forgetting, and so on

"Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow." -T.S. Eliot

I fall into familiarity so easily when I come back to Pennsylvania, driving with ease past what was once Sweet Daddy's, where I nursed broken hearts in sixth grade, past the Gryphon Cafe, where I I would write and write and write and down overrated biscotti while Louis Armstrong and Ella played in the background, to Valley Forge, where I spent a countless number of sleepless nights wondering what exactly I was doing with my life. And then the sun would rise, there in Valley Forge National Park, and dandelions would tickle my nose and everything smelled like freshly picked apples and caramel and I would watch the world erupt into life.

People ask why I want to leave the east coast when everything here is so beautiful and easy. When my family is here and so many friends and my childhood. And that is exactly why - it knocks the wind out of me, the constant remembering. I drive by the playground where I grew up pitching in softball games and drinking beer in high school, with most of that time spent with someone who is no longer here and never will be and I still, years and years after her death, can't wrap my mind around that. My heart has been broken and put back together one too many times here and I worry sometime, late late at night when the last of the fireflies have died and it's so cold that it hurts to breathe, that my heart will finally just give in.

things I have forgotten to tell you

I never hated high school the way others did. Nor did I think it was the greatest. Most of my days I waded in a shallow pool of happiness - I did well in school, had good friends, and boyfriends that were more friends than any kind of combustible love affair that left me either breathless or in ruins. Most of high school I treated as a time to get through, to put up with until real life started, when I would feel things more strongly and life would be more than surface level.

So going to my 10 year reunion this weekend was an extension of that status quo I felt growing up. It was vaguely nice seeing people -though the people I really wanted to see I've already kept in touch with. I had one really good conversation with a girl who I haven't kept in touch with, who I spent many an afternoon with writing letters as part of the high school's Amnesty International club, who has a chicken farm and who asked me for advice on how to deal with a mother who just found out she has cancer. Other than that, I enjoyed the whiskey more than the conversation.

Really, what last night proved to me was that I think I made the most out of my time at a high school in the conservative suburbs and was right to always want to, and to finally, leave there. And it's nice to return every 10 years, to see the people whose faces used to populate your every day, and say I'm happy to see you're doing well. That you have pretty children, fun stories about yoga in L.A., are practicing environmental law in D.C. And then I'm happy to leave and return to a world where I feel more free and everything is scarier and more poignant and I cry and laugh with equal enthusiasm. Where when I say I have loved Morocco and Wyoming more than anywhere else, or I want to live in Alaska, people do not ask why.

no one, not even the rain, has such small hands

i live under blankets these days, hibernating with tea and pumpkin pie and candles are everywhere and i can't stop writing love letters to autumn and everything smells like cloves and the light is always beautifully waning. changes in seasons of course make me remember all the times i've danced in leaf piles, mashing bits of yellow leaves into my hair, giving my hands permanent grass stains. six years ago emile said i love you for the first time just after i jumped into a leaf pile and spun and spun until i ran into him and it was so late at night and i was leaving for wyoming in a matter of days and everything was so happy and so sad and there was such finality in that beginning. thanksgiving, six years ago, i thought i was saying goodbye to the person who i thought was going to be my biggest loss. there was my first thanksgiving in college, when we all stayed in wisconsin, these new friends who became my family, and stuffed ourselves silly with tofurkey and drank wisconsin beer until we fell asleep on old corduroy couches that always smelled faintly of nagchampa and oranges and i forgot i was trying to patch up a relationship i had sabotaged. i remember so well waking up that next morning and eating leftover pie and taking a walk by the river and my roommate telling me, "let's write all about last night and put that paper somewhere safe so we'll never forget anything." there have been thanksgivings with our families for the first time and so much wine and laughing and remembering that as much as we fumble, as many mistakes as we make, as hard as we fall and as much as we bleed, there are times that we can say, as the last of the leaves fall and the trees become their old and crotchety selves, these are the people i love.

good night, good night, wherever you are sleeping

It's easy to get distracted here. There's the arm-length tall hefeweizens at bars in the village, tiny bookstores with cold green floors and an employee that looks like Harriet the Spy (as an adult, that is), the glorious cold that came rushing in today, sending the neighborhood kittens into the half-burnt church. There are poetry readings and work of course and coffee with friends from another lifetime, when I was someone who never thought they'd return to the U.S., that they'd always live by the sea in Morocco. In red shoes, eating peppermint patties and drinking hot cider, I find myself wishing for some omniscient narrator who can tell me as nice (and as vague as that word entails) as life is right now, it will get better. That I'll wake up exactly where I want to be, which is somewhere far from the easy grit of this city. Where I can be completely alone, watching the stars' old light on some spot on the horizon, once again an unknown entity to all.

I'm writing you now just to see if you're better

The chill in the air has settled in, finally, and songs about leaves waft from doorways, ours included. A man with a tambourine groans as he sits and stays put at the bottom of the subway stairs. People look to see if there's a place to give him money, but seeing none, they move on, brushing raindrops from bulky gray sweatshirts. And the man shakes his tambourine and the woman selling water ice doesn't show up to the station anymore and I'm drinking tea from red tin containers and football (football football, not soccer) is played in Irish bars. It's autumn in New York.
Has it really been two years since I first moved here, since I would get lost on the subway and end up somewhere where a man from Ghana would give me free chips and tell me how my wallet looked like it was from his country, which he misses but will probably never see again.
Our apartment is cold, which gives me ample opportunity to light as many candles as I want, and the light bounces off his brown sweater and my red dress and, after reverberating off ceiling corners, it zeroes in on us again, making us seem almost ageless, and in this moment, I am happy. Happy fall, friends.

Ray LaMontagne

I've been to hell and back so many times I must admit you kinda bore me

a fitting farewell

tipping hats in yankee stadium and beer on bleachers and wine on of course porches and saying hello all over again and, oh, friends, it's an extended farewell to summer and everyone's hair on the subway had halos thanks to the setting sun. there's so much happiness and emptiness, sharing it with and without so many, and I look at all these strangers and as we trek on, through puddles and dropped flowers and last night's vomit and the strawberries no longer in season, there are so many holes. there are so many holes and I'm learning you can't always fill them. that you just have to learn to let life's oddly shaped beauty cover them up a little, leaving just enough space for them to breathe.

we were born before the wind

and magnificently we will float into the mystic (happy birthday van morrison!)

the heat has returned but I have my heart set on fall, so I'm drinking pumpkin beer and can barely contain my excitement thinking about leaf piles and feet under mounds of blankets on freezing nights and cumin everywhere, on everything.

(and moon dances, yes)

how many nights have I spent like this - exhausted by deadline, wondering what I could have done better, what turn of phrase could have been more beautiful, if I forgot to call someone, if everything will all come crashing down on me tomorrow. but somehow, everything doesn't fall apart. somehow, i have managed to trick everyone into thinking i am normal, drinking orange juice and star gazing and running over the Brooklyn Bridge like everyone else.

but tonight, i retreat into books and writing and letters and craigslist to search for land in montana or argentina or morocco.

the end of the summer

it's the end of the summer and all i can do is listen to lucinda williams and ray lamontagne and drink beer in pools and tonight it's cherries and cherries and too much wine. we danced in the rain tonight, after the thunder and lightning passed, and i opened my mouth and all the heat and the mugginess and the heaviness rushed to my head and i wished for lakes and mountains and loneliness. tonight i'm trying to finish a short story i'm hoping to submit to some literary journals but it's becoming more difficult, the characters being a little too close to my heart, too wrapped up in the confusion of these days. tell me i am not the only one who wants to leave and run and run and run, westward.

it always drifts off too early, westward to the islands

"Think of light and how far it falls, to us. To fall, we say, naming a fundamental way of going to the world - falling." -William Kittredge

it is a strange thing, to go home, even now, when home is so close to where i live and to visit is no longer a rarity. it is why i cannot imagine living anywhere for too long, it can be suffocating, everything you remember. sometimes i will give friends from other times in my life tours of this place, the tree where i began to learn Japanese, the tractor-trailer sized tire swing where, while wearing a purple panda shirt, i had my first kiss, the middle school soccer field where we sang over the top renditions of Queen, the house where i grew up and stuffed notes into the floor with the hope that someday, decades from now, a little girl my age would find and take solace in them, in their descriptions of my interpretation of a 10-year-old's world.
it's strange, to see things as they were more than as they are - to know where the ice cream store was that is now a bar, to remember O'Brien's News across the street, where friends made out with their first pack of cigarettes and smoked them behind the library, to see 6th grade versions of yourself and your best friend walking down Lancaster Avenue and speaking of lives we never wanted to tame.
i remember so well crying as i watched my grandparents' car drive away after they had come to visit when i was in fourth grade. i cried because of the finality of all moments, and i promised to always remember that time - leaning out the window, smelling spring, waving to people who could no longer see me. and so i have, remembered.

something about what happens

does this make sense? does it matter anyway?

(not my favorite version of the song, but, hey, it's lucinda williams so it's still amazing.)

quick life update and then more later: new jobs and shorter hair and packages from best friends who are scattered across the world and who i want someday to all live on the same piece of land somewhere in maine or montana or spain or morocco or new mexico or or or. some disconcerting doctor's visits but it all seems to be alright and we don't let it stop us from dancing, slowly, under street lamps when the world is hot and quiet.

i just stood and looked at the open space (another all time favorite from lucinda)

grace from reading

"I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love." -The Color Purple

i never thought this life was possible

the heat comes easily and we all move so quickly to the front porches and the middle of lakes where we can sing and yell and say so this is why we made it through winter. we sat on gloriously old rugs smelling of nagchampa and nectarines and i looked up and loved minnesota and its bowling alleys where waitresses dance in lieu of taking orders and its rivers that sneak up on you and so much swallowed watermelon and climbable trees. i digress, i meant to say: it was me on a plane to chicago, where one of my best friends met me, hair flying everywhere and us, on the road, where i think we're meant to be all the time and wisconsin, a state i forgot i missed, and we flew by all the cheese and fireworks and the remember-whens and i felt so lucky, getting to the twin cities, with so many of my favoritefavorite people. what do you say when you get to watch another best friend filled with so much love that it bounces off her, onto sidewalks and trees and some i'm sure is making its way down main streets in kansas and maybe tennessee and hopefully it will tango its way to the east coast, where we could use reminders that we are so small, we must dance we must laugh when we get poison ivy and drink while we try not to scratch and always drive past our exit and say tomorrow we hit utah. tomorrow, we start all over again. so cheers to you friends, what a world we live in that the universe drop-kicked us all into the same place. how lucky i am to know you all.

one last song

It's been so long since I've written anything real. Tonight I will try. Tonight, I'll tell you I got a package from my aunt, who sent me a book that belonged to her best friend who just died and she sent it to me because it's about wandering and always trying to find some concept of yourself that always seems slightly elusive and because she said I'd understand and all I could do was sit on the couch with a beer and cry and cry and shoulders shaking think, has it really been seven years since my closest childhood friend died? Has it really been that long since we walked along Lancaster Avenue, sneaking late late at night, when the fireflies would sleep on your shoulder, into the park where we grew up playing softball, where we drank warm, skunked beer in high school, where we spoke of all the porches we would visit as adults. We promised each other we'd be 90-years-old and happy and drinking spiked lemonade on a porch overlooking some unmarred horizon and I keep thinking of things to tell her and after all these years I wonder when it is that time is supposed to make everything alright. Sometimes, everything seems so small and I want to be so quiet and it's hard to explain this to a beautiful city that never sleeps. Its windows are like fireflies tonight, dancing on tonight's horizon by the bridge, silently moving above a landscape full of old blood and newly mixed cement and spilled Thai food and mouths dribbling tequila and ripped flannel and you and me and everything in between. It is almost midnight and despite the little clothing I have on I can't stop sweating and it is nights like these I wish so much you were here. We could walk, slowly, down the street, stopping beneath a street lamp so we could see each other and say, oh, hey, I miss you. I hope so badly you are somewhere bicycling through naked rain, always.

for the heat, etc.

because i will never tire of mixes:

http://8tracks.com/annag

and it's stamina that i lack

because i'll only ever be a middle distance runner

e.e. cummings has been sent to me in text form, for the first time, and i sit down in a park next to a highway because everything is so confusing. the faithful moon follows us these days after we've watched everything brilliantly burn into night and it's skinny-dipping season and oh the home brews are out in force and my hand is happy when it touches my burned neck. some of my closest and most inspiring friends are coming to visit next week and my excitement is burning holes in a stomach full of chocolate-covered strawberries and a crumbling mess of peaches and blackberries.

always Milan Kundera

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of 'We are all writers!"
-Milan Kundera

beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.

I wonder, sometimes, what anyone is supposed to get from reading this blog. I forget, sometimes, that I'm writing this for an audience, and then I wonder why an audience would come back here at all. But, dear reader, if you exist, these days are big and filled with sky and waiting for the fireflies and harboring those Big Life Decisions in my stomach. It is always now, when the chopsticks are discarded, All the Pretty Horses is half read, barely thought out short story ideas litter a floor cold with night, that I revert to the way I've always been: driving past my exit, dreaming of somewhere lonely with a windowsill. I've spent too much time on this coast, and now? The if-not-now-when's are hard to swallow, the beer less so.

I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet

somehow, it has become summer and I love this, everyone sweating, messy hair clinging to backs of necks, everyone migrating to front porches, where all the stories and the Manu Chao and the home-brews that taste perfectly of burnt peaches come out. I want to ban air-conditioning for days like these, so we can sit on alternate wooden steps, telling stories about eating squirrel in Virginia and that maze of a train station in Buenos Aires and getting lost in Morocco until finally you give up trying to find your hostel and get drunk with men in massive, sinister-looking hoods. I want to toast and toast and toast to you, summer, until we have cheers-ed each other far into August, when we can say, oh, isn't this perfect, look at this world turning into red. Look at all of us, turning into something more beautiful.

but in the end, I missed what it meant

(and smoke away the night) (prelude: I'm sorry to link to MySpace but I could find the song Ariel Ramirez nowhere online...)
I've hunkered down in my living room for the night, armed with tea and bundles of fleece blankets to ward off the cold that has somehow seeped into this New York City spring full of guitar players in Central Park and rolling in fallen cherry blossom petals and waiting with bated breath for summer. Because then! Then best friends from all over the world will be here and we will sit in corners of bars and they will tell me about hikes in Spain and grad school in Argentina and farming in Colorado and all will be right again. Tonight, after another deadline had passed, I watched the moon's reflection in a puddle and wanted so much to tell someone everything because I could see no stars. This light, tonight, this bright moon in a sky with no stars, it is stripping away all that is safe for me. Promises have become the seed head of a dandelion.

tonight you're on my mind

I'm getting sick, which gives me an excuse to sit in my faded red t-shirt , read, and listen to Jeff Buckley:

lover, you should've come over

and of course hallelujah

lived in bars and danced on tables

because deadline is over and i want to hang out with chan marshall

with no lodestar in sight

(music to read by)
I escape sometimes, when the city becomes its darkest, when some of the lights finally dim, when light bulbs flicker, exhausted, crinkling before they become something to trip over in corners of apartments overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. After talking about Melbourne to our waitress who hopes to make it big in film here in New York City, I retreated, for just a minute, to the darkest part of the bar to breathe and search in vain for a juke box. How many times have the stories I watched play out happened before? The numbers being asked for, the girls in their red skirts and tall boots crying on the sidewalks, the musicians heaving their drum sets off blue truck beds, all the lonely hope.

because the city lights are fading

a song to fall asleep by

the smallness of us

tonight: watching Y Tu Mama Tambien and drinking beer and dreaming of the Mexican countryside and packing for camping and i'm happy. i can't wait for lakes and dirt under fingernails and cheeks pressed to grass and friends who have seen you grow up. there will be guitar at night and card games and more beer and, my favorite, the fires. everything is so perfect in the light of a campfire, skin glowing, silently, people basking in the smallness of us.

this is how it works

I feel small today, in the way that makes me want to sleep in blue hostel rooms and train cars smelling of cumin and wave goodbye to you and recede behind the Moroccan hills permanently burned into memory. I want sand and dunes and freezing cold showers and me when I was so far away and never going to return. I worry, sometimes, that I will always be like this - ready to jump, grass-stains and all, into the sublimely temporary. I worry I will never know where I belong - or, worse, that I already know and that I'll never go.

define temptation

The rain won't stop and I take the time to believe it's June. It's all reading and writing and wine and music this weekend, and the prospect of summer teases me and I fall headfirst for its thunderstorms that giggle and save me and destroy everything. I refuse to take my bathing suit off and imagine it all smells like honeysuckle and my friend writes to me about a road trip south, across the border and maybe we'll just keep going. But, for now, it's late nights and talks on porches and I hold my breath, slightly, until I waver and exhale.

come into my world, I've got to show, show, show you

Oh it is spring and I play Regina Spektor in my car and everyone is in yellow skirts and they twirl and we all exchange small smiles in our eyes. My concentration is shot to hell these days and all I can do is sing along and talk about the Czech Republic to the guy selling cotton candy in Central Park and Thai peanut sauce is all over my shirt, all the time. What I mean is, how do you say the words you know you'll never say? And what happens when you never say them? Life, I suppose.

snowy atlas mountains

post script: falling hard for this song (listen to snowy atlas mountains)

I don't know if you notice anything

tonight it's chocolate stout beer and guitar picking and i'm so far away. it's cumin and i'm staring at a city that winks and puddlejumps and waves goodbye as it pirouettes mid-air. it's so easy here, all the moving sidewalks and free samples of sushi and the salsa dancing on every corner. it would be so easy to say i can't do this and hide myself in the snow and the dirt and the corners of billiard halls where my white tank top is yellow with dust by the time the sun comes up. but tonight, it's middlesex by jeffrey eugenides and letters to everyone i know in my head and so much space everywhere. i revel in it, and i'm sorry.

learning loneliness

Today has been spent in flannel, waiting for snow, finishing "Gilead," which I lovedlovedloved. The prose is so lonely and it makes me, as so many things do, want to tunnel myself away from this world, far away from the facebook message sent to me asking if I got the e-mail about getting the phone call they made three minutes ago. It's cliche to teeter on existential edges, but despite the glorious Nepalese restaurants and the conversation over wine in Jackson Heights and jazz clubs in Harlem, I find myself gravitating toward that old need for all that is lonely: the mountains, the motel based in the harsh glare of neon lights, the corner in a bar in New Mexico where you wonder just how much hope oozes out from the heavily bearded clientele and makes its way to the green linoleum floor.