There is a man in a purple shirt. I am drawn to the lines of his face. He has a black scarf tied around his neck. He rests his age atop a chair.  He is not alone in this frame. There is another man in the picture, a best friend or possibly a lover. He waits. We all do.

I stand quietly and watch Merce Cunningham blink on film. This is all part of Tacita Dean’s contribution to the Haunted exhibit at the Guggenheim.  As I watch, I know that Merce Cunningham has already passed away. I think. There is a particular sort of poetry in watching a dead man breathing.

So, I put on a ridiculous dress and drink Heineken beer. I make myself dizzy on some ballroom dance floor. I tell stories. I hug friends. I eat a cheese sandwich as tall as the Chrysler building. I ride the subway. I take a cab. I sit on the bus next to a woman with a jar of pickles in her purse. I sing along unabashedly with a shirtless man playing an acoustic guitar in the middle of central park. I blush easily when he winks at me. I carry his smile for three or four city blocks. The skyline becomes punctuation for the conversation I have with a dear friend on a gorgeous New York Night. I laugh with my roommates while taming runaway split ends or slipping on high heel shoes. I spend an inordinate amount of time waiting for the elevator. I feign interest. I clap politely. I use an entire box of Band-Aids. I eat croissants and shop for perfume. I corner women in the bathroom just to thank them. I regret some mistakes. I repeat them. I make a point of going alone to the museum.

Tacita Dean’s work is on the sixth floor of the Guggenheim. Merce Cunningham sits in a chair projected by memory and light. Countless people pass this light and become projected into the art’s frame. We become these beautiful silhouettes against the stillness of the old man. We come in and out of focus. Nothing is permanent.

I have spent a lifetime holding back. I want to use my body. I kneel at Cunnigham’s feet. I brush my shadowy hand against his cheek. It is not enough for me to simply observe. I also need to participate.

If you ever loved a vagina, yours or another person’s, you should click here. Then, you should tweet, Facebook, and tell everyone you know to do the same.

No. Really. A woman I love and admire just put up a panel idea for a room of your own at the Blogher conference being held in New York City. It is an amazing idea. It is about women owning and sharing their own stories, their memories, their bodies, themselves.

Knowing my friend, it will be funny, moving, and a room you will not want to leave even when the session is over. I would hate this idea to get beat out because my friend, like me, has a smaller blog audience. Her panel deserves your vote.

So, do me a favor. Click now. Sign on up over at Blogher’s site. It’s free. You don’t even have to go to the conference to give your support. I promise.

If you do not do this, you run the risk of pissing off your vagina, or the vagina of someone else. You will most certainly cause my vagina to cry, and there is nothing more frightening than a weepy vagina.

Now go. Vote. And, convince all your friends to do the same. Sometimes peer pressure is for their own good.

I was once asked at a writing conference what I hoped to accomplish by the age of 30. I thought for a long time before I wrote down,

I hope to own all that is inside of me.

I am turning 34 next week. I am still working on this goal.

I found out recently that I am going to Blogher 09’ in Chicago. I am going to Blogher with a story in my back pocket. It is simple, plain, and strong. I want to matter to someone, if only to myself.

I have been invited to speak at this conference on a panel about the transformational power of blogging. I would be lying if I told you that I was not terrified. I just hope you all come barefoot to the panel, so I do not have to fear that any shoes will be thrown.

I am exhilarated by the opportunity to give voice to what I think so many of us wonder each time we tap our fingers against the keyboards.

Do the words I write have value? Will this resonate with the community at large?   

I am hoping to see you at this conference, at the panels, in hotel hallways, at cocktail parties where we each glitter and shine? I want to hear the words you carry in designer purses or on the cuffs of your polyester pants.

Have you ever felt broken and used like the hasty wiping of a dirty tissue after the furious beating-off?

Were you the chubby awkward girl of your youth, mistaken every year for a stout and angry boy while trying to sell Girl Scout cookies in your neighborhood?

Do you love your children but fear you are fucking it all up?

Or do you ride your bicycle on the serpentine streets next to a beach, enthralling in the shake-shake of your single singing limbs?

I would like for you to tell me stories I have never heard before.  

Blogging is the way we discover each other, these tucked away parts of ourselves. I encourage you to write it all down and bring it with you to Chicago.

Become the radical act of women writing, this power for us all to transform.

Edited to Add:

To all you darling men who land here. You are revolutionary too! And, I proudly bestow upon you honorary lady parts when you kick it over here on my site. Enjoy them!

Dear Heart,

Do you remember when Dad took us in to the city for the very first time? We could not have been more than 6 or 7. You kept pace, thub, dub, thub, dub, thub, dub, with my excitement the entire time on the subway line. How wildly you beat against the skyscrapers, tall as the little girl dreams I dreamt that night on the pink-lined paper of  a diary I locked with a flimsy gold key. You were the rhythm I danced on the street corner, keeping time with the man who beat music on an overturned bucket with shiny silver spoons. We were so young then, you and I, so sure the world was without harm and infinite. I do not think we realized, then, that you would ever skip a beat. 

Thub, dub, thub, dub, thub dub, wild beatings in the 7th grade stairway when Tommy Greener snaked his fingers up my skirt to scratch the skin of my soft and dough-like thighs. Your urgent message that we were cornered was falling on the deaf ears of the girl raised on the pop make believe of Debbie Gibson and Phil Collins. I battered my eyes thick with shimmery pink and blue eyeshadow and wondered if this was what a love song should feel like. I am sorry for the way you broke fast and furious the next day when he did not become my boyfriend, but instead the town crier who told everyone I did not shave past my kneecaps. I should have listened to you then.

Dear heart, are you still bleeding?

I’m sorry for the years that I lost you in the hazy fog of cigarettes and too much booze. It took me a while to reclaim you from that desolate snowbank where my legs were forced open and two men tore you to shreds. I left pieces of you there, your thub-dub softly fading. I decided to go it on my own. It was just too hard to feel anything for awhile, those years I walked around without you, a gaping hole.

You beat a symphony for me the first time he held my hand. The steady thub, dub, thub, dub returning as we walked to protest rallies and he taught me how to take back my own night. I realized then that you have a stronger memory than I, because it would be you to first beat the child-like wonder in the simplicity of a kiss under a streetlight even though my virginity was a long way gone. 

Do not be still my beating heart. My road map. My confidant. You are all at once the most familiar sound and yet each day I rediscover you. I watch you run outside my body in the shape of Bug and Butterfly. I awe at how you do not burst in the joy I take in mothering them. Thub, dub, thub, dub, thub, dub, you are this chorus of triumphant, all trumpets blaring joyful for me now.

Good heart. I do not know what lies ahead, more love or disappointment. I know that I can not shield you, us, from loss, death, and despair.  All I can do is listen. Each night I pray that we rock steady for a while, thub, dub, thub, dub, thub dub, this anthem that you beat inside my body, this song you sing inside your walls.

This post was inspired by the amazing women over at blogher, and this initiative. Go check it out!

I saw you today for the first time, your hair a subtle flame, the lit tip of a cigarette against the backdrop of snowy silence. I sat quiet in the wonder of why you would ever be afraid. If I had hair that red, I would always want to flaunt it.

I tell you that when we meet, and go to all those parties, I will decorate your neck with strands of iridescent beads. When you tip your head back to laugh, every single woman in the room will pause to make a wish. What is the power of this friendship if not our ability to make beauty out of the recognition?

I recognize you, the way you gather up your words and scatter them across the creaking floor boards of abandoned houses, those words you cradle to your chest on the days your children’s limbs are stubborn in their growing, the lines of poetry you send as signatures at the end of all those e-mails, I am fortunate to read.

I am thankful for you, and for the circumstances that have given birth to this hope that we may meet against the back of swollen skyscrapers, lit up Chicago nights.

I imagine the rush of conversation, our spilling out across the sidewalk like shiny marbles warm from children’s hands, pitched out rainbows across the concrete that pedestrians will slip on in their way through nine to five. And I wonder if this city is big enough to contain us, our girl-hearts, our ordinary freckles, the wings we hide under the thick sweaters of low resolution film. I imagine us infinite then.

I imagine us.

And so I write this down, and hope the act of belief is enough to make it so. Hope that car rides and currency, and far away places I have yet to go, are not insurmountable distances for two new friends to travel, to discover what I think we have known all along, that we are really just two old souls pulled together by the fate that is our love of words.

So between the Great Lakes,
The Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie,
The living lighted skyscrapers stand,
Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow,
streamers of smoke and silver,
parallelograms of night watchmen,
Singing a soft moaning song: I am a child, a belonging
Carl Sandburg

I am going to Chicago.

I am going to stand before you and ask for you to love me, with my hair all tangled in knots, and my palms sweaty. I will be all legs and wineglasses, name tags I’ll have to squint to read from across a room because the children have broken my glasses. My children, who will wait at home while I shrug off the role of mother, quietly place it in my breast pocket, and become what has, up until now, been only longing…
                                           this dream of being a writer.

I am going to Chicago to claim it. 
I hope to see you all there.