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.