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.