Two. NYC #9

I titled this post Two, and then remembered bits of a poem I wrote nearly ten years ago.  I went to look for it on my poetry blog, not fully remembering what it was I was searching for.  Then I came across the one called, what else? Two.

I just re-read it and several lines jumped out.  The one that fits best for this blog is,

"there are two eyes and two feel who tailor specifically to their two surroundings.  There are two people in one body (who will never be at peace)".

Then I started to wonder if I was instead thinking of my poem from exactly ten years ago, Shh...can you hear it? The one that says,

"I move around the planet to find her home and I still can't get it right."

Today my dear Kara and I were texting and she said this in regards to having lived in NYC and now living back home in CA,

"I think I've settled in my heart that part of me will always feel I belong there, even when I also belong here...these two things can be true at the same time because they ARE both true."

Exactly.  Exactly how I feel.  I've felt this for ten plus years.  I'm living it, actually living it once more, right now.  I can't ever decide.  I flip and flop, and love two places, and two ways of life, and I want it all, and I want everything, and I want to do everything on earth.  I am not able to decide.  I am not able to tell you one is better for me than the other.  Truly.  I am not able to pick.  So I won't.  I will just say that two things usually exist in me at any given time.  That I am constantly living with internal contradictions and parallels.  And that it just is.  It is just so.  There are always opposites. 

I am afflicted by my wanderlust.  I am constantly pulled.  And to think that my life has been made up of two homes on opposite ends of the country, only two, blows my mind.  All the mystery in between the two that I've never seen.  All that lies outside that I've never known.  

What makes a sense of home? I asked that a few posts back.  I wondered if it is the people or the place? And I don't know.  I don't know because I don't like having to pick a home.  I have places where I feel comfortable.  I have places where I thrive.  In turn these places can suffocate me in very different ways.  I can be too limited or too busy.  I could try it anywhere.  

The problem is, there's not enough of me to go around.  There's not enough time, or enough means.  There are too many things I want.  The reality is I can't do everything on earth.  I can't be everywhere at once.  And I want to.  

I have the hardest time in a human body.  I feel so much more expansive than what I visibly am.  I am constantly constrained.  Always looking for a way to go beyond.  When I'm not aware of my physical body, my mortality, my human ego, I feel best.  I am connected to something else.  Something bigger, something far more real.  

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say or where I intended for this blog to go.  I am supposed to be in two places, too.  Maybe more.  I am supposed to be bigger than I am.  I am supposed to search, to question, to long for all things.  Everything.  

This also reminds me why I connected so deeply to Sylvia Plath, that I tattooed her words of a heartbeat on the pulse of my wrist.

I definitely came to this life with bits of her recycled stardust in me...

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.” 
― Sylvia Plath

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” 
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.” 
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar