after reflection and an evening where the energy is rushing in my head like waves crashing jagged cliffs, i'll clean out some more of my mental closet of private thoughts.

if people are drunk, i seem to make them drunker if i'm in one of my moods. i'm usually sober around people because i only seem to be able to enjoy alcohol during specific celebratory times. otherwise, if the circumstances aren't exactly right, my body tends to reject alcohol. but if i'm in a more magnetic mood, i seem to make sober people act a little drunk and drunk people act like my new best friend. but when i'm drunk in a situation where the universe has kind of allowed me a night off to be myself, it turns into a bacchus. i'm pretty convinced that if i were completely unleashed, i could start the best orgy known to modern history. well...maybe that's a little hyperbolic, but i'm sure it would come as a pleasant surprise to many. but i figure, if it didn't happen on my birthday on saturday, then it's probably never meant to be.

people shouldn't read too much into me because for all my evasiveness, i'm honest. i always said that being honest and being straightforward are not linked. i'm not straightforward. but i'm quite honest. if i'm evasive, it's because you haven't earned my trust yet in understanding certain aspects of me, or because i don't like hurting feelings so i always try to say the most positive or nice thing when connecting with people i like. but if given a free-for-all or a safe space, i will tell you the blunt, bare-bones truth whether you're prepared for it or not. i haven't yet figured out if this is a good thing or a bad thing that happens, because people react in dramatically different ways.

maybe i did get really sick of taking care of my family emotionally yet feeling that my efforts were invisible and unappreciated. and for years, i've been cooping up this feeling that for how incredibly, angelically good i've had to be in all these years, all the patience and maturity and self-sufficiency...all the sacrifice and humility...it was a choice made somewhere in the fiber of wherever my soul exists at an age when most kids are only aware of the sun and that they feel good with the sun. i dedicated myself to focus, that whenever presented with a fork in the road, i would always take the road that would make me stronger even if it broke more sensitive parts of me that take longer to mend, because people depended on me. sometimes i get irritated with people who think i'm a good person, like good is a black-and-white trait a person's born with not that i actually consciously decided that i didn't want to be "not good" and that i could just as equally be very bad. i don't think all people are born good. i think some people work harder at it, and in doing so, are also carrying a shadow side that needs to be accepted and expressed. people don't understand shadows but sometimes its power outputs in the positive as well. sometimes if you give it enough room, you'll find that it's an ally that's possibly even more powerful than more superficial graces.

i created an energy storm last night. i made it noisier than destructive and it nearly destroyed me to see him hurt so much. i found myself reaching into the darkest of night inside me, to be so cruel and say these things that i didn't understand but that i felt were the blunt truth within him, to drag out things i hadn't seen any proof existed, to sit on his greatest pain and recreate it for him until it broke my heart more pathetically than any humiliation i've ever endured, so that i could bring out his insides and therefore, mine. i had to lose him completely until there was no more hope, before i bent my head in truce and asked for forgiveness, bringing an energy that calmed the storm and brought rain. and then he realized that none of it was real and i've never seen a man so relieved. i was relieved it was okay.

he woke me up to tell me he was dreaming of being chased by nazi's with scars on their faces. i couldn't fully wake up so i just told him he needed to confront them. he told me his dream really scared him and kept going for a long time, but i was stuck too deeply in my own so i wrapped my arm around him in a protective way so he could sleep against me and said again, you need to confront them.

i asked him in the morning about his dream. he said it was scary. he had a similar dream when we'd gone through a similar exercise in england. i asked him if he knew how to control his dreams. he said no, like it was a silly thing to say because it's not possible. i told him that i used to drown in my sleep until i made the discovery that i could decide that i could breath underwater and then do it. i told him that this morning, i'd had a dream that i was supposed to go with him to the airport, but i'd dropped some friends off in a taxi but the area didn't have any traffic to catch a taxi back. i didn't have my cellphone on me either so i realized he wouldn't be able to find me and i would miss saying goodbye to him. this filled me with incredible anxiety. i was running around looking for a taxi realizing that he had to leave for the airport in a few minutes and the car ride alone to my place was over 30 minutes...making the situation impossible. then i remembered that i make the rules so i can change them. i decided in my dream that i wanted everything to stop and i would teleport myself home so we could see each other. i remembered that i could change the rules in this reality. then my cellphone rang (i was still in this deserted neighborhood with no taxis) and it was him (remember i also didn't have a cellphone earlier). he asked me, where are you? i said, at home. and i looked around, and i was at home. as i was explaining the dream, i realized i could have decided that he wasn't leaving if that would have given me less anxiety in the dream, but i don't think this ability is that skilled yet. in response, he told me that at one point, he demanded one nazi to get out and he didn't look like he was going to, but somehow he made the nazi leave. i asked him to repeat the story just to verify it. it sounds like he's starting to change inside.

later, i found written on the shower door, i love you more now. i felt relieved to know i hadn't mortally wounded him emotionally. i know my shadow side can be a difficult encounter but i'm grateful when people do understand the intentions.

so i was finally alone tonight. waiting for the moon. then a little miracle happened. i feel good. i looked out my bedroom window and found my temple reflected through my bedroom window, which is on the other side of the house. i'm facing away from the temple yet it'd managed to reflect itself off a window in the opposite building, coming down into my bedroom, at an angle in which you can only see it from the spot in which i read tarot.

i was curious at first them dumbfounded. even if this reflection is a frequent occurrence and not a part of this solstice moon-mercury energy tonight, then i haven't noticed it in the 8 years i've lived in this place and sat in that spot looking out the window.

there was my temple in miniature, the structure i spent hours at night staring at and communing with, sitting in my window looking down on my spot like a ghost.

i haven't spread my cards for months. not since i looked at them individually after i first met david. but i did a spread while looking at the temple reflection because i felt like that was what i was supposed to do.

and then i knew. center of it all...the message...was the tower.

the one card i'd been talking about lately.

this may be good, this may be bad. but i have to be prepared and take my challenges as they come. the tower is the tower that builds strength. either i just had a fork in the road, or i've got one coming up. but all my intuitions are right...my life is changing. things that don't belong in my life will come crumbling down. now it's just a matter of seeing what falls.

i do have to say this though. earthquakes. weird shit going on with earthquakes. i woke up to an earthquake in taiwan. everyone's been freaked about them since the one in china. this quake was a mid-sized one but it lasted a long time, like a ghost shaking our bed just daring us to be scared. my mom woke up panicked and said, julia, it's an earthquake. i refused to wake up and said really indifferently, yeah i know. rolled over, went back to sleep because i knew the earthquake could never hurt us. she went back to sleep. two days later, she was reading a newspaper and she asked me if i'd known there'd been an earthquake the other night. i said she'd even woken up and talked to me but she didn't remember. i'm glad it hadn't scared her. but the feeling of earthquakes is keeping me away from san francisco right now.

there's something else i discovered this week. that little game i play with figuring out where i'm going to eat?

i kept talking about a handful of restaurants i wanted to take david to over the week. before each meal, i would name off a few and ask him which one he wanted to go to. he would keep trying to throw it back on me and i would just respond firmly, "you're the guest." the thing was, whichever restaurant he would pick, was already the restaurant i'd seen us eating at when i thought about where i saw us that night. it got to the point where the last meal, i could see the place where i thought we would be eating, but i didn't mention it in the list of options. yet after some hesitation, he tentatively asked if it was okay if we went there. so then this is confirmed somewhat objectively. which remains, the chicken and the egg argument. am i projecting a reality of a future event/setting and therefore, it comes real? or am i actually picking up on an event in a highly likely future? am i an active projector, or just a passive observer?