How Brilliant It Can Be

Thunder rolls in, covers your windows in immediate night, branches lashing against the panes. It's gone in an instant, taking a few degrees of swelter with it. You can't be mad. If anything, you wish you were out there in it, your senses could use a little shakeup. 

Tomorrow, a holiday awaits, the one that always cracked your chest open in all the ways it could. The longest day, the shortest night, but then the day when it turns. How winter lies in wait with every summer. How darknes hides behind every light. If you want to come back in the fall, just let me know. We'll work something out. 

One week until adventures begin for the season. 

Sometimes it feels like you are doing everything right.  

Print Shop

Another gloomy day, you wonder how much of this you can endure before thinking that maybe it's just a sign, that maybe the universe is looking to push you out, out. You look at weather forecasts in New Hampshire. 

The weekend is a mess of a country in tatters. Of assassinations, parades, and marches. An audience member asks, what am I to make of my American dream? and the presenter says, it was never meant to be easy. You repeat it in your head. You had 30 years of easy, and even then, once or twice, the easy got stuck in your throat. 

We fight when we believe we have something worth fighting for. 

A dream not worth fighting for, 
was only ever a figment of your imagination. 

Jag Fattar Ingenting

More rain, June disappears in a cloud cover of its own making and you're ready to go along with it. The top-ups are so temporary, so light, like hummingbirds resting only for a second before they're off again. You feel like there should be a key here somewhere, a door, an answer, but you are left with nothings, with more of the same. 

Wherever you go, there you are, she said. You spent a lifetime trying to prove her wrong but have ended right back where you started with nothing but sand in your hands. 

It didn't have to be like this, you think, but maybe that's exactly where you get it wrong. Maybe this is all it is, and you should have learned how to make your peace with it.  

Saltwater

The cure for anything is salt water, it rings and rings in your ears and you never tire of hearing it. 

I get on the parkway, driving against rush hour traffic in the sunny mid-morning, the New York Bay glittering at my side. There's a metaphor here about going against the current, about how easy it is, but it comes out sounding so trite against reality.

The waves at Jones Beach are a rough but consistent, dragging a slew of seaweed and silt from the ends of the earth to your ankles. Groups of youngsters shriek and giggle at the cold but you dive right in, the brief short circuit of winter waters like a wake up call. Dive into a wave, swim over another. Surf a short wave to shore, float across the billows. Once one wave passes, another appears in its place. Sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, forever the promise of a perfect wave just beyond this one. 

Stand there for hours losing track of time, what use could you have in knowing what the clock says. You never regret one last dive in the water reminds itself to you and you let yourself stay longer. Your shoulders fizzle. Another dive. Your legs tire. Another dive. A dolphin leaps at the edge of your vision,you look around to see if anyone else noticed. The Universe winks at you now and again. Summer is here. 

I return to the city smelling of salt, skin flushed, head tired. All the debris that lingered in my chest has been washed away, nothing matters now. I look at houses along the shoreline, consider a fall spent marinating. My landlord writes to say the rent is going up and anyway I don't know if you were planning on coming back. All the world's potential lies ahead. 

All you have to do it dive in after it.  

Weathered

Another day of rain, you wake early to hear it washing the windows, and fall back asleep until it's turned into a nuisance against your temples. Pull the string on the ceiling lights – in June, who ever heard of such a thing – and ignore the headache trundling across the top of your brain. You're back to believing the Universe is trying to tell you something, you just don't know what. 

I'm a boat out of steam, a balloon out of air. I'm hell and a hand basket, I'm a hunger of picky eaters. The shoebox on sixth street has doubled in price, but I'm not looking to go back in time.  

I only wish I knew
what there was 
to look forward to.  

Unrest

In California, a smoke cloud billows out of the military siege. Do you remember how it was last time? And the time before? Do you remember who sat on the right side of history in the end? 

A wasp gets trapped inside my bedroom window, too exhausted to leave when I clear the path. I feed it sugar water and strawberries, it delights and revives. We could all do with a little comfort, a little care. 

Instead we are kicked into a world of each-person-for-themselves-ness and suspicion. I look at apartment listings on the lower east but wonder if perhaps the answer lies in a country cabin no one could reach. The questions are the same year after year, why

do we keep asking them? 

The application asks if I've ever been a communist, ever been a terrorist, ever been married to more than one person at a time. It seems the Vogons are alive and well among us. 

I'm packing my books. I don't need this reality from you.  

Applicate

I dream of wayward office fans in hospital rooms, frantically fighting for off switches and wake to a window AC blasting, my dreams have been so strange lately. I dreamed I passed a woman in the street who used to me like a mother to me and haven't seen in years, what of it. It is summer, the world is trying to whisper to me. I'm trying to prove myself to you, America, I'm trying to mold myself in your image, thirty-two years we've spent together America, isn't it time we made it official? For better, or for worse, I've already given you all, isn't it your turn to prove what that means. 

If you like it, 
then you should have put a ring on it 

but I'll settle for your papers. 

In a previous millenium, I could've never expected that we'd be here,
America. 
But I fell in love, despite myself,
full of the audacity of a secure attachment, 
full of belief that we'd both be allowed to be our selves

And still have a place with the other. 

Now is the time
we show our hands.