I want to talk about the weather. I want to talk about love.

It’s raining. I think it’s been raining forever. I think it will never stop. I’m driving home. I turn onto my street. I pass a cop car, the cop standing out in the rain with his flashlight on the driver of another car, pulled over. I pass another Oakland PD car half a block down the road. I get to my corner a block later and there’s another cop. Parked next to the corner store. Kids playing in the rain, in the darkness. I start crying as I pull into my parking space. Why are there so many cops in my neighborhood right now? Why is there so much rain? When will it ever, ever stop?

I’m a raw nerve. I love too much. I feel too much. Sometimes abundance is almost as poignant as scarcity. There’s nothing that doesn’t pull my heart this way or that way.

I want to talk about skin. Loose and taut, weathered and smooth, glowing beneath my fingers. I want to talk about touching. I want to talk about how age does not decrease beauty. I want to talk about kisses and wrinkles and infants and death. I want to talk about how almost everyday this week I’ve found someone unexpected to fall in love with. At least for a few minutes. My very first lover, almost nine years later. A former lover’s grandmother. A precious lady friend who was once a passionately unrequited love, who might be a future soulmate (one of many). A man I used to sleep with a long long time ago who is now in a monogamous relationship -- I can only meet him in public. And another former lover, now beauteous friend, now precious family who lives in my house – we cry over a movie that understands so much about love and life and pain. Every connection you make means overcoming a history of hurt and pain. Writing a letter to my former partner’s former lover –slash- current best friend, an artist, who inspired me to paint, who still has warm feelings towards me, even though, even though. Another woman who has been a lover and been a friend and a lover and a friend and a lover and a friend at this point for almost as long as I can remember. A fairy who has flown too far away. These are the simple ones. The rush of love that rises inside me, insistent on touch, resistant to boundaries, irrelevant propriety. My heart beating in my ears like wings.

This is one week in my life. And each of these is a story or a novel or an epic. I want to tell you all. I cannot even begin.

And there are others. Love foundation in my life. The pillars of love. Summer Island. I cannot speak of love without speaking of them, but when the weather is rough, when the terrain is turbulent, when the path to ease is on a cliff’s edge in a hurricane, I do not know how to speak of them. And lately, the weather has been rough. I can say I saw the sun peek through the clouds today. I can say the storm went to bed last night. I can say it rains and it rains and it rains. I can say I don’t know when he’s ever coming back, if he’s ever coming back, or if he will ever have me come again. I can say the raging winds knocked down one of the pillars and I don’t know if it will ever be put right. I can say I’m done with distance and if I can’t grab on to you, touch you, taste you, how on earth can you claim that you’re real. I can say the sky is clear after all of the weeping. Talking and laughing and crying and arguing and curling up in a partner’s arms in the sushi restaurant after therapy together. I felt reborn and the love was easy for a minute.

I don’t want to give too much away. I want to respect everybody’s privacy. I want to be very very specific. I want to be very very vague. I am writing this because I can’t tell everything I experience to everybody I know. And I want to. Except for all the details I want to keep hidden – I regularly don’t want people to know all of what I’m thinking and experiencing when I am with them, though I want others to know those details, too. How can anyone write with so much inhibition?

And all this love feels incomplete unless I can describe exactly what happened and exactly what was felt and said and shared, in immaculate and exquisite detail with people who want to know, who care, who understand. The experience itself feels incomplete.

No one can be inside my experience except for me. No one can be inside anybody’s experience. It can be awfully lonely to know that. It can be awfully lonely to experience all this loveliness and be fundamentally alone, no matter what. Nobody can be inside you with you. I know I need a shift in consciousness. I know it hasn’t happened yet.

It’s still raining in Oakland tonight.