Buoyed In Possibility

"leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart 
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl. 
you have an apartment 
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away 
your cracked past, your 
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down 
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before 
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take 
a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. 
make the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it 
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying 
to disappear as revenge. and you 
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade 
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong 
they can smell it in the street."

Monsoon Season, 2014

"I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth."

Conversations that Might've Been

I had the inclination to listen to one of my old high school mixes the others day, which made me realize that for the last few years, I've learned to underestimate the power of music in moving me. Maybe the surroundings were just right; the vastness of a gathering monsoon, a creosote breeze coming in through the window, and a general world-weariness. 

"Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future." - Jennifer Egan

When I first arrived home, my surroundings incited a cacophony of deja vu inside of my body and mind. I'd arrived during the month that signifies the the annual cooling of the paralyzing heat that is Arizona in the summertime. After spending so long in California, a place that held no past (or foreseeable future) for me, at home I felt the echo of my own essence in the earthy smells, the open skies, and the infinite pebbled sweep of the desert. Seeing a person I once loved so deeply and remembering why. Feeling conflicted by the question at hand: to cry or to kiss? I remember a sweetened, light October wind curling around the edges of my face.

Perhaps I am an addict to change. Fall turned to Winter, Winter to Spring, and Spring flowered and wilted into the scorch of Summer. Without a romance turned sour, an apartment to abandon... which transition can I identify with currently? Paralysis becomes me. I am a girl in love, and therefore useless. 

 via Alyson Provax

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.