it's all half-light in here

it comes in small pieces, little bits of your cabin with gingham, lots of gingham. there's your email that hits, hard, and i think about it while listening to yo la tengo and the new old 97s cd and jonimitchellbobdylanalways. my hair gravitates outside, tired of the inside of this toyota corolla that doesn't have the character of my old, rusting '91 honda accord. i almost died in that car, on the side of some wyoming road in the middle of a blizzard and when i thought i had lost you, it was me in that car, all wool sweaters from mexico and tears above Fremont Lake. it was me and my roommates and talk of Life, What's In Store? and rilo kiley in the background and avocado sandwiches and we shrugged and laughed and said ah well as long as there's letters by candlelight i guess it will be alright. there's too much light these days, too many ceiling lights, not enough non pretentious dingy bars. here, the lack of light is on purpose and otherwise it's a flood of halogen, an assault on your senses until you adapt to an all fake world. your email hits, hard, and my heart subsists on google images and the light that emanates from this laptop. there's so many silences and so much other-meaning behind my words and i think i'll die with novels having been written in my pauses and ellipses...

and the night, i think

sometimes, i think i could be quiet for the rest of my life. i would make sounds, of course, but not really speak. i could clap instead of asking for cheese or ice cream, and gurgle when wine drips from mouth corners and stains wood and cotton. most of all, i could stare into fire until, finally, i stop feeling so young and insignificant against the backdrop of something so relentlessly ancient. every fire i light reminds me of death and the Sahara and nights spent on the dock overlooking the dirty jammed up river next to my dorm room and where i shouldn't have been in and everything i've meant to remember and forget and dance to and laugh with and at and the end.
the song "Brockwell Park" by the Red House Painters only exists once on youtube, and even then, it's just a cover. it's comforting to know not everything is online, available at the tip of your fingers, only a couple keystrokes away. what's so wrong with searching, with taking trains and more trains until finally you can find a record store where the song does exist, by the artist, and you can take it home in context.
i need to call back so many friends, but instead i've been wishing for a pen pal. i'd tell her/him about apple picking and how i can't wait for fall because of the too big sweaters and everything being red and all the sadness everywhere.

bursting into light

"Autumn Leaves" plays and a thunderstorm has just subsided and though it's summer, I can smell fall. Everything is burning and red and I'm living smaller these days, more carefully, less rhythmically. An old friend of mine told me my e-mail was an "opus" and I laughed, smallishly, because I write so few e-mails and letters these days. And none of them feel anywhere near the War and Peace-length pieces I once wrote. These days, my e-mails are all about the gray winter, the waveless ocean, the cold cheeks smashed to sand, to rock. I find myself tensing, easily hurt, quickly climbing into myself, wanting to bury my head amongst my own marrow.
I prepare for another move, another round of feeling slightly out of place. I'll be happier there, I guess though I'm clearly not sure, tucked somewhere away from the strip malls boasting too many CVS stores and even the pizza shops grate on me, being a constant, albeit silent, reminder that I'm here. When I tell people about Morocco, they tell me I'm brave to have gone there, and that makes me want to cry. I'm tired of explaining myself. I'm tired of never feeling like I entirely connect to anywhere. Except, of course, Wyoming and Morocco.

(the following passage is an excerpt from my journal. it's dated May 9, 2003)

Drunk and sentimental. I don't want to go home and forget about these changes, this place, this sky, the way I feel alone and free.
I still have a paper for my women and economic development class and a french final, but I really feel finished. Finished? Can you grasp that? How is it possible to understand that these people, who have helped create pieces of ourself, might slip out of your life completely, that you may never see them again?
How do you say such goodbyes?
How do lives merge, never to even run parallel again? but to be thankful for that one merge, for me to see that I have been happier than I ever have been before. How can I ever thank Morocco for allowing me to learn to fly?

Now this is the present day me:
I am going back to the place that has consumed so many of my thoughts for five years. Five years? Is that possible? I re-read my journal from Morocco, and I can remember everything in such vivid detail. I have physically ached to go back there, and now I am. It's just for a couple days, and I know it will make me want to move there. Places have such a tug on my heart strings.

sometimes, i will get a whiff of cumin and i will become disoriented, close my eyes, and believe, momentarily, that when i open them the rows of orange juice stands in Marrakech (a city of rose colored walls) will stand before me.
Alexandra Fuller has been in the news lately, and along with her Pinedale and Sublette County and i miss the harshness of Wyoming so much. i open my New York Times and am confronted with the dirt and the isolation and that sought after loneliness i lust after here in the land of SUV drivers doing lines of espresso off steering wheels. i miss the bone crunching cold and not having silence be something to conquer. i make so many promises, so many insha'Allahs that i will return - to wyoming, where a garage still holds a pair of long forgotten sandals and Morocco, where a country holds my heart.

to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

-e.e. cummings

when everything we felt failed

are we all so lost another time would fit us? we could fall into someone else's mold, someone else's bar, someone else's hands tracing the edges of jukeboxes. i'm listening to the songs that were once my passengers, my sanity driving past the Rockies, when pictures fell from two-toned white walls and i never even noticed. it's that same vague sense of being in constant awe of the world, of having such a seventh-grade crush on the world that it makes me want to write love letters every day and slip them into mountain cracks and river beds. it's that desire to live in backseats until i die from the snow or the heat but not the everyday. i don't want to die in my sleep.
it's strange, wondering if anyone falls upon this blog, this blog where i do not describe at length new technologies or political ramblings. i wonder in the vastness of the internet, does anyone see this? do they like yogurt? do they staple buttons on as i do? do they smash cheeks to grass in hopes of grass stains as permanent as that dimple, that ever-present dimple in the photos of you at age two, clad in red with worried eyes.

Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern

Since we don't have t.v. and I'm not a religious YouTuber, I just recently found out about Sally Kern's insaaane remarks (tell me...exactly which societies have disappeared after embracing homosexuality....??) and am totally at a loss for words. How offensive on so, so, SO many levels. To homosexuals, to Muslims, to hopefully anyone with a conscience. I'm so tired of people, especially freaking ELECTED OFFICIALS, being so unexcusably ignorant. At least once a week or more I'll hear people using "that's so gay" and people accuse me of melodrama when saying that's just as bad as using the N-word. Someone told me Suffolk County is one of the worst places to live if you're gay or black or anything that's not disgustingly mainstream. The anxieties I have about living in this place, and my desire to leave, is eroding the layers of my stomach. I feel so anxious about living here that it sometimes takes all I have to get up in the morning after remembering where I am.

"Honeysuckle is its own revelation"

I'm sitting here, after reading David Axelrod poetry ("Honeysuckle is its own revelation") and listening to Emile and some random girl talking about socialemotional and academia and so I pretend I'm doing work, but really I'm looking at images of Homer, Alaska. I look out the window and pretend to see the mountains, the lakes, the sense of sanity in a world in which I'm quickly losing faith.
But. I take deep breaths. I swim in the ocean at 2 a.m. and tangle hair with seaweed and finger Argentinian leaves in journals. And the faith, slowly, comes back. And I wish I could hold it, even if it crumbled, like the leaves.

je ne veux qu'elle

My desk: Trader Joe's pad thai; papers claiming truths about oil, cancer, governments; excavation.
My desktop: Marc Lavoine for the sake of memory in lieu of taste, Guggenheims, Anne Lamott, revolution, YouTube's Moroccan accounts.
My thoughts: The library is open until nine, my throat hurts, minutiae kills me, are revolutions possible in the U.S.?, I can feel burnt out, I can't wait to live in Brooklyn, I'm excited to write an article about super tuesday, I'm going to check out No Logo by Naomi Klein at the library even though I have a million books I need to read at home, I fall in love too hard, too easily with the world and it breaks my heart every day.

judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character

I so savor my alone time, but when it comes to "alone, alone" time, I'm always at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Typically, during my "me" time, there will be someone else in the house, namely my husband. (Still so crazy to see that typed out. It makes me seem so much older and more mature than I think of myself, this person who's about to turn 26. 26?!) At any time, I can shout out a line from a Charles Bukowski poem just so I know someone else in the world can appreciate what I'm experiencing. Sometimes, I wonder if I have forgotten how to give myself feedback.
Now I have a couple days to myself. I'm wearing Superman underwear, wrapped up in a fleece blanket and watching The Jane Austen Book Club, which I have yet to be impressed with. I'm drinking pomegranate tea and wondering, as I always do around this time of the week, how exactly I'm going to write all my articles by deadline. I need to call lots of friends back, write letters and return e-mails to friends in Spain, but I've done none of that.
I heard clips of the "I Have a Dream" speech while eating in a Jamaican restaurant in Philly this weekend, and it was really jarring and made tears spring to my eyes and my throat clench. I so want to believe this country will, finally, challenge itself, accept its wrongdoings and move on to a place where when a black man or a woman runs for president, we will be able to focus on their platforms and not their race or gender.
Let us all continue to fight for justice.

and some things that i said to her (i'll tell you what i missed)

In Wyoming, when I would feel overwhelmed, I would walk outside and the infiniteness of everything — the sky, the mountains, the blades of grass, the conversations in little hondas with rust spots — would soothe those chafed life spots. Everything was so big, and I felt so happy being so free and so small. I imagined myself turning corners in London and Algiers and clinking wine glasses on cross-country train trips and screaming love notes to a world content to bang on the pots and pans.
When do we all stop walking to the edge? When do meet in fields and not on cliffs? When does the every-day become something not to surmount, not to defeat? When can we let our shoulders shake; when can we stop being strong and fall, just a little bit? Why must every breath be so obvious?

sometime in between friday night and saturday morning

It's the time of year everyone talks about new year's resolutions. "Oh hi so and so!" they say at the grocery stores, the banks, the concrete seas that swallow box stores whole and shit them out in tiny alleyways, where the third graders don't venture anymore. They stand with frozen chicken in hand, giggling nervously about the need to lose weight. They gush over cilantro. They ask about family and report back to the suburban soldiers who just don't give a shit anymore.
I've never made new year's resolutions. I turn over no new leaves; I make no new self. I am still me, drinking beer and reading Zadie Smith. I laugh too loudly, write too many letters without sending them, receive stares from passerbys witnessing my version of "Boots of Spanish Leather," complete with new haircut shakes and all.
What is it about the specific marking of a passing of time that makes us reevaluate ourselves? What is it about arbitrary country lines that makes us nationalists? What draws us to countdowns, to straight lines, to rigidity?
My resolution for society? Drink champagne at noon during a siesta, write a collective novel maybe with Antigone playing some sort of lead role, smash dirt in your flannel shirt/face. Stop narrating.