Y is for Yes, Yardstick, Young

When I get my first tattoo—it’s bound to happen, don’t you think?—this is what I want to get, like Gluten-Free Girl—simply one word, the word “yes.”

Yes to life.

Yes to love.

Yes to listening.

Yes to looking.

Yes to a walk in the rain with a dog that smells.

Yes to trying new vegan recipes when 20 people you suspect enjoy gnawing raw goat bones in their spare time are coming over for dinner.

Yes to hot gingerbread with that yellow curd sauce stuff on it. Ooh, ooh, yes to lemon bars.

Yes to coming out of hiding.

And yes to making notes on little index cards for when I’m older (like next month) and can’t remember what Emma and Tess said that thrilled me so.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

“Yes, and” rather than “yes, but.”

Yes.

“No” is so reductive (and so seductive) and makes for deep lines where rain gets stuck at the end of each eyebrow. “Yes” is so fantastically generative and expansive, planing faces smooth like that Kiehl’s crème that I bought for a trillion dollars to reduce marionette lines because those salespeople in crisp white coats in a crisp white store were so…antiseptically lovely, like I was in a lab experiment and needed to do my part. What does saying “yes” to life every single moment look like? Is it exhausting or exhilarating?

From this past April’s poemapalooza on 37days, a poem I love that gets at “yes”:

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

-Kaylin Haught

Y is also for yardstick, a reminder of how we measure ourselves by the wrong ones.

And don’t forget that Y is for young, too:

Young

A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling over me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother's window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father's window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman's yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

-Anne Sexton  

On second thought, tattoos seem painful—are they? Perhaps I’ll create my “yes’ every morning in some fantastic mystical ceremony involving wacky yoga positions, some piped-in Enya or Flaming Lips (depending on mood), my new favorite Earl Grey tea in real muslin tea bags (forgive me: “sachets mousseline”) sent by my friends Lora and David, a ceremony that each morning will be completed by writing three small letters on my arm with one of my favorite objects, a permanent black Sharpie.

What I’m telling you is

Yes Yes Yes.

Yes. Not maybe, not when I have more money or when it stops raining or when I feel better or when I’m well-rested or when my manuscript is accepted or when my planets are in alignment, but simply, wildly, yes.

[photos from the fabulous Gluten-Free Girl whose recent description of her wedding will make you want to forever walk toward a sign with "yes" on it]