We generate our own light...

night falls like people into love,
and we generate our own light to compensate
for the lack of light from above.
every time we fight, a cold wind blows our way,
but we can learn, like the trees, how to bend,
how to sway.



Tonight, Ben and I talked for two hours and forty five minutes. We exchanged book suggestions (he has read quite a few Feminist theorists), and talked about our relationships with Mom and with Dad. We discussed theories on life and swapped mutually counter-cultural stories on the pretentious people we meet--I go to a private university and he works in a ritzy restaurant, so one can imagine the types of encounters we explore. And we kept telling each other how excited we were to talk with each other, which we both cited as our first real conversation in over five years. And he repeatedly mentioned how proud he is of me.

First, I was born into a family. And then they left, and I left, and we all shattered to each other. And then I made my own family, constructed of close friends and mentors. And now, I have that constructed family, but I also have this faint and terrifying hope that maybe there can be something with that original set, with Dad and Ben. Maybe there's something there.

Can I slip into this love for them so easily? It frightens me, but I am so excited to be talking with Dad and Ben. It brings to mind Heraclitus: "You cannot step twice into the same river." This love we have, I once felt it surrounding me, holding me afloat in its motion, and at some point we jumped out of that. Now I'm testing the water again, after five years of parched anger, stepping in a bit eagerly, and I know that this water is different, that this current has shifted, and that we, especially, have changed, but it feels similar and welcoming and vaguely consistent, and my feet have been so long dry.



i, i think i understand
what all this fighting is for-
and i just want you to understand:
i'm not angry anymore.
no, i'm not angry anymore.

--Ani DiFranco, "Angry Anymore"