Writing in airplanes again...

Watching the clouds from above them almost feels like watching the ocean waves roll in. Like you could balance on the wing, arms out and eyes so open and you could dip your toe into the soft. Like you could swirl it around slowly and turn it to spun.
I wish I could get in. Sink down to my shoulders and feel the breath dense in my lungs and float. Let my fingers go. There would be nothing to grasp for, anyway.
I am looking at the lights below me like bioluminescence and it is just the same. Sparkles created by creatures I am not fated to understand, but will forever see as beautiful and confused and illuminating their own paths, sometimes interrupted by the likes of messy me, waving my arms in an attempt to float. To stay at my shoulders. To stay where it is not so hard to breathe.


I just left my soul mates. I just boarded a plane without those hearts that beat the same way mine does. I watched for as long as I could until everything looked like sky and my eyes became too tired to strain.
Oh, Maho. Filling hearts to break them.

I have always felt sad to leave these people. I am famously terrible at goodbyes. I just can't handle the question of when. I can't handle that these people are not in my every day. That I am not in theirs. It is a grave injustice and it is not one I have ever been able to accept or let go of.

And how lucky we are to be so sad. Before you can feel emptier, you have to have known what full was.
Full is a blue cup. Full is sandy speakers and a yellow floatie. Full is a family chosen for you by the stars and by the boardwalks.

But full is this, too. This feeling of being so in love with a cluster of souls that the inevitable distance between you is almost physically painful. How lucky we are that we know the true capacity a person has just to love.

A Shift.

Some days, when the sky is falling in more ways than two, and your eyelids are being pulled to your heels by the gravity that refuses to give any part of you a break these days, some days like this, you sink. Or some days, you take a bath, long and steaming, droplets forming on your tired neck and tired temples, candles playing shadow games with porcelain.

And some days, you write.

A shift is happening. It's palpable, the way you can feel a potato bug unfurl in the palm of your hand when you have given him the time to be comfortable there. When you have given him the time to trust it there.
I used to need to wobble. I would search for hollow things that I could wear down and through until their centers exposed themselves as empty. And then I could move on without even shells to discard. That girl is still here. She still floats wishes on dandelion air and she breathes through her eyes and she craves new worlds. But I am noticing, so slowly, that she is beginning to quiet down.
Two years ago, I would have scoffed at that. "You're letting go of yourself! You're letting the real world tell you who you are! THEY ARE WINNING!!"
And maybe that's true. And maybe it's not. And maybe every wave you face doesn't have to be another one that knocks you to the ground because it's ok to be more inside a life than ankle deep.


I can say that to myself without believing it, or I can believe it without saying it until I can't even tell the difference. But it's probably true, anyway.

Only the Birds

In the mountains again. It is late morning, unless you would call it afternoon, in which case I would ask you to hand me my mimosa and let me live my life.

  All is essentially silent except for the birds, stretching their vocals for an early spring. I am kept company by two woodpeckers, one of whom is fairly inept at a what I imagine to be his only job. The other, in turn, seems to be a mighty show off. 

I can hear chipmunks cracking the hopes of seeds who only wanted to grow tall, or wide. Or beautiful.

The peaks in the distance still hold snow in their arms- a passive aggressive reminder that these tree limbs, pregnant with green buds, are still fragile and at the fickle mercy of the Rocky Mountain May.  The wind blows the cold like an exclamation point just in case you had been careless enough to forget. 

Perhaps the only way to be here is alone, if for no other reason than to listen to the birds. Only the birds. 

Airport rambling

What do you write when you have nothing to say? 

Do you describe your morning? 

  It's Easter and I'm sitting at a speckled Formica tabletop in a Nashville airport diner. I am early for my flight- enough time to have two bloody Marys. One more than I actually want. My waitress is sweet. Young, with plastic plumeria earrings, and she just wished me a happy Thanksgiving. Maybe she needs these drinks more than I do. 

Do you talk about the life you're going back to? My tiny apartment waits for me- missing someone who isn't sure she belongs there. I fill that space and I live that life never feeling completely filled myself. I have realized slowly that  you never really lose yourself, even if you're numb with happy hour and netflix. Losing yourself never applies. You allow yourself to go. Whether that is growth or degeneration is anyone's guess. 

Do you write about love?

If love is needing someone and you don't think you'll need anyone, is love lost on you? 

Maybe you write about your past, but God damnit, you spend enough time on your past- do you really want to spend ink as well? As if writing about it will quench the pining. As if anything will help. So you quietly acknowledge to yourself and no one else that those are skeletons and ghosts on that hill, and it's time to let go. 

You could talk about the beautiful things.  How Nashville was perfect as you watched one of your favorite souls marry his match. How the air felt like love and the sky was blue and the trees bloomed pink and white. 

  How you'll return to Denver one month before its own petals will cloak the city steam with yellow honeysuckle. 

  

You are in love there and maybe you miss that tiny apartment and stop thinking so much, James. Just remember to look at the stars and you'll be fine.

I used to go to the sea in the mornings.

I used to go to the sea in the mornings. The early mornings, when the breakfast cooks were rubbing their tired eyes on the 50 foot journey into their open-air kitchen. When it was still tender and almost dark. I would try to walk quietly past Chateau Maho, The Fish Bowl, The Roach Motel, The Barefoot Mansion. Through the red tile kitchen and down the main boardwalk, barely able to see Whistling Cay under a struggling moon. It would nearly be sunrise by the time I got to the goat trail, so I could see the roots of soft-shade tamarind trees and those rocks I had met with knees and toes (and one time, a shoulder) in less graceful moments. It was late fall, and I had to wave my hands in front of my face to fend off the hurricane mosquitoes, fatter and somehow quicker than those creatures we knew in the spring. I could feel the night air, heavy and falling on my shoulders, as I stripped away my morning clothes from my bathing suit and stepped toe at a time into the clear water.

Aqua jogging, we called it. A totally ridiculous name for a totally therapeutic act. I preferred to run on the hill valley roads, but my knees had become pavement-sore and I needed the drunken sand to soften the impact of a quickening foot and elevating heartbeat. With the water to my chest, I would run. From one end of the still beach to the other, back and forth. There was a stingray I had named Big Bird, the biggest I have ever seen, who would shadow me more than I necessarily wanted. He came most mornings, maybe hoping for whatever sea feast I was kicking up with my rough heels as I ran. Back and forth, back and forth. Happy to wake up with the island. To get some time together and feel that St. John, Big Bird, Whistling Cay and I were closer than anyone had been to anything ever.

You are who you are.

Every time I come to the mountains, I find something I wrote the last time I was in the mountains. I have a few notebooks that travel with me to quiet places, but I can never remember which has the most empty pages. So I end up searching through old thoughts for blank lines to write new ones.

Anyway, I am in the mountains. This notebook is red and spiral-bound. It is mostly full of half-written letters to beached friends, but this is one I wrote to myself. It most interesting because I had started to lose myself and now, probably around a year later, I feel.....not that. It's hard to say that I have lost shooting stars when the reason I am in the mountains is to watch a meteor shower. You are who you are, even if you lose it for a little while.

I am happy now. In love and happy.


Every notebook leads to buried treasure.





So you sit down at your desk, and you're wearing your glasses. You didn't know that you needed those, and you wonder how many shooting stars you've missed.

And then you realize that you haven't looked at the sky since you moved to the city.

Erin's voice sounded good tonight with tree frogs in the background. It's the first familiar thing in months. You should be there, dressed in tan lines and mosquito bites with bleach stains on your best dress.

You're in your room. On a townhouse near a corner you know to be a trading post for certain unmentionable merchandise. You have walls with white panel curtains. They are not made out of sheets. And a space heater.

You stay busy. You don't have time to miss anything, and you don't have the energy to feel much. You say that you love boots, but you love bare feet more and you wonder why moving on seemed so much like the right thing.

It was the right thing. You weren't happy there anymore until the very end, when it was too late. And that might be why you felt happier. Panic happy.

This city excites you, but don't get trapped. Don't stay forever. Do not get wrapped up in the lights and the life and forget the girl with wild eyes who looked at the sky and swam in the sea at night.

You Decide to Notice

Some days, I survive only because I am caffeinated. Where the sea used to be my savior, I am now routinely rescued by the coffee bean.

And when my feet race over hot concrete on my downtown walk home, I can still feel the sunned boardwalks like a phantom pain and I'm confused for a moment- not quite sure of where I am and less sure of where I should be.

These moments, more than a year and a half after I left those boardwalks for the true last time, still happen. They still catch me off-guard. There are days when I search my floor for a bigger gap to sweep the sand into. There is no gap. There is also no sand. When I run through one of the city parks, I still dodge shadows or leaves that look like lizards, and most nights I wish to the stars for the sound of my tree frogs. I imagine these things will go away eventually. They'll fade and turn vintage. But I suppose that I'm not in any big hurry for that to happen.

On that note, in a different color, I will say this: Walking home yesterday, the air smelled like flowers. Now, I am accustomed to knowing the personality of the world surrounding me. I am used to knowing the plants, the creatures, the wind. I am used to jasmine. Aloe. Agave and frangipani. But city air doesn't smell like jasmine. No, no. City air smells very much like a city. Fried food and street steam and diesel exhaust piping out of delivery trucks. If a city smells like flowers, it is the result of a million perfumed women, struggling to walk more quickly than men in their pant suits and high heeled shoes. Right?

Maybe not.

Denver, Colorado, for the month of June and maybe July and we'll just see about August but I'll let you know, smells like flowers. Not perfume. As luck would have it, though I miss my plumeria, Capitol Hill wind carries the sweet scent of yellow honeysuckles. Honeysuckles! Past row houses and over cracked concrete, they spill from backyard fences onto rose and lavender gardens. They don't discriminate day from night like those snotty jasmine blooms. They are as fragrant in the middle of a cloudless Tuesday as they are in the cool dark. I love them. And I needed that.




I thought St. John gave me flowers, but what it actually gave me was the heart to notice them.

In related news, there are night frogs in Cheesman Park.