Solitude.

Solitude means tilting back and saying anything to the ceiling, means taking inventory of yourself, prodding out the weak spots and mending yourself like a sock, peeling at all those other skins until you’re nothing but bones and stories. Being alone means finding some grain of ambition, some little coal of desire underneath all your ropey necessities and habits, slicing down to the tiny thing that makes you open your eyes in the morning, makes you go into the world despite all the things that scare you, despite that feeling that you will be found out, that those weak spots are bleeding into the water, despite the daily inundation of dread, despite the heaviness of wearing skin thick enough for other to see and feel you, despite having to exist as a series of arbitrary facts and figures that are irrelevant to the boiled down jelly of your essence.

Solitude means answering that ominous knock that comes in the midnight of your unconscious, means listening to the wavering decibels of your own voice; being alone means you don’t have to hold yourself in contrast to the other, to scrutinize the purple flaws of your skin and the achy gaps in your character, to count the lapses of judgment accumulated in your history, which you wear all across your shoulders, tangled in your hair. Instead, being alone means letting all the events of your past, all your loud regrets rest, simply exist in stillness, factual and whole and okay.

Yesterday.

Good morning, my name is Tressa. This is the first day of the rest of my fucking life. Outside, there are loud chickens, screaming from behind the fence. Mishka is pawing at her bone, trying to pull an elusive treat out of its hollow center, where Casey shoved it before he left to skateboard. There is a wax stain on the tablecloth I sewed. There is a passing ambulance. There are two cinnamon buns growing cold on a baking dish next to the stove. There is warm coffee in the pot, and cold coffee in my mug, the green mug, which I do not like.

Today I am thinking of taking Mishka for a walk. I am thinking about going to the bookstore, or the library, but the thought is also exhausting. I am thinking of going to the art store, or walking, or staying.

I wonder what other people do all day. I wonder if I should cut my fingernails.

Other things I’m considering are: turning the tablecloth to hide the stain, making small books with scrap paper, going back to sleep. I don’t think that’s an option because I’ve had too much coffee, and besides, if I sleep in the middle of the day, I’ll wake up with a headache.

Everyday adventures.

It's funny how when it comes down to it, I know what's important. What's important is love. I know that time is limited and life is unpredictable and ultimately all I can do is make sure to squeeze everything out of every little moment I'm given, yet in any given moment I am worried about thousands of things that don't matter. But every so often I have a moment of clarity and I just want to hug the earth and myself and every person I've ever met because the sun is out, and there is kale growing in garden, and I can play loud music and dance around the house, and my dog is ridiculous and my family loves me. 

The duality of my brain is amazing and terrifying to me sometimes. I have so much love for humans, but half the time I'm terrified of them. I spend so much time burrowing into my own brain and getting lost in my own flaws that I forget how wonderful is can be to experience other people. There's no way of putting it that isn't silly. I think I often come across as an extrovert, and in the right circumstances I definitely am, but there's a huge part of me that is totally petrified by my own fabricated fears. What am I always so afraid of?

So much of the time, within the confines of everyday life, I find it so hard to reach out to people and to connect and make friends and relax and be myself, but when I get outside of that routine and enter into the realm of inhibition and wildness, into travel mode or festival mode, and I feel all my knots come undone and I'm able interact with people in a way that is totally different, that is totally genuine and uninhibited. I don't know why I can't do that every day.

It's nice to be aware of some of the differences within myself. This summer I'm going to have so much time on my hands, I'm really hoping I can use it to find fulfilling things to do and find people to be around that will pull me out of myself a little. In Spain, I was so aware of the necessity of taking advantage of every opportunity that presented itself, and I think because of that, I was able to give myself up to the universe and to the possibilities of life in a way that was really freeing and exciting. I want to start looking at every day as an adventure again.

To the future:

Do not forget the slick green leaves, wet under February rain. Do not forget spilled coffee.

We were once a planet of questions and sore backs—what are you now? Do you have a lottery? We have a lottery; orange tickets sold over dirty glass counters. We pay for the fantasies of what we could become.

We cut down trees and turn their wood into pulp and turn the pulp into paper, pressed into thick notebooks that we carry, and when it rains they go soft. I hope you have paper and trees. I hope you have yellow books.

I hope you eat curly pasta, that you paint your faces sometimes, and that sex is safe and legal and good. I hope you are not defined by the arbitrary conditions of your flesh, desire, and belief.

I was born in a long state full of trees and sea. I hope your oceans are full and blue. I hope your lungs are big and clean. I hope you have beautiful homes, to cry in, to eat in, to fill up with memories.

Do not forget the grass bursting through cracks in black asphalt. Do not forget the spicy smell of nasturtium flowers, do not forget the feel of old tennis shoes. Do not forget how good it is to hold hands.

I hope you are better than I am.

photo credit: artolog via photopin cc

Fragments of thought from the back of my notebook.

Today I handed in the last paper of the quarter!

Every quarter, while I fill the pages front to back with notes for class, I fill the pages back to front with lists and dreams and thoughts. Often, these things creep into my margins and fill up the pages that are supposed to be notes, too.

Anyway, here is a little collection of notebook fragments that I've pulled from the insanely disorganized doodles of this quarter:

 

I.

All I can remember is making lewd jokes in my sleep. Now, dreamless, I feel hollow and heavy. Interrupted at least once, often twice in a night, crawling awake into gray-blue to empty myself out. Distracted sleeping.

II,

Only 3 days ago I complained into these pages, uncomfortable in my own skin, feeling stranded in the sea of my mistakes. But today, despite an early morning headache, and toast burned beyond rescue, I feel alert and ready, full of creative energy and hopefulness. Impervious to inattention, content with my social shortcomings, full of forward momentum. I hope it lasts.

III.

I dreamed that someone put me in a play without telling me the lines. It was Shakespeare. I tried to make a joke, but the audience was stunned and horrified by my irreverence.

Later, in a cafeteria, some precocious girl kept saying, “You know?” And I didn’t know. She asked me to make eggs fifteen different ways.

IV.

Somehow, I returned to Spain to learn more Spanish, but everyone spoke to me in patient English. Everyone I knew was one unwieldy hour away. I wanted to see those smiling faces in Granada, so close but impossible.

Kim was in a messy room with grayish light, where a boy was sweating feverishly into his sheets. I could see his bare shoulders. Maybe the fever was love; she would not leave him.

V.

The seams in my body are aching. I woke up unhinged from time, all gray and bleary eyed. It’s my own fault for going to bed thirsty. What is the name of my ignoring divinity, white eyed with rage foam; where is my crystalline sense of interconnectivity and direction? I am susceptible to pt. 10 Times New Roman, I feel heavy with second hand almost grief and undone elastic, with the orange wind that rattles my slumberous senses. I am susceptible to unintentional eye contact; I am semi-perpetually slogging through the fog of my fade-away analysis.

VI.

There are golden leaves bursting up beneath my eyes, there is a ghost, feeling my body. There is a thirty percent chance of rain, one hundred percent change of my pants slipping down. In the creeping, hopeful heat of Tuesday morning, I am bursting with sadness for humanity, bursting with melancholy affection for all the tiny, glaring vulnerabilities. The tall boy by the door, standing so awkwardly in his big blue high tops; the lecturer’s self-conscious clichés; a red-head’s soft shoulders; the smell of cheap public bathroom soap on so many hands; a girl’s chunky leather shoes, peeking out of her wide jeans, her chubby face full of lisping urgency. My mind is so critical and loathsome, so full of sad love.

VII.

If Rosa Morales were teaching Me in her bleating accent, what would she say?

“It was a known fact that she was awkward, and often red. She burrowed in a smoky, striped jacket, and withdrew. She planned anti climactic social events and then dreaded them. She offered squirming hospitality, begrudging kindness. She lived according to inconsistent belief systems and jumbled dreaming. She lusted after more authentic poverty and groaned at her tedious transformation into a penniless poet. Who is certain of their greatness and does it make the heavy scales of success any lighter? she would wonder. She did not know what she wanted very often. She was self-centered and sighing. She worried she was not very smart, after all. She could the smell ink on her cluttered pages, and the sides of her hands.”

VIII.

You and me, in blue-black predawn, your hand squeezes my side just a tiny bit. You’re drifting off, holding on. We ate orange capsules of focus, and hummed, and hummed in place, sitting on that faded futon, hours jangling through our desperate nerves. I become weird and obsessive, you lost steam, we distracted and muttered, went off on tangents. You spent what felt like at least an hour trying to explain integrating or something called u and a bunch of garbage symbols, but I leaned against you a little bit, and felt your hair brush mine where our heads met, and none of the words you said made sense but I said, uh huh, and was content, pretending this was maybe the third time we hung out, and that all our tiny touching was flirtatious and thrilling. It was easy to pretend, because the wanting to touch you has never changed. 

Secrets buried beneath sandy eyelids.

I remember soft light through a window—it looked like the purple-yellow of an insect’s wing. It was a mysterious, murky light. I remember soft feet, I remember hiding up high in a tree,  waking up feeling heavy with the dampness of not-quite-dawn and the gravity of some lost fragment of thought. Secrets, buried beneath sandy eyelids. Cold toes on the wooden ladder. A split second fear before flipping on the bathroom light switch, perhaps of seeing something unexpected in my own pale face, reflected in the oval bathroom mirror.

Continuously coping with return.

I think I have finally identified that gnawing anxiety between my ribs, the intermittent weight hanging over me as an existential dread resulting from the mismatches in my experiences, in the realities that I feel attached to or embedded in; an expanding sorrow as the past and my connections to it drift away, the sense of relationships dissolving into their geographic impossibilities.

Second First Impressions

Everything here is flat and wide and spread out. The buildings are squat, the streets are wide and black and busy, but there is a wonderful greenness all around. The air smells sweeter and feels cleaner. The napkins at restaurants are wider and more absorbent. There are toilet seat covers and paper in the bathrooms. The streets are devoid of paper scraps; fences and walls are not covered in signs announcing apartments for rent, services provided, and animals for sale. The sidewalks are wide. There are houses with green yards and two or three front steps and colorful doors. The sidewalks are smooth, monotone gray, easy on my shoes. The passersby are thick and heavy; I feel a natural inclination towards dislike when I hear them speak. Somehow my own language has become a stigma. The waitresses are nice, they smile all the time; they try to be helpful. The food is better but more expensive. I gawk at the prices on jelly jars and sigh at my grocery receipts. There are more trashcans. The dogs are all on leashes and there’s no shit on the sidewalks. There are no people lingering in open plazas, sitting in the shade. The youth is hidden away. At 2am, everyone goes home. We drive everywhere—our friends are spread apart, the restaurants and bars are spread apart. There is no late night bustle, no clumps of twenty-somethings drinking forties on steps or in front of bars. I haven’t seen the sunrise yet.

It’s sad how fast the magic fades, the magic of all these little things that once seemed so symbolic, so intangible and achy. I’m thinking about this as I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, so foggy and solemn, so big. I’m thinking about this as I lay in my big bed and feel very, very alone.  

Although I don't believe in God.

 

How can I be expected to properly express myself when my vocabulary is so small a thing and the world so large and full of nuanced experiences? Here always comes the start—the outpour that does not know if there is too much or too little, if we are too similar or all alike, if there is more or less to be done, if I am doing anything right or everything wrong. I am tired, tiresome, my skin feels heavy and old, despite my sometimes role as that sort of semi-wandering embodiment of innocence. God bless the drugs, and God bless your father growing marijuana in his vast French fields. God bless the white-eyed German boy walking down the highway in his underwear with his thumb out. What have we done? Picked up a bit of trash, at least. God bless that docile compliance to the flow of life that rises up with the first rays of sun when our jaws are still working and our pale shadows are still jumping all across the sand. The margin for error is as slippery a place as my heels are full of sea urchin spores, but there is something to be said for these transition spaces and the strange, wonderful people that inhabit them, thumbing through memories in their little wooden homes. Home is where your questions come unraveled. Home is where you test out your new skin and hope.

The American Work Ethic

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

            Everything.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

            Building yourself up is not something you do with money or unhappiness. I want to build a self out of beautiful words and unforeseeable experiences. Strange and strong—I want to be like no other person you’ve met before. I want to be my own reverberating echo, a process of something like “freedom” and “truthfulness” and not in the sense of any cheap verbal honesty, but in the sense of fully inhabiting my own chameleon skin. Admit that you are not a person, neither the person you dream of, the person you long to be, the person whose mouth you speak through, you are a process just like:

            everything else.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

It’s based on a Dream;

            the Dream is not beautiful—

if you have the power to exist within an indefinite space with malleable rules and new visual/sensory possibilities that are impossible to even remember in a cognitive/conscious way according to the terms of waking memory—shouldn’t your Dream be at least beautiful?

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

America is not ours.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

Happiness should not be a novelty.

Headrush

 

You are an empty something (I am)

Maybe when I saw your face bleeding,

            across the room, blinking lights and my heart the same

I was seeing something ooze

from you soul (your right eye).

How can I ever judge you when my head swims with infidelity and vacillating disappointment?

What was that word you told me to remember,

other you,

some sort of crystal eyed favorite, a blessed child gone all crooked bent and stray

and still loved so wholesomely,

and how are we still sorting through and categorizing,

judgments falling jagged like bricks like

my stubborn spine like

red blood cells and all our breathy deficiencies.

Oh, sigh, trailer, take me home,

            whatever that means,

just to let me

sit

down

heavily, sighing, and rely all over you,

sloppy like the creature that nowadays seems like an embarrassing fairytale.

Choosing is always a difficult thing,

for a fickle, pale person, for an  undecided soul,

and yet when the choice is one of skin and sinew and soul,

and when the options are as vague and intangible,

abstract like gaseous memories of throbbing feet and swollen tongues

of pine trees looming like antiquated morals

of chattering teeth,

and yet…

Oh, eternal unformulated self

            what is this thing?

What are we to do, what have we done, where did we go?

Where do our unspoken words wander, and where are the words we’ve spoken

            into an earshattering racket,

fractured, bruised, do they ever find a home,

in the hollows of our unconscious?

And, and,

reverberating cries, hollow eyes,

these are all the things that make reality despicable and false,

there is nothing to believe,

anymore.

And all this is just a headrush and a cough,

and all this is just your body, a thing as disposable as redwhiteandblue

paper cups.

I am the most contained,

I am the most free,

I am your average contradiction, a pair of bruised legs and

a head full of Spanish heat and questions,

expectations and overseas airline confusion,

cat fur,

dirty nails,

dinner at 9 or 10,

unaddressed postcards, unaddressed problems,

flutters and shudders,

sweat.

Heave

jangle of anxiety

nameless knot, a’tangle

sudden thirst for the drastic

bared skin and ink, needles, hard rocks, pounding muscles, heaving flesh, yellow bruises, rushing wind, taut vocal chords strumming, hollow echoes, spraying dirt

and here within the dull bluish light

you drone—

foe, fiend, friend

the bland blabbing nonsense, lesbian

interpretations, you reduce inspiration to

some groveling textual paste

sludge to be sorted, reeking dead words

to stack

and separate

and sterilize;

outside the sunshine glimmers in absolute liquid intangibility

outside, beauty is a thing as varied and monstrous and fluctuating as

pungent and sweat-beaded

clawed up and stinging,

scuffed and scarred arching back,

as some pock-marked tooth-sweet neck

            raspberry red, hot with surging blood,

loud and discordant as

jagged breath through swollen, wet lips—

nothing is pure and simple

nothing is clean and true—

life is only worthwhile as some sticky

            half-guilty, heavy-lidded ecstasy

something to be eaten up and ravished

to throw yourself upon

with naked, shameful abandon

to grasp at with greedy fingernails

            hungry, groping limbs

shadows running slantwise all across the bared,  imperfect flesh

traversing goosebumps and pink scabs

            with trembling fingertips

nerves exposed like the dirty rafters in some split-open squat

wide open

and submerged in wet adrenaline

ferocious, determined chance

absolute surrender—

I hope to not live in the stillness of black and white lines and

immense, immaculate care

but to spend myself in some exhausted heave

to drop dead in a morbid tangle of sweet sickly memories

splayed out, vulnerable as birth

and all mixed up in the reverberating echoes

of a million ecstatic, frenzied souls

each intensely devoted to the vibration of their own shadowy selves

intensely devoted to the exploration of their inky abundance

            boundaries

and the limits of this strange, rippling sea

            of possibility and pleasure

            of dark and velvety aching

            of celestial, stinging uncertainty

Being Bullied

So, this blog is about something that actually happened to me a few months ago. It was a pretty intense experience, but also kind of weird and embarrassing and I put off writing about it for a while, and then when I did finally write about it, promptly forgot about it in the back of my notebook. Today, in my Children's Literature class, we discussed a book called Juul, about a boy who is bullied and ultimately mutilates his body piece by piece in a search for acceptance. It was one of the most intense things I've ever read, and it made me feel compelled to share this. I may no longer be a child, but this was definitely a unique experience for me, and I think there is something to be learned from it.

 

I was walking home with a feeling like iron in my bones; I don’t remember why. I came up the hill, heaved a deep breath, turned right into the twisting narrow streets where during the holidays we heard the incessant boom of dynamite, where a singed bath tub has been sitting for weeks, where once a group of kids burned a chair and left its stinking carcass in the street. I heard someone laugh, it was loud, childish. I turned down a street, there was a group of kids, teenaged girls and a chubby soft-faced boy; the boy was in the street, stepped backwards as I turned the corner and turned to make an ugly gaping face at me. He made a harsh braying sound, and I gave him a kind of skeptical half smile, the tense look that draws up my eyebrows, and kept walking. The boy stepped in front of me. I tried to edge around him, and the girls poured out all around me in this awkward surreal kind of stream. I was looking down at them, they were either young or small or both and were united in a strange unspoken agreement, an instantaneous decision, to be whimsically cruel. There was a flood of sounds, ugly irony, their faces contorted in blind hatred, they got close up to my face, just barely resisting touching my skin, they screamed in mirthful glee, pulled apart my body. An older girl with a Monroe piercing and dry skin stuck out a finger, jabbing at my piercing, ¿que es eso?, she demanded with her mouth loose and wagging. Un piercing, como tienes tú, I finally said, the words coming incredulously from my tense, guarded smile. I guess it broke the spell, I pushed my body forward, finally resigned to move past, to flail if I had to, and they pulled back from me in reluctant, stubborn little steps, crying, ¡un aplauso! and clapping and howling as I walked away.

As the clatter faded behind me, I walked home listening to my breath. My face sighed down, anxious smile erased, I bit my lip and marveled at the silenced that roared in my hollowed out body. I got home, climbed the stairs, sat on the edge of my bed, and cried resentfully, struggling against each silly tear.

It’s strange to spend your life in a self-aware position of cultural dominance, with that history of privilege, that shameful advantage of being a white, middle class American, to be aware of that horrible dark thing, historical cruelty and repression, with all it’s echoes and ghosts, and to live all your years with the knowledge that you will never experience this twisted thing that you are implicitly and helplessly destined to be a purveyor of cruelty. It’s strange to be taught that this feeling is something you have no right to experience, and then to turn a corner one vulnerable day and be confronted by exactly that.

It’s strange to find yourself in a place where nothing you do is the right thing—your words are deformed, uncertain creatures, violence will only turn around and eat you up, silence is weak and indefensible. So, I cried on my bed, and then tried to breathe and felt quiet and lonely and strange and bad, and counted my limbs and my unbroken skin, and breathed and sighed and went downstairs, and found a new way to walk home. And then I cried more and felt weak and helpless and lame, but at the same time, hesitantly satisfied, because I’d glimpsed the nauseous thing a white American never thinks they will touch, and maybe there’s something to be learned from it, maybe this little piece of trembling, blurry nightmare day will be useful to me in that endless process of becoming—becoming a whole person, a better person, a worthwhile person, a new, never stagnant person, a changing, continual self.


Comic relief:

(I would prefer to use the scene after this when the guys are telling their parents about the incident, but I couldn't find it.)

Solipsism and Interconnectivity

I.

I’m trying to say that nothing feels real. Moments come and go and fade away. Memories seem like dreams, I can almost see myself in them, like a different person. Sometimes reality even seems implausible, sometimes while sitting, looking, talking, I feel the world tilt back away from me, glaze over like a dream. I’m never quite certain if I’m awake.

I’m trying to say that I feel sometimes incredibly disconnected from all that is around me, as if I’m floating through life without touching it. People sometimes seem impossibly distant, impossibly different creatures. I don’t understand the things they do, or why we all behave in this kind of shadowy secret way, as if we don’t have innards. I wonder why it’s not okay to show more. I feel like words are often inadequate for expression—thoughts are so much more than words, they are multi-dimensional experiences that mix up bodily feelings, senses of all types, goals, dreams, hopes, conjectures, memories… And I’m often frustrated by my inability to access the experience of others, and by my inability to share myself, my experience, my thoughts, my inner world, with others. Misunderstanding is a human condition. When a series of events produces a reaction within me, I want it to be touched and held and seen and understood and validated by others. That rarely happens. This makes me feel dismissive. This makes me feel achy and uncomfortable in my own skin.

There is some comfort, but also horror in the idea of solipsism. I am the only thing, just one long thought process blossoming into a complicated, colorful word within which I’ve built a place for a concept of self. Sometimes time feels jumpy, like I’m being plopped down into different settings and manipulated into interacting with varied, imaginative stimuli, just to produce feeling, to test the limits of the imagination, the boundaries of the big, sustained thought process which is the only thing, ever.

Sometimes I feel that way, but more often I guess I feel like we are isolated little units, blundering into each other with no hope of communication. Not only is language inadequate, it’s incredibly personal. A word is a only a symbol, attached to which are a series of experiences, and these will never, ever match up. Maybe this isn’t solipsism in a pure sense, but I think it relates to Gorgias’ idea that even if something exists, and even if something could be known about it, knowledge can’t be communicated to others.

II.

Despite all of this, though, communication does occur, at least to some to immeasurable degree. We can relate symptoms of physical pain, for example, and diagnose illness. We can meet for lunch at 2 ‘o clock. We can even listen to the same haunted notes and cry. And sometimes, quite often, despite the fact that we try so hard to present an outer idea of self and conceal our inner world, the inner world leaks out, and we study each others actions, personalities, histories, and come up with sometimes accurate conclusions. How?

All this makes me feel the opposite of alone; it makes me feel intrinsically connected to everything. It makes me feel as if we are not individual selves but fleshy pieces of a huge, breathing organism, something universal and communicative. Perhaps words are inadequate, but we seem to be communicating through out pores and veins, through our irises and our nerves.

These are the things I’m trying to say. These are the sensations I’m trying to convey. The words are inadequate, but I hope I am transmitting something.

Disclaimer of sorts: I know pretty much nothing about solipsism or Gorgias. These are just thoughts that I had brewing in me today, after watching Solipsist and reading a very small bit about the idea of solipsism. They are also probably influenced by reading excerpts of Emerson's essays on Nature.

Growing Different Eyes

 

Michelle and I are sitting below San Miguel Alto, below us the city is beginning to sparkle. It looks like someone has scooped up a handful of white buildings and tossed them into place like dice. The sky is melty orange red, smeared with wispy clouds, and the mountains are all wrapped up in gray.

I’m so glad the Alhambra still amazes me.

It’s sitting there, lights hugging against its incredible, certain walls. I take a swig of bittersweet beer, marveling, too. There had been a brief moment during these past months that felt like I’d reached a plateau, but it’s gone now, and I’m back in the habit of being amazed and thrilled with every day.

When my mother came to see me, she kept saying every day has been absolutely different, every day an adventure of a new sort. It’s true, and I suddenly realize, sitting up on the hill, wrapped up in my polar bear hat with a beautiful friend and a liter of beer wrapped in a plastic bag, staring down at the ancient castle, staring out at the sighing sky, that this is my life. Everyday, an adventure, everyday a swelling of amazement, strange beauty, curious discovery, everyday a brand new page, a new memory. It’s incredible that after seven months, nothing has grown bland and gray even though I have walked many of the city’s curving streets, even though each day I wake up and sit in class, even though I have seen the Alhambra glowing patiently a hundred times, and even though a certain kind of routine has formed, the sense of adventure has never left. And then there’s a moment when it kind of just makes sense.

When you leave everything behind and embark on a journey to a strange place with a simple quest, to learn the language and see the things that place has to offer, you grow different eyes. You are no longer content to wake up each day and move in sensible pre-determined steps, you are instead inclined to throw your arms out behind you and give yourself to the opportunities that appear, to wiggle yourself into new places, experiment with discomfort and rapture, with ignorance and awe, helplessness and determination.  You become determined to build an adventure with your bare hands, and whatever falls into them.

Remember These Things

Feel good, feel big, wide, spread out, stretch out, soak up. These are the memories that build up your skin, these are the moments that fill up your heart, that pour out your mouth, fill up your eyes, jumble up your mind. Do you want to be a person? Do you want to be a whole person, a person of substance, a person to hold onto, to drift away with? Do you want to be a person that can be seen, a person that fills up a page, a portrait or a poem, a person that can see, with clear eyes, eyes full of reference points yet clean as a blue summer sky? Then open wide, tilt back, soak up, take in these little seconds, their stillness, their incessant hum, just fling back, let go, take it in, let it all fade by in a blur, just so long as you remember the way it felt, at least, let it all come at you, come in you, like the most beautiful film you’ve ever seen, with it’s booming, whispering, with it’s sobbing, laughing, screaming orchestra. These are the sounds that will hold you at dawn, when the sun ignores you, and rises up and reaches out, these are the memories that will come back to you, in fragments, pieces, all cut up and scrambled and coded into secrets, when you sleep, behind your eyelids when you are hiding from persistent sunlight. Touch it all, let the days run through your fingers, like sand, just as long as you remember how it felt, that smoothness, slipping by, and the little scoop it came from, and the little mound it made.

Remember these things: Thursday night plastic bottles in a loft, the deep red walls, the sting of the air on the street, wobble steps, to the door, the brown neck of a beer bottle, the cold clammy glass, a song, or another, and your feet shuffle, and the doorman, who remembers you, he’s a short man, smiling, little slips of paper, foam, those stumble steps, again, some empty place and that laughter when you leave, the rush and thrum of music, music, music, letting yourself fall away back into it, darkness, bumping, someone with dreadlocks, a Santa Cruz t-shirt, the laughing with your hand over your mouth, time that slips and disappears, and those fucking bathrooms, of course, waking up in a stifling darkness, and falling in and out of it, and then the deep bells jangling, it’s four pm, citrus, panting, uphill, hot water, in cups, unexpected neighbor call, the humming belly surprise, tobacco scent soft and usual, easy words, watching them, and, then, a, long, moment, of, sitting, late morning sunshine, stop and go, outside, in like a sponge, open pores, eyes all sparkling, the city down below, the Alhambra, stoic and brown as ever, just perched, the wind, smoking, the soft smell of one spliff or another, picking down the hill, quick hellos, yellow beer in long glasses, counting my silences, but content, and out onto a bench, a stubborn dog, a three man band, strumming, blissfaced eyes closed, beer, bathroom, beer, and out and over and up into a plaza, on a bench, hugging the last rays of sunlight, borrowed music, the eyes that close, the feet that tap, and the growing moving impermanent sway of human vibrations all around, the animals tussling in the dry dirt, the sun blushing out and down, drums across the plaza, guitar and flute, all mixed up, solid redwrapped litros and shared shivers, swaying, watching, all those beautiful people, and as the evening turns purpley the beat rises us and everyone scrunches around, those distant smiles, stamping feet, absolute in the sound, dirty fingers lifting up cigarettes and fingering wind instruments, and it swells up, and down we go, plunging into the cobblestone maze, a sweet teashop pastry hello, living room drinks, bitter and pink, speed cooking, all amped up and hungry, and laughter, and maps, and we’re dancing at the bus stop, waiting, the burning plastic bottle, the last stop, a lucky guess, and hello, hello, we’re here, glow in the dark masked debauchery, fling ourselves around, sweating to the sounds, jostling, climbing, and we’re spotlighted, cheering, arm in arm, conga line, kick, kick, exultation, and singing too loud in the bathroom, slamming on the walls, some angry face, and the whole thing has only just begun, here we are laughing, masked and only us dancing, fuck it, new faces, new places, a feeling like tugging, what are the things I know about you, the hours drank down into empty bottles, cans, cups, dimming lights, and down on Elvira, spilled beer on the ground, salsa picante, and some conversation that I can’t taste, and dark night shivering, drive up easy, collapse, and then, brief oblivion, it starts again, meandering down, dancing steps all on the road, those faces turning, looking, us looking, laughing, finding, some unexpected faces, hello, and we are here, swaying again, sun like honey all across us, smoke curled all around our eyes until sunset is soft gray beautiful, puppy prancing, we move to keep the shadow out, and separate and then find ourselves all mixed up together, again, in the sound, in the beer, rocking on the steps of the Cathedral, curled up on some large terrace, spit down onto the sidewalk, and, then, the silent, walk, home, just quiet, just happy, just cold, just okay.

These are the things that you must grab, that you must not crush, these are the things you must hold soft as a butterfly, that you must retain within you, that you must let out of you, all at once. Do you want to remember? Do you want to be, feel, to know what you are looking for, what you have had? This is how.

Things I'm Thinking About at One O'Clock

The flimsy nature of reality and the white border that forms around all physical objects when your eyes go slack; the universal nature of facial expressions; how little these two hours, these four years matter; about how it would be to sit in fifty your old skin, adjusting my scarf and glasses, and talking into a roomful of bland, open faces; crooked teeth and evolution; my blue mug and caffeine; a pair of eyes that caught mine; my missing planner.

Dealing with Decisions

I had this strange moment in a shower so hot I could barely make out my toes in the steam, where I realized that I alone could make the decision of when to turn the shower off, when to get out and put on clothes, what to do next. Suddenly, in a huge damp wave, I was overwhelmed with the enormous quantity of decisions we are required to make everyday, and the nonchalance with which we do so. I guess this casual attitude is necessary in order to function. I also began to wonder if this is why I sometimes find it so hard to function; a decision so trivial and seemingly small, just trifling little steps of logic like, should I shower now or in the morning, should I study more or sit and write, should I try to knit this scarf while I’m stoned, what should I eat for dinner—all these little things that come at us in huge waves in the span of mere seconds present me with an unconceivable amount of options, the weight of which I may be incapable of comprehending.  The length of time it takes to make these decisions, too, becomes an overwhelming problem—these are precious seconds during which everything is changing, maybe. If I do not complete a particular decision in a particular period of time, the resulting minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, may be vastly altered in a way that I will never understand, and perhaps always question.

What if. What if today I did not decide to buy chili sauce? I would not have strolled down Pedro Antonio, I would not have bought soy sauce, called Laurel, stopped by the house, seen Leon, helped him move, gotten a coffee, talked about writing, belief systems, nudity and shitting, musical festivals, prostitution, drank a beer, bought a specific brand of incense, walked up to the park, smoked a bowl, met two boring girls, met one zany dealer, walked home in the dark, made spicy rice for dinner… Maybe instead I would have studied. Maybe I would have been more capable of studying now. Maybe I would have done better on my test tomorrow. Maybe without my paranoid overzealous worry I would have forgotten to check the time for the test. Maybe I would have missed it. Maybe I would have made pasta for dinner.

I guess being able to make decisions without thinking about it on such a specific, intensive level is about being okay with the way things turn out, or about trusting yourself to be okay in any of the sweeping spectrum of possibilities. In a way, I guess it’s about letting go of all the past decisions you’ve made, realizing that the veins of possibility that once stemmed out from the countless decisions you’ve made throughout the years of your life that you have already lived are now closed, or rearranged into different time frames, and that reaching back to them, imagining them, rolling them around in your hands, in your heart, is useless. It’s about being okay with the good and the bad that have come from the tremendous scope of decisions that you have already made, and trusting that the opportunities that you missed will reappear and that the mistakes that you have made will not; it’s about separating time frames in terms of possibility and usefulness, and making fresh starts in every moment.