I can't really keep plants alive. I bring them into my home with the promise of light and water, cool from the faucet, and an easy place to shine. I have visions of green geranium leaves crawling like sunbeams, and cushiony aloes, plump with medicine, and red pots teeming with herbs whose aromas battle one another for space in the air.
But I can't really keep plants alive.
I smother them at first. A helicopter mom, hovering and feeding and anxious. I fear they will suffer thirst, and so I make them drink. I am proud because they don't have to ask. It works for the cats- they love me most in the moments before they feel a meow might be necessary. But if anything is more fickle than a cat, it's cilantro, and I can't really keep plants alive.
I move from over-attention to near neglect, wounded from rejection. I avert my eyes when I walk by them. They have asked me for space. But if there is anything more fickle than a cat, it is cilantro, and they are wounded as well. Like a girl who just broke up with a boy so he might care more, their heads hang low and moping. Their fingers curl into delicate fists, for sadness and not for fighting. I bet they'd weep if they had water enough for tears.
Tough love does not work for plants, however. And I can't really keep plants alive.
Thursday, July 6, 2017
Saturday, May 13, 2017
When I Left
On May 24th, 2005, I left everything for everything. I did not do it responsibly, or with kindness. I left a wake. I told everyone I knew and loved that I would see them in August, and then boarded a big plane to a tiny island. I didn´t know it was a lie at the time, but I think I´d hoped it was. August came and went, humid and on fire. It would be November, and November would be a round trip back to the islands. I had been on the ground in Colorado for just long enough to pack a Goodwill suitcase with all the home I thought I would need, and that was not even enough to fill it.
My sister moved me out of my college house. It was up to my roommates to find a replacement. I would not see my friends and a family until the following August- a full year later than I had promised. Even then, I would never really return.
I traipsed around the Caribbean, carefree and tanned, and my friends graduated. And my friends got married. And my friends had children. And my mother missed me the whole time.
It wasn't romantic, what I did. Nor daring, nor brave, nor particularly interesting at its core. It wasn´t about being a wild girl who needed to chase the wind, and it wasn´t about some Eat Pray Love journey to self discovery. It was selfish, and reckless, and cruel. With no regard for the hearts I left behind, it was abandonment.
I needed to leave. That became obvious the second I realized I could. But the callousness with which I left has plagued me in the decade since, skewing my perception of home, hitting a reset button on many of the people and places that had been sacred.
The first time I ever checked to see if the grass was greener, it was. I´m not sure you can ever recover from that. Instead, you wonder and wander, only recognizing anything that felt like home after you´ve left it, constantly imagining that it might be better somewhere else.
Being on the Narnia side of the wardrobe has served me well for the most part. I stretched my arms to fit the whole wide world inside, and they were almost big enough. I have found wanderlust to be a dressed up way to assume that the best part of that wide world is the part you have not yet seen.
And I´m not sure that´s true.
My sister moved me out of my college house. It was up to my roommates to find a replacement. I would not see my friends and a family until the following August- a full year later than I had promised. Even then, I would never really return.
I traipsed around the Caribbean, carefree and tanned, and my friends graduated. And my friends got married. And my friends had children. And my mother missed me the whole time.
It wasn't romantic, what I did. Nor daring, nor brave, nor particularly interesting at its core. It wasn´t about being a wild girl who needed to chase the wind, and it wasn´t about some Eat Pray Love journey to self discovery. It was selfish, and reckless, and cruel. With no regard for the hearts I left behind, it was abandonment.
I needed to leave. That became obvious the second I realized I could. But the callousness with which I left has plagued me in the decade since, skewing my perception of home, hitting a reset button on many of the people and places that had been sacred.
The first time I ever checked to see if the grass was greener, it was. I´m not sure you can ever recover from that. Instead, you wonder and wander, only recognizing anything that felt like home after you´ve left it, constantly imagining that it might be better somewhere else.
Being on the Narnia side of the wardrobe has served me well for the most part. I stretched my arms to fit the whole wide world inside, and they were almost big enough. I have found wanderlust to be a dressed up way to assume that the best part of that wide world is the part you have not yet seen.
And I´m not sure that´s true.
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Conditional Truths
This will be a very brief love affair, I know. It's quite strange to know that. To live in a place- to call a house a home at the end of a long day, to accept that the sun sets in Princeville and that avocados are more expensive at the farmers' markets because the vendors buy them at CostCo, and that the swell belongs to the North in wintertime- these are truths of my life. But only my current life. Only right now. Geographically conditional truths.
I am at a beach today. Anahola, a place of locals, which I will never be. The sand gives easily under my feet, and the sun and clouds are holding hands to create that perfect, pot of island gold beach day. The ocean does not need to roar here, and so it whispers, softening driftwood and coastline, making question marks out of edges. I am mostly alone. In my periphery I can see a few tanned, black-haired boys with spear guns slung over their shoulders, an octopus who melted into the saltwater an hour ago hanging limp from a holster.
The sand crabs are my favorite companions. I watch them, and they me, each half carefully respectful of the other's space and quiet and reverence for the Pacific. We say hello and politely move on when we find ourselves too close to one another. I like the way their clean their homes, climbing to the surface handful by handful, a careful assessment followed by a spray of sand. They leave the soft beach pocked with two-dimensional archways; grand entrances to hard-fought abodes. Sand crabs have no reason to run from the ocean. They understand it. I have seen them predict to the quarter of an inch where the surf will draw its line and sit calmly at the end of their world, winning their games of chicken. I wonder if they sleep well in their tiny homes. If they notice the constant, guttural groans of the sea in their ears.
This is a truly beautiful place. A siren island, entirely aware of its own appeal and peril. Green mountains thrust out of the ocean like spires of a church where the structure is the deity. You are meant to worship what you sit inside. It stands tall, and alone. The oldest of its brothers and sisters, Kauai does not need us.
When you are here, you sit in the very center of the earth. Everything else is a satellite- less blue, less green, less fierce, less gentle, less kind, less cruel, and so much smaller.
It is a little known fact that most of the Earth's gravity is generated by a 550 square mile island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. (The rest is generated by my grandmother, whom we can all thank for Denver's population boom.)
I have yet to see a Kauai spring, but I imagine an atmospheric rush of warm-color flowers and sweet mangoes and seafoam spray from the whales as they say their yearly goodbyes. Spring in a place without winter has to try harder, be louder. Without the swell of torch gingers, or the purple orchids, would we take notice? The desperation of Christmas lights in a tropical place is easy to spot. We feel it like we feel how far away everything is. But spring?
We are not quite friends yet, this island and I. It seems to [correctly] suspect that my allegiance lies elsewhere, and is unwilling to pester for new congregants. As much as that is the case, our fondness for each other grows every day. I am clearly the more difficult half to love in this scenario, Hawaiian islands being paradise and all, and so I do what I can to earn my keep and stay in its good graces. And while I may not pray to its spires, I can certainly understand those who do.
I will be sad when I leave here. Devastated, I would think. I will mourn the sunsets, their shades of pink folding into more shades of blue than there are words for colors. I will miss Kapaa Town. This strange, tiny place. This slow-moving mobius strip of palm trees and blue sky, and shops custom-made to mirror the aloha shirts that wander in and out, shave ice in hand.
I will close my eyes occasionally and wish that I was back here under the thick canopy, listening to birds sing to each other about how the sun springs from the sea in the mornings and sets the clouds aflame.
There is so very much to love, and so little time to love it the way it deserves. Inevitably, our exit from this pretty, green place will rush on us like a riptide, will grab us without apology and without permission, will happen so quickly that we might forget to breathe deep the eucalyptus that one.last.time.
The best any of us can hope for the ability to look straight ahead, even with the blinders off. To decide to be where we are. To love everything there is to love with ferocity and intention. To notice.
For me, I will live happily inside my geographically conditional truths for a few years. I have time to get sticky with mango juice in the springtime, and sing with the birdsong choir in a place of worship that is not my own, but madly beautiful just the same. And when it is time, I will have a squeeze of lime over velvet papaya, wake up with the curtsy of a sunrise, and find my way back to my grandmother.
I am at a beach today. Anahola, a place of locals, which I will never be. The sand gives easily under my feet, and the sun and clouds are holding hands to create that perfect, pot of island gold beach day. The ocean does not need to roar here, and so it whispers, softening driftwood and coastline, making question marks out of edges. I am mostly alone. In my periphery I can see a few tanned, black-haired boys with spear guns slung over their shoulders, an octopus who melted into the saltwater an hour ago hanging limp from a holster.
The sand crabs are my favorite companions. I watch them, and they me, each half carefully respectful of the other's space and quiet and reverence for the Pacific. We say hello and politely move on when we find ourselves too close to one another. I like the way their clean their homes, climbing to the surface handful by handful, a careful assessment followed by a spray of sand. They leave the soft beach pocked with two-dimensional archways; grand entrances to hard-fought abodes. Sand crabs have no reason to run from the ocean. They understand it. I have seen them predict to the quarter of an inch where the surf will draw its line and sit calmly at the end of their world, winning their games of chicken. I wonder if they sleep well in their tiny homes. If they notice the constant, guttural groans of the sea in their ears.
This is a truly beautiful place. A siren island, entirely aware of its own appeal and peril. Green mountains thrust out of the ocean like spires of a church where the structure is the deity. You are meant to worship what you sit inside. It stands tall, and alone. The oldest of its brothers and sisters, Kauai does not need us.
When you are here, you sit in the very center of the earth. Everything else is a satellite- less blue, less green, less fierce, less gentle, less kind, less cruel, and so much smaller.
It is a little known fact that most of the Earth's gravity is generated by a 550 square mile island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. (The rest is generated by my grandmother, whom we can all thank for Denver's population boom.)
I have yet to see a Kauai spring, but I imagine an atmospheric rush of warm-color flowers and sweet mangoes and seafoam spray from the whales as they say their yearly goodbyes. Spring in a place without winter has to try harder, be louder. Without the swell of torch gingers, or the purple orchids, would we take notice? The desperation of Christmas lights in a tropical place is easy to spot. We feel it like we feel how far away everything is. But spring?
We are not quite friends yet, this island and I. It seems to [correctly] suspect that my allegiance lies elsewhere, and is unwilling to pester for new congregants. As much as that is the case, our fondness for each other grows every day. I am clearly the more difficult half to love in this scenario, Hawaiian islands being paradise and all, and so I do what I can to earn my keep and stay in its good graces. And while I may not pray to its spires, I can certainly understand those who do.
I will be sad when I leave here. Devastated, I would think. I will mourn the sunsets, their shades of pink folding into more shades of blue than there are words for colors. I will miss Kapaa Town. This strange, tiny place. This slow-moving mobius strip of palm trees and blue sky, and shops custom-made to mirror the aloha shirts that wander in and out, shave ice in hand.
I will close my eyes occasionally and wish that I was back here under the thick canopy, listening to birds sing to each other about how the sun springs from the sea in the mornings and sets the clouds aflame.
There is so very much to love, and so little time to love it the way it deserves. Inevitably, our exit from this pretty, green place will rush on us like a riptide, will grab us without apology and without permission, will happen so quickly that we might forget to breathe deep the eucalyptus that one.last.time.
The best any of us can hope for the ability to look straight ahead, even with the blinders off. To decide to be where we are. To love everything there is to love with ferocity and intention. To notice.
For me, I will live happily inside my geographically conditional truths for a few years. I have time to get sticky with mango juice in the springtime, and sing with the birdsong choir in a place of worship that is not my own, but madly beautiful just the same. And when it is time, I will have a squeeze of lime over velvet papaya, wake up with the curtsy of a sunrise, and find my way back to my grandmother.
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
The Feeling of Feeling
I could have driven home with the windows closed last night. The sky was lavender and the air was brisk and sharp with the teeth of a December Pacific. It was windy. One hand rested on the steering wheel. The other seemed unable to stay still, instead caught in a cycle of surfing the breeze outside the window and pushing unruly hair back behind my left ear. My toes had adopted a layer of sand as their own. I could have let them stay dry. I could have packed my beach day things and driven away, skipping the barefoot run back to the shoreline, alone, watching the Hawaii clouds blush as they shed their daytime sun.
At some strange point in my beloved busy-bee city life, I stopped splashing in rain puddles, opting to watch from a window until the weather passed. Safe and dry. Grumbling with the rest of them about the inconvenience of a cool spring shower. Worried about my shoes.
I am not sure that we are aware of losing ourselves as it happens. I suppose we call it "Growing Up."
You let go of island loves. You trade the treehouse for an expensive vintage apartment downtown (It's quirky! I'll buy a yellow couch! I'm still whimsical!). You start painting your nails all one color and you begin to care what people think of you. You stop writing.
But mostly, I think, you decide that it is less important to feel. Or I did. When I say feel, I mean touch. Taste. Smell. Feel. With your heart, sure. But also with everything else. As we leave whimsy behind, we tend to neglect our senses. We neglect our human need to have some understanding of the piece of Earth we wake up with every morning.
I could tell you what Denver smells like right before snowfall. I could point to which stars you should follow to Vail in September, and then in May, and which to follow home. I could walk you to the most fragrant roses on Ogden Street (they're at 10th, across from The Kensington Apartments). I could show you the most picturesque block of 16th St at Christmastime, and where to get roasted poblanos, with their desert smoke which fuses with the air the sting your eyes and fill your breath with earth and pepper. And I know where to find the softest grass at Cheesman Park because ever so occasionally, I would kick off my shoes and remember to be a part of the world around me. I would remember how important that is.
When you lose bits of yourself, the collect like charms on a shining bracelet. They clink together, and you can see them, each one, glinting in the light every time you give them movement. They tend to be confused for memories and they cant hurt to look at, like the slow ache of old pictures.
But they live and they wait, hoping to some day catch the light. Hoping that you will move back to an island. Hoping that you will play in the rain. Hoping that you will run barefoot through fallen palm fronds and stop to inhale the ribbons of jasmine and stare at the marshmallow sunset.
Hoping that you will drive under the lavender sky, push wild-wind hair behind your left ear, sing too loudly with Billy Bragg about California stars and welcome back the feeling of feeling.
At some strange point in my beloved busy-bee city life, I stopped splashing in rain puddles, opting to watch from a window until the weather passed. Safe and dry. Grumbling with the rest of them about the inconvenience of a cool spring shower. Worried about my shoes.
I am not sure that we are aware of losing ourselves as it happens. I suppose we call it "Growing Up."
You let go of island loves. You trade the treehouse for an expensive vintage apartment downtown (It's quirky! I'll buy a yellow couch! I'm still whimsical!). You start painting your nails all one color and you begin to care what people think of you. You stop writing.
But mostly, I think, you decide that it is less important to feel. Or I did. When I say feel, I mean touch. Taste. Smell. Feel. With your heart, sure. But also with everything else. As we leave whimsy behind, we tend to neglect our senses. We neglect our human need to have some understanding of the piece of Earth we wake up with every morning.
I could tell you what Denver smells like right before snowfall. I could point to which stars you should follow to Vail in September, and then in May, and which to follow home. I could walk you to the most fragrant roses on Ogden Street (they're at 10th, across from The Kensington Apartments). I could show you the most picturesque block of 16th St at Christmastime, and where to get roasted poblanos, with their desert smoke which fuses with the air the sting your eyes and fill your breath with earth and pepper. And I know where to find the softest grass at Cheesman Park because ever so occasionally, I would kick off my shoes and remember to be a part of the world around me. I would remember how important that is.
When you lose bits of yourself, the collect like charms on a shining bracelet. They clink together, and you can see them, each one, glinting in the light every time you give them movement. They tend to be confused for memories and they cant hurt to look at, like the slow ache of old pictures.
But they live and they wait, hoping to some day catch the light. Hoping that you will move back to an island. Hoping that you will play in the rain. Hoping that you will run barefoot through fallen palm fronds and stop to inhale the ribbons of jasmine and stare at the marshmallow sunset.
Hoping that you will drive under the lavender sky, push wild-wind hair behind your left ear, sing too loudly with Billy Bragg about California stars and welcome back the feeling of feeling.
Friday, September 9, 2016
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.
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.
Friday, August 12, 2016
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.
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.
Friday, June 24, 2016
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.*
-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.*
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)