here I am in the moment of tender possibility; here I am also in the present.

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what needs to be written?

[redacted].

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etc.

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what else? how to love, how to open, how to keep it there. is it just like this? soft and sincere, terrifying and honest, surprising and exciting? I am learning something that is orthogonal to so much of what I know, I think, an articulation of acceptance and presentness rather than judgment or understanding, of working with whatever is present, whoever we might already be. these logics are incommensurable. one is a finite game; the other one an infinite game, a game that is played in order to be played, played, played--

if I learn how to love then I also learn how to love myself, a lesson learned when I'm not trying to learn.

I am learning that love can also be soft, quiet, easy, smooth, like the wind or the water, undulating but insistent, changing in understandable ways, moving with the terrain. is that me? my mother says my grandmother says I lack water, so my name came to be. here I am, next to this so-called river, really a tidal strait, the conjoining of two oceans, filling and unfilling of water. is this it? is this how it is?

is this it? could this be it? couldn't this be it? why not? one logic asks for certainty, logic, questioning. the other logic asks to be present with what is already present and possible. why not; why not?

or rather: isn't this it? I am in the ocean, my body tossed buoyed waved along. p shares that the task, as we get older, is of the intensity of experience itself but of noting the particular flavors that are present in it, and I imagine our taste buds honing, becoming more precise, specific, to understand exactly what might emerge. the pointed taste of cut grass; the sharp char of thinly-cut beef brisket emerging from pho; the ozone smell of new welding. water, too, has a taste, not just an absence but itself a kind of presence, softness, harshness, texture. so I am in the ocean, looking out at faraway ships underneath a sky softly gradienting until it hits the horizon. isn't this it?

isn't this it? underneath the paving-stones the beach, underneath this all this quality, life itself, the texture of us being, of age and death, of loss and grief, of regret. these are all lofty words, well-worn. like every good cliche, after the experience the phrases make sense, easy language knowingly used becaues language fully becomes simply a signifier, a snapshot-

anyhow, anyhow. an immensity of experience and time this past year. did I not learn immense lessons? am I not emerging and shifting into some kind of new life that I am struggling to birth, contractions and pains and morning (winter, spring) sicknesses? what might emerge? can you believe it, future self, can you, can you? would I have it any other way?