Thirst for Salt

Not even plenty of caffeine can make snow fun. Nope. Uh uh. My dream of an endless summer has become buried under a blanket of slush. Just a week ago I looked out the window at the grey, endless expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. The lullaby of high tide reminds me of moments of utter bliss: swimming in the moonlit, wine-dark sea during summer solstice in Rethymnon, Crete, reading alone in Santa Cruz, snapping blurry photographs of my brother at Big Sur, the stinging wind and rain at Les Falaises d’Etretat and not even caring the boy I loved was about to leave me, dancing unabashedly on the cliffs above the Golden Gate Bridge, getting stoned (the last time) at Muir Woods on the way to Napa, falling asleep with C.S. and Delta the dog in Venice Beach…I only now remember drifting last night in a blueblack sea and overflowing calmness. Something spiritually healing about the sea. Something that resonates with Home. Something in the way the salt air murmurs and beckons me unknowingly its wholeness. It envelops, embraces me, and I cannot stop myself. I drink hungrily.

Will Not Give In to the Cake

How is it that I could have wasted six complete hours so easily? Effortless and imperceptible. Not spent sharing how I really feel about Joan Didion or reading Tripmaster Monkey. Not spent putting down on paper the words to the examination of landscape and self in Gretel Ehrlich that are cluttering up my head and begging for release. Not spent doing a single work related task. I appear to be on a bender of utter laziness. The current weather (grey, rainy, cold) doesn't help. A former student once had the awareness to notice this unfortunate quality in me. On the evaluation he wrote: "How the classes went seemed to be tied to the weather. Good weather = good class. Bad weather = bad class." I'm still not sure what to do with that. Being intuited on my own perception and psychological influences of place and space by an eighteen year old boy I will never see again.

About Broken Things

Unable to push away these persistent thoughts of snow. The television this morning shows me that by evening, there will be snow in the mountains. The first snow of the season in the Sierras. Makes me think of my brother, tall trees, lifetimes ago, snow so deep you couldn’t find the cabins sometimes. When he visits next month, it will be alone now. How long since he has been alone? It is different for me, but it is my loss too, a loss I mourn. We do not leave it that way, do not agree to go on with our lives when they inevitably go on with their own lives, separated by distance and space and intention. We even promise each other that nothing has changed, nothing will change. That we will both be the same people, the same friends, as we always have been. Always. A gesture that is meant to bind and connect, rather than split apart. It remains unsaid, unsettled, but we both know our words carry little truth anymore. Change rises and swells and our voices cannot be heard in the silence. In this moment I feel the grief strongly. For everything that came before (driving and singing ‘take the skinheads bowling,’ inviting random strangers to Christmas dinner, drinking coffee in the mountain mornings). For the choice between two things I did not ask to make and all that I now have to relinquish. Letting go as if it never mattered in the first place. For knowing that there is no other way.

Something Like Summer

Eighth floor, big window overlooking the clutter of too much traffic, human and not. Construction on a building in the distance, and the ground in front is covered in filmy, almost transparent plastic. I spend whole days up here thinking of leaving, not leaving, wanting to leave, looking out the window instead, rarely talking to anyone else. Each time I see the building out there, see that pale glint of almost white on the ground, my heart pauses, falters. Every time I am tricked into thinking sometime in the day, while I've been trapped in this cubicle, snow has fallen. I know it's not far off now, those long, long nights and bitter days. I have always dreamed of finding an eternal summer, a place where there is little darkness and much light and life. A place defined only by the warmth of the landscape and of the people who live there. Three times today I was tricked. Three times (and more) that I'm dreaming of a place where there is no snow. Not here. Not yet.