On the train to Thailand, 4/29

On the train, I can't help but feel that movement is happening for me. That movement is happening only for me and I love it. Rickety and slow, but steady and free, I have become this movement. Free yet on track, going through Tuesdays as bleak as the smell that once was them, as bleak as the tears that was that one Tuesday, yellow and pertinent, standing out like my hip bones used to. I am rounding out in the best sense of the word, not just from curry and naan and noodles, but from the buffer zones and self-protection. My face, smiling and bright emerges from where it once hid behind my seat belt and cried. I am now beginning to begin the process, that thing is starting to happen I think, where I crave it, I crave to be alone, I know people who know me, I am allowed to show them my face without makeup, I am allowed to share Pringles in the seat of the train station with a three year old Asian girl while showing her my Kindle and laughing, trying to teach her words while she giggles. I used to not do that, I used to want to do that or approach it gingerly, now I jump in. I see myself in these children, in the girls watching Toy Story, in the girl wearing a leotard dancing around the train station, stopping occasionally to get a chip or dried mango from me. I see them and I feel a part of me, an innocence spring up from a place within me previously unknown. Then the pain comes and I almost start to cry – like the pain of the world mixed with my own childlike pain all on my shoulders at once creating this impossible inability to sit up straight, or pick my feet up when I walk. No matter how stained my fingers get with curry or how stained my heart gets with dragon-fruit juice dripping from its chambers, I will still be burdened until the one day when I will work through it. I will be strong enough to remember this pain and carry it, not to throw it away. But for now, sitting on this train, hilariously bunched with the two other foreigners I realize that maybe,just for now, and just for a while, its ok for me to sit with this idea that I am building up the strength to be able to handle this; to walk with it on my shoulders because it will never, ever go away. I will only one day be able to contain it, carry it, love myself peering out from underneath it and eventually I will swallow it and it will become me. I don't think, but again this is part of a process, that I will ever become it again.