The Summer That Tasted Like Hazelnuts
When you tell yourself no before even getting started, or you feed into the noise which surrounds you. You opt out of the project of becoming the [person] who doesn’t gets out alive.
Feargha,
I am in Dions and so are you! It truly does feel like a fantasy to be here with you, to finally know what it feels like to dance with you, what being held by you feels like, the precise texture of your skin under the sun and what our chats are like in person. I will forever associate the summer we met with the taste of hazelnuts, with the tunes of “holy bliss”, the summer my curls started having an identity crisis and the summer I disappeared in the brilliance of Michelle Zauner whilst fairing a heatwave. <3.
I know we use the term “surreal” to describe this moment, but the term surreal doesn’t even begin to explain just how impossible the days in France have felt like (thus far), let alone what it’s like to be in you and Meg’s company. The two of you alone are so magical, that it can get overwhelming but I have so much gratitude as well as faith in the world from knowing that the both of you get to be alive. The sheer awareness of it is enough to make the world feel less un-done. It restores me so deeply and it is so hard to explain besides that I feel truly blessed that I got to spend July with the two of you. That I got to meet an old friend (you) whilst simultaneously make a new one (Meg). To be in shared space with two distinct as well as whimsically wonderful characters.
…
As you know these last few days, I have been fixated on the questions surrounding the concept of permission and ownership. Specifically within the realms of existence, i.e., how much of my desires I am in possession of or entitled to, how much of my life is actually mine. Which I am aware is a bizarre question to present to oneself, but also is one that I am still very unclear about because so much of my life doesn’t feel like mine, yet I am aware it is. However, at best I am dispossessed of agency—so divorced from any ownership over what comes next for me yet so stubborn about mastering this life and getting F-R-E-E (on my own terms).
But how does one get free, if it is them—I—that is standing in-between potential and present circumstances? A question you posed to me that day at the garden, a question I am not really sure how to answer besides with the awareness that you can lose yourself when you deny yourself the permission to exist outside of the forces that are attempting to tame you because sometimes people (/ the world) try to destroy you not because they don’t see your power but precisely because they recognize it. They see it and don’t want it to exist. Thus, opt in games of obliteration (i.e.,submission, humiliation, control, etc.) to halt any possibility of you becoming before you even have the chance to know who you are, let alone know how to alchemize your intrinsic power in order to foster a path forward for yourself.
Which is to say, we all enter this life walking toward a death sentence, a living death, a type of death where we are physically alive yet not in command (of things) since we are not taught to have the imagination to B-E-L-I-E-V-E we can be the person of our dreams, we are rather taught how to become the things in which we are not, how to exist within the rigid parameters of our identity silos (or expectations placed by those around us) and how to hate the things that make us full (because often these are what the culture regards as marginal and insignificant).
…
That day as we walked through the vineyards before sitting down on the curbside of an empty road to rest, you also said to me: people will judge us, (some cruelly), however the only way people will find and know about our lives (deeply) is if we continue to show up. You then said, the greatest imagination you will need is to believe you can be the person of your dreams. You will need to consider that perhaps people are cruel or judgmental because they can’t fathom you, not because you are those cruel things but purely because they can’t process your complexity. And because it was you saying these things to me, it registered.
I began to see the logics behind the uneasy feelings I would feel every time my existence was questioned. How much I normalized the impulses of having to prove my belonging. How little I believed in my legitimacy and how much of my daily life was channeled in the task of trying to be comprehensible rather than be in alliance with my nature.
…
how to follow our nature? Is the question I offer you, but is also the one I am exploring now in order to exit the zero-sum game that is the trying to enter conversations that will and never hold me—that will never tolerate my nuance, let alone contemplate it.
…
Feargha, I am changing this summer—growing closer to myself. I can feel It. I can sense the vibrance of us together. I arrived here believing I had lost myself completely and will leave restored. The summer that tasted like hazelnuts was the summer where a desire was fullfilled and became the antidote to the war within me, as well as the one the changed my life. I hope it was for you too.
Yours,
Mariam