Summer 2003

The dreamy blood red basin slowly went down the drain.

So this is the place

this is the place I live she thought,

and died.

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I am large, I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman

support the ones you love

"Because she knew he wouldn't mention this afterward; she knew he wouldn't take it as a sign that she was losing her nerve or was in too deep. There weren't many people in this world who would let you be vulnerable and still believe you were strong."

Veronica Mars, “The Thousand Dollar Tan Line,” an original mystery by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, pg. 188

the rain

People accuse me of being contrary when I say I love this weather, but I don't mind. It's not overcast, it's tropical balmy. It's soft, bunched-up, pearl grey, Maui overcast. It's not grey, it's Paris grey. It won't rain, but if it does rain it will be something soft and transparent. I've worked 12 hours in the rain, I've slept in the rain and today I don't mind the rain, because I know I can go home and put on clean, dry clothes and open the window and listen to the rain; if I choose. I may choose to go for a walk in the rain. I might enjoy getting soaking wet just because I can get dry again and it will be easy; as easy as going home to where I live, where I can afford to live, where I rent a clean, dry space all my own where I am free to be. Where I have stocked with food and blankets and bed, where I have built in space and time and my own. I don't mind the rain, because I can do all these things, and still get soaking wet and still be okay. It is just the rain. I have loved the rain since the summer we cut the hay and it was lying flat in the field to cure when it started to rain. And it rained. I remember my father coming into the kitchen and starting a fit something awful because it was raining on the hay and it was the end of the world (and it might have been for us at the time. To lose the hay crop meant we would have to buy hay and hay was expensive for all the animals and beds to feed; even I understood this as a small child and understood this import and that that was why my dad was so upset.) Still, I remember standing in the kitchen window, listening to the storm above me, staring out at the rain, and thinking, "but Daddy it's only raining." And I felt bad for the rainy day because it was so beautiful. We lived in Washington state and when it rained it rained. I remember looking out into the yard and it was so green it hurt. The apple trees, the pear tree, even the old scrappy little prune tree that was always trying to die, were green and bright and budded and bending over in the rain to accept the rain. The grass was too long and looked like a horses main, standing up in thick green tufts. The sky was heavy and leaden and dark, and in the window I could see reflected the bright, clear primary red of my favorite sweatshirt. It was like the earth was seething and breathing thick blood-dyed color. I have been in love with super saturated color ever since. And with the rain. So no. I'm not being contrary when I say I love the rain. I want to lie down in it and let it soak me to the bone until my blood threads with the trees and my skin dissolves into the dirt and I wash away from it all. I want to be like a ribbon of water threading through a river, made of rain, made of me.

"This Happened"

I met this girl once, or anyway I knew of her or perhaps I thought I knew her or maybe I just hoped to know her, and you would ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up, or at least what she hoped to be when she grew enough to live by her own decisions ‎(though we wouldn't say all that) ‎and she would say, "Oh I am going to see the world," as if that was a profession. I saw her once many years later and she seemed like the same girl, or at least she did to me if the light was right. I asked her if she had seen the world and she said no she had not and I asked her why and she seemed lost at the train station trying to answer; for a reason to find an excuse for the choices made and not made, of living in no outside of a yes, or at least that's what it seemed like she would say about a life not yet entirely lived, had she answered.

 September, 2003

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the sounds in my neighborhood

Sometimes I sit down right where I am standing and listen to the sounds in my neighborhood.

A car drives by playing loud music. It’s so loud the windows on the car rattle and it sounds like the car said boom.

My mother says the music is a little too loud, but my brother says it’s just loud enough.

An airplane flies overhead and sounds like a giant bumblebee making lazy circles in the sky.

Several people are mowing their lawns. It sounds like the Christmas concert we went to in the city. My mother called that a symphony, so maybe this is a symphony of lawn mowers.

Our neighbor is running a table saw in his garage and it sounds like a lion’s roar and I imagine being a famous explorer in a far off country.

My sister says I have never heard a lion roar so how do I know if that is true, but my mother says maybe I hear what I hear and my sister hears what she hears and that is okay.

A truck drives by after making deliveries to the market on the corner and it sounds like its climbing stairs as it drives passed our house.

My father says the driver is “shifting gears” when the engine makes that sound.

One of my favorite sounds is the sound of wind rustling through the trees. It is a quiet sound and easy to miss. My grandmother says it is a lullaby the trees sing to the birds. She puts her arm around me and kisses my forehead when she says this.

The sun is hot on top of my head and even the heat seems to have a shimmering kind of sound. I can’t explain this sound, you will have to listen for it yourself.

It’s easy. You just sit down right where you are standing and listen to the sounds in your neighborhood.

What are the sounds you hear?

perfect/imperfect/love in retrospect

Someone once said to me, What's wrong with you? How come you're not married?

I said, It's a long story.

He said, What's the short one?

I said, He died. 

The irony is, had he not died, I doubt I would have learned this about myself. They say marry your best friend, and I never would have married him. He said, I want to have a baby. I said I will never have your baby. He was too old, I was too young, but it felt like we'd known each other for a thousand years. I remember the conversation, sitting in his living room on a low to the ground beach chair he used like an arm-chair, and him saying let's get married and me saying, but I don't like you like that, I don't like you like that at all. Yes we are friends and yes we can talk together, but I want everything. I want the man, the myth, the romance. I want tall and broad and perfect and like you, but not you; you but more like screen idol you and less like who-you-look-like you, but still you who I can talk to you, who is my best friend.

I remember him saying, MBC (that's what he called me), what we have is rare, you don't know this, but I do. I angrily stormed out, and probably said something like, how dare you tell me who I am? You don't know me! But he did, and he didn't mind. He never got mad-- sure he had a temper-- but he never got mad at me, even when I was yelling. He would just laugh and eventually I would laugh and that would be that. It was as easy to miss-communicate as it was to communicate. I was too young to know this, but he was not too old.

This is not a sad, bad, terrible, tragic love story. When I first met him it felt like the love match of the century, true. But that was because I was in a highly altered state of mind. As I got clean and stayed clean (he already was clean, that's how we met), all that quickly faded and without thinking about it we went everywhere together. It was as they say, easy. Maybe it didn't feel so easy at the time, but having lived 14 years in the interim of his death, I look back and see how easy it was. He would tell a story of his brother Mark, who had died in the 60s. When they were little boys his mother once asked Mark, who was quite a dreamer apparently, "Mark what are you doing?" and he said with affronted 7-year-old wisdom, "I'm not doing anything. I'm just being." So we would often say to each other in regards to each other, "we're just being."

I had no appreciation for most of this at the time, and the time was relatively short. Four years and four months, but it felt much longer.

The story would translate into an impractical love swept Cinderella in diamonds tale of love worn female afraid to love lest it not be perfect, spending her lonely days in the tower, tossing rose petals out the window on the back story of imperfect love and tragic endings; except that is not the case_which is not to say I did not write exactly this for a publication several years ago about the clamors and questions of seeking unattainable love. The editors tacked on a stupid title which I hated and published it (and I would not do that again; a writer's misspent writing youth); and although I do think romantic love relationships manifest unresolved business in the human spirit, the purpose of this story has nothing to do with pining or moping or sad or destroyed or never again or why me, or never me, or when will he, or why didn't I, but simply to remember (or possibly to realize) this person.

It's not his birthday and it's not the anniversary of his death, but he walked across the screen of a dream the other day, literally just walked across in front of me, like someone who knows you are watching but is pretending he doesn't know you're watching. He was young and vibrant and vital, a Damien I finally realized I had always known in my heart, but never seen with my eyes. He was a young stallion heading for the hills, he was on his way.