Struggling to understand

    I did not always believe that everything happens for a reason. It was unclear to me why anything happened at all. The world, it felt to me, was chaos, all parts of it moving at random--just confusion. We were all so desperate to make sense of what happened to and around us that we invented all sorts of wonderful systems for understanding, or making believe, or whatever--and I have been dismissive of most of them. To use the word Ayad employed to describe Obama, I have been "supercilious" but that has changed recently. 

    Maybe I don't see the elegance of the superstructure, or perhaps I am only able to sense that it's there but not yet able to appreciate the subtle grace? Either way, I am beginning to think that everything happens for a reason, even if I have been too dim to perceive what the reasons are. In very short order, I was fired from my job, then went to working all the time to keep up with 5 kids & producing no new writing nor reading anything because of the amount of exhaustion I felt all the time, then my drug use increased to levels that I didn't even think was possible "wee handfuls" of pills (caffeine pills & wellbutrin in the morning, then at night sleeping pills in ever larger doses) as well as more weed than one human should be able to smoke without their lungs collapsing, then in the winter--I got sick, the kind of sick that laid me out and had me coughing up black stuff. I've coughed up a lot of things in my time, but never anything black. And now? I am sober, I am writing every day, I am no longer in the same state as my abusive sister, and I'm following a path that doesn't feel evil. How did I arrive here?

    At my most sick, I felt a hole opening up beneath me & I knew that at any moment I was about to drop into it--whether I committed suicide or I let the sickness take me, I was not long for this earth. I turned to my family for help, but sadly they thought increasing the amount of drugs I was on was the solution. My sister brought me more weed, encouraged me to get out of bed & get back to watching her 5 children. I thought constantly about how smoothly a razor would run up my wrist--how the blood would leave me like a river of silk, and if I had taken enough of the drugs that were everywhere around me--then the end of my life wouldn't even be that painful of an episode. I didn't blame my family, I love them fiercely & still do--they did their best to protect me from the homophobia of North Carolina, tried to help me be more "straight" and to survive the cold, hard Christian reality that I had been presented with. At their core, I know they love me.

    I told my sister and my mom, the two people on earth I knew loved me most, that I was thinking about death all the time. They changed the subject, puffing away at their cigarettes, my sister annoyed that I was being so selfish--why couldn't I continue to stay high & clean/cook/watch her children so she could leave and have fun with one of the men she enjoyed seeing? She didn't care that I wanted to die, nor do I think she really believed me--she thought I was talking about suicide as a way out of doing her chores, but everything I did, I did out of love for the kids. I wanted them to have good food to eat, a nice house to live in, and I wanted to protect them from the worst of what their mother was: angry, violent, abusive, manipulative, but above all: cruel. Yes, I loved her knowing that beneath her human mask was a sociopath who didn't understand empathy. 

    When I realized my sister would not believe me until I actually tried to kill myself--and because I knew in my heart that my desire to die was so real that if I was brought to the point, it would not be an attempt--I would follow through with it--perhaps for the first time in my entire life, I would actually follow through with something, instead I ran.

    I haven't stopped running. I ran from Virginia to Niagara Falls, then to Amherst, then to Providence, and now I'm in Pittsburgh. Each time, I felt I was moving farther from danger and closer to...something. Closer to something I needed to see, or hear, or do--driven not by my own will necessarily, but by something else. Some other force that I began to trust with my life. It's like, I've decided to let Jesus take the wheel, except I'm not sure that after my southern Baptist upbringing that I want to give the force that's guiding me a "Christian" personality or flavor. In Niagara, the falls filled me with awe--a sense of wonder, there were greater things in the world than pain. In Amherst, I picked up a book by Dawn Potter (The Conversation) and my love for poetry was reignited. In Providence, I had my first open mic reading and the other poets called me beautiful and brave, the first kind words I'd heard in so long that I didn't understand them at the time. Now, in Pittsburgh, I am starting to see that America is both less and more than I imagined it to be.

   

     Still, I'm struggling to understand--what is guiding me right now? I know the next two places I'm meant to go, Detroit then Minneapolis, but I don't know why or what's waiting for me there. I think here in Pittsburgh, I was brought specifically so I could stumble upon the work of Ayad Akhtar (who had not even crossed my radar before, but who's lecture was meaningful and who's work I've been devouring voraciously) but possibly it was Sarah, the woman at Few of a Kind, who talked about Rumi with such a light in her eyes that I couldn't leave her store without buying a book--Mystical Poems of Rumi (second selection, poems 201-400, translated by A.J. Arberry) & I have not much knowledge of Rumi but on the back of the book was perhaps the words I was brought to the city to read:

            "You sell my soul for a handful of dust; what kind of bargain and sale is this?

                Give back the dust, and know your own worth; you are not a slave, you are a king, an emperor.

            For your sake there came out of heaven the fair-faced ones, the sweetly hidden."

    I sold my soul, to my family, and was a slave in a household that took nearly my life away. And now, am I a king? Or am I an "urchin" like I call myself, hiding in the balcony of the Carnegie Music Hall, looking down on the author I wish I was? Or am I neither slave, nor king, nor urchin--but something new? 

    Inside the book, Sarah slipped a handout for the Muslim Women's Association of Pittsburgh. This is the organization that I must dedicate my next poem to, I know that with a certainty that is becoming strangely familiar. Just like I knew I had to dedicate "The Smile" to House of Codec in Providence. It's how I know that it's not time for me to meet or interact with Ocean Vuong, but one day--I will have to. Why? To what end? I'm struggling to understand my role in any of this--but I'm desperate to understand, to feel that I'm not losing my mind. 

    Tonight, I came to the realization that I must "scrub" myself out of the book I recently self-published, Psalms for the Queer, and thus make it more universal. I need to make it easier for a wider audience of queer people to connect with the call to action that I'm putting out: we must reform our community, we must come together, there is important work that will require us all to put aside any differences that might exist between us. 

    Whether I am delusional or not, whether I am losing my mind or not--I do feel in my heart that I would die for this quest, for the goal of bringing the queer people of America together somehow. The work that we must do once united will be hard, and there's still a decent chance I will be mercilessly crucified for even trying to do this. Maybe I did die last winter, and this is my afterlife? Or maybe, I started to live last winter, and I am on a path that I long resisted. The whale has spit me out and now I am holding on to it as it swims in the great sea--knowing that I am in the middle of vast waters, that if I let go, I will certainly drown--but also knowing that if the whale decides to dive, I will have no other option but to go down with it--into the dark and murky waters. 

    I still speak in the language of Christianity--but it's the only language I was taught to use when speaking of spiritual experiences. Perhaps I was meant to find this book of Rumi's poetry because I'm meant to learn a new language to describe the mystical experiences that are unfolding inside & outside of myself. Now that I think about it--Rumi was inside Ayad's Homeland Elegies, page 315, I just went back to confirm:

            "I hope you don't have it already."

              I tore off the wrapping. It was on old edition of Rumi's Mathnawi. 

             "I don't. I've always thought I needed to read it."

              "That's what I thought when I saw your play. You know, they did it in Omaha."

              "You thought I needed to read Mathnawi?"

              "You're making fun of him at one moment in the play, and I just thought 'He doesn't know Rumi, because if he did, he wouldn't want to make fun of him..."

    The narrator goes on to say that he was making fun of the guy who "thinks he knows something about Islam because he's reading Rumi" and then Sultan, the character that gave the narrator the book insists that, "But anyone who reads Rumi does know something about Islam, beta. Something good, something important. For me, that book is my Quran." 

       Perhaps, I was brought to Pittsburgh to find Rumi's writings? I will go into the work with an open mind. I must note that yesterday at Ayad's lecture, he mentioned Søren Kierkengaard--making that the third time in recent weeks that Søren's come up--all from radically different sources. The universe nudges me again & again, so I must make the time to look further into Søren. How much time do I have? Certainly all the time in the world.