sometimes i want to walk in your shoes

sometimes i want to walk in your shoes
do the kinds of things that i never ever do
so i take one look in the mirror and i say to myself,
baby girl, you can't survive like this



i ran tonight, through suburbia, dark and still beautiful, despite the beige
beige, beige
the miniature ipodshufle i received for my birthday clipped to my sports bra and Beyonce and Bruce cooed in my ear. i ran four miles and each mile was better than the one before. last week a giant owl flew right in front of me 9:30pm on a weeknight, turning his great and snowy head toward me in that odd way owls have of articulating their necks as if they were not actually connected to the bird body beneath. i saw his wings stretched out, and he flew over a rooftop and dipped and was gone. it was an immense moment. an owl looked at my face. 
the sky here retains is truth because there are not tall buildings. when i run the sky is enormous and star studded and the clouds are dark and beautiful and the town is very quiet and moving my body inside of this cleans me. i come home and i can breathe.
at home, sometimes i cannot breathe. all i have are questions. i used to have many answers, but those answers got used up and retracted and wince when you touch their edges. this is a lie. i have much more than old answers and new questions. but when it comes to the balance, this is what i'm pointing to, the balance of knowing and not knowing- that has been grievously assaulted. i meditate on my unknowingness. i sit with it because one of the few answers that still holds its fullness and health that i know is running from or hiding from not knowingness only keeps the not knowing flourishing. it feeds the bloodlines and curdles the whispers from god/theuniverse/treemother or whatever name you'd like to give our connectiveness. disconnection without reconnecting somewhere else is death. to disconnect through meditation is to connect deeper within. when there is no answer and only questions, i keep moving and working and running, but not run away. don't run away, i tell myself. it's less tempting than it was when i was younger. but i'm still young, and i feel young, my heart feels young, i feel that sense of possible rejuvenation lurking in every place, and my desire to dance and make love and be ridiculous and sing and talk and meet people and travel and love and learn and all of the life stuff is as strong as it ever was, were you to hold your hand to my flame, you could feel that. 
i encounter walls everywhere. this feels new, despite the hardship my life always was, and this is scary. i don't want to fossilize within a set of walls that i paint to appear sturdy. i am looking at the cracks and the structure and the underlying bones and watching for the trembling motion of new, uncertain life. 
sometimes i want to do the things that i never, ever do. instead, i do the things that i am afraid to do, i do the things that are hard to do, i do the things that are right to do, and i wait for the silence and not knowing to turn into a tiny mewing, like a kitten stuck outside at night, certain they are home but unable to find the way in.