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.)
