I am cleaning my room today. Ask anyone who really knows me and they will tell you, not of my impartation, but from their own observation that the state of my room is a portrait of how my heart is behaving. Right now, I live in a purple, gabled coat closet. It is the size of a small nursery, with just enough room for a bed, and a small dresser and bookshelf. It doesn’t take much to look unkempt. Nothing is tied down, all my sheets are loose; I sleep with throw blankets and two pillows, one borrowed. The mattress isn’t even mine! I might not leave this apartment unless I get married (if I get married (why would I get married?)), and the mattress will just stay where it always has been—on the floor without a bed frame. There is little value in this room; stacks of books that didn’t fit the bookshelf, journals, my shoes and my hanging wardrobe. I don’t own a bike. No car. I am an itinerant! Just give me your cardboard boxes and your friends and we will haul my little load to wherever it is that I will go next. A friend laughed and said that my living this way is a slight to my human dignity. My housemates’ parents ask them why they are so cruel to me, half-joking. But I tell everyone that I don’t mind, because I don’t.
I have no collateral to give you but my poems (my two mites) and my books, which I guard jealously. For now, I am an ascetic, for that is how my heart looks. I am learning to live on bread alone, on only what is necessary. No fashion or furniture, because I am in a state of wandering. Someday I might share my life with someone, and that requires giving yourself. So here, in this windowless room, I am growing my life so that I may give it and keep growing after the giving of it. Love encompasses and does not divide.
Kite Cathedral 