mi patria.

i remember the first moment that my timid feet met foreign soil (or i guess foreign airport concreted earth). i remember the taste of the thai air and the smell of the bangkoked world. i remember wishing for my own bit of language & markets & beaches that helped me know who i am.

i remember being asked what my culture was when i sank into cuban sand and soaked up varadero breeze. i remember being wordless, and aching for some sort of colorado salsa to answer the rhythms of their freed hips or some bouldered cuisine to challenge their cassava dreams.

now i can remember when i realized that i can create my very own cultured existence.

my culture is dancing til i'm salted and red by face. my culture is baking yams with a bit of yeast & flour. my culture is plunging mountain streams/rivers/lakes with their snow melt shock. my culture is whatever i decide to say it is each day i wake.

so now i know that my patria is mine for the making; never will i identify with fast food chains and semi-trucks and monolingualism, i'll keep dreaming up something more interesting.

shapes

why is it that we grew up with all these square ideas that master who we become? i don't want to change my shape so i can fit into such a rigid puzzle. i don't want to be what everyone tells me i am. i don't want to just make expected sounds, i don't want secret bits of myself locked up in hidden safes.

i want to escape the lines and draw myself with curves and waves and dots and stripes. planting myself into a world where i am nameless and faceless has made me realize that i can be who i want to be. i'm creating myself, having left all expectations of who i should be and what i should say and where i should walk and how i should dream packed away in forgotten boxes in a 334 mile-from-here basement.

these new windows where all can see in and i can see out probably means i'm meeting myself for the very first time. to hell with squares, i'm pro-oval.

days

i'd always heard about this thing called the present, the place that we're supposed to live rather than whispers of the lucid past or screams of the drifting future.

but i'd always found myself so locked up in my head that the present sailed by while i basked in previous aches or drowned in the wicked coming. then suddenly my being changed gears and now that last tick of the clock and the one that most likely will be are irrelevant and the current direction of my step is the only thing weighing on my brain. it feels good to not think so much.