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.