On Being Alone

  7am.  I love this time of morning.  This too early mountain hour where you can step outside and hear the Earth gentle-crack her bones awake, creaking from age and from wear and inhaling with the sun's rise.  The Colorado mountains and that yellow sun wake up at the same time and birds flutter from their rubbed eyes.  It is much too cold to be in the treeline air, and a sin before God to stay indoors on mornings like these.  So my ears will be cold, but my fingers, drag racing blue ink on lined paper, will stay warm and stay awake and they will not numb with the chill because this is why you came here, Jamie.  This is why you come every time.  Now, write.

     The sun is not up yet, and the air is still colored that frostbite blue you only see with the daybreak snow.  But the pink is bleeding through the aspens now, grabbing onto clouds to climb up and up.  What an endeavor, to paint the entire sky, and all for the pleasure of the birds whispering good morning.

     Minutes spent like this, maybe more than minutes spent any other way at all, let me inside my own head.  The hinges are stuck with rust lately, and the door is heavy with no give.   I need a crowbar day.

     The state of being alone can be a complicated one, you know.  It turns the whole world into a silver-backed mirror and it forces you to look into your own eyes.  I don't always like what I find here.  Jesus, does anyone?  But lately, I have been made to wonder what exactly I would be looking at in those glare moments, and so here I am.  Two hours of sleep, one mug of instant coffee rapidly losing its warmth, a very cold set of ears, and a pen.  Waking up and creaking with the morning.  The light, the mountains and I bidding quiet how-do-you-dos to one another, as it has been too long and we are strangers again.

     Interesting, how the sun awakens a valley.  She stretches over the curve of the Earth to brush awake the peaks farthest from her.  The foothills and the floor get to sleep in, the lucky saps.

     So, here is a thing.  Here is a thing about being alone in one of the only places where I can truly just be alone.  I think I like it.

     I read through some old journals this week.  Not from nostalgia, but from curiosity.  I write these things and then it ends.  I rarely look back.  The simple, single act of writing everything down is the introspection I need, deeming the examination of it all wholly unnecessary in that moment.  When I write, it is to build a home for all the words battling for light inside my head.  They float down and they stick to paper like snowflakes and the fight melts off.

     So, I read through years of my life.  2006, when I met that one.  2009, when I forced him to let me go.  2009, when I returned, quite broken, to my treehouses and allowed them to get close enough to dress my wounds.  When I let that island save me for the second time.  2009, Greece.  2010, heartbeats and heartbreak.  2011, that jungle gym of an island, Dominica, dripping with passion fruit, hot springs and waterfalls the blood in its veins.  And I made some of those years sit in their shelves.  The tough ones.  The ones with claws hidden inside time-softened covers.  There are words that I do not need to see again, so the clawed journals can rest.

     But I found a theme in all of them.  No matter whose heart I was tangled into, there was one theme- being alone.  And not just for a moment.  Not for a small span of time, until my hand could find another to slide into, but alone.  As if I have always suspected that I might be meant for that.  Just for that.  And I'm not sure that it's a fate so pleading for resistance.

     I do not know that I am meant for anybody.  That there is a soul somewhere, bouncing off the sides of the universe, hoping to get close enough that the magnets meet.  Hoping to be drawn to this inward, selfish girl.  This cold person who finds the most solace in a black cup of coffee against total silence.  This girl who would usually rather.just.be.alone.

     The sun is out now, and warming my hands.  But the more awake I am, the closer my words stay to my chest.

     And it isn't sad, this alone.  It is not a cry for pity, nor for affirmation that he's out there really he is you just haven't found him yet but he's looking for you just be patient.

  Is he?  Why?

     The isn't to say that I won't fall in love again.  Maybe a thousand more times.  Maybe a million.  I love being in love.  I love every stage of it, including the one where I end up here, inside myself and writing, another solitary creature waking up with the Earth, watching morning birds flutter.

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.