Some Kind of Love

I want a hungry kind of love, a love with an appetite. I want lips that salivate at my touch and eyes that feast like worn out travelers. Rest your weary bones at my feet and let me serve you a banquet of me. 

I want a sticky kind of love, thick like honey between my fingers. Coat me in your honeyed words, let me soak you up like sunlight through open shutters. 

I want to be buried beneath you, covered in you, I want a heaviness in my love. Let me learn the language of your skin, gain fluency in the way your body curves, twists, bends to fit my own. I want to carve out a path of my hands down your spine and memorize every muscle, every indent, every blemish. I want to read you like braille beneath my fingertips. 

Give me eyes that undo me, split me open and sew me back up with fingers, warm and delicate. Steal the oxygen from my mouth, rob me with your lips on my lips, your tongue on my tongue. You are a thief and I'm your co-conspirator.

This is the kind of love that I want. 

The Allure of Ugly, Open Vulnerability

Let me tell you something real. 

I've been dating the last few months, swiping left and right on various apps, and it's been an interesting experience. I've never really dated. I've never met dudes organically, locked eyes from across a crowded bar and exchanged numbers over vodka tonics. I've never met someone at work, flirted during happy hour and carried on a clandestine relationship. This just hasn't been part of my life experience. 

I've been on several first dates, a few second dates, and it's been weird reliving similar conversations, asking and answering the same questions over a drink or two. I find myself searching for some vulnerability, some opening that would allow me to understand this person beyond the superficial. Because that's all I want from someone I'm dating - I want their fleshy insides peeled open and laid bare for me to explore. I want to know them immediately within the context of their lives - what events shaped them, molded them into the persons they are today. I want to know what fucked them up and made them stronger. 

I'm attracted to vulnerability, to the secrets that lie under other people's skin. Perhaps because it's a trait I try to cultivate in myself - a sense of openness, an invitation. 

Dating casually has been a bit of a challenge for me - in most areas of my life, I want intensity or I want nothing. In dating, I don't have patience for surface-level conversations. I want to lean into the uncomfortable, to uncover the ugly, the grotesque. And I want to feel a certain kind of magnetism, a gravitational pull. I want an electricity that runs in currents and fills the air between us. I suspect that this is rare, or perhaps doesn't really exist, but I still find myself seeking it out in all of my interactions. 

Like other daters, I've been searching for connection, trying to unearth common ground upon which me and another person can stand firmly together. Sometimes on my dates I'm able to feel out the threads of a potential connection, pull the strands together to see where they lead, and other times I know that there's nothing there to hold onto. It's been both fun and exhausting; not an unfamiliar experience for most, but for me, it's new - strangely, sickly, excitingly new.

I've enjoyed getting to know people, poking around their histories and piecing together their identities, but I'm also looking forward to what comes next - to the prospect of a shared vulnerability, of knowing someone wholly - their scars, desires and all - and them knowing me similarly. 

A Year of Goodbyes.

I've been sitting on these words for months, folding and unfolding them in my head, waiting for the right time to reveal them. 

2016 has been a year of goodbyes. I said goodbye to my job of the past 5.5 years, and by extension, goodbye to San Francisco, a city for whom my love is well-documented. I said goodbye to Penny, my sister's beloved 12-year old dog who left us suddenly and unexpectedly, almost without warning. And I said goodbye to my 9-year relationship, one that I'll always think of warmly, filled with laughter and love and mutual respect. 

A lot has changed. 

I'm currently in the midst of a 3-month funemployment stint, and I've spent the last week both thrilled and terrified at the now seemingly endless amount of time at my fingertips. Suddenly the "more time" I've been craving for years is here, now, stretched out before me, waiting to be filled. After spending the last several years chugging away like the workaholic that I am, it's almost intimidating to be faced with nothing but responsibility to myself. 

So I've been going to yoga, I've been writing, I've been reading, I've been cooking, I've been checking things off my life to-do list that I'd been ignoring for years, activities I had previously shelved for more immediate matters. And there's still so much more I look forward to doing over the next few months - finishing this website, figuring out how to use my camera, getting into the fittest shape of my fucking life, etc. 

A few of my friends have asked if I'm planning on traveling during this period. While I do plan on going on some local trips during my break, mostly I'm looking forward to not having to get on another airplane for an indeterminate period of time - no more boarding passes, no more airports, no more pre-planned outfits packed into my suitcase, no more life lived in transit. I'm looking forward to growing roots into this city, pulling this LA life over me like a blanket and really settling in. 

I've learned that you must make yourself vulnerable in order for new doors to open themselves to you, and when they do, you must be brave enough to walk through them. I'm grateful to have lived the life that I have, because even in my darkest moments, I've been guided by a sense that at the end of the day, whatever happens, I will be ok.

I don't know what other surprises lie around the corner, but when I meet them I will greet them warmly, and welcome them to this new life. 

Rivver // Am I Ok (feat. Milk & Bone)

I’ve been living in a hotel in San Diego for the past week, and will continue to live in it through the rest of this week. 

The week before, I was in San Francisco. Next week, I’ll be in LA. The week after that, San Francisco. Then Vegas. Then Portland. Then back to LA. Then NYC. And then it will be early June.  

And I’m ok. I’ve acclimated to this life lived out of a suitcase, and I’ve learned how to love it, how to be grateful for it, how to feel centered in the midst of constant movement and travel. 

I’m writing again, reading again, working out and going to yoga regularly again, and as a result, I feel like I’ve been able to rediscover my sense of self. I’m breathing more deeply, walking more confidently, venturing out alone without experiencing a crippling fear of the unexpected - a feeling that punctuated my first few months living in LA when I didn’t know the city and didn’t know myself inside of it. 

I think too often we forget about our malleability, of the way we evolve over time. More recently I’ve been reminded of how I hated my first year living in San Francisco. I could barely afford to live in the city, I worked at a job that I didn’t believe in, and my relationship was in a precarious position. It’s funny to think of how much I pined for LA then, how I thought switching geographies would cure all my self-doubt and general dissatisfaction. 

Then I got a new job and (perhaps subconsciously) dedicated the first year of my long-distance relationship to myself. I started going to yoga, changed my entire wardrobe, and made a conscious effort to spend dedicated time alone and with friends. 2012, despite being a really shitty, challenging, lonely year, was also a transformative one. I made a lot of mistakes and said and did things I, in retrospect, shouldn’t have said nor done, but I still sometimes think wistfully to it, to what that year represented in the timeline of my life. 

I came out of 2012 with a staggering overconfidence. I thought that I had learned everything there was to learn about myself and became complacent. LA forced me to confront the reality that I’d outgrown that identity, that it was time to cultivate a new one. I was clinging to a life that no longer existed, and holding on to a version of myself that didn’t fit into this new life. 

I think perhaps our lives are marked with these periods of transition and transformation, where we shed our past selves like an old skin and come out refreshed on the other side. 

I can feel it now like I felt it before. And it feels ok.