Echo

why does love make people put up with bullshit? i feel like balance has a hard time existing between people when emotions get involved. you’re either on one side or the other, abusive or being abused. dominating or being dominated. i don’t like being on either side. i dream of balance where two people in a love partnership just get along the way you do with your best friend. no one hurts anyone deeply and unintentionally. i suspect the pains have to do a lot with growth and motivating each other…sometimes that motivation to evolve comes out of conflict. but i don’t like it. i definitely don’t like being in a dominant role where i end up making people feel bad. i feel that if you don’t get too intensely involved with people, you’re more likely to live and let live and things don’t get intense. but life doesn’t really give you that choice, does it?

i just got back from the bay area. my mom kept bugging me, asking me if i was sad. why would i be sad, i would respond in the same exact way every time she asked. because your boyfriend left. do i seem sad? i asked her. no, she said. but then she adds, you always seem to know there are so many people out there and are always looking. i think you must be sad, but you’re just hiding your emotions from yourself.

but she kept bugging me the entire weekend, asking me if i was sad. she was getting so repetitive like when michael calls me multiple times a day and asks me for my flight information just because he wants to feel secure that i’m really coming. i finally asked her what her problem was. nothing, she said. i bet you’re sad.

i wanted to either shake her or give in.

i cried for a whole day, okay? is that what you want to hear?, i ask her in frustration.

the truth was, i didn’t cry for a whole day. i just kept tearing up a bit uncontrollably the morning of, feeling like i was teetering on the edge of a cliff, while secretly, i couldn’t wait for him to leave so i could be alone.

i bet you cried, she said with a smile of victory.

thanks, mom.

she was also driving me crazy by analyzing my party. she had looked at everyone at the party and decided which couples looked like they belonged together and would stay together and which ones she thought were mismatched. she brought it up again that if one of my friends wasn’t with his girlfriend, he would surely be with me because his girlfriend loves him more than he loves her while she thinks a part of him has always loved me, but his girlfriend is good for him because she’ll give him the stability he needs. i kind of hate it when she brings up that whole situation because while a part of me doesn’t believe her, a part of me doesn’t even want it spoken of because i don’t want to get in any trouble even though i’ve never done anything wrong. it’s just one of those things that should never ever be put on the table because it’s not right.

she noticed which guys had been following me around a bit and told me which ones i should be careful of. i told her i had no intentions of getting involved with any one of them.

but the thing was, she’d intuitively noticed and commented about most of the men who were characters in my life, but the one that needed the most commenting. all she would mention of the subject was focused on getting me to admit i was sad.

she’s mindfucking me.

wtf?

you can’t suddenly start poking a guy in the ear with a bully stick while things are good until he gets upset, then call with the intention to apologize only to stomp on his feelings until he cries, then let him stew in anxiety for a night before finally apologizing over a text in the middle of the night and while he’s relieved that you’re not walking out on him, make secret plans to find a job halfway across the globe to live closer to him which you are likely to freak out at if you actually get.

get a hold of yourself, gemini. what the hell is wrong with you? what the hell is making you so goddam mean? this isn’t like you at all. this really isn’t like you at all.

just watched lars and the real girl.

my mom kept coming in and out of the room commenting that he was sick. i finally had to ask her to either stop judging the character and pay attention, or leave. she left.

but my dad, who hadn’t been paying attention to it at first (reading the newspaper), stayed up past his bedtime to finish the whole movie.

weird movie, he said near the end as the fake girl was dying and the town rallied behind lars.

it’s a sweet movie, i said.

everyone in it is so nice and kind. even the guys who show up in the bowling alley who you think are going to do something destructive are kind and accepting. it really says a lot that we, as the viewer, are surprised when people are given the opportunities to be cruel, but they’re not. at least for me, it made me realize how little kindness we expect from our fellow man when it comes to acceptance of things that are out of the ordinary or vulnerable. it’s a movie that has a lot of heart. i really appreciate it for that.

i liked this film a lot. my dad grumbled at the end about it being weird again, but i could tell he was touched. it has such a positive message, about psychological pain and the process of healing…how someone who has a lot of love (even if wounded) will attract others capable of love and in turn, they heal each other. i think it’s important to see this cycle in action.

i think while the primary objective of film or any mass media can be for entertainment or education, if a message is skillfully conveyed, it’s capable of healing on a very subtle but dynamic level. i’m thankful tonight that the filmmakers were able to get this movie made, and that i watched it with my dad at a time in which we were both open and in need of this message.

last night i had a strong tower dream.

i found myself walking into a hotel room that was modern, gray motif with floor to ceiling windows depicting a gray world outside. it was an expensive room but i could comfortably afford it because i was successful myself. i was staying here with a girl i knew from college, a sagittarius whose limited idea of who i was had limited my feelings about myself when i was younger. she wasn’t there so i went into the bathroom where there was a massive, luxurious tub, and ran water to take a bath. i went back into the room and saw that she had left a note for me. connected with millen, it said, with a big happy face. millen? i went through my mental files trying to place the name millen, then remembered it was this uber-pretentious east-coast writer she’d liked. i saw an open notebook on the desk and read it. she wrote about meeting up with millen whom she’d been a big fan of, and how talk of literature led to dinner and finally a kiss. she talked about how this was a dream come true. i had ambivalent feelings towards her because of how i felt she’d tried to limit me, but i wasn’t jealous of her happy experience. i was too expansive inside for petty feelings.

i went back to the bathroom and saw the tub was only half-full, and the water was lukewarm. i realized i hadn’t closed the drain fully and so the water had been draining as i was trying to fill it. i didn’t really feel like taking a bath anymore so i went out.

as i walked out of the hotel’s glass doors, the city was all gray steel and windows, skycrapers, sidewalks and steel-colored sky. everything was clean and metallic, comfortably neutral. everything looked new and foreign, a future city where everything was in order. i’m sure there were people around but i felt isolated in my own world until i ran into a someone whom i’ve been missing. we were surprised to see each other but very happy. it felt like fated coincidence. how did you find me, i asked him. are you really surprised, he asked, and i realized that i wasn’t. it was always meant to be. we hugged then held hands as we walked and i could feel he was in a different place. he was glowing…he was free. what happened, i asked him. he smiled so happily, a warm energy that started in his chest and expanded all around him. i changed everything, he said. i let go of everything that was holding me down. and her?, i thought but didn’t ask. he laughed and shook his head. not your concern, i read it as saying, and it was true because we were here, together, knowing exactly who the other was, and we were happy. then i realized, this whole time, neither of us had said a word…everything had been communicated within our minds. it didn’t matter where it was we’d come from or what structures we were responsible for or tied to in the physical world…what mattered was that we had managed to find each other here, and we had a private, mystical place in which we could truly connect and we didn’t have to hide anything.

we reached a street light and i pressed the button, letting go of his hand. we didn’t say a word, just so content to have found each other in this place. when the light changed to green, i reached out and grabbed his hand, suddenly fearful that this gesture might be inappropriate. but the feeling of connection felt right, and he squeezed my hand like it’d always been this way, and we crossed the street, hand in hand like we were always meant to be whole.

i know i don’t have to apologize, but i want to be open as a symbol of explanation and reciprocation. i’ve been really looking out into the world lately and at the people around me, trying to understand them and be more willing to connect with them. i have communication difficulties inherently that i’ve kind of creatively figured out how to compensate for when i was young…they seem to whimsically get me by. now i’m trying to become more interactive despite inherently finding it draining, but it’s not because people aren’t amazing, wonderful human beings. it’s just because when i say things exactly as i see them, they’re completely true, but people can’t always seem to understand me or refuse to understand, and it can range from being comical to frustrating. i feel like the things i see have value that sometimes people can’t recognize. it’s like trading shells with bead-worshippers. you can’t blame them, it’s just different currencies.

time. words. places. all figments of all our imagination (organization), yet also willed into a concrete reality. it’s such a strange yet complementary paradox.

the reason i enjoyed being 29…

it felt like being a little drunk every day. it was like one year-long new year’s eve party where you could do anything and it didn’t matter, because the slate was being wiped clean and you’d graduated with honors like you’d hoped you would. then at midnight comes this magical mini-reincarnation, except you get to keep your memories. a part of you exits and re-enters through another door, and yet you remember exactly who you are and the room is just as you’d left it, despite the introduction of a whole new world. in that sliver of time when that portal was open, if you’d really let yourself take things in out of the corner of your eye, you could see the shadows of magic (Intention) in the background. remember the rainbow? my little mystery valentine’s gift to you last year… i revealed it. hope you didn’t blink. ;)

master your dreams.

when the dust settles, look around you and see what you were able to bring with you. i hope the things you brought were the ones that will be useful for you. i hope the partners you’ve chosen to stand behind you will be the ones who remain with you. i hope you looked around, when your world was revealed and you saw with only the eye of truth, that you understood what you saw and that you will remember it. i hope this new world will be a good one to you.

and if you’re one of the people who missed it, well, you know…life without proof of magic is fun too. you can, like, go bowling.

after reflection and an evening where the energy is rushing in my head like waves crashing jagged cliffs, i’ll clean out some more of my mental closet of private thoughts.

if people are drunk, i seem to make them drunker if i’m in one of my moods. i’m usually sober around people because i only seem to be able to enjoy alcohol during specific celebratory times. otherwise, if the circumstances aren’t exactly right, my body tends to reject alcohol. but if i’m in a more magnetic mood, i seem to make sober people act a little drunk and drunk people act like my new best friend. but when i’m drunk in a situation where the universe has kind of allowed me a night off to be myself, it turns into a bacchus. i’m pretty convinced that if i were completely unleashed, i could start the best orgy known to modern history. well…maybe that’s a little hyperbolic, but i’m sure it would come as a pleasant surprise to many. but i figure, if it didn’t happen on my birthday on saturday, then it’s probably never meant to be.

people shouldn’t read too much into me because for all my evasiveness, i’m honest. i always said that being honest and being straightforward are not linked. i’m not straightforward. but i’m quite honest. if i’m evasive, it’s because you haven’t earned my trust yet in understanding certain aspects of me, or because i don’t like hurting feelings so i always try to say the most positive or nice thing when connecting with people i like. but if given a free-for-all or a safe space, i will tell you the blunt, bare-bones truth whether you’re prepared for it or not. i haven’t yet figured out if this is a good thing or a bad thing that happens, because people react in dramatically different ways.

maybe i did get really sick of taking care of my family emotionally yet feeling that my efforts were invisible and unappreciated. and for years, i’ve been cooping up this feeling that for how incredibly, angelically good i’ve had to be in all these years, all the patience and maturity and self-sufficiency…all the sacrifice and humility…it was a choice made somewhere in the fiber of wherever my soul exists at an age when most kids are only aware of the sun and that they feel good with the sun. i dedicated myself to focus, that whenever presented with a fork in the road, i would always take the road that would make me stronger even if it broke more sensitive parts of me that take longer to mend, because people depended on me. sometimes i get irritated with people who think i’m a good person, like good is a black-and-white trait a person’s born with not that i actually consciously decided that i didn’t want to be “not good” and that i could just as equally be very bad. i don’t think all people are born good. i think some people work harder at it, and in doing so, are also carrying a shadow side that needs to be accepted and expressed. people don’t understand shadows but sometimes its power outputs in the positive as well. sometimes if you give it enough room, you’ll find that it’s an ally that’s possibly even more powerful than more superficial graces.

i created an energy storm last night. i made it noisier than destructive and it nearly destroyed me to see him hurt so much. i found myself reaching into the darkest of night inside me, to be so cruel and say these things that i didn’t understand but that i felt were the blunt truth within him, to drag out things i hadn’t seen any proof existed, to sit on his greatest pain and recreate it for him until it broke my heart more pathetically than any humiliation i’ve ever endured, so that i could bring out his insides and therefore, mine. i had to lose him completely until there was no more hope, before i bent my head in truce and asked for forgiveness, bringing an energy that calmed the storm and brought rain. and then he realized that none of it was real and i’ve never seen a man so relieved. i was relieved it was okay.

he woke me up to tell me he was dreaming of being chased by nazi’s with scars on their faces. i couldn’t fully wake up so i just told him he needed to confront them. he told me his dream really scared him and kept going for a long time, but i was stuck too deeply in my own so i wrapped my arm around him in a protective way so he could sleep against me and said again, you need to confront them.

i asked him in the morning about his dream. he said it was scary. he had a similar dream when we’d gone through a similar exercise in england. i asked him if he knew how to control his dreams. he said no, like it was a silly thing to say because it’s not possible. i told him that i used to drown in my sleep until i made the discovery that i could decide that i could breath underwater and then do it. i told him that this morning, i’d had a dream that i was supposed to go with him to the airport, but i’d dropped some friends off in a taxi but the area didn’t have any traffic to catch a taxi back. i didn’t have my cellphone on me either so i realized he wouldn’t be able to find me and i would miss saying goodbye to him. this filled me with incredible anxiety. i was running around looking for a taxi realizing that he had to leave for the airport in a few minutes and the car ride alone to my place was over 30 minutes…making the situation impossible. then i remembered that i make the rules so i can change them. i decided in my dream that i wanted everything to stop and i would teleport myself home so we could see each other. i remembered that i could change the rules in this reality. then my cellphone rang (i was still in this deserted neighborhood with no taxis) and it was him (remember i also didn’t have a cellphone earlier). he asked me, where are you? i said, at home. and i looked around, and i was at home. as i was explaining the dream, i realized i could have decided that he wasn’t leaving if that would have given me less anxiety in the dream, but i don’t think this ability is that skilled yet. in response, he told me that at one point, he demanded one nazi to get out and he didn’t look like he was going to, but somehow he made the nazi leave. i asked him to repeat the story just to verify it. it sounds like he’s starting to change inside.

later, i found written on the shower door, i love you more now. i felt relieved to know i hadn’t mortally wounded him emotionally. i know my shadow side can be a difficult encounter but i’m grateful when people do understand the intentions.

so i was finally alone tonight. waiting for the moon. then a little miracle happened. i feel good. i looked out my bedroom window and found my temple reflected through my bedroom window, which is on the other side of the house. i’m facing away from the temple yet it’d managed to reflect itself off a window in the opposite building, coming down into my bedroom, at an angle in which you can only see it from the spot in which i read tarot.

i was curious at first them dumbfounded. even if this reflection is a frequent occurrence and not a part of this solstice moon-mercury energy tonight, then i haven’t noticed it in the 8 years i’ve lived in this place and sat in that spot looking out the window.

there was my temple in miniature, the structure i spent hours at night staring at and communing with, sitting in my window looking down on my spot like a ghost.

i haven’t spread my cards for months. not since i looked at them individually after i first met david. but i did a spread while looking at the temple reflection because i felt like that was what i was supposed to do.

and then i knew. center of it all…the message…was the tower.

the one card i’d been talking about lately.

this may be good, this may be bad. but i have to be prepared and take my challenges as they come. the tower is the tower that builds strength. either i just had a fork in the road, or i’ve got one coming up. but all my intuitions are right…my life is changing. things that don’t belong in my life will come crumbling down. now it’s just a matter of seeing what falls.
i do have to say this though. earthquakes. weird shit going on with earthquakes. i woke up to an earthquake in taiwan. everyone’s been freaked about them since the one in china. this quake was a mid-sized one but it lasted a long time, like a ghost shaking our bed just daring us to be scared. my mom woke up panicked and said, julia, it’s an earthquake. i refused to wake up and said really indifferently, yeah i know. rolled over, went back to sleep because i knew the earthquake could never hurt us. she went back to sleep. two days later, she was reading a newspaper and she asked me if i’d known there’d been an earthquake the other night. i said she’d even woken up and talked to me but she didn’t remember. i’m glad it hadn’t scared her. but the feeling of earthquakes is keeping me away from san francisco right now.