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.

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

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.  

Blog #100: Cádiz, Coming Home, and Cat Sedatives

Guess what!

This is my 100th blog. 

I was going to try and do or write something awesome, but life is just too crazy for me to be that creative, however the month is slowly taking shape and making a tiny bit of sense. Chaotic, stressful, transitional sense, but still, something like certainty is slowly creeping into July.

For starters, Gypsy may actually be coming home with me after all. My cat-loving aunt got wind of my pickle and has offered to help out, so now I've re-commenced the kind of slow, confusing, electronic communications process of talking to animal shipping people and figuring out how it's going down. It's simultaneously a huge relief, because I'm so happy to be bringing him home, but also a huge stress, because the process is confusing and the people aren't extremely helpful, and because it's changed all my semi-formulated, half-assed plans for my last little stretch of time here. Which is coming to a close, very, very fast.

The new plan is something like this: stay in Granada, in my house with Gyps and Borja until the 12th, then bum a ride with Borja and friends to Cádiz, where he's from, meet his fambam, see some stuff, hit up a little festival for a couple days, probably be a beach bum for a little, then try and get a rideshare on the 20th or so back to Granada, be a homeless cat person at Mauna's house for my last few days, and then rideshare or bus (potentially sedating my cat and sneaking him onto said bus...) to Madrid to catch my 11am flight from Madrid back to home sweet San Francisco, where my lover will be waiting with burritos in hand. And from there it looks like we may be headed to the woods, potentially escaping my reverse culture shock and despair by camping with mom, Uly, Casey and hopefully Kelsey for a couple days. I agreed to this without thinking about what to do with Gypsy, but I also recently bought him a harness and leash, so maybe he'll be chillin. So far he doesn't seem to give a fuck, even though Borja and Guille won't stop making fun of him and warning me that I'm going to give him a complex.

Look how many fucks I give about my cat harness.

Guys, I'm gonna be home in 19 puny days. This is incomprehensibly awesome and terrible. I don't wanna go home, but I can't wait to go home. Shit is strange. I've skipped a ton, but that's all for now. I have to go buy cat sedatives.

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.

Azul

Este es mi primer intento de escribir algo creativo en Español; ironicamente, es dirigida a alguien que no habla Español... Espero que no sea completamente ininteligible.

 

¿Donde esta mi taza azul, mi pájaro azul, mi alma azul?

¿Donde están mis dedos, azules, en la blancura del invierno?

¿Donde están esos ojos fríos, tan azul como el mar tumultuoso y indeciso, los ojos que me miran directamente en el azul de mi alma incierta?

Dos meses largos y ardiendo, dos meses de naranja y rojo, dos meses oliendo de la acera caliente, de sudor y agua tibio, dos meses lánguidos y húmedos…

Y vuelvo a ti.

Y vuelvo a la verde tranquilidad de los árboles.

Y vuelvo a la frescura del aire pacifico, de las nubes San Franciscanos.

Y vuelvo al azul de tus ojos, al azul.

Stop the squirming.

 

Stop that squirming,

with your blackhole anxiety,

transition dreams and pockmarked skin,

there are certain people and then

there are others.

Displacement is not replacement,

personality is a fluctuating element, susceptible

to time and rejection.

Don’t forget to dig up love,

don’t forget that you can’t dance but you do,

don’t forget,

bald bird,

that you are just another indoor cat

before the open door.

Your secret hands are no secret,

self pity is no hot commodity and hot days

make you like this:

sticky, stuck, irritable.

And your lungs, too, may be cloudy

and thick,

but breathe through the gunk.

And your eyes may be cloudy

with distance,

but don’t blink the time away.

And your skin may be cloudy

and lonesome,

but it’s still translucent;

so the only choice is to be the muscles and the blood

the only choice is to be the bones and the sinew

the substance and the soul.

Another dream underwater.

 

I’ve signed off on rights to a mermaid adventure film, mother tells me, somehow certain that I am the mermaid. Later I will ask about the slippery tail and an art director looks at me with scorn. It’s about more than a mermaid. It’s a metaphor. Oh.

Still, strangely, all this time in water and tape has captured something secret, and on the flight home my silver suitcase is shuffled and scanned. For discrepancies.  I picture them with their fingers all over the watery footage. They must have found it, that dark thing, and scraped it with a scalpel from the sticky lace of my memory. All around it are hints that something is missing, and yet…what?

The escalator also goes down.

The escalator also goes down, mother sees this and we dash down pushing past sleek-haired women in blazers, past serious faces and rolling suitcases. Commotion.

Ladies and gentlemen. We are all floated out to sea, in the most brilliant piece of silver; luggage is scattered and rearranged. Beside us a group of Asian businessmen gather crates of soy sauce looking somehow simultaneously calm and peeved. On another floor, footsteps echo on slick floors and a huge man stuffed into a gray suit becomes enraged, stuffy and enraged. Where is why is, etc, these are the things that vex and bite at him, gray and bureaucratic, he strikes me, grabs my arm. I look at a big glowing clock and take note that at 5:03pm, I was struck. He snarls and denies it. Look. We are out to sea.

Kelsey wanders in, and he put his hands on her, his big mouth making ugly remarks. There is one other woman in the room. I look at the big glowing clock, making notes. His protests are like malevolent elephantine wails.

On the deck, or whatever, red and blue backpacks… We see them coming.

Kkkk. underwater oxygen sounds, kkkk.

Hold still

mermaid

what if

your cell phone goes off

underwater.

The breathless faces, all greenish blue, looking.

The voice comes through, narration overlapping the cloudy waves sounding crisp, clean and serious; And in the darkest waters, I climbed up, and squinted, eyes fogged up in murky waters, and I hurled those secrets into the green streak that could be a river channel. Later we will scrape the ocean floor with metallic contraptions, and pull the truth up to the light.