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.*