on trust
I was in the shower last night listening to Kelechi Okafor’s most recent podcast episode. She was reading the tarot for that day. Part of the message she relayed was about trusting yourself and your intuition. In that moment, with soap suds and warm water washing over me, I had a distinct thought: I love myself and I trust her.
The timing of this message was needed. I’d spent much of my summer thus far with someone I felt intensely about. Our first date was unexpectedly magical. He was 45 minutes late at the pool hall where we met up. I was surprised by how earthy and gentle he was in person (we’d talked extensively over text and once on the phone before meeting). Not to be cliche but, the sparks were immediate. I was drawn to his intellect, his childish humor, and the way his body hovered over mine under the thinly-veiled guise of teaching me pool technique. Oh, and his beard and forearm ink because, me. The month we spent together was mostly idyllic. I still think tenderly of the 4th of July weekend we spent along the Hyde Park lakefront, sitting in the lawn chairs he brought, smoking the joints he rolled and holding hands.
Things dissolved between us because our conflicts would get ugly. He made me feel small and like I was caught in a lie I didn’t know I told. My accidental slights were filtered through a lens of malice. To say we ended on bad terms is a bit of an understatement. I was sad that was the case. A week has passed and I’ve found myself questioning my decision to end things. Remembering the view of him laid out in my bed, or how I watched him feed his puppy big spoonfuls of peanut butter. It’s the rose colored glasses of it all. I needed to remember that I instinctively thought to myself, this cannot continue before telling him later that night.
This is a potent time, creatively and personally. Call it Saturn return, call it approaching 30, call it living through a pandemic, call it life. Call it all of the above. I’m tapping into this energy as I finish an essay I wrote earlier this February. I am also culling together a collection of poems - maybe a chapbook, maybe a full-length collection. To be determined. There’s always the question of when a piece is done. You can revise and revise until your eyes begin to cross over. Or if you have perfectionist tendencies like me, you spend a year and a half editing before feeling satisfied enough to send your work out into the ether. My blog is an exercise in letting go of perfection. I usually write one of these, return to it after a few days for one more edit, then post. I have to trust that what I’m trying to say will come through, even if it’s not as polished as I would like it to be. It’s enough, as is.
I am leaning into the belief that what’s meant for me will find me. Without question. It’s tough to trust that good things will happen after disappointment upon disappointment, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t trust. There’s a lot of shit I know nothing about. The Divine is a million times older and much, much wiser than I.