasing into the air. There are limits to everything. Including the ability of the earth itself to handle the destruction we as humans feel compelled to inflict for our own growth and benefit. Including our ability to keep up with an unsustainable pace at work and in life.

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To quote the late Andrea Gibson, "I knew you blew this world a kiss..." when you helped me open not only my heart but also my body to the violence of transphobia. 

Those phobias live so deep inside of me that I don't even recognize that when I look away it's because I'm looking away from the shame that lives deep inside myself. 

It happens when I look away from the homeless person on the street. What triggers me to look away? Is it their precarious position and the ravages of their addiction and mental health? Or is it the exposure of their bodily functions: urine, odor, and wild hair? Because that image of the wild, unkempt human? That is all of us inside: raw, gross, smelly humanity. I tend to look away from reality. Look away from the fact that the person could be me if I lost my job. It could be me if I let my secret compulsions of my own get too out of "control."

So I look away, I control myself. And maybe I don't understand that gender fluid person because I don't understand my own gender, something so personal and yet shaped so deeply by society at the same time. And I don't understand the world and its destruction just like I don't understand myself and my own self-sabotage. 

But I knew you blew this world a kiss when you said, "I'm going to love myself AND you AND the fear AND the hate anyway." I put myself and my body out there. I said, "Fuck it, I'm gonna love myself and the world."

Then I felt my limitations and looked at reality in the face and saw all the flaws in the world and in myself. Limitations that tell us that we are human and therefore we too will always make mistakes and that forgiveness is also worthy. Worthy for ourselves and worthy for others, no matter how fucked up things get.

So, to my dreams and ideals, I don't know what I'm going to do with you and your creativity and imagination and hope and impracticality and distance from reality. But maybe there is a way I can hold on to you in the full awareness that you are a complete fiction. 

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“I’m reminded...of a famous cartoon. It’s of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out—but to his right and left, it’s open, no bars…All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there is a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.”--Lori Gottlieb

I used to think I was a bird in a cage, flying and slamming against the bars until I was too exhausted to move. They were only lines I drew myself, too close to see through the blur of exhaustion and fear. Maybe the freedom isn’t in the flight I once imagined, or in the perfect life I thought I’d earn if I just worked hard enough. 

Now, when the dread rises and the weight of the world presses down, I remember this: I can still walk around. My wings might be tired, but they’re not broken. I can stand, stretch, and step forward—out of the cage, into the open air—carrying my dreams as a compass towards something else. 

And for the first time, I am not slamming. I am simply walking.

Perhaps freedom isn’t in the soaring I once chased, but in the tender, steady act of walking forward—wings folded, dreams trailing gently behind me like the shadow of flight.

And as I cross the threshold, I realize: the cage was never the end. It was only the beginning.

The world still sucks. Life is still a struggle. I'm not sure those ideals are ever coming back. Is it time to resurrect old dreams or come up with new ones?

The point is that there is no point...except to walk your journey and find some growth and freedom along the way.

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Dear dreams and ideals,

You were the reason I got up in the morning. You were the light at the end of the tunnel. You were the thing that gave me and my life meaning and purpose: that there was a happy life out there waiting for me. That hard work would reward me with success and money. That if I pushed off pleasure now that I would get mine later. That there was hope for a better world. 

That there was a future where I could live off the grid–on my own communal farm with chickens and goats and spinach. That I would live in a big, shared house that I co-owned with all my closest friends and lovers. That I could change the world–or at least, have an impact. That the point of everything was love and connection. That I could find interdependence, for living in harmony with myself, others, and Nature.

I miss you.