With Love From The City Of Flamingos

My dear readers,

How have you been? It feels like it’s been a long, long while since we spoke. For one, this medium has changed so much that many of you don’t post comments or write emails to me anymore. To be quite certain, I’m even surprised at the daily graph of visits and readers. It seems like some of you are interested in what I am saying. Why and what things, I still don’t know. But I will not ask for you to speak up. Some of you have probably been with me on this journey for years and respected my decisions to be anonymous, hidden, coy and then open. So I must respect your choices.

I went through a rough patch earlier this year. It wasn’t the heartbreak of a failed relationship or the pressure of a job I hated. It was the feeling of not being able to write. I had never experienced it before and it made me question my identity, my very existence.

One of you, a stranger I had never met before, spoke to me after my birthday post and asked,

“How are you now?”

It was so unaccountably touching and kind, I felt I had to respond. It has been months since that day and I’m afraid I haven’t till now. But I feel like you’ll forgive me for that. You and I, have come a long way and I believe you may have learnt to forgive me for my moodiness, my desperate flakiness and my unpredictability. The truth is I was not ready to answer. I had the answer, I just didn’t have the words or the voice for it.

I still don’t know exactly what was or is happening inside of me. But I feel a little less anxious, a wee bit less suffocated these days. Allowing myself the leeway of not writing did that. I guess I must allow myself to let the identity of writer fall away sometimes, to remind myself that I am more than that.

I’ve gone a long way into Spoken Word performance, far longer than I ever imagined. The format gave me a chance to explore stories and feelings that got caught in the mesh of my head and didn’t make it out in writing. And today, I did something new. I tried performing with musical accompaniment.

This post here will tell you about my troubled relationship with music. Add to it the anecdote of the ex-fiance, a rapper with obsessive ideas about his chosen genre to the point of squelching any musical inclination at all in me. So I count today as a milestone in trying to reverse that painful journey so far.

It’s a story I’ve performed a few times before. But just like my confidence grows with each performance, the story seeps better into my being with each telling. So here it is, the result of several months of working and several years of feeling.

Mills to Malls. Walk respectfully when you tread over the bones of my city’s history.

Home. City. Identity. Nostalgia. Memory. Melancholy.

Me.