Destiny is only the dense residue of childhood.

Only jackasses quote Rilke (Rilkey? Rilk? I'm not Germanic) but, as one of my favorite clients says, "yet and still" there are words he has written that apply to my current situation. He wrote a little-known poem entitled "beleaguered Social Worker in Chicago Attempts to Build an Admirable Life" which was more like a freestyle rap and was too progressive for late 1800s Austria-Hungary. Anyway, the quote above is from Marie, and this is too:

To be here at all is a glory.
You knew it, maidens,
even those of you seemingly
passed over, sinking into the city's meanest streets,
festering alleys choked with
trash and stinking of excretions.
Each of you had her hour,
or it not an hour,
an instant, at least,
between two moments when
life burst into flower.
Every blessed petal.
Your veins throbbed with it.

This is it. I met with a boy today, a boy with a history we should all be shielded from, who has of late taken to threatening and stealing from me. The idea is: intimacy is horror to him. He is pushing you away, Renegade. If you move through this--the stealing, the threats, the creepiness--the basic human need for love is revealed. And I had stealed myself for theft and assault and pain, for months and years, but I was willing, I am a soldier of love.

Today he was more open and real then I had ever expected.

Last night I was awoken from a deep sleep with a night terror that consisted of my age, cast in mythical proportions, and my own sense of mortality and worthlessness. I don't care if it's all bullshit but, following a dark night of the soul in which I questioned every step I've made, I go to work and a:

precious child tells me secret things about himself and reveals shames he has carried for years.

If this evaporates tomorrow, I was still gifted a moment in which my love for someone meant something. It occurs to me that I am so saddened by the fact that, at 29, I have not been loved (completely, sexually, like in the movies) that I forget how much I have been given the opportunity to love. It's all Chicken Soup for the Soul but, nonetheless, I carry the experience of loving a child. I can literally feel my heart expanding. Existential woe, get thee behind me. Half of what we love about others is how much they let us love them, and I am racking up numbers like you wouldn't believe. It's gratitude and apology mixed up in one: also fear and pain. German poets, Chicago streets, indie rock songs--anything that crosses my path on a day like this is literally slayed by love. If we get even one moment like this, veins throbbing, love palpable--we have each had our hour, our instant, our veins throbbed with it.