The Unflattening (Winding Like Roses)

1. Wake up blearily and vaguely recall the dream of Desi Arnaz, your true love disappearing, experimental films, blood clots. Mix up days, all the dreams bleed together.
2. Memories of mangoworms and the heroes who squeeze them out of puppy paws. Do not think of the dying puppy's porous jaws, do not think of it, look up "trypophobia," know each hole is a button you press, know each worm is trying to survive in its tiny way, and it enjoys mangos just like you. You have a lot in common.
3. Everything is cancelled. Talk to women who care about you. They will remind you that the only goal is to tear down barriers to love.
4. Look at social media, the colors of hair and the smiling faces and the lipstick and the quickness.
5. Walk outside to the pharmacy and belong to the day.
6. Belong to the day.
7. Belong to the melted trash can.
8. Belong to the neighbors you greet as though you belong here, as though this is where you have lived and will always live.
9. Greet the pitbull, the chihuahua, the porcelain garden lambs.
10. Enjoy the stripes everybody is wearing
11. Try to understand systems, promise yourself your brain is still functional
12. Find something to love, something to embrace.
13. Interact lightly with a friend and feel the ease of all of the shadows lifting.
14. The Bodhi Tree. I sit with red clown hair present to all experience. Here for the stillness.
15. Make an orderly outline, the one you have made so many times, and laugh. Maybe you are not checking anything off the list, maybe just tracing the same spiral, walking on the Escher staircase.
16. Know the system is just beyond your reach and you are part of it but never ever able to see its machinery
17. Approximate the machinery
18. Tell the machinery in list form that it will emerge organically
19. The machinery is the winding roses curving around the grey white house
20. Just stand in front of that place in your neighborhood you never noticed before, on a breezy afternoon, and let yourself cry. Because that is more beautiful than anything. And become unflattened.
21. Make your own choices, your own mistakes, your own lists, your own words, your own smiles, your own loves, your own approval, your own love, Like a Woman.