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.

Witch & whale.

I am in some rusty vessel bobbing through the blue, isolated, enclosed, and in the shadows and hallways there is a resounding throaty growl, gripping, grabbing, and filling us all up with blackness, blackness that spreads, blackness, filling up our pupils and spreading to blot out our eyes. Bobbing, rocking, swaying, queasy seasick dread, eventually it’ll come for me. I can see out across the water, something looming, huge and gray beneath the surface, huge and gray, and waiting.

When she comes for me, I feel myself slipping towards the edge, all that vast blue looming heavy beneath me, ready to swallow me up, the yawning mouth, the abyss, the endless, endless depths, black as those iris-less eyes, darkness that reaches back into my soul and finds itself, waiting in the bitter bile of my secrets, all the failures stored up and waiting to pour out.

And as the whole rusty ship comes creaking down, tilting very slowly so that gravity is turned on its side and we are leaned over, backs parallel to the shimmering sea, parallel to the gray hulking mass, feet still touching the deck, and our hair spilling all around our faces, and all of us tumbling to certain death, I suddenly know that I am more than the sum of all that blackness and I push against it until I am staring into gray-blue eyes with tiny inky pinprick pupils, all emptied out. Everything evaporates.

In the next moment, I am walking away, huddled up and hurried. I encounter a person on the path that asks me where I’m headed, and I tell them I’m headed as far away from all that ominous water as I can go. Oh that, they say with a shrug, that’ll dry up any day now.

photo: Hani Amir via photopin cc

Springtime Drizzle

Caffeine, dried up in the back part of my skull and aching in my teeth. The sky is heavy and full, pregnant with all our discontent, will all our folded back dreams seeping up through the exhausted skin of the clouds. When will it all open up and come crashing back down upon our insubstantial shoulders?

In the springtime drizzle, we curl and unfurl, hoping to be entered by sunshine, to be kissed by indulgent bees. What else is in the wind? Our desires are too big to be buried beneath soil, we come creeping out onto the surface, tendrils needy as infants. Show me the white underbelly. Show me the ways in which you are not a tree, after all, but a small thing, a forgotten acorn.

Despite wet socks and unrestful sleep, we come out thirsty, bones cracking for more— keep shifting the earth from one place to the next, keeping sifting through the dust of me for some little treasure, amongst the moldy tea bags, the greenish orange peels, and the slick avocado pits. Somewhere is a soul, I think, waiting to be loosened with the curious fingers of summer, with the feverish call of the road.

photo credit: aussiegall via photopin cc

Word Cloud

I've been pretty absent from this blog lately, focusing on finishing up my final year at UCSC and working, but I recently came across a word cloud generator and plugged in the blog URL to see what came up. I kind of like it, it seems pretty reflective of my time abroad:

"Home"

 

I’m back in California after what could very well have been the most wonderful year of my life. Wonderful, yes, insane, chaotic, full of lessons, full of scrapes and bruises, full of loss and gain in an endless surging flow, sorrowful at times, surreal, unbelievable, euphoric, terrifying, also. There is so much I haven’t had the time or the attention span or even the words to tell you about. And now I’m back “home,” toying with that word like a question in my mouth.

Northern California is a beautiful place—we are lucky to grow up here, basking in the mild sunshine and the fresh redwood and ocean air. When I returned I was struck by the expansive sky, spread out above the low building tops, by the wideness of the smooth, black streets, the sidewalks. Everything is low and flat and spread out, bordered by green. Everything is square and new. The graffiti is painted over in stern squares. That image has a lot to do with how I feel, with a certain specific blankness, a lack of stories. I feel my bursting, booming, blooming year fading inside of me, as if eroding upon exposure to this sweet foreign air. Was it all a dream?

There are things that feel right about being here, like seeing my lover’s blue eyes up close, like getting behind the wheel of my dusty, leaf-cluttered car, like my brother’s skinny ten-year-old arms wrapped around me. I feel like I can sigh into California’s temperate embrace and sleep off a year long accumulated hangover. But I also feel something missing—a big gaping half of my heart. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t been overcome with the urge to cry at strange moments, like at a stoplight, or while buying cider at the grocery store.

In Spain time moved differently. Every moment felt full of possibility. Life seemed like some wild undefined adventure, something to be molded and tossed around, something to plunge into with open eyes and an open heart. Every strange, surreal dream felt possible. Back “home,” all those elaborate unconventional dreams seem impractical. I am being re-acclimatized to something called stability. Routine. Planning. Where before growth seemed spontaneous and personal, now progress seems like something to be charted out on some kind of dull trajectory of compromise. This is called the future. Suddenly all your living is supposed to be stored up for later—right now you must work to build options.

There is a Californian girl inside of me, and she knows how to navigate this kind of lifestyle—she’s done it for many years. But there’s another person, maybe new and raw and uncertain and incomplete but thirsty for life and strangely strong and all of this change is pressing against her all over, crushing her. Even on a purely geographical level, my options are suddenly limited. I’m compressed into a cage of stale social roles and a lack of travel possibilities. I feel like I left a certain kind of hole when I left, and now I’m supposed to come back and fill it, but I’m not the same shape anymore. I’m trying to find a place where I have room to move on, but also to acknowledge that so many amazing things have transpired in the past year, and to find a way to examine how these things have affected the trajectory of my life and who I am as a person.

We are pond.

First, I became a crocodile, amber eyes and pale green flesh, I slithered through the hot, swampy water, my mouth gaping. All around me was the swish and flow of parting water, beneath me, sulfuric orange and emerald stones; my flesh became like these stones, these fiery, slick pebbles. We scooped them up in our white, puckered fingers and poured them all across our shoulders. They tumbled and slid, down, across our collar bones, across our breasts, down the slope of our backs. And as we laid in the steaming streams, they piled up on us, great mounds across our bellies, piling up on our knees, our shoulders. We slithered and rolled, beneath the water we could hear the stones of our flesh scrape against the stones of the pond. We could hear the pond breathing, it's slick fingers reaching out to us. And we were crocodiles; we scooped up the dark red earth, the black earth, and spread it across our cheekbones, in stripes, over the ridges of our noses, we pushed it down across our shin bones, dug our fingers in, deep, and we knew we could not leave. We were crocodiles; we crawled up against the muddy, grassy shores of the pond, and snapped up at the creatures that passed by.

Do you speak the language of the crocodiles?

They sat up on the grassy slope and watched us cautiously, we could not reach them, we crawled the muddy banks and looked up at them with our yellow crocodile eyes. But slowly, we could feel a change in our flesh that was made of stones, we felt ourselves pouring back through time, coming apart at our slippery seams and folding down into our most basic chemical forms. The pond held us, spoke to us in its gurgling voice, and we receded to the shore, writhing in the slick mud, in each others crocodile limbs, and we began the slow process of devolution. Above us the trees shivered and quaked, and we melted into ourselves, into the red and black mud, into the damp green moss, into the bright stones, the soft flow of water, we became pond. We slumped back against the clay and the stones and mud and our bodies receded deep down, into sludge, into the absolute beginning. We are pond. We became mixed up with each other, bodiless, just soft and warm and wet. We can never leave. We are pond.