if you think there is anything missing, it is an illusion...

I listen to songs on repeat. I find something I love and I play it over and over. Each conversation, each breath, and each glance. Each only happens once. I cry from the joy and the sadness of letting go and of holding on. The girl with no roots, no national boundaries to tie her...family scattered to the wind. She misses her past lives where mama and papa lived in the same village and sisters were on-hand to play, to imagine, to create. She dreams of a time when her best friend returns from Iraq. She watches her love grow with each day circling around lovers as different as the sky and the sea. She is the horizon where they meet — meeting never in more than the conversations she brings them into.

What world is this? Modern plagues of isolation behind these screens. Empty. Distant. The glow replacing the light. She is able to detach from it all she says — disappearing into another haze — pushing away clarity cause the picture may just be too scary - too powerful and/or too scary.

She has given up almost everything to create art — with the hope of sharing it — in hope of returning the energy that all her heroes have given her throughout the years. She has ripened and rotted several times; seasons pass and she matures into her role. But what is that role?

"Standing just outside the circle of light is where you've been living your whole life...you got to step back into the corners of the room where it's really black and launch your attack." Ani sings to her for the thousandth time and this time she swears she is almost there. Slow is beautiful she reminds herself of that when everything in the modern world tells her that anything short of mass production and lightening speed is falling short. She rushes ahead like everyone else, but not really. She skips those five shots of expresso that keep her New York peers running. Forget the cocaine; give me a joint on a lazy Sunday morning in bed with someone who blows my mind before they've even said a word.

It is hard to see society have its way with her. She worries about all the superficial things — her teeth aren't white enough, her body is not thin enough, her skin is not flawless. When will she feel safe, know there is money in the bank, know there is someone to come home to, a job to leave to...

On Valentine's Day she has a gallery opening that looks beautiful and costs her more than it should for the six people that stopped by. The culture and the men around seem to want more than her art. They break her plasma screen and offer her a t-shirt that says "pornothug" as compensation.

It is Valentine's Day and infection fights in her kidneys. The woman she wants to marry is having her one-year anniversary with another woman and the one man she could spend 'forever' with is holding his new baby girl, less than one day old. She comes home cold and alone, she forgot her jacket. She throws-up in the dark over a cold generic toilet bowl. Shaking, she peels off her clothes in a lethargic motion, crawls into bed like a wounded animal, and cries until her eyes are swollen shut and sleep somehow finds her. She wakes up to the tears. A crazy-deep kind of sad...the kind where the tears wake you before the sun does.

She curses emotions and the way we all seem so addicted to each other and how pathetic it is — all these crappy, sad love songs — love's not like it used to be she thinks. Just like artists used to work on songs until they were masterpieces of rock in rock, of rhythm and blues. Now everyone just samples, little pieces of 10 old songs must make a good new one, right? We can sing about being rich or poor, black or white — we can sing a few lines to feed our egos on top of whatever mix they bring us. Just like the cultural phenomenon of piecing 10 different people's attributes together to create the perfect balance of everything we 'need.' I mean, you just can't get it all from one place can you? And you have to have it all, right? I mean, why wouldn't we have it all? When we can. While we can. Maybe because it is like thinking we can just have another plastic bag until we hear shocking truths like there are collections of plastic bags in the ocean that come together in the currents to form masses larger than the United States — and three is more than one, anyhow. Just like those dating reality shows. It amazes me that there is even one, let alone many. The carelessness.

I look at all the fat people, all the little women stuffing themselves with diet pills, the men with steroids. Or we take hormones to change our respective sex. We cut holes in our chests and fill them up with rubber tits.

I shake my head at how sick it all is and then catch myself looking in the skyscraper's reflection glancing along the street to the 'prettiest' girl. I think, "how can you ever find love that lasts until you look like this?" The truth is she knows better. She knows supermodels feel more alone than she does. If you think there is anything missing, it is an illusion. She breathes deep and the love of the universe pours over her. She knows self-love, she knows she knows it. She holds herself close and with so much tenderness. She eats rose petals and blackberries with wamm tea and munuca honey.

She wonders if we are all as super-saturated in lovers as we are in body mass? She walks by bars in the cold shuffle-by and catches glances of hands on asses, cleavage everywhere, men hoping to score another point. Dating becomes as meaningful as video games, becomes as surreal as the real killings we watch play-out on the evening news or each time a women gets fucked in a porn. And the distance between the soul and the body widens with every shady story, with every genetic wish your girl was as hot as me on the dance floor. He tunes-in with a little bitch slappin' rhyme and it's all in good fun.

Work is so stressful, we are all so sad and lonely, insecure, we need to go out and fuck and be fucked. Ah, old romantic living during the fall of Rome — the sequel.

The idea of having one partner to share the whole story with excites her more than anything else she can imagine. She wants that old-fashioned bond, that union. She has set aside the idea of having children of her own so that she may birth herself during this lifetime. This is the first time in centuries that she has had a chance just to raise herself. The idea propels her forward. How amazing it would be to put all that diaper-changing energy into birthing a revolution, in preparing for 2012, for living in the forest, for being primal and wild, for being never tied-down to anyone, tasting every person like the rare and exotic fruit that they are. I have loved. I have had more love, so much more love than I could have expected, hoped for — I have never screamed for love. I don't ever go out to seek love. I am alone until it finds me. I work all the time, Friday nights, Saturdays. I feel like I never get anything done. I do...just slower than I would like to. I miss structure, guidance, company, a place to go other than the living room.

I should have a huge space that I can turn into a center of creation, inspiration, movement. I want a publishing company. I want a media center. I have twenty books inside my mind and this computer - one on the environment, another on mothers, fathers, war, sex, abstraction, primal nature, poetry, uniting in diversity, the meaninglessness of it all and the meaning therein, the hopelessness and the hope therein, the meaning that is actually meaningless, and the type of hope that breeds hopelessness and the distinction therein.

It has been a hard week for my family. One sister calls me crying from small-town England because she can't find a minimum wage job and she is brilliant. The other calls crying from the Middle East cause she is locked in a royal palace — she is the bird in the golden cage and she is brilliant. My mom cries because I am not with her now, and I really fucking wish I were.

So frustrating to be born poor and have to climb so far just to reach a place where no one has anything to say. How often do you speak with an automated response? How deeply ingrained are our programmed responses? I know, the eternal optimist in me knows we all have something precious and rare to say. So I wish we would burn the fat and cut the small talk or even the big talk and just share sound and glances, share eyes and stories, universal and personal.

Two amazing women came over tonight. Beacons of light, beautiful, living heroes. Such a blessing to have them in my home, and yet, I see that I am only half there — closed. We talk about furniture instead of sharing the cool story about how I found two of the same bamboo rocking chairs on two different streets in the same week and now they are sitting in them like a perfect set. Instead, I just say the furniture belongs to my roommate who is never home. They ask me if I am in pain, and I say "yes" and answer a few questions about CAT scans and other tests when really I want to say that it is my heart that hurts the most, that I feel heartbroken from not waking up to look at the same curve of a back and intertwined fingers everyday, that I miss having the partnership that I see in them, that I miss living in a big group house with so many great friends making so much art, sharing so many hugs. Why did you all have to die and disappear? She needs to be held; these beautiful women hold her flesh but she is trapped inside like they say her birds are trapped inside of her. How am I meant to take flight with them?

She is an angel ready to raise hell. Sick of all these Biblical references — looking instead to the warrior goddess who was born of no one's sacred story but her own.