Half Way

I’m getting a brand new tattoo… not any tattoo. I’m getting a tattoo with my girlfriend. We both turned the same age this year like we do every year. We have known each other more then half way of it already and we have done and been undone by it all pretty much together. Young pony tailed, freckled girls now holders of the light, woven a life, each others weft.

The last time we were tattooed, she was inked in a french town after some cheap red wine. She got it and I felt the pain. Symbiotic. We celebrated with chocolate spread, french bread and more red wine in plastic cups. I have the photo somewhere. We were half way in our travels and landing into our own lives with a feeling of freedom that little french balconies, tattoos and the smell of foreign lands offers.

I have two tattoos on my body already. Only two. A love heart which was a 21 year olds birthday affirmation that one day I might mean it. I mean it now. I love me now more than half the time. The other, a little flower that goes nicely with the pretty dresses I have worn since I was a pretty little girl. I was pretty till half way. Now I am beautiful and luminous so this tattoo is gonna be luminous and straight to the point. I’ll show you when I am done as I want it to surprise me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about home these past few weeks. The past year really. First I was homeless and loved it, I had to strip away so much of the outer and inner stuff to see the simplicity of things. It was a freedom to unload it all. In this past year I have discovered that

HOME IS NOT ALWAYS SOMETHING TO SEARCH FOR BUT SOMETHING TO ASK FOR AND RECEIVE.

Home is a bed with fresh laid sheets for falling into. Home is the hug on arrival after another flight. Home is one place for my son and where my son is for me. Home is my man who strokes my hair whilst I unload my aches, brings me picked flowers and makes me tea { english for dinner cause he is ever so slightly english like that }. Home is a painting of a bare breasted woman who hangs on the wall waiting for me to sleep under her. Reminding me the sacred is never for sale. Home is the friends that wash my heart with tea and honey. Home is the incense I burn and the crystal in the bottom of my bag, the adornments I wear like musical instruments, soundtracks of my days as they jingle through the late nights of this and that.

Home is the dad that just loves me, just loves me.
Home is the sister that just loves me, just loves me.

Home is the people that I just love. Once strangers that now carry parts of my story woven in with theirs from time spent, children cared for in unison, like a modern day village of comings and goings. Home is the women that have my back and oh let me not forget the men that have my back also. I daydream of the home that is calling to me, one place, no bags to pack un and re. Home is here and it is coming. I welcome home.

I have been keeping a secret from more than half the world. It has had a life of its own, parallel to the beautiful things. This tale is not entirely only mine. I have been distilled. I am four years in and three months out from what I call my Haiku.

Here I am. I have three hearts to hold in this and three hearts that all who love us hold and hold and hold as my children’s father and I smash it out. Smash the already smashed into dust because it seems that broken wasn’t broken enough. But this is about my son having a voice, my son having his place in the whole god damn thing, honoured. This is his time. But fuck it takes all of me till I am emptied on the couch, staring out of the window. My ship wrecked body, all out to sea in my soul. Self care has become my mantra as I walk the beach, steal naps and growl out through my yoga. some days tears cascade silently in the grocery aisle, some days I am a desert, parched.

The opportunities that I have left in the wake have all been forgiven. All the disconnections from not being available to anything much beyond this journey these past months. My heart somehow in tatters but more real. Leaning into new depths of capacities. It is a vulnerable time of heart and hand holding. A time of courage and loss.

My children seem more vivid to me every day. I talk to my son as he traverses the coming of manhood and the disappointment he holds. I watch as my smaller boy waves me goodbye like a grownup for the first time and blows me kisses over the fence. Tears well up and my nose burns like it did the first day I dropped him to school and 9 years ago when I first dropped his brother. I brace myself with every leaving. My son more then half way left from the nest but never from the nest of my mother heart.

I wonder how it would have been different if I birthed girls. As I talk to my beloved about his own daughters transition into the mystery. I want to catch her fall. I want to catch all their falls, as I fall into my own unfathomable. Reflecting on the lost relationship with my mother who is beyond half way and such a stranger to me now, though I was once her. Birthed on this day half way ago. The full circle of things for the women in our family seemingly playing out another generation.

Half way I decided to call this. Not because I know something you don’t. Half way because it feels like that. Because what I have learnt that I hold dearly is

THERE IS NOWHERE TO ARRIVE TO. NOWHERE TO GET.

It’s all here in this one singular moment. Unveiled. All of it. I am half way unfurled or half way undone. I am half way old or young and it doesn’t matter anyhow. Half way is full of scope and possibility and not so long that it goes on forever. Half way has experience. Half way has stamina in it. Half way has options and back story. Half way feels like a cross road I sit at that diverges out in front of me as I wonder and wander.

Blessed be me on this half way day.

– Lotus Indigo Shakti Kruse