This is Hard

I want you to know something.  I want you to know something, and I want to be the one to say it to you and probably to myself.  I want to say something.

This, friends, is hard.  This instagram life, ripe with mangoes and the tan lines I have spent so many years chasing, with its crash-wave soundtrack and sea foam lightness and the grip a green coastline has on your eyes, this is hard.

Except for a single handsome gentleman, gray in the hair and occasionally long in the face at the discovery that perfection is not made with handles for holding, even when framed in palm trees and scented like plumeria, I am a literal ocean away from every person I have ever loved.  I am a literal ocean away from every person I have even just barely liked.  After living in a beautiful spiderweb of acquaintances and friends and family and even those who defy labels, I am spending my days sanding away the city shine so I do not stand out as a stranger in a web that is not my own.   I was granted a fresh start in a beautiful place, which is a thing I did not ask for.  It's a thing I have asked for before, and so I know its colors and I know its curves.  I know how to navigate wishes granted, but I find myself in a world of left turns now, unable to distinguish the edges from the center.

So this is hard.

I line the walls with happy using seawater paste.  I am grateful for the wide-eyed geckos who keep me company in moments that I wait for him, my only human, to get home from a job more difficult than either of us was prepared for because when you sell paradise to people who wait their entire lives for it, there are no second chances and there is no room for mistakes.  I worship birdsong in the mornings, an altar familiar to me.  I touch leaves and smell petals and work to love this place as a place that will certainly end up becoming part of me, a task easier for most than it has been for me so far.  I inhale ginger lily wind and thank the island for reminding me of the things in life I hold sacred.

But I am alone in this.
   
Apartment lights twinkle like stars on the hillside, but they do not know me and I am not yet welcome.

So this is hard.

I am learning two new people.  I am learning him, and the way he leaves his shoes in front of the door and the way he loads the dishwasher and the way he breathes in and then out when he sees open arms after a difficult day.  I am learning myself.  The way I resent giving up my yellow couch for two black ones and the way I miss the selfishness of a life lived alone, and the way I need him to melt into when the sky falls down.

We are learning all of those things you think you already know about a person.  We are doing it without training wheels in a life we are careful to project as enviable in a place is that is supposed to be perfect.

So this is hard.

I am sitting on a beach now.  The waves are using their inside voices, and I am barely out of the reach of a palm frond shadow, playing its fingers to play with the breeze.  I took a picture of this, which I will not need to edit.  I will use my seawater paste and buff it to a shine with gentle white sand.  Tonight, I will make dinner with him.  A kind man.  Patient and sweet, with edges just rough enough to hold onto.  A man I am still desperately in love with, who leaves his shoes in front of the door.  I will wish that we could meet friends for a drink and be a little sad and watch a Hawaiian sunset to numb the pain.  I will feel ridiculous for being in any sort of pain at all.

I will live this mystery island until I understand it, and I will go to work selling paradise as if it is made of magic.

And it is magic.  But it's also real life.  And this is hard.

Morning Number One

Back in a place with morning rain.  I am looking at a rainbow, and at hibiscus petals leaden and sulking with the wet dawn.

Tropical mornings.  I remember this.  I worshipped this more than any God I have ever been introduced to.
 
   Strange how the city falls off your shoulders.  No room for it with all the new freckles, and it gives up quickly in the light of who it knows you to really be.  All of the things I have been gripping onto are all of the things I do not actually need.

We convince ourselves of so much.  That we need our noise-cancelling headphones.  That our heartbeats don't count if they're not racing.  We buy blackout curtains so the city doesn't get to tell us when to wake up.  All at once reveling in overstimulation, and desperately trying to escape it.

And yet here I sit, awake with the Pacific sun, with my noise-cancelling headphones hung carelessly around my neck.

Happily Moving Backwards

These thoughts are unfinished, and I am going to leave them unfinished as that is how they came to me and also how they left.  A progression in paragraphs, spanning the mind splatter of the last two months.

-Sometime in May:
So, I'm looking around my apartment.  I have lived alone in this tiny piece of the city for three years now.  Ok, that's untrue.  It has not been three years uninterrupted, and I can see the cats side-eye me, insulted, and so I have not lived alone for three years, but I will run this sentence ragged and say that I have lived here alone for three years.
     I love these walls.  I have studied them.  I have asked them about their cracks and I have shown them mine and we have laughed together at the impermanence of it all.  Walls like this- the walls which have held me together in moments when I have not been sure that my skin could do it alone-walls like this are friends.
     The walls are wearing their boxing gloves, and the tattered, bargain gift box which holds my future it wearing its own.  This is over now.  How are we ever ready?

Some Other Time in May:
 Oh, I feel those words with claws out.  The page is scratched with wine fingers, the words cut into shanks as if the life I'm living is a prison from which I'm not sure I even want to escape.  Stockholm Syndrome, I suppose.
    When I wrote that, as I so sharply pointed out, I was alone in my tiny apartment.  My tiny, pretty, messy apartment.  My first, actually.  These three years have been my first three alone.  In relationships and rather cruelly back out of them, sure, but alone.  Getting to know who I am inside the world most people live in, and most of the time totally unconvinced of the merit of it all.  And when I cried at the loss of my tree frogs, this apartment tried to soothe me with the night sounds of a city.  When I grappled with buying a hammock stand instead of a couch, this apartment cradled my question marks as the furniture was delivered and I was lurched into a life that could not be packed into flat rate boxes.  This apartment has forgiven me for every time I have added my own cracks to the walls.

I do not know how to write about this.  I have been sitting on my bed for 5 hours doing everything but writing about this because I do not know how to write about this.  This life that I have built is over.  This life right now, with the scarred walls of my heartbeat apartment and my creaky hardwood floors, loud with the heaviness of 87 years of footsteps and the dishes piled in the sink because my cats do not require me to answer for them.  This is over.  And when I walk out of this door for the last time, I will cut out a piece of my heart and pull up a floorboard to place it in and I will thank these walls for keeping it safe in years past and in years coming.  If I could fold this room up and put it in my pocket, then I would take it with me wherever I went.  I would open it in private moments and let it stretch its arms.  And then I would take each tile and gingerly put it back into my pocket and grin as I hear them clink together, because they are my home and I am theirs.


Sometime in June:

Go, girl.  You can stop now.  You decided to be a city soul in a concrete life and it never really worked, did it?  You found happiness here, but it was hollow and it has worn through like the soles of your busy shoes, and this life will make shadows of people who were solid once.

Sometime later in June:

The lilacs are helping, but lilacs are captive and I need something wild like a mangrove or a blackberry bramble.  I appreciate lilacs.  I do not identify with lilacs.

I feel like I need to escape my own skin.  It is covered in city soot and I am just not sure that city water can get rid of it.  This has not been a dark tunnel, so I am not looking for a light at the end.  But I suppose that I am looking for the end just the same.


Annnnd even later in June:
     I walked through this life happy and proud, eyes squinting in the sun.  I wanted to learn it.  I wanted, after years of sweet lulling, to run hard on painted ground.  To live under neon.  To leave the slow stars behind me and climb to the top of a steel ladder so I could breathe at a faster pace.  I wanted to live with intention.  With ferocity.  I wanted to know that I could be more than a sand-comber, solemn with dreams of everything else the earth had to offer.  So much more than these beaches.  These tired beaches with their whisper tides and ghost crabs and bad-posture palm trees.
   Paradise, yes.
  But so.  Very. Slow.
And I did it.  I ran hard and I ran fast and I scraped off the mermaid scales and lost my voice so I could walk.


It seems that I have not quite finished with June:

The Gods of ocean and hills are jealous siblings, getting possessive when you spend more time speaking with only one.  The mountain God, she is gentle.  She soothes with birdsong and birch trees and low-growing flowers which breathe scent into the air like dandelion fluff.  She is subtle and she whispers into your ear, "Stay.  Stay here with me.  The birds will wake you in the morning for tea and the columbine wind will sing you to sleep."
     She is drowned by her brother.  Who can ignore the pull of the sea?  He shouts and he causes a scene and he plays no games.  "I am here," he says, "I am here and you know I am here and I need you more."
So it is.

I would like to refuse, as a creature of the earth, to live in any place where one can sleep in and not miss a thing.  How pitiful the sun is in a cityscape.  A lion in a cage.  What injustice.
     We should love feeling small and unworthy.  We should open our eyes and marvel at the stars that would be here even if we were not.  Men did not do this.  This green expanse..  These aspen trees with leaves like tambourine bells.  These creatures playing tag in the air.  All of this is better than we are, and more.  We are meant to be a part of it.  And to marvel.
   And I love to wake up this way, at 5am when birds chirp more urgently than the alarm on my smartphone, feeling like we all waste the sun when it is held captive by gray buildings.
     I think we all ache to wake up like this.  We come to these places to escape.  To vacation.  To get away.  And though I have managed  to stifle it, I hold true and sacred that we should not live a life we feel we need to escape from.
        It has been years since I said that.  Hello, old friend.
     I don't mean to sound snobbish.  Maybe for some, the siren song of the morning is an actual siren. Maybe for some, God is in the city and he inhales and exhales with the traffic lights and the sun is not in a cage, but uses skyscraper mirrors to shine so you can see it even if you are standing in a shadow.
Maybe.
But I've been hanging out with the city sun for a while now, and even the whisper of the mountains speaks to me more loudly.



There it is.  The brain scatter of a life changed quickly from one thing to another, and then back.  Hopefully spending some quality time in an island hammock will help to seal thoughts.




*This is a long post.  It is not particularly cohesive.  The writing is not sensible.  It meanders.  I haven't had one story to tell lately, so I have been trying to grind them all together.  Apologies.*

Words About No Words

I haven't been writing lately.  And I blame time, or lack thereof.  I blame this city, with apartments lit up like pretend stars and the quick-move pace of a life where I can't quite catch my breath.  I blame work.  The career that I am still inside of, and how I feel like the room I thought was a trap had a treadmill installed so I will feel like I'm moving.  If only I had windows so  I could tell the difference....
     I also blame something a little more concerning.  Sandwiched by excuses of the Earth simply revolving too quickly is this small itch that my nails are too manicured to scratch.

"I have nothing to say."

       i have nothing to say.

     About a week ago, I read a quote about writing.  Forgive me for not being able to recite this exactly, and I don't remember who wrote it, but it is something like this: "All writers are desperate.  When you stop being desperate, you stop being a writer."
     So what does that mean, then, when the ache in my fingers, born of heart-pressure pumping, seems to have subsided?  Am I not desperate enough to place pretty words all in a row?  Am I not sad enough?  Do I not pine enough, as the salt water has finally evaporated and allowed me to breathe?  Am I not writhing around enough, looking for a way to escape my own skin?



Do I need to be?

   What was I so desperate for before this?  The answer is a cloud, I suppose.  Floating high and just as solid.  And to say that the answer is something, that the answer is anything at all, means maybe I have dulled my senses and rounded my corners and have stopped needing pretty words.  That I have calmed the heart-pressure.  That I decided somewhere along the way not to be among the desperate.

Desperation, all of its negative connotations intact, is the inability to escape feeling. It is the total envelopment of a person into his or her own heart without permission.  And so desperation is the ache of captivity. Sometimes, it is the ache of a love swell, sweet and bursting.  Sometimes, desperation is the state of being so infatuated with this round world that shadows are just the light of negative film strips.  This breed splits seams with words jumping at the chance to live on paper.
    And sometimes, desperation is a sadness unable to hold itself together, so it gathers at the downturned corners of blue eyes and runs away, quickly, and without apology, falling into poems and creating crystals of prose.
    Or, scariest of all, it is the boulder weight of absolutely nothing.  It is the scarcity of pressure.  It is the need for a need to escape, or a want for sadness making its getaway,  The absence of feeling is as desperate as the most shattered of irreparable broken hearts.
    And that is the one which renders ink useless and forces hungry pages to stay starved.  A tree rowing into knots, getting in the way of its own sun.

  And I guess I will resign, for now, to that totally uninteresting state of being entirely unable to feed hungry pages.

And attempt to write about why I cannot seem to write.