Losing is the New Finding

The only constant in my life at the moment is the self-medication of the gardens, and I return there night after night to breathe in the scent of opening roses. The buds hold the perfume not of dreams or expectations, you lovers who buy a scentless dozen, but they enchant with a momentary endorphin release, a deep breath of be here now, a natural prozak. In their crowded beds filled with plump new petals juxtaposed with wilting ones, they display incredible change at fast-forward. One day passes and everything shifts. It's a brand new place!

We try to freeze-frame a memory, press flowers at their perfect moment between the pages of a book, capture euphoria in a perfume bottle. Elusive scent, momentary burst of living color, drug flower, I miss you.

Lately I play a game in my head called "Everything Changes". I picked up a popular culture token and began to claim squares. My list grows:

1. Girls are the new boys. Just ask all of the men who are trying to reclaim the masculine.

2. White is the new black. Black culture is forced into continual evolution, a step ahead of being co-opted, alive with new language, dress and custom. But never reaping the benefit.

These could work:
3. Bitch is the new good girl.
4. Blonde is the new brunette.
5. Pain is the new pleasure.
6. Fake is the new real.

And George W Bush has created some new ones:
7. Religion is the new science.
8. Spin is the new news.
9. Narrow-minded is the new informed.
10. Uncritical acceptance of government is the new patriotic.
11. Uncritical accepance of war is the new 'supporting the troops.

And some hopeful ones:
12. Old is the new young. (Cyborgs we will be.)
13. Rich is the new poor.

I have held on so hard to sameness (and our culture encourages us to hold on with contracts, certificates, commitments, vows, ownership, promises!), that I have made myself sick. I tried to stay the same, like a woman. Like a girl. Like a person taught to suffer. Like a slave, like a whore, like a selfless one. Like one who is taught to sacrifice. Like one who can take it. Like one who puts others first. Like one who is silent. Like one who is complicit in the wide-spread deception that things stay the same.

Isn't our collective desire evident now, after the devastation of Katrina? We will rebuild New Orleans! We will stay the same! And after 9/11? We will build tall towers that declare our permanence! We own. We claim. Together, we labor to stay the same.

But I am tired of holding on. My hands, not working too good anyway (what does our physical have to tell us?), have allowed slippage. I let you slip out of my grasp. I claim one last square:

14. Losing is the new finding.