“Poetry, she thought, wasn’t written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.”

Nicholas Sparks

DATE A GIRL WHO DANCES (NOVEMBER 2013)

Date a girl who dances. 

Date a girl who floats upon the whispers of the world with elegant poise in her movements at the simplest of tasks; she sits with delicate posture, unknowingly, even while seated in the most comfortable of sleep-inducing chairs. Date a girl who has her eyes directed towards the sky, she looks down from time to time, in a curious pace, as if to dissect the earth and it’s ambivalent mirroring of the world around her. Date a girl who has a repertoire of routines and movements deep in her soul that become her expressions of existence when she allows them to be explored in time and space. She has endless theories of the world and constructs seemingly infinitesimal variations of choreography, each different from the other.

She won’t be hard to spot.

Find a girl who dances alone in the shadows of dim moonlight upon the sand of conformity and classical euphonic chaos to the waves of noise around her as they cautiously approach the shore. You’ll know it’s her because as she talks to you her eyes will shimmer when she hears the music around her, silent, syncopated, surreal. You will see a crease of a smile wander itself gently across her lips as she pictures a description of what she feels and what she thinks into a glissade or a dégagé or a turnout. You know that odd anonymous splendor you see sitting at the coffee shop, enjoying the simplicity of life? That’s the dancer. They can never resist a chance to breathe deeply the constant smell of life and it’s vivacity. Find the girl dancing in the corner of a large room, to her own beat, it will become the pace maker for your own.

She’s the girl that will shine in a room of stars and blend in with a sea of perfection. You will often catch her smiling, often lost in a dream, in imagination. She may catch your eye then spin away, as most girls do, as if your presence disrupts hers. Ask her to dance.

Take her hand and allow it to guide her into your world. Explain to her on every off beat and every back step that you truly loved Giselle. Lie and tell her that Tchaikovsky isn’t your favorite composer. See how her face contorts in question. Spin her. Take two quick steps, two fast steps, do a waltz. Show her Miley Cyrus isn’t the only one that can Twerk, and then gently dip her as if she was an ice sculpture, fragile enough to melt away into your arms. Surprise her with a move out of a Michael Jackson music video, that you learned just for this occasion.

Let her go. Watch as she defies gravity, complicates physics, and exhibits strength beyond anything you’ve ever seen. Enjoy her presence as she becomes a single solar flare emitting from the deepest crater of the sun.

Be vulnerable to her. Show her that you aren’t afraid to fall, and then let her let you be the one to catch her if she does.

Challenge her. Change the timing of the dance. Add variety to the skewed 1-2-3, 5-6-7. Take a triple step.

If you find a girl that dances, let her dance away, but keep her close enough that you can spin her back into your heart. When you find her in the early morning sitting silently watching the sunrise, lift her up, and hold her tightly. Take her to watch others dance. You will lose her into her own imagination, but let her go; she will come back to you. She will speak as if every character, every movement, explained a story you will never understand.

You will laugh so uncontrollably you will fall on the floor; she will make you smile. You will cry so much you will dry of tears; she will mend your pain. You will compose a dance just of the two of you. It will be full of falls, full of Sailor Steps and Copas and Pretzels. It will be slow, it will be fast, it will be andante at times. It will hit hard spots and, although you would like to avoid it, you will drop her. But, she will glance up to you, give you an adorably angry face with flared nostrils and irritated discontent, and quietly pick herself up, pick your pride up, and glide on.

You will propose to her on the edge of a cliff. Or from below her balcony. Or sweetly through a little note, scribbled on a piece of paper, at the barre you first met at.

Date a dancer, because she will change you. She will open your eyes to more than you were aware you could see. She will explore your ambitions and your emotions to a degree you did not know they could exist. She will push you to learn, to fall, to grow. She will take you through an Arabesque, and you will fight her at every Brisè, but she will not let you falter. If you want perfect imperfection and flawless dedications to improvement, if you want the sunrise and the sunset to blend into one endless summer and for time to stop at every kiss and every grasping of her hand. Then date a dancer.

Or better yet, marry her.

THIS STORY (MARCH 2010)

I hope one day to take a short hiatus, needed, wished for, and expected, in hopes of reflecting on my life as being something worthwhile.  For all of the people I have met, all the ones I have become accustomed to seeing over the years, and all of the ones I hope to meet in the near future, my most sincere hope is that with all of these acquaintances, with these hundreds of new faces, a few will be cemented into my mind as a known reality for which my conscience is always connected.  I'm tired of the false facade of feigning depth, the attempt at making something more from shallow ambiguity.  Our actions now are things for which I hope to understand eventually.  I'm sick of the in between, to be honest.  Frankly, it's appalling and I'd much rather have a direct line to one or the other: are we to be entirely memories to no one, or are we hopefully to affect a life?

In an instant, as my philosophy so is, (to anyone that has read any other of my notes, this may hopefully be apparent) you can alter someone's life.  Hey! This is entirely a far fetched idea I must agree but take a chance to craft this vulpine pathway, our scenario is as such: One day a boy walks to the store and comes across a kind cashier that helps him with his purchase.  He makes a joke about something or another and they maintain a brief conversation in which she suggests to his traveling soul to go to a certain coffee shop down town known as "The Living Room." Enticed, he goes down to have a cup of coffee where he finds there is nowhere to sit but in the corner next to a nice old lady sewing a scarf for her grandson.  The kind woman has lived a long life and wishes nothing but to construe a picturesque imaginative story for the boy of her experiences, much like Forrest Gump himself.  Towards the end of the conversation she remarks that she must go, it is almost time for Golden Girls to be on and she has an endearing connection to the actresses in it.  Getting up to leave the boy bids her farewell and glances out upon the Pacific from the vintage window, classically ornamented with a vine of bronze and silver down the side.  He notices that the woman has left something behind, a ticket to be returned to a laundromat for her newly dry cleaned clothes.  As he turns to look for her, he realizes he is too late and the woman is gone.  Hoping that some sort of information has been left at the dry cleaning the boy heads to the store, "Ocean Steamers" as they like to call themselves.  Besides himself, in the sun ridden unusual morning of the next day, he takes the bus down to the store turning the ticket in and asking that the woman be contacted such that she will know her clothes are in good hands.  Life has it's way of working karma one would hope, and as he leaves the store he makes sure to tip a homeless man on the street.  A sign saying "Change would be nice" wasn't something that normally would have ushured in much attention, but for some reason today, the boy is feeling a slight hint of generosity and although he has barely enough to make it home on the bus, he figures the walk today would be pleasant.  The walk proves to be a kind senseless trip of a somewhat relaxing ennui; but, as he passes a street miles from home the sky turns to grey, firing it's exhausted frustration down upon the world.  Hiding for shelter the young man ducks under the cover of a shaded porch to a small pawnshop.  Cold and drenched in a sudden shock of rain he steps inside, if only to borrow the phone and call a friend for a ride.  Unfortunately, the storm has caused a disconnection from the world to the archaic spin dial phone inside the shop.  For the time being he finds he must meander through the relics and makes small conversation with the young woman working there.  He sees an old guitar and it reminds him of times far past.  The conversation grows and the couple realize they're interest in the history of this Airline Twintone electric guitar is a mutual one.  The weather begins to cease it's hailing notions and the conversation stops, he exchanges his last words and walks away.

Years down the line, the story of how the young man met the woman of his dreams would be something that would be a tender one to tell, a hopeful one to imagine, and most importantly, something for which everyone could have some sort of gratitude.

Who says that meeting that next person at the coffee shop or party won't lead to something amazing?  Life could always end routinely, inebriation could simply seed corresponding ordinary times; or, maybe a twist in this story might make for a delicately balanced ending.

As if romance and storytelling are dead...

Viva i romantici (March 2010)

Quando sto senza di te, é un giorno differente,

Il mio sole é indebolito, vuoto di potere,

Guardando avanti attraverso nuvole impareggiabli,

Alla ricerca la risolutezza passato perbenini di luci,

Interminabili, speranzosi, eterei…

Per la prima volta, le stelle si spegnono,

Smettono di brillare

Come le loro vite cadono nella riflessione luccicante,

Specchiato e calmo, della faccia del mare

Come si muovono per mischiare I colori del mondo…

Quando sono senza di te, la mia vitá non la capisco,

Le mie anti di finestra simulano per accogliere la mattina,

Come accogliendo un esempio perfetto di tenebre,

La mia vitá non é né pericolosa né malinconica,

Ma, veramente, é curiosa, dolorante, e carente.

Peró! Quando sto con te, posso cadere con occhi chiusi,

Nel mondo, perché io so che quando ti ho,

Accanto a me, con le tue mani nelle mie,

La mia vitá é illuminata con un'onda infinitesimo,

Di passione, calore, e felicitá, semplice, e perfetta.

Quando mi alzo alla tua fragranza delicata di mattina,

Io ricordo la ragione per cui mi alzo,

E ricordo che cosa mi mancava,

E non potevo vivere senza di nei miei sogni.

Dire che sei il mio mondo ed il mio universo é cliché,

Ed inoltre, una sottovalutazione grandissima.

Per me, l’amore é quando passo molte ore accanto a te,

Per sezionare le crepe della tua faccia,

La grana del tuo corpo,

E la fragranza della tua anima;

Se soltanto per cauterizzarli nella mia mente, cosí

Un giorno, fra molti anni, se nessuno mi chiederá di descrivirti,

Potró pitturare un quadro perfetto, del mio cuore, ed il percoso

Che ha cambiato l’attimo in cui ti ho conosciuto.

Dalle nostre memorie abbiamo le nostre vite,

Ma, senza di te, le mie memorie sarebbero, una storia senza significato.