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.