I read with every broken heart we should become more adventurous.

I look around at the women seated at tables near me and wonder what it would be like to have another life. To have clean hair, maybe brushed into soft lines that rest on my neck or braided into a shiny rope down my back. To have unwrinkled sweaters, striped and boat-necked. To be seated across from a boyfriend, a father, a son. I prick the surface of the bundle of grapes on my plate with my fork tines, relishing the moment before the skin breaks. Stretch, swell, burst. It's been a year and a half of sitting alone in cafes and wondering when the purpose of my California life would show itself. I would search for symbolism in the friendships that wouldn't seem to form, in the workload that often felt like a sack of rocks on my chest as I attempted sleep. Most of all, I searched during the long, strenuous calls with the person I called my boyfriend, whose dead silences reaffirmed my pitted feelings of isolation. Six months of staring intently at the foam lacing in my empty coffee mugs.


Today as I open my most recent library rental, a foreign piece of paper flutters from it's pages like a dazed moth. Turning over it's freckled surface, I read the words, "Thank you for contributing to The Yellow Bird Project." Yellow Bird: a reminder of words from a folk singer's voice from my youth, catharsis for my first heartbreak. I smile inwardly at this "fateful" nod to adolescent resilience. Of course I know that it's silly to assign cosmic significance to ordinary events, but on the eve on my next great adventure, I can't help but take comfort in these two smiling words.

When the marine layer dissolves at 6 pm, my view from the edge of the world comes back into focus. The sun is setting and the beach is cloaked in a nostalgic, golden glow. A group of elderly folks cluster behind me in chairs, flanked by baskets brimming with crusty breads and jarred olives. To my left a trio of women swirl glasses of wine between nimble fingers, reaching towards colorful cubes of cheese between swallows. I imagine they were chopped on wooden boards in someone's light-filled kitchen, the kind with perpetually open windows and the lingering smell of breakfast. In this small vignette of life, we've all gathered to take pleasure in this ordinary miracle. To feel a moisture-dotted breeze on our skin and be reminded that life is sometimes sweet among the salty.  

When you look closely enough in the faces of others, you’ll realize that you’re surrounded by the afflicted. It took 23 years to realize this, and a glass-paned house that opened it's panorama of the Pacific. My eyelashes focused, held, shutter-clicked.  Here I could point my finger down at a dark spot on the gently undulating surface of the water and say, "look, a kelp forest." From these bruisings, these vulnerabilities, intimacy is born. 

In the vein of "How To Be Good," a bulleted list of these valuable pangs in my heart:

- Stand in the shallow ocean foam and cry for every unresolved issue in your flight from Arizona. Look out into the grey waves and wonder what it would be like to disappear into their silver creases.

- Stand on a wooden deck at night and search for that warming comfort in the dark stain of Catalina Island on the horizon, the lit windows of houses in Laguna Beach, and the melodic depth of the frog and insect chatter. Fight the feeling that this may be your last appearance here. 

- Spend July 4th on a deserted beach, allowing the darkness to swallow and draw you further into the microscopic pyrotechnics from a spot on the shore miles away. 

- Stomp around in a pair of withering cowboy boots, despite the pitying stares of those who own a (self-appointed) sense of sophistication.

- As Christmas nears, stare up at a glittering tree a with a hollowness that you do not recognize.

- Exhaust many with sadness-filled silences.

- After a brief visit home for Christmas day, resist the urge to be dragged kicking and screaming onto the return flight to California.

- Spend New Year's eve in a Buddhist meditation class. Feel warm and content for the first time in months, and be grateful for bare feet and rhythmic chants as you hear fireworks and drunken yells in the distance.

- Visit San Francisco for the first time with college friends. Drink up the constant costume changes, fly-by sightseeing, girlish gossip, and drunken stupors like an addict starved. 

- Make your first set of friends and attempt to get to know them in the dark, thumping chaos of a nightclub. Make much more progress at home with wine and conversations about drag queens. 

- Foolishly allow someone to lay it on thick. Lay there, incredulous, as he references his past in selfish detail. 

- Greet a sweet cousin at the airport. Tepidly take on her suggestion of ocean kayaking, but feel incredibly alive as you speed through the marina past sleeping sea lions and expensive boats with idiotic names. 

- Become less concerned about yourself and much more about the well-being of others.

- Spend your second July 4th in a much dreamier state. Walk with your trio of beautiful souls on thick sand and watch fireworks pop and explode among the stars and the ocean's dull roar. 

- Ferociously hug a beloved soulmate at the airport, and take your first road trip up the California coast. Stop and admire crustaceans in Pismo Beach, shell chandeliers in Monterey, and terror in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. 

- Spend the early hours of a tumultuous night bundled up in the rec room of a hostel, comforting your dear one after a devastating breakup. 

- Examine what it means to be young and full of incredibly volatile feelings. Use this as an excuse for perpetually dirty hair and paint-stained dresses.

- Spend the night drinking wine and swimming under the quiet Montecito moon.

- Feel as raw as a peeled-grape and free of past indignations for the first time in awhile. 

- Detect a familiar, subterranean understanding and urge to move forward. 

Arizona, I am ready for you.

"If you bend your back swirl and twist the spine maybe perhaps you will grow new veins, teeth and eyes." 

-Dorothy Iana Adjovu (Rest in peace, you sweet girl.)

My heart has thawed and continues to beat.

1 year on the golden coast and I'm sensing an end to the state of things. Excuse me for a moment while I gather my words for a more poignant explanation on my lessons in self-love and forgiveness.

...and the truth is I’ve been dreaming of some tired tranquil place
where the weather won’t get trapped inside my bones
and if all these years of searching find one sympathetic face
then it's there I'll plant these seeds and make my home.

Doldrums

There's a series of California highways, freeways, driveways, lined in palm and succulent. They all carry ambiguously numerical names; 101, 225, 5, 154, and they fly like flecks of spit from the mouths of the aesthetically elect. These twinkling fuckers. Someone always seems to have a powder to sprinkle on food to suppress my appetite, some pointed factorial on which fruits have a high sugar content, a euphemism to describe what's wrong with the generously-applied curves of my body, and a meticulous record of my outfit repeats and offenses. And I drink it all in. I let my odometer teeter dangerously close to empty while I merge from one stretch of pavement to the next; 101, 225, 5, 154. I sit in reclining chairs and let a nimble blonde paint my hair the color of clotted blood. A color that, when rinsed from my hair, drains in lazy strains down the sink and leaves behind an inky black that extends to my roots. I subject my body to muscle-shuddering exercises that leave me nauseous and momentarily blinded. I see a dog shit on the sidewalk, staring at me the entire time. I learn that a smiling acquaintance has passed away. 

Just like an amnesiac trying to get my senses back

My right foot slips on an algae-wet rock in the mountains of Cold Creek and my equilibrium tilts; the world of my body ripping from it's axis and into an abrasive rock face. Bruises have already begun to pigment themselves across my legs, deepening like kelp forests on the ocean's surface. Lately it has felt like anyone who even slightly acknowledges me is a possible paramour, and my current interest is laughing at my clumsy attempt to fit into his outdoorsy world. I am struck by the absence of embarrassment as I rise, tepid, back onto my feet. What's another dismissal?

Sometimes I feel like Homer's Hector; dead and being dragged by the ankles through the sodden detritus of someone else's past. Covered in dust that sweetly conceals my identifying features, my body is a blank screen for you to project your expectations of a young female. Every one of these bleak-fucking interactions leaves me feeling even more empty than the one before it. In what seems to be a recurring trend, I will spend long stretches of time looking at myself in the mirror afterwards. Having crept through the inky darkness to my bedroom, I will make sure the rest of the house is awash with it's sleeping sighs. In the dreary fluorescence, I inspect my pores, my raw lips, my liquid irises, the crumbling dregs of my eyeliner that still clings to my lashes. I am the trodden version of my previous self. Although I still look like a human, I feel like a girl aggrieved. I've been pulling this late night routine since I was old enough to be unsupervised, and the years are starting to show themselves. 

I've been contemplating a string of loose remarks once made to me by my favorite yoga teacher. He talked about how our shape is always changing. Not just our bodies, but our essence. He said that we should always shift to accommodate the space our body wants to create; a point that he made very clear by placing his hands on my hips and shifting my bones into painfully new territory. Instead of focusing on the pain of the unfamiliar, he said we should relish in the deep stretch-- the benefit of the discovery. Focusing on what we hate about our bodies denies us the opportunity to appreciate what we like about our souls. 

I was reminded of those words today after standing my tired legs, blooming with bruises, on top of a rock and staring from my spot on the mountainside to the small town below, across the highway and into the vastness of the ocean. Every part of me is so tender, exposed, deepening my stretch and searching painfully for the payoff. Why am I in California? Why am I setting off on hikes with people I don't know, revealing my sense of humor far before I can be sure it's acceptable? I so deeply crave a night when understanding suddenly strikes me, shaking me from sleep the way my nightmares so often do.

A life in transit.

"Wouldn't it be nice to be done with it? To be done with sex and longing? Mitchell could almost imagine pulling it off, sitting on a bridge at night with the Seine flowing by. He looked up at all of the lighted windows along the river's arc. He thought of all the people going to sleep or reading or listening to music, rising just above the rooftops, he tried to feel, to vibrate among, all those million tremulous souls. He was sick of craving, of wanting, of hoping, of losing."

Into the Sands

The incendiary crackle, simmer, BOOM of thunder rattles my apartment, sending teacups crashing to the ground, their dregs spilling out across the floor in ancient tongues. Letters pinned to the wall flutter as if whispered to intimately, and terror vibrates from my sternum, tearing me from sleep. I am split between the impulse to run, nightdress fluttering, to my parents bedroom and bury my head between them in that comforting, sleepy warmth, and to turn and cling to whichever ex-love I've conjured to the surface in my dreams. Reality cuts itself into my aortic palpitations and I'm reminded that I am a woman now. I am naked, twenty-three, and alone amongst a mountainous tangle of bed sheets and rational fears.

sand-caked sensibilities

"-- they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns." -Jeffrey Eugenides


























The sun is setting on the day I find this photograph. The air is light, warm, and intimate from this year's first spring blush, and it longs to be shared with a lover or spent watching children tumbling in the frothy waves. All normal beach sounds are hushed as the sky fades to pink, and I keep collecting small crab claws that are sprinkled in odd abundance along the shoreline, curled robotically into themselves. For who? I've been wrapping my strange collections in paper and sending them to girlfriends who will either understand their significance or be startled by the unappetizing reference to life's finite nature.

Back into the yellowed dim of my apartment and I prop the image of the mysteriously pensive woman against an object of cut glass. Something darts through me every time I fixate on her and I almost remember what it's like to gaze at someone tenderly.

Closure letters to no one

I once loved a man who contemplated his reflection on graduation day, mortarboard perched on his wavy brown hair, letting his eyes well up with pride as he wrapped his arms around my complacent midsection. A healthy observer may have been touched by our closeness on such a momentous morning, but when my gaze searched our spotty reflection for some small, shared warmth, I felt a twinge when the only eyes that locked were his own green irises. 

Several curling iron burns and subdued panic attacks later, I am folded into a sea of anxious, alcohol-reeking, sweaty, bellowing classmates. A dark part of me wonders if holding his hand in the midst of the fray will forever color my recollections of this overblown occasion. When our indulgent graduation speaker quoted the encouraging lines of a pop song to inflate our already-bloated senses of worth, I notice how he chuckles sincerely in all of the right places. The chirping words of our student body president send detectable strains of emotion through his features, and I conclude that he reassures his own predictability with the swells of a heroic orchestra in his head. 

No matter that these are the prejudiced observations of a girl recently jilted. Are each of us not guilty of being the main players in the tragic, Shakespearean screenplays of our lives?

Life carried on. Boxes were packed, goodbyes were said to friends and family. I parked my ass at the least threatening city on the golden coast, using vague adjacency to declare my commitment to words intimately spoken. I walked the marble-lined hallways of the ostentatious, beautiful beacon of wealth that was his childhood home with a wistfulness that I wish I could yank from memory. 

Alas, my walk-on role was cut short. Killed off. Written out of the script. This resulted in his screenplay taking a turn for the existential while my own became pitchy and irritatingly melancholic. The ideologies of a starry-eyed, art student coupling could only last as long as the euphemisms of art school critiques rang true.

I will miss your sweet optimism. 

San Francisco Blues

My friends and I find a pocket of love in the Castro district of San Francisco. We share an affinity with gay men because, like them, we openly wear the wounded mien of those afflicted by aggressive masculinity. Bubbles down my throat, and I disappear happily into the glitter of sweaty, bronzed skin and embellished costumery. 

(I am that wonderful person you want nothing to do with.)

And on the third mile of your drunken trudge through an unfamiliar city in your cheap, designer knockoff shoes, you start to feel the night hanging from the folds of your skirt, the ends of your hair, the corners of your eyes. It cackles at you and snatches at your ankles as you wander through hordes of men without faces. Late night grease sits in your stomach like a small, swaddled Christ, and you can't help but fear the quarrel that is blossoming between your companions. Swish, vomit, pout. 

Kindness made the cut so clean.

In my present life, there is 3 of me. The girl with things, the girl with people, and the girl in the air. 

The girl with things sits in the exact chair I type from now, creating a ruckus with innumerable charms and beads that hang from strings around her neck. The rest of her, however, is silent. She attempts to fulfill quests for meaning by way of scavenges through tangled piles of clothes and jewels in thrift store bins, scrawling sentiments to far away friends on postcards with carefully-selected quirk and deeply imprinted letterpress, and by buying the most colorful and oddly shaped vegetables at the farmer's market for meals that she'll never cook and dinner guests she'll never have.  

The girl with people is excessively wordy, sympathetic, and uses intellect to compartmentalize every deeply troublesome topic of her life when catching up. There is no "the breakup was mutual," there is only time for an explanation of her progress since that fateful phone call. Her friends are very supportive of her every move, and why wouldn't they be? In the interest of time and energy, they've each been provided with a case study of every tribulation, and if they're lucky, she'll even reference a distant relationship or allow the twinkle of a brimming tear. She is the only one of the three who feels grounded and sure of her place in the world. 

Girl in the air exists only for a few hours at a time, suspended in time and space between her two heavily-defined counterparts. She stares out of the airplane window and admires those strangely-passing solar systems of cities, admiring them as if they were jewels in a case, contemplating her existence and feeling smaller and less permanent than the cubes of ice in that cheap, plastic cup.

"How strange it is to be anything at all."

Detail of "Vicissitudes," underwater sculpture by Jason de Caires Taylor

I still lament the fact that my disposition is light years away from ballerina grace. I will buy pale pink flats, carelessly off-the-shoulder blouses, and tie my hair up into glossy buns, but my limbs refuse to act accordingly. My body often feels like a bumbling, bulky thing pinned to my soul... an easy figure to blame for all of the broken vases at home, fixtures at work, and unfinished drinks long since steeped into my jeans. During yoga class, a task itself that seems foolish in attending each week, I am forever the eyesore. "Sun salutations" are a series of poses that, when executed correctly, are supposed to resemble and feel like the an ocean wave lapping at the shore. While the willowy backs of my peers  elongate, muscles rippling underneath like tiny fish, my knees lock up and occasionally send me tumbling back to my mat with a conspicuous thump. While they extend their ankles above their heads, supported only by limber wrists, I am forced to endure the white noise of my self-defeat while I sit and touch my forehead to the ground. 

In connection with this entire concept is this childhood memory that I can't seem to escape... A necklace string breaks, tiny baubles hit the ground in fives, a deliciously multiplied pitter-pat on the wooden floor, and my tiny, fleshy fingers grab at them. These beads sat in the miniscule drawer of my childhood jewelry box for years, and unless someone else has since intervened, may still be tucked away in the velvet lined cranny. It feels like the first memory I have of that panicked feeling of loss, frustration with my carelessness, and a complete inability to acknowledge the end of something. 

Why do I continue to pin so much loyalty and trust into things with a terrible return rate? "The prospect of arm wrestling with my only ally in a place full of strangers was just too daunting." And thus, the fucked up dreams commence.