13th Moon

So we were trying to decide what to do with our lives..? My sister's voice trails off. It's early Friday evening in the post-Christmas haze, and the little bar is nearly empty. We laugh at the notion; we never get anywhere. She orders another beer, and we talk inappropriate dreams and New Year's plans instead. I'll be in New York for a few days, you know, she says, as I stare at the Brooklyn Brewery taps and feel nothing. The city feels further away than ever. The world.

There is no sleep to be had. I spend my nights in alternate realities, broken characters playing out their turmoil on the screen and seeping into my bath water. They make my stomach hurt. I know I'm grasping at straws; I claw and plead, regardless. The same blood that has coursed through you for 30 years powers you still. It runs thick and dark, infected with years of fear and fervor, of terror and toxins and ugly secrets. The movies serve a welcome break, the relief of someone else's cancer. There was sun today, while I was hiding in my darkened office, there was sun. We haven't seen it in what seems like weeks.

Spring will bring us our lives back again.

You just make sure the one you get,
is the one you wanted, to begin with. 

Da Capo

The weathermen with their ominous prophecies again, they say the rain will freeze, they say the roads will kill us all, but I see the barren sidewalks and wear sneakers anyways, revel in the freedom. In the middle of the day, when the gravel is wet, I stretch my legs and take long, long steps and look strangers straight in the eye. Later, at night, the streets are all black ice and stray office rats shuffle carefully to safety. Calculate the cold feet and strained legs, wasn't it still worth it though for a moment's joy?

All day, my mind is words, is sentences crafting themselves and lying in wait to be written down, to find their fit, but how when that blank page rolls out in front of my eyes nothing right comes out. I pound at the piano for hours, forget the dinner on the stove, the furious energy makes me laugh as my stale fingers revive themselves in notes so often played that they fray at the edges. We crescendo according to direction, interpret sad words, glad words, break our fingertips at the fortissimo near the end and do not notice. An entire story told, an entire life lived in a few minutes, of somebody else's painting.

If only it were as easy
to interpret the tune
from within. 

Thaw

The snow is washed away in rain, the streets lie bare. People outside the corner bar mourn the loss, as I laugh through the puddles at their feet. It makes the nights darker, yes, but my feet feel safer on concrete, my body lands firmer on streets than on that white magic. The building grows quiet, finally, my mind begins to stir. It is too late for song; I plug in headphones and pound classical pieces into the piano until my fingers fail and my jaws are clenched tightly.

A letter appears in the sheet music piles, a crooked hand-writing, a companion through the years.
And there it is, how simple: an answer to the writhing questions in your gut.

This madness, Cajsa, 
this sadness, 
this overwhelming angst and self-abuse, 
they are You. 

It doesn't mean you cannot be happy
It doesn't mean there isn't method to the Madness. 

It only means now is not the time
to give up
to give in. 

It means
you bleed
with purpose.

Death to my Hometown

In search of comfort, all there is is death. He dies, slowly, but inevitably. I took the train out to the country, to see the town where she grew up. We drive the scenic route, see the worn little school where she asked a boy to be hers and the worn bigger school where no one wants to go any longer, but then neither did she. She shows me the room she tried rebelliously to claim in her youth and the mother she has since tried to leave behind. Her father grew up in this town, made his life in this town. Her mother came from the ends of the earth; this is what life makes of us. We drive across the water to the tiny cottage in the woods. When we each worked a 20-hour work week, she says, that was perfect. The next baby waits impatiently in the wings. The darkness claws at me and I long for my city street lights.

The well is deep; have you landed at the bottom yet? Are you scratching your fingers bloody against the brick, staring desperately at what must be up to see but the slightest sliver of light? Tomorrow I go to an office to pack up my things.

Tomorrow when you wake
I'll be on my way. 

Navidad

I wake up in a haze; it takes a while to get my bearings, figure out where I am. That's been happening a lot, lately. I drink too much; I don't think it's why. More families are created and announced, again those expectant faces on the screen, even though the paradisiacal internet café will not allow for voices. Overwhelmed, it seems impossible to leave now, their children are my children. These people are the bricks that build my life. I am so intent on destroying it.

There's more drinks, more company, more convoluted conversation in the night and everything twists like a vise. The motion crushes everything in its path. There's a deep gash in my index finger, it bleeds all morning, it was a silly slip of the hand, didn't my sister say these knives were dull, I ramble.

It's too much.
We can't blame the snow
for our permafrost.

Solstice

Another day where everything trembles. We go about preparing for the Christmas feast but a hangover tears at my seams and I spill gingersnaps all over her kitchen floor. How much truth was spoken in the late hours and there is still no explaining the gash in my hand. I go home exhausted, begin to scrub the corners; I say it is for Christmas but I'm only trying to avoid the cobwebs within, the cliché beats itself to a pulp right in front of me. I dreamed last night that I knew what it was to want to hurt you, but I cannot remember it now.

The darkness turned yesterday, could you feel it? Every day, now, is longer than the day before. You survived the slippery slope, you will survive many more to come even when you don't believe it. Hold my hand, stay under these covers, spring will come before we know it.

The blood that trickles from our wintery skin, will be replenished in time.

Mia Cruda Sorte

I never called your subject glib.

The woods transform, the streets. Their apartment is beautiful, so big. She gives away the wine, the cheeses, the growing scribble inside her too fragile. The screen moves, it is  a sort of punishment he says and I know he is right. It is a sort of punishment. They are happy.

It's the same bar, we vow not to get kicked out this time. His new girl is all curls and young smiles; I adore her, I adore his face in her presence. Voices call from the edge of the island; I have had too much to drink, distance is incalculable. Later, the apartment swims, the voices speak clearer, it is too late, I falter. Packages inside the door. It is so green. You should be here.

(The world has nothing, on people who refuse its reality.)

Comes the Night

Constantly the ever-so-slight tremble in my chest, like a heatwave gone wrong, like the old apartment where the subway trains rattled the floor and I get no reprieve. The snow thaws, the urbanites scurry around various temples of consumism to get all their Things, to amass so much stress under their belt that they can expel it all on Christmas morning in a spew of family arguments and disappointments. He stands in my doorway and says Maybe I'll go, maybe soon, I have no answers, I've always liked London, and I adore the shy smile on his face.

His stories read like Alice in Wonderland for adults; I find comfort in recognition, gratitude that someone has put words to the mad universes I try so hard to keep at bay. The old homemaker's guide from before the Great Wars declares that while marriage is truly a wondrous things, those inclined to madness do best to stay away. Being mentally unsound does not lend itself to a life of joyous matrimony. The v button on my keyboard is dull, I have to pound furiously on my computer to complete sentences. I cannot sleep.

My muscles and sinew change shape, my words recreate themselves. I hear another voice, another person, molded to her surroundings. I know this is the thrill of the move, the reinvention, the jig-saw puzzle made to fit.

I suppose I just thought one day the puzzle would turn out to be my own.

On Jagged Edges

The bath water is excruciatingly hot; I grimace, getting in. In a few minutes, my skin is numb, flustered, I can't feel where my body ends and the water begins. Next door, the old man is playing his violin, it is so hard to tell if he does it well. It's always loudest in the bathroom, in the vents. Finally citrus season, I peel a giant orange and let the peels drop into the tub; the fruit is juicy, refreshing, delicious, it will absolve us, it drips down my chin and lands sticky on my chest.

I know you walk these streets, still, I know our time is long since over. Summers will always give way to icy desert and endless sleep.

Another tired day passes, the nocturnal creatures rise. I feel the snow fall in my lungs; I move on.

Snowflake

The toy begins to sing and play when I kick it by accident, rummaging through my bag for a pen. The little child lends me her room for another night; I dream too much and get no rest. He sends me a manuscript; I devour it whole the minute the others have gone to sleep, it leaves me trembling. Crooked innards and charcoal eyes follow me to sleep.

Madness never terrified so much as it felt like home.

Hometowned.

Everything thaws. By morning, the streets are bare and the sound of water dripping from rooftops is deafening. I sleep in a room without windows and awake only at the smell of coffee, distant dreams of sex and summer settling in the corners.

All the bars are closed and he wretches in agony at the small town. We find a sports bar finally, get drunk, make lewd jokes and I ask him why he still lives here, when the world lies at his feet. I cannot leave them, he says. And when the other jewels lie scattered across the globe, I suppose I simply cannot make myself choose.

How odd, I think. To run only with purpose, and not out of fear of the calm. The bar closes, the people leave their chairs. They all look the same. I cringe.

Evergreen

Tell me at once all the fantastic things going on in Stockholm while I'm away, I write, as a heavy wet snow trickles aimlessly down the streets of the small town. Nothing, he says, but I won't believe it.

This town reminds me of why it is I go, what mire it is I fight so hard to sink into. The faces blur, they all look the same and I forget who I am in their mirror. His words remind me of city lights and greener pastures.

And I long for that safe harbor which is mine.

Pestle

We're just thinking of it as a two-year plan, I heard my father say from the other side of the Atlantic. In two years maybe we'll know more what we want, where you girls are, and we can make a new plan. The DNA that flows in my crooked veins, oh but it comes from them after all. For 19 years, everything sorted into two-year increments: long enough to find comfort and laughter, short enough to never have to answer to anything. I wanted only to live so that I could move with two suitcases and my bicycle on a train, my mother said once, as she poisoned my tongue with the taste of freedom.

The compulsion of repetition lies like a dark forest against my heart. It rolls me inside its cogs and tosses me out time and again to be crushed in the grind. My musles soften, yes, my resistance.

But my heart is mangled
and bleeds to no end.

Chat

Anyways, the point of the story is this famous asshole old man who obviously is brilliant says that the girlfriend is the young artist's ball and chain and keeps him from ever getting anywhere with his art, and that the only way to get anywere with your art is to sacrifice all those things that other people have, and like I said he was full of himself and an alcoholic but I'm just saying, maybe you think less about all those things that you anyways don't know what you want to do about right now and do the thing that you know you want to.

Yeah, I guess that's the thing. If I can sit in a chair and write for a living then everything is worth it. All the things that didn't work out and all the children that never were. That's the thing.

There you go. What are you waiting for? Cut that out and save it and good bye. I will see you in New York. 

I do not trust my own volition.

Her voice means I don't always have to.

O Magnum Mysterium

Commitment issues, he said and laughed. Did you ever consider that you might have those? We sat on the deep couch, in the dark night, the snow fell in great flakes outside and the calm of the evening mismatched every inch of my wretched innards. He waxed poetic about living in the moment and told my sister not to get so caught up in practical road blocks. I stared into the candle light and discovered bruises all along my arm.

Years ago, how young I was, when I tried to tell him of the silly ease of life. How world-weary his gaze at me then, and now the roles are all reversed. He put on his best understanding face, I couldn't help but lean against his steady shoulder and smile.

It occurs to me yet again that I do not deserve these people at my side, who follow me through the years and who carry me when I falter. I do not understand their loyalty, their kind eyes at my tragic corpse, but no matter.

I will hold to them until the end of days, if they will let me.

Laphroaig

Strange dreams play out in front of my unconscious eyes, of memory losses and acting classes in green summer grass. I awake confused, long unsure of what is real and what is not. When I walked home at the end of the night, the bakeries were beginning to open, but the streets were quiet. It was so cold my skin turned pink, or at least so I said and I walked in a daze.

These nights, how they will toss and tumble your frail psyche. How laughter sparks dormant connections in your gut but the whisky muddles sanity and you end up in the snow with question marks etched in your skin.

Once, years ago, I stood in that line, I know I stood too close to him and your eyes just missed it. The image has remained with me, all this time. You never saw.

I'm still not sure if I wanted you to.

Chéri

A soft hush settled over the theater, the houselights dimmed. I sat, just as when I was a child, and stared into the high ceiling, at the ornate decorations, imagined patrons 200 years ago settling into the rows to be, if only for a few hours, whisked away. I spent some time frowning at the lead's overacting, at the imperfect seams of music to whispered lines, at the restlessness of the audience, and then I was gone.

When we left the theater, people seemed to have a carefree look about them, as though they were already on to the next and wasn't it quite early on a Friday night and aren't we having a lovely time. I was certain my eyes betrayed me, that the tempest of my wrought insides played out on my face like I didn't know how to restrain my emotions. I thought Am I the only one who cannot handle being overwhelmed and hurried in the cold night to the small bar where bodies would soften my contours again.

There was a time I thought we could solve it all if only you needed me. There was a time I thought I would never tire if the bonds were only solid enough, great iron cables connecting my island to yours and we'd be safe.

It is not him I fear. 
It is his absence. 

How quickly youth fades
from us.

Wonderland

The storm calms; little flurries drift slowly towards the ground and land in soft piles. The news are frothing at the mouth trying to cover the disaster in its entirety before it passes. While I pretend to sleep, the streets get cleaned up, the city prepares to start anew. I do not pull the blinds. The world outside has that odd light color where ground and sky are indistinguishable, it is soothing.

The snow surprises us every time it comes, as though we'd never known it would hit us again. The questions on our lips are the same, year after year. We are always overwhelmed by their existence. It is life.

the Fast Forward

And by morning, the storm has come. Great big drifts of bright white snow sweep across the rooftops outside my window, cover the streets and cars and people. Life is at a standstill; I am grateful to work from home, to not have to even open the door. A super shovels snow from front porches across the street but to no avail, it is endless. I exhaust my every sense of snuggle and comfort, cannot take another long bath or drink any more hot cocoa. A video clip comes on the screen, a reminder of years ago and a man who watched the show only to indulge my attempted innocence. I tend to think if things were different then, they may have been different now, but it is only a trick of the lights. The truth is, we are who were were, and the sweetness in your voice was never going to change that.

The show seems old now, dated. Funny how the same never can be said for memories.

Winter Winds

They say the snow will wreak havoc with the city. It will come while we are sleeping and bury the streets in immobility. I putter around the apartment in oblivion, hanging evergreen wreaths and trilling carols at the walls. That heavy, wet blanket of despair lifted and all that is left behind is fresh air in my lungs and silly giggles at the mouths of babes. I walked home last night and the white snow lit the church at the end of the street, moonlight glittering off the side of the steeple, the air silent with winter. My inner cynic rails in confusion.

I'm packing a bag, now. Summer dresses, canvas shoes, things I will not miss for a few months, I'll send them with my father when he returns west next week. I am packing a bag. I am emptying a home.

The fever grips me. I laugh.

Commited.

You look cold, he said, here let me warm you. I shivered in the sudden winter as he wrapped his arms around me, his breath hot against my cheek. How easy to soften at somebody's side, to mold your body to theirs thoughtlessly, but wasn't the December night still freezing, our breaths white clouds against the black sky? I went back inside, danced until my head hurt, until beads of sweat poured down the small of my back and I forgot where I was. The couples gathered their possessions, prepared to sign checks they'll forever work to pay, an extra room in this apartment because soon there'll be babies and we make our lives in this city now, we follow the path laid out for us.

There was a picture in my inbox, 7th and Grove, why did we never come to this bar? I miss you every day. I looked around the dance floor, at the sober faces, at the unpresence of magic, and I knew it was time to go.

New York, my dearest, have we made our point yet? Have we fought our war and can we bury our hatchets, temper our pride? New York, my darling, I'm ready to come home.

In Stockholm.

The snow came, at last. It is winter. Little children stare wide-eyed and laugh, adults pull their coats closer and tighten their lips. Little whisps of icy flurries pounce at unsuspecting victims turning a corner and the subway is packed. Tomorrow, we decorate for Christmas, my boss says, and I can't believe how quickly the time passes.

Was the cold snow not just thawing? Was I not just sitting on that balcony at the end of the street and seeing the sun return to a city I barely even knew?

I biked home in the black Stockholm night the other day, saw the city glitter below me, saw the water tremble and the rooftop mosaics sleep, and then I knew: I love this town. I didn't mean to, Lord knows we got off to a rough start, but there it is. You make your home where you unpack your bags. You never fail to leave your heart. Sometimes it simply takes a little work.

Break Up.

The words evade me, of late. They tip-toe past the tip of my tongue when I race to work or sit with friends, but when I sit at the computer, nothing comes out. I discover old lovers in my box of sheet music; the notes ring  beautifully, but the meaning lies flat against the weighted keys. Time passes, as it will.

There is much to say, it will arrange itself in my subconscious eventually and march out like prose through my hazy eyes, I know it. But I miss the words while they are gone. I miss the way they calm my trembling nerves and the soft smile on my lips in their presence. I miss the way a chest full of words makes me feel like home, no matter the street where I sleep.

(When the truth is, the same can be said for you)

Truth

When the November night is dark
and the fork in the road lies treacherous ahead,
When life muddles my vision
and blurs my determination,
When I am lost.

No matter.

I am,
as ever
grateful
For you.

or Alive

Today I laughed. A great big laugh that began in my spine and rattled all through my bones and echoed in my gut and tickled my neck and sang through my apartment and did not stop till it was finished. It kept the dark night far away and the oxygen in my lungs lighter to breathe. It made the mess of my home and the mess of my life easier to bear. No matter what: today I laughed.

When You Go

I woke up at three in the afternoon. Twilight was just beginning to sink its teeth into the world; I couldn't tell what kind of weather the day had been. The wine bottles had emptied, one by one, and by the time we walked home, the clubs were closed, morning was waiting in the starting blocks. I dropped him off at the apartment by the bakery, and we saw a hundred loaves fresh out of the oven, it seemed impossibly quaint and smelled like comfort. When I reached my own apartment, the old lady across the street had her lights on; we live in different time zones. I dreamed another reality and didn't want to wake up, when I did.

He writes to say inspiration is failing him, that every page is a struggle. That he would much rather sit in bed with his girlfriend and drink coffee, listen to music. But that he will continue to write, despite the heartache inevitably rearing up around his main character, because he has people around him who believe in him. Because we need him to finish. I write him a long email of encouragement, of how worthwhile to fight when the battle seems poised for defeat, of gathering the last bits of strength and proving yourself, if only to yourself, and of the satisfaction that lies in accomplishment.

It was not until later, after I'd pushed send, that I realized I was really only talking to myself.

On Deadlines.

Suddenly, everyone is dying. Every new blog discovered is a farewell letter to loved ones, or the painful monologue to someone lost. I watch Bergman movies and the dead are ghosts, but they are gone. People reflect on what to make of it and everyone declares they will now go forth and live their lives better, love one another more, sweat the small stuff less, and appreciate the single moments because they are what make up this blessing we call life.

There is only the one, you know. It would be best to use it wisely.

But the truth is, we don't know what we've got till it's gone. We will all plead when the grim reaper knocks on our door. We will all procrastinate even paradise, as long as we can.

Billbored (sic)

Society, how sad. I walked around downtown yesterday, on that busy street I so rarely visit, and fumbled around racks of clothing and ideas of what a successful, happy life should look like. A million eyes and not a single one looking into another; elbows downtown are a little sharper, apologies a little harder to come by. No one looking like the pictures but everyone consuming like hell to try. It's been said before, but it's still as depressing to see and I left in a hurry.

We ordered another glass of wine, sat close together, laughed heartily at our flaws and at our growing bonds. They make it harder to leave, they always make it harder to leave and I wonder why I cannot let them be reason enough. They make my heart rest easy, make my smiles feel genuine; I sat there on the sofa and let their voices flow through me like medicine.

But again it ran out as soon as they left, and the cigarette left a bad taste in my mouth. I woke up at four a.m. fully dressed with the lights on; the ghosts lie heavy on my chest sometimes, they knock me out.

One day we will look back on this life and it will be but a distant, silly memory. And we will laugh.

Strange Things

The evening grows late. I long to resign it to the wastebin, to sleep again, because at least sleep makes the time pass, makes the life pass and there's a short moment in my dreams when I am carefree; it's appealing. The headaches always begin with such strange visual dances and I have to try so hard not to look mad in my attempts to focus.

But I am not tired. The black stars in my eyes disappear and all is perfectly clear. And just as I begin to turn off lights and take off clothes, tiny trickles of words begin to migrate to my mind, to my fingers. It cannot be helped, streams of stories run from my hands. For a moment, I forget impending commitment and hopeless mornings. For a moment, I forget the dull throbbing of my mind against its restraints.

And in this one moment, I am happy.

Fireside

A few hours on another couch, a few hours of normalcy and smiles, you think it'll put air in your lungs but you walk home later with bricks in your belly. Their ever-comforting light only keeps the monsters away while it's near. Your parents call and you turn the video off, try to keep it short, try to protect them as long as you can. Your voice is weary.

She told me, a while ago now, how her father had to take over her finances and give her an allowance again. She could not handle the slightest responsibility, if she managed to put her own clothes on and get to work. I thought it seemed absurd, in a way; how hard can it be, after all, even when your medicine cabinets are stocked with your insanity. I walked home tonight unsure of what kept me out of white rooms with padded walls and was humbled with recognition. 

As long as I do not breathe, I cannot feel. Pull this straitjacket tighter. I will rest in confinement, a while.

Stupor

Apathy reigns surpreme in the little apartment at the top of the hill. A moving body carrying a black hole gathers more and more mass, absorbing energy from the matter nearby, ever swirling, ever building, a steel figure of indefinite shape and emotionless muscle. Winter lies dead outside, the streets a graveyard of leaves, the sky an indiscernible color for a few hours before the power goes out again and all is black. It begins again; it returns every year and you know this, but you are helpless at its hand.

I sat at the piano and attempted to remedy the lump in my throat, the pit in my stomach, but my fingers fell heavy at its keys and every misstep was a reminder of criticisms past. Nothing is holy, nothing is only yours. I long for a great big kitchen knife to run down the length of my belly to lead this black matter out, but I know it is to no avail: skin will always heal, if crookedly, and you will be no freer then than now.

There is no salvation in flight,
nor in resignation,
nor in blood.

This is the script you were handed.
This is the part you have to play.

November.

She says I think of you everytime I want it all to be over and it keeps me alive. It was her I called the day you died , all the boxes packed in our apartment and spring on the threshold. How quickly life can alter your perceptions, your persuasion and I swore I would never create such a devastated mess as you left behind.

and I will not.

I will not.

I promise.

Bakom Västerbron

Why the hell wouldn't you move? Just go already. Go. Something in her eyes was so sincere, it felt as though the idea were entirely new to me, and it seemed so simple. What are you waiting for? and I stared into my beer with tingles up my spine. My boss looked at me the other day and said maybe this'll be a good kick for you to go; this is not what you want to be doing forever. You realize people are living their lives by magazine print and rule books but maybe you don't have to even though it's hard to remember. You shuffle around a dirty apartment but at least the life you live is yours.

The days at the office provide a few hours of refuge; you relish putting on clean clothes, having coffee breaks, making small talk, sorting papers, as though you were perfectly normal and you would go home later to dinner and order, to going to bed on time and instead you fall asleep just before morning and miss your alarm. The feeling creeps back as you climb the steps to the door, you return to a cavern of solitude, of dread, but of words, and you love their greeting you at the door.

Time does not run out, the money does not run out, it is merely the fates conspiring for you, they lead you to the place you cannot go on your own. Already you are saying your goodbyes, already you are bracing for the storm.

We decide not to jump off the bridge. There are bigger leaps, to be taken.

Paradise Cove

All these words, so many words, but they have all been told, have all been written already and better in rows of shelves and eternity. Demons arrange themselves comfortably on your furniture; they fiddle recklessly with your sensitive decorations and stretch their clammy fingers to your skin, and burying yourself in that bath tub will not get their smell off your body. I don't want to die; I just don't want to live and it echoes through your mind even with the music turned up so loud. Like staring into the sun to sneeze, you create playlists to push buttons in your interior but you don't know where you want them to lead. They make your voice tremble.

This apartment is losing its shimmer. I go through it looking only at things that can go, that will go, when the bags get packed. I detach myself from the comfort of Home, from the beauty of streets known, of people loved. The music makes me dizzy. We are born screaming, but I appear to die in silence, withering. I can feign surprise, but this was happening all along and I always knew it. What sounds like victory rarely seems it, in daylight.

Still Remains

It was summer, maybe it was the first summer after we moved to America, maybe the second. Public television was airing the miniseries The Octopus late at night. My mother adored it and would stay up to see it. I was never much for mafia dramas, but I also never could go to bed on time, and an entire summer passed with us keeping company in the basement of our old house. She would clean--she was always cleaning when she got the chance--and I would build fantasy worlds out of LEGO blocks, knowing full well I was too old to be playing with them still. When the latest Octopus episode would be done, we would turn on the Simon & Garfunkel concert in Central Park CD a little too loud, and I'd sing along as she vacuumed the books one by one. I didn't understand why people booed as they thanked Ed Koch, I didn't know why the guys who were selling loose joints would donate half of their proceeds to the city that night, but I always smiled when they mentioned how nice it was to do a neighborhood concert. When I hear studio versions of The Boxer, I miss Art Garfunkel's misstep in the beginning, and I always hear 500,000 people cheering at the bit in the Sound of Silence about seeing 10,000 people maybe more. To this day, those are some of the best times I've spent with my mother. I think she knows.

To Make Nice

Dinner invitations. Regular society knocks on my door and I go into the fresh air, enjoy it even. But I miss that dark, messy corner where my word processor lies, I miss the world that swims around within it. It is all rain and heavy sighs, but it sooths my angst, did you notice? I thought today If I could do this, and nothing but this, all my life, I would, and didn't realize until later that some people do. That it was what I thought I would do. That I could be dirty, ragged, Bukowski all my life and no one could berate me because it was the Way. Across the ocean, slippery ballots determine the Brave New World, and I go to sleep with a knot in my stomach at the possibilities. I hear your voice in my ear and I think your skin would be soft against mine but it's too late now. And I'm tired. Tomorrow, tomorrow we will have answers in our headlines.
And Bukowski and I will drink a beer. Hide another day from the light.

Bitters

A day comes and goes without my knowledge. The blinds are down, the music is loud; there's no telling one moment from another. She writes and says We just don't have that much work for you after the end of the year, and I can't help but think it's a sign it's time to go. Perhaps it's sooner than you planned, but what is there to wait for. The miracles you've been scouring the South Island streets for haven't come, have they?

And now this story, it gathers potential. You see your slew of unfinished books in cupboards and on shelves, you smile at them dearly still and know the symbolism they incur lying there. No matter. You weave around you scores and scores of letters, of words, they keep you warm at night, they keep you sheltered through life. It is such a dreary world out there, does it not only hurt and tear at your flesh? You are better off in literate dreams, and you build it, now. When I was little, I read Alice in Wonderland and believed with all my might in the possibility of such silly madness.

We have to believe in something, after all.

Monday, 1:23 p.m.

I am writing again.

Entire stories paint themselves on the canvas of my interior; I step into the other world and forget where I am, what is happening. I look up from my computer and realize sadly the dreary scene around me: blinds closed, bed unmade, one p.m. and I am still undressed. In my mind, the storm rages around me, feelings stir. The wind whips at my coat tails and the city lies dark around. In my mind, years of other peoples' lives flash before me; I have lived them, too. In my mind, life is bigger than just the measly one we are offered.

Years of disapproval and criticism bark at my door; I know I will let them in and they will tear my every page apart, until I start over, until my life peters out into oblivion. So it is. But for just one moment, the words swim undisturbed through my veins. The world is endless in imagination. For just one moment.

All is magic.

And So It Goes.

She looks so much like her mother. Those eyes, deep, slanted, she laughed in such a way it made my heart melt. She falls asleep, and we talk of their upcoming move in the spring. New York, it's all in order. Perhaps there are different ways to go about doing this; perhaps none of the ways are wrong. The important thing is that you get there. Did not their eyes light up, just as mine will, talking about it?

We sat in the backroom, all cozy lights and opportunities for indecency. A thick fog lay outside. The November night is so dark, always so dark, why not place a warm body next to yours to endure the season, but you go home alone because his crooked youth bores you.

Sometimes it seems this life is too overwhelming; you don't know how people contain it within their bodies, within their hearts. You bleed all over the streets and are too tired to gather up the mess. Your roommate has her power back, everyone has fled the neighborhood. You wash away as the floods recede. You dilute with the tide.

Sunday Times

I saw you in the street today. You look alive but you are dying. We are all dying, you are simply doing it more eloquently, more urgently. A reminder, perhaps, for the rest of us but it's too painful to see the steps, the falling apart, the relentless fight even in the face of hopelessness.

I can't reach my roommate anymore. Perhaps she is out searching for food, batteries, water. The world goes on but downtown New York remains in the dark. New stories write themselves in my interior; they make do with imagination, but still scream You should be there. In the stores, they've begun hawking Christmas decorations. It seems abysmally tacky. I'm still wearing my summer jacket.

Sandra Dee

You like me because I tell you what you want to hear, she said and laughed, but she was right. The reasonable voices, they make me cringe and gnaw at me in my dreams (all murder, lately). There's no reason not to go, just as soon as it is at all possible. He writes me with temptations of summers in Alaskan cabins, for a second anything seems possible, isn't tomorrow November and don't we usually open the door to mad hatters and crack delusions in November? 

A storm rages through New York. It leaves oceans and devastation in its wake, lost urbanites on pilgrimages to the nearest wifi-carrying coffee shops, they gather in masses at dry street corners. My roommate picks up the phone because it is the last rotary phone in civilization and doesn't require the power grid to be working. You should be here, braving the storm with us, she says. It's so good to hear your voice. 

I can feel the darkness
creeping in.

...and the time has come to start...

...and the time has come to start...

...and the time has come to start...

Diaries

No word from Scribner’s. Their silence and businesslike judicious patience is driving me crazy with tension, worry, expectation, disappointment — everything. And the novel is yet unfinished, really, and the time has come to start typing it and straightening it out. What a job in this weary life of mine, this lazy life. But I’ll get down to it. The news that Jesse James is still alive is very thrilling news to me, and my mother too, but we’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to impress the New York world at all — which does bear out, in its own way, what I say about New York, that it is a heaven for European culture and not American culture. I don’t get personally mad these things any more, because that is overdoing things in the name of culture and at the expense of general humanity, but still, I get personally mad at those who scoff at the significance of Jesse James, bandit or no, to the regular American with a sense of his nation’s past.”
       --Jack Kerouac.

Be Your Emmylou.

They sang the words New Jersey Turnpike and I began to cry. Twenty years of America in my ears and I am still lost and unable to find my way. The concert hall lay quiet, dark, as their voices curled out into the night. The aftereffects of last night's wine bottles thrashed in my system, screamed insults and pleas at my unrelenting skin. Stockholm's cold, but I've been told I was born to endure this kind of weather. When I was a child, at some point I realized the immense Bigness of life, the madness of me being alive, how incomprehensible our places in the universe, and it terrified me. For a split second, tonight, I had that feeling again: entirely overwhelmed by the prospect of living a life, and of wasting it. I cried into the circus floor and wanted the show to be over. They changed the clocks last night, and I'm still not going to bed on time.

* * *

We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad.

Saving Daylight

In my dream, I held your hand in secret, we couldn't help ourselves. I woke with bread crumbs in my bed and sunshine in my room, empty bottles on every surface, dread poured through every wrinkle of my skin.

Sometimes the nights are too long, even when they are over so quickly.

Softly

It snowed today.
It hit me as I biked past the central station, light wisps of white dust sweeping pleasantly around me. I wanted to be angry at the approaching winter, at the seasons changing too soon and me in my white summer jacket still. But as I crossed the bridge and passed the parliament building, quiet and dark in its after-hours suit, I looked up at the south island and saw that special hue the sky turns at the year's first snow fall. How dark, and yet how illuminated. How quiet the air below.

By the time I'd come around the Old Town, the snow had increased. The glittery sprinkles turned into big, wet flakes in the air, like heavy eyelashes batting against my skin and a million of them fell into the black sea, were never heard from again. I had to keep my head down, but snuck peaks at the city as it fell below me on the hill, subdued, sparkling, silent. I thought the first snow fall is magic, and couldn't help but smile. An hour later it was over, the streets glistening with thawed crystals, the street sweeper no busier than the warm night before.

Why don't we play pretend at this, after all? We can break each other's hearts, and be done with it.

Afters

There is a moment
just as the effects
of the alcohol in your bloodstream
begin to wear off

and the light,
serene,
tickled feeling
of an evening
goes with them

that you seem to see
life
exactly as it is
in its sad reality
and its flatline
of emotion

and you decide
it's better
to live
in illusion.

October 24, 2012

The night is late
-again!-
the night is always late
always blacker
than ever before.
I know it must be an illusion.

Allen keeps me company
always Allen
always sweet sage poet Ginsberg pigeons
and New York brick and silence
He knows.

The feeling
creeps
in again
-How familiar-
That this life has one path
of love
and family
of steady incomes
and a rested soul

and another
of long nights
all darker than the previous
of the glow of type
of inestimable sadness
and 80 years fighting
for that short moment
of feeling
that your body is not yours
that it is owned
by a spirit stronger
than your veins

and when you wake up
there on a white sheet
of paper
your blood
you leave
a Word.

and it was worth
the every black
dark
lonely
empty
tragic
painful
night
in its wake.

Island in the Sky

eternity
lies waiting

for you.

Winds

The church clock strikes midnight, and my body is in a frenzy, making up for an entire day of inactivity. My mind races with inspiration and joy, but the alarm clock looms, my empty bank account screams at me to never say no to hours. Rows of contact sheet prints run along my line of vision, images built in the land out west, images that create the Great Space within. The red rock runs smooth along the edges, deep canyons and gasping heights in the clouds twirl through my interior, blows me away every time.

The days are too dark, too real. The view through a lens is a relief, one step away from the agony of what life is. I can rest in pictures.

I never really sleep, in real life.

an Evil Hour

The warm fog lay thick around the suburban construction, made the black, quiet night ominous and mysterious. We took the last train home and I sat alone on the subway in false lashes with masquerade gear in my bag, tulle and lace spilling out of it, but the light in the subway is garish and casts such a hard light on the drunk, tired faces within. We all look away and pretend not to see others, to not risk seeing ourselves.

I'm going for a walk, he said, though the night was dark and the hour of the wolf was near. I need to see the ocean. In my mind, I saw the water black ahead and endless, the wind whipping across cliffs and through the pines, cold, vicious, calming. A therapist once told me to picture a place where I could be at peace, to stand there, imagine the moment; it was always the sea, always far enough out that the wind would catch my hair, beat at my skin, drown out the Everything Else.

Stockholm was a monsoon today.

The floods that run in streams down the street,
are nothing like the sea at all.

Lagged

I fell asleep sitting up; I awoke with a start and tried to will my heartbeat to keep still.

The clouds are different here, they melt into each other and spread low across the land. The people do not smile,  will not look you in the eye; I forced sunshine and shrugged at the suspicious faces on the receiving end.

My apartment lies cool and calm at the top of the hill, sweet gestures from houseguests scattered around the room. I sleep a heavy, dreamless sleep too early; it can't be helped. It is dark out. It will be darker still. I saw your face on the screen and though you don't know me, but you don't have to. The suitcase lies open, yet to be unpacked, in the hallway. I set extra alarms, for fear of the time zones.

I try to keep this new blood in me, as long as I can.

Outbound

The bags lie packed in the corner of the room. There isn't enough time, there is never enough time and yet here we are, the night before takeoff, and it arrives ruthlessly. I stared into the sun today in the parking lot and I remembered, this is what it's like. This is the sunshine in which I grew up.

Tomorrow I return to darkness. It is what it is.

Sunshine can remind you of the fireworks you once owned. Sunshine can help you own them once again.

Tumbling

There was rain in the mountains today. Great big clouds hung across the ridges, dipping their toes in the valleys and smelling of wet grass and dust. We haven't had any rain all summer, I am glad, she said, as we braved the trickle. We are still so poor. I don't know how we'll do it anymore. 

It seems all the lives around me crumble and build with the tide, lately. We catch a moment's breath, only to have our sand castles toppled over, and we begin again. She arrives with the plane; he got a job. We can move out of his parents' by Thanksgiving. Months ago we feared she would not live to see the summer, under his thumb. We pack the million grains of ancient rock, make our walls and windows, see the great wave come in.

I drove through the mountain pass alone today, the golden aspen trees glimmering in the mountains, the highway swaying steadily, and it sank in: I swim through the same hamster wheel, season after season, and now is the time to step off. I am tired of rehashing the same compulsive repetition.

Now is the time
we built our towers
of concrete. 

Red Rock

I am afraid of heights, too, you know. We climbed to the top rock and dangled our legs a thousand feet over the canyon floor, my nervous laugh echoed down the valley. My feet tingled. All day spent on two wheels, navigating slick rock and deep sand, our bodies ached and still we couldn't make ourselves stop.

Enormous red rock faces stood up straight on our side, reaching for the sky. On the other, a steep cliff to the bottom, the curves of the track like a miniature model below. The wild west stretched to the horizon and never ended, the sun beating down as it does.

This country built me, you know. It is in my veins, it is in my voice, it is in my bones. I am red rock a billion years in the making; I am wide open spaces and desert sun. We fall asleep early with aching muscles and battered limbs.

We are fine.

Moab

Hotel sheets pulled tight across tired muscles, twenty years of coming here and we still stay at the same dingy inn. The bathroom smells of chlorine, but these pillows are the most perfect pillows in the entire world.

It's many years ago we were here, do you remember? Months of New York City screamed in our brains, we were exhausted of the adventure. Middle of January, we drove down through light dustings of snow and were maybe the only patrons here. We went out to the monuments, rocks carved by ages, by eons, we were all alone and the silence left a hissing sound in our ears.

You were afraid of heights. We stood at the edge of the impossibly deep canyon and you trembled violently, but made yourself go to the edge. We were so tired, we were reeling from what we had seen and didn't know who we'd become, yet.

I thought of you today as we hiked to the arch at sunset. Wondered where you were. We shared such a strange existence. Today I don't know who you are.

The pillows are the same, as ever.

Wasatch

(There's something in the way the moon shines over the mountains in the west, and the road curves just so under the stars, and the twang in peoples' smiles, I sleep easy at night, I haven't a thought, not a feeling, in all the waking hours. I try to write, but I come up quiet. America sings in my veins. I listen.)

Departure

Sunrise over Stockholm; the little city sleeps. I drag my bags along Bondegatan, the air crisp, the stores silent. We cross the water and the horizon has that pink hue, that near-light, the distant island ablaze with foliage fire.

It's too early in the morning, my body screams, my eyes falter, but I know it's just a countdown of minutes, just a limited unease. In a few hours I am on that plane, in a few hours more I am Elsewhere.

I locked the door to the apartment I love so much. Said I'll see you soon. I leave home.

I run straight into the arms of another.

Away

He said Dolores,
I live in fear
My love for you's so overpowering, 
I'm afraid that I will disappear

No Sham

Visitors stream in and out of the little apartment near the church. I shuttle back and forth to the train station to pick up, drop off, introduce and show off the city that will not stop raining. We discover new hidden corners together, but I always walk them past the lookout, past the old wooden houses where families would toil and never grow old before their backs broke in them. I do not know the sparkling City at the center, where the successful toast and maintain the economy, and my guests do not get to see it.

I think this adventure was simply meant to be, he says as he surveys the streets that will be his while I am away. I have no agenda. I will simply go where I go. My ticket burns in my back pocket; in a few days will I not myself be navigating the wild highway of America, staring into the sun? We cannot stop to see where we are going, we haven't the time; isn't it better just to go?

I think of all the angels that have opened their doors and spare mattresses to me, all these years. How I delight in opening mine. Wandering souls unite in discovery, in the delight of the adventure.

It is the only way
to live a life.

Winter Winds

It occurs to me that this blog is nothing more than a record of a love story, the unending tale of a beating heart. That I have spent the last three years here obsessing, relishing, pining, and dreaming of the same one love, for days and nights on end. For good times and bad, when near or far apart. Every morning I think of it, every night when I lie in bed. I mourn the loss of it, as I rejoice in the slight tremble in my heart everytime I think of returns.

This was never my intention. My intention was to write a story of my life.

It simply turned out that the two
were one and the same.

Echo Park

Do a cartwheel right here, right now, he said in the empty lobby of the subway entrance. My hiccups had finally receeded; my last remaining brain cell convinced me that no, it wasn't a good idea after all, and we parted ways on the platform, later. How drunk I was on the train, and with no long walk home to sober me up.

The moon is full over the church tonight. It seems ominous, but I remain too hung over to see its symbolism.

As long as I have a home, you have a home, she said into the closing bar. Come with me in the Spring; come to California and it will all be alright. The promise of New and Shiny on the horizon; I leapt and smiled. The sun always shines, on the west coast. And the rest, will work itself out when it needs to.

Chaperone

(But I needn't fear. In the dark, in the night, I am reminded. There are rules, and trodded paths, there are expectations, this is life. But as long as you are with me, I am exempt. As long as I lie in your arms, in your velvet night, I can be whoever and do whatever; I am invincible. How easy it is to doubt, when the light of day glares at the flaws in my logic, but I mustn't. We mustn't.

Once you have found your purpose,
hold on to it
like your life depended on it.

Because it does.)

Enfin

There has to be
something more
than this.

There
has
to.

( )

Take this silver spoon
from
between
my lips
please.
It is
perpetually
choking me

and I cannot
digest it
to satisfaction.

In the Crowd

There's a glitch somewhere in the windows; cold air rushes in and makes the room unbearable. I took a hot bath and nearly drowned myself lying under the surface for too long but you can't tell now, considering the chill of my fingertips.

The apples I picked in their garden are rotting on the counter. The grapefruit that only cost 6 SEK. The flowers in the window. Everything rots. My body. I make myself a drink but it does me no good; I make myself a life but I don't live up to it so what the hell. You lose some, you lose some.

He writes poetry, I devour it and want always more, always more. When we were young we would tap our teeth to know when we were intoxicated; I tap, tap, tap now and don't know how it's supposed to feel. I think I take these pictures to be able to stare unabashedly at people for hours on end, to look you in the eye and not look away. Perhaps the same goes for everything I do. Don't be scared. My camera won't bite.

I imagine I could steady your trembling hands, but I can't make promises.


...I'll be yours
if you'll be mine. 

But I can't promise that, either.

and I Will Wait

The rustling room came to rest, dark curtains covering afternoon sunlight and hiding the morning's toys and distractions. I laid at the edge of a small mattress, little fingers running across mine, soft eyes looking at me as they contemplated life and the arrival of the Sandman. He wouldn't let me move even an inch from his side, and we lay there quietly, together. Soon, the whole room slept (and no place is as calm as a room full of sleeping children), and there was not a thought left in my head.

Because oh, how the essence of children erase the demons from my side. How their bright eyes and eager curiosity break my egocentric circles and discard my self-conscious chill. We ran through the park laughing, exhausting our every limb and still asking for more, always asking the world for more, our desire for it insatiable.

Sometimes I don't understand this battle I wage. This incessant need to ruin everything that is beautiful and simple about life and make it difficult.

But if you take my war away, as well
I fear there'd be nothing left
of me
at all.

So I fight.

Equinox

The road goes east again. The rain has stopped but the night is blacker than before. Conversations are lower, slower, the remains of a late night and an open bar weigh on our senses. Counting the hours to home, counting the hours to Monday morning.

The church was enormous, a canopy of ancient valves and stained-glass windows, we only filled the first few pews, the brides like tiny figurines at the altar. They stood nervously fidgeting, stealing glances and keeping a somber face. A steady voice trembled at the piano, it echoed through the giant church, the moved congregation, and I was glad no one could see my eyes quiver. There is weight in the moment of forever, it gets you every time.

The party was long, we stayed till the end and laughed in the taxi and fell on the floor. They left earlier, their life brand new, their dreams official.

When you've promised forever,
forever can't start soon enough.

Eve

The stars have returned; I thought their absence was the result of urban living, but it was just the summer un-nights that rendered the galaxy invisible. We sit on the long road west and hope for the rain to end, each preparing our individual duties, speeches, gifts for the upcoming day. Tomorrow in an old church in the old town an old love says I Do. It's been so many years, we've lived so many lives since then, I almost can't remember who we were when we were us.

We were never meant to be, you know. I was already always somewhere else. You always wanted to be right there, half of a whole, safe in the arms of another. Tomorrow, and from then on, you will be.

There is no begrudging anyone that.

We finish our speeches, collect our thoughts. Winter is long ahead; the stars will grow brighter, yet.

Are Just Trees

My father searches through cupboards for ingredients, tools; he asks about linens and shakes his head in concern about my lack of the pieces that make up a proper home. I tell him proudly I can stay another few months and he sighs. Is any of this furniture yours?

But he asks when I plan on returning to New York and it seems the day cannot come soon enough in his eyes. Make it work, make it happen, I think it's where you need to be. I was 16 once, I was angry and lost and had no idea that my biggest supporter lived in my very house, had the very same blood coursing through his veins. We seem to understand the other, even when we do not understand ourselves.

In his years, I see my life unfold. Crooked, crumbling, narrow lifelines etch their way into my skin and do not end in rainbow treasures. No matter. I had the choice once, to take the straight, wide highway through life, to coast along that white line and sleep soundly at night. I chose otherwise.

An dark path leads into the woods. There's nowhere to go now but forward.

Do You Wrong

The landscape changes shape, changes colors. It is fall in the country. A terrible cold grabs hold of my head and rattles my lungs, but my mind rocks content along the railroad tracks: on a train you are always moving, always immobile, always safe.

In my dream I held his hand and somehow it was okay. They speak of houses and watching their children grow up and I don't know who I am in their eyes. Sometimes I fear there is too much truth and not enough veiled filters. The maple trees are red now. It is fall again and no one knows where it ends.

Homecomings

Sweet hearts
Grow dearer
With age
And years
Behind us

No matter.

This town
Still tears
The will
To live
From my veins

And makes
Me wretch
In gutted aversion
And hopeless
Allergy

She asks
"well isn't this home
Then?"
And I cannot
Begin
To tell her
How much
It isn't.

En rêves

They've set the clock in the church bell tower right again. I had gotten used to its four minutes' eagerness. He writes and says perhaps I can stay another couple of months; I had just started to tremble at the ground giving way beneath me. I don't know how I got so lucky. This apartment breathes in my stead.

Last night in my dream, a body floated to the surface in the water. The ocean became a swimming pool. I knew all along, didn't I think it all along?, that this was just for show, it wasn't real, but I don't know now who the audience was. They want me to rescue her, I have to rescue her of course, even if it's fake, I thought, and looked around in hopes of assistance. None to be found. I forced myself to jump in the water. I know it's fake, I have to save her, why aren't they yelling cut? 

How long does it take for a body to rot? She was dark blue, I knew the skin would be spongy, sticky, dissolving into its watery surroundings.  How reluctant to reach out and touch her, how certain there was no other way. Finally heaving her up to the poolside. Knowing it was too late to save her, but again as convinced I could not escape putting my lips to hers. I have to know I did all I could, even if it was to no avail.

I don't know when the act became Real.

Be So Bold

The fruit flies in the kitchen have died. The nights are black; I had to leave my bicycle in their courtyard because I had forgotten the lights. There are new houseboats in the harbor, all with renovation materials and paint buckets stacked along the decks. They seem like great migrating birds, resting here now, preparing for many miles ahead, the cold winter. My carefully weaved threads begin to unwind with wear; I consider packing my bags, painting my deck, and joining the migration.

Have you unpacked your bags yet? Have you settled for winter? My skin trembles in your wake. It seems we should be living these miles, together.

Blunderbuss

Jack White comes to Stockholm, Jack White with his black curls and razor fingertips, with his elven band members and one hundred guitars, Jack White and his fire. I leave my simmering word processor and screaming playlists on legs trembling with hunger to feel just a moment of his passion.

This is what I've chosen to do, he says, I can't help myself, and the stadium walls explode. You owe it to your art. I close my eyes and breathe in the violent dances of music, revel in the pause from my own feelings and woes. Does it not seem exhausting to carry one's own emotions around at all times, to air their dirty laundry in tired breezes of indifference? Perhaps that is the point of all this deafening music, lately: not to ward off the demons of my interior, but to silence the voice that manically binges and purges on them, that rehashes them to the perverse.

Perhaps it's time for a different beat, a blank page, a new story to tell. Because I want my chest to always vibrate as it does now.

and the Bogeyman

I wake ravished with hunger, but the day progresses as the last. The music so loud I cannot be distracted even by my own mind, hours passing without my leaving this spot a single moment, without food, or smoke, or thought. Words sift through my line of vision, build themselves into monuments of fairytales, of Unrealities. I read others' words and am glad at their bleeding flesh, their psychotic melancholy; it makes me believe in a place of belonging for everyone. The world outside my window falls away; it is not the Reality. We choose our Stages.

A dear friend asks me to submit material to their magazine; the latest edition's theme is fear, and I have nothing, I reckon, never being much for horror films or the tickle of terror. Until it occurs to me: life is nothing but fear. Every step is carefully choreographed to protect our fragile hearts and sensitive egos. Life stabs you at every opportunity with gut-wrenching loss and unpredictable mires. The incessant, ear-numbing song and frenetic activity are not distractions, they are a method to keep the demons at bay.

The monsters hiding under your bed
have got nothing
on what it is to simply be alive.

Flowed

Back in the apartment, the nights have turned black. Windows and lives light up across the street like a dollhouse; I see every move, every lonely endeavor. Life is sad, when you look at it.

The suitcase still stands in the hallway, the pantry is empty, when I turn on the music and land in front of the word processor, feel limber fingers dance lightly across its long abandoned keys. Suddenly, it is twelve hours later and I haven't moved an inch. I haven't eaten, dressed, so much as looked up. My kidneys ache, my muscles. The music is so loud my head is numb and my eyes play tricks on me from fatigue.

No matter.

When the Flow catches you, you ride its wave. You dive through words, you travel the stories. You build the pages you came here for, to begin with. And it's a good reminder.

If you peel everything else away, every pile of money, every lifestyle magazine trinket and notion of what you are supposed to make of your life, every meaningless rat race stressors nipping at your heels, this is what remains. The word is your purpose, your joy, your first love. 

Whatever means you employ to maintain that, it is fine. When you find love, you never let it go.

Place Camille Julian

Crooked streets and the dinner is superb; the wine does not end. We loiter on the cobblestones as the others return to their beds, reluctant to follow. A newfound friend brings her bicycle and velvet accent to show us the better quarters, the Friday night. We follow giddily, the summer night is warm and where else would we be going?

Hours later we stumble home, and aren't the streets just as warm, the night just as young? I know there are plans for tomorrow, I set my alarm. But my head still simmers with a language I begin to remember, a comfort I too easily forget.

Life on the road is exhausting. It is worth the every heavylimb.

Bleed

"So how is the writing?" she said, and I knew I should not have answered. Narrow cobblestone streets confused us, we had to look at a map and the streets were so dark. I never know how to lie at the right times; being polite trumps protecting my words, she is my boss, and what is the right answer anyways?

Speaking of these words, it is like opening a solid door to unprotected flesh. They are the children I must keep close to me, and not toss them around haplessly like summer flowers. I begin to speak and secrets seep from my veins like sap; I pray the walk will end and I can return to silence.

The Bordeaux night is black. We cross the mighty river, glittering under street lights. Perhaps it is a whole other world. Perhaps if I bleed straight into this river it will not matter. Scatter your words to the wind: at least then they will go somewhere.

When In France

BBC world news because all the other channels are dubbed; my French holds fast in the streets but I'm tired. It is early yet, still the miles under my feet are countless. The air outside is warm, humid, it smells of summer and foreign lands.

Because it is.

And how quickly the traveler in me returns. Drawing maps in my head, practicing accents silently. Walking without rest, resting without care, sinking into the everyday life around me. Always pretending, what would it be like to live here? What is a life, in Bordeaux?

But then, don't I already know the answer to this question? Haven't I already asked it before? Did I not walk these streets a mere year and a half ago, finding the currents of the street agreeable?

It's funny. That was a whole other trip, in a whole other life.

I am still the same.

Fevered

The alarm clock by my bed ticks louder, beats faster. The hours, minutes, until rising time disappear into oblivion; it will not be morning when it rings, but no matter. In the center of my room stands an open suitcase. In my pocket is an airplane ticket. Tomorrow the sun shines warmly again, tomorrow the tongues will speak a different language and the streets will lead to places unknown.

Tomorrow, we travel.

And 30 years of airplanes and trains, of homes in faraway lands and suitcases packed and lost and filled with treasure, have not diminished the jitters that course through my body the night before takeoff. Always that rush of nerves, that giggle of excitement. Always the gratitude for rubbing the eyes of your outlook, receiving a new vision of what life is. I do not go far; I do not stay for long. But even the swiftest journey shakes up my body, rattles my senses.

These jitters are perhaps the most familiar of all. I recognize myself in its comfort. I sleep with a smile on my face.

Unchanged

2004-09-02
...but your friends, these Angels, they make your life better...
They are the answer. 
The question is irrelevant. 

Years pass
and bodies change.
Sentiment,
does not.

Blue Moon

Can you spare a homeless man a cigarette, he asked as I was just about to step in the front door. I can roll you one, I said, but it'll take a second. What is it about purses that always leaves the things you need therefrom in unreachable corners? He sat down on the step, we began to talk as I rolled. Filter, or no? He told me he was on the run from a jail sentence across the border, explained the long gash across his face, pinpointed my accent. I grew up right here, in SoFo, he scoffed at the word, but hell, I've never even had a caffe latte.

He can't have been much older than me. His lines were clean, his eyes kind, his hair mussed the way men his age spend hours perfecting. In another world, he would have been far out of my league. Now, instead, I was the one turning him down for continued company; I was the one with an agreeable night ahead. He offered me a beer; I told him to take care of himself. I usually spend winters in prisons, he answered. That's one way to do it, I responded. We shook hands; his grasp was firm, strong.

Hours later, when I came down the steps and out the door again, the curb was empty. I looked for him in the dark streets leading me home, but they were empty. And I missed him.

Map/Quest

There is a line of boats, along the docks at the south end of my island. Houseboats, with potted plants and hammocks, bicycles and mail boxes, they lie there, steady through the rains, through the nights. I walk past them when the sun is out, in my incessant, futile attempts to tread my way to enlightenment. Their loosely hung lines writhing like giant entrails on deck, doesn't it seem they could simply abandon their moorings, take their dinner tables and residents, and escape into the world, into the ocean foreverland, into unknown adventure, without ever losing footing, losing the sense of home. Doesn't it seem they could be the snail, and carry their homes with them always?

Today I walked slowly, closing my eyes and turning my face into the light. The joggers disappeared, the school children and parents on leave, the Swedish air, as I imagined skyscrapers towering at the edges, the sounds of impatient cabs and the humidity of late August in a land far away, and I prepared for the lighter heart and easier smile such visions always invoke.

But no such relief was to come. I faltered in the imagined avenues. They tumbled and evaded my grasp; they shrugged at my longing and looked the other way. For a short moment, the New York City grid was no home, not the soft landing it always is. For a short moment, I imagined I did not belong there either. For a long moment after, I felt more homeless than ever.


. . .

I suppose the trouble
is I wish
you would be
the home I carried
with me
always

regardless the land
under my feet.

Lex

If you never say your name out loud to anyone
They can never ever call you by it.

The Other Night You Wouldn't Believe

It gets dark early now, that proper dark that seeps into every crevice, there didn't use to be so many lights on in the apartments across the street, everything is different and when did that happen?

Did you land yet, did you arrive? Have you seen how dark the streets have gotten, how cold the wind? Did you forget to look, when summer was young? I have been waiting for fall since May. I have been waiting for death since my youth. Better dread arrive so one may have it out of the way; it's the wait that'll break a heart. Are you still on cloud nine, and is it brighter, there?

You should stay,
as long as you can.
I'll take the heartbreak,
so you don't have to.

To the Moon

Happiness is having a ticket
in your back pocket.

I have three.

30

It occurs to me that I may have had this life thing all wrong all along. It is so easy to listen to Voices of Reason, to march to the same beat, the same tune, to build your ideas on what life is about off somebody else's blueprint. 

Here's the thing; you do not care about success, about money or climbing the career ladder as very far as your particular assets allow. That was never your thing, but you've started to believe it is... That you are at an age now where you can no longer fuck around.

You have been mistaken.

You want to write, you want passion and madness, ecstasy and alcohol, you want life, and you miss New York. 

So I propose this. If, by the time you read this, you do not have an inspiring man by your side, a finished manuscript in your drawer, some sort of functioning madness in your spine... Get your shit together, save your pennies, and go back Home to New York.

I don't care how you think you are old; I don't care how you were unhappy and unsuccessful there as well. You still loved New York every day you were there; you still had purpose and remembered what it was to be inspired. 
And if you haven't found that in Stockholm yet, fuck it. 
Just go.

Worry about the Rest later. 
This is your life, even at 30, 
even at 40. 
I want you to live it all you can. 

Eves

All week like a long preparation for the day that arrives tomorrow. All year, perhaps. I was always a step ahead in expecting disaster, age, death. One day I will lay in my grave, eyes open, heart beating, and tell my grand-children that being prepared is just good common sense. My entire youth was spent preparing for old age, and subsequently always feeling too late for the experiences of my time.

Perhaps then, 30 is not the time when it is all over. Perhaps, this is the time when my age catches up with my anxiety.

Perhaps now is when I say fuck it, and live.

Alternatives

The sun came out just in time for the surprise. She appeared around a cliff as we scrambled with putting straws in drinks and synchronizing song. She smiled that contagious smile of hers and we knew we'd done well. Summer lay like a picnic blanket over the city as we sat with our food and our giggles on the top of the hill overlooking it all. The water sparkled that way it does that makes you think somebody paid it, a canon went off, Stockholm spread out below us like it was in on the celebrations.

The night continued in a rush of mad rambles and misplaced lipgloss. Of dancing on the upholstery, of serenades and unabashed laughter. If the next 30 sees me with you people, I'll be fine, she said, and we couldn't picture a future where it was not so.

I came home inebriated, dizzy, the night gets dark now; I forget what it's like. The lights were out on the church, and it loomed sadly with just its clock faces alive.

The scene seemed to be telling me something. I don't want to know, what it was.

To Keep

Hatched

I nest.

Every day a new cupboard, a new shelf to clear and clean. Bags of recycling and trash build up in the hallway, every thrown out piece lightens my load. I am preparing this home for a rapidly approaching day, when 20-something is over and a new decade begins. The scent of household cleaner and symmetric order my only crutches in navigating the process of acceptance ahead. These are the terms of service you agree to when you choose to live. The years will pass, regardless.

We stood outside the bar when she saw her friend. His grandparents were visiting from Australia, doing a tour of the various grandchildren and great-grandchildren scattered around the other side of the world. We were impressed by their coming such a long way, but the colder the evening grew, the more we learned of their years past. Of eating whale meat in Barrow, Alaska, of skinny dipping off the Great Barrier Reef, of all the stories that make up a life together, and a life in the world. Their eyes sparkled at the memories; I saw 50 years of travel in me yet.

Perhaps the cleared closets aren't so much for order and control. Perhaps shedding the heavy trinkets of a life in stability will simply make it that much easier to soar.

Motives

...but perhaps
the problem is
if I don't belong
in New York

then I don't belong anywhere.

And I can't bear to be homeless
again. 

The Flowers

Things I have loved
I'm allowed
To keep.

the Chill

Something has changed, you know. It's not in the cool wind that blows from the sea, it's not in the way the leaves have turned that deep dark green, the last shade before their inevitable death. It's that the nights are dark now. The sky is black, and the street lights mere spots of light to guide your way. Suddenly, across the street, I see lives on display in lit apartments, like cinema screens appearing all crisp and clear in their dark theaters.

I think of you again now. I hadn't, for a while, there were distractions and summer grass, there was a busy schedule and not much time left over for meandering day dreams. (no, that's not true. I did not think of you because I do not let myself. Some paths are better left untreaded.) But here you are, back on these streets, back in my air, the gnawing sense in my gut that will not be coaxed to rest, it is you. I bide my time.

And hope your dreams are sweet.

Swept

So this thing with you moving all the time, this thing with New York, what is it you are running from? she said. The office still reeled from vacation vibes, no one was working much. We sat barefoot on revolving chairs and talked about the future, instead. I'm not running, I declared, I just love New York, I want to go home. For once, speaking of other places on the horizon in terms of not being the endpoint of escaping someplace else, seems true. As though all my talk of the City genuinely stems from a sense of belonging and is merely the endpoint of a steady trek towards mental sanity and emotional stability.

But Sunday afternoon arrived with a storm, a pressure system building all across the coast and it stirred the fallen leaves in my apartment, stirred the dusty corners of my subconscious. I began to open drawers, sort out the unused trinkets, upgrade to a larger trash bag. I considered whether I needed half of the contents of my closet, whether I couldn't simply burn it all and start over. Just a month ago I was bringing old building blocks of a home into this small space and wished I could properly make it mine. Now the walls close in and lay bricks around my feet, make my dead skin cells itch with the ache for renewal. I want to molt, I want to leave, I want a plane ticket in my hand and the wind in my face, I want a white blank page and a land of boundless opportunity. I want my blood to rush madly in my veins, I want laughter to bubble in my chest, I want explosion of the heart.

I pretend I am not running away from Stockholm, from the frail tendrils of roots I have sent into this mountainside; I pretend this move to New York is simply what makes sense, that my heart is lonely without it. But the truth is nothing has changed.

We are forever running to stand still.

Flake

In the dream, I carried my child in my arms. A son, all white hair and plump flesh, he fit so snugly in my grasp and looked at me with his wise blue eyes. We sat in the backyard of the house where I grew up, my parents inside, waiting. He was so small, he should have been too young to speak, but when he turned to me, the questions were perfectly formed. Where are we? he said humbly. We are at grandma and grandpa's house, I replied. But where is our house? Where do we live? he continued.

There is no 'our house'. 
We have no home. 

No matter the silliness to follow, something about seals in icy waters in the same backyard, no matter the long scene before this, mostly concerning a water well in a town square, no matter the nonsense of dreams as the leftover debris of a long day, getting swept up and carried off to the dumpsters of the mind.

In my dream, I carried my son in my arms, and told him we had no home.

If I ever have children, in the waking world, I pray they know how to pack a light bag.

Where You Belong

Take it easy, he says, it'll be fine. 
Shaking fingers reach steady keys, a trembling voice touches the microphone, softly at first, then louder, the spine straightens. Soft notes stumble across rolling tape, little paw prints etch their ink into just a few minutes of air time. Glasses of wine empty, temperatures rise, the cats traipse along the edges and keep quiet when he pushes the record button. An aching mind finds a million mistakes, but a singing soul knows no steps off key. The night grows longer; we sit at a bar around the corner and speak of life, while music falls to the sidelines.

But when I return home, the to-do list long and the alarm clock looming in hours near, I hear a song stream from my phone, and it is as though all the anguish never was, as though all the questions and all the life that run in a million directions simply rest, simply wait. Four minutes of air in my lungs, of calm in my mind.

It's not that big a deal, he says.

He has no idea.

Parklife

Warm Wednesday afternoon, yellow August light and longer shadows, park littered with relaxation. Fingers run through long, lush, deep grass, skin soaks sunlight like were it water in desert lands. The moment lies resting, content in its stillness, in its ability to simply lay there.

There in five. Grab a bite?

Life continues.
I return.

Back to School

The trouble
with self-imposed exile
and burrowing
into silent corners
of solitude

is that they
are
so
damn
comfortable

and impossible
to try
to leave.

Inflate

I leave with shame in my gut, after all. My mother's words of gratitude fall flat at my undeserving feet; I ran out too early, there was more to be done. I was just so tired. I longed for a moment to myself, a moment at home. My body crumbles beneath me. I should have done better.

It will be late Saturday evening before we reach Stockholm central station. It will be a sunny evening spent behind glass, it will be a lost opportunity to see friends in the old hometown, it doesn't matter. At the end of the journey lies that tiny apartment, lies a soft bed where I may rest. At the end of this journey lie three days of unwritten pages, of unclaimed vacation moments, of the opportunity to put yourself back together. Sort the memories, write the to-do lists, drink your cares away.

Summer is young, yet.
Sleep a heavy sleep.
Wake up
Brand new.

Gold coins

"...how would love solve all that? How could love possibly make me unafraid of death, of old age, of overwhelming choice, of missing the ones left behind?"

If there was a pill,
For the fear
Perhaps I would take it.
But they don't medicate
Against life.

Be So Nice

A hundred pounds of lead melt slowly into my legs, the thick liquid heavies my spine, my eyelids, everything is treacle, I cannot speak. I arrive back at the apartment and collapse, my to-do list long and the day so short. Vacation seems an obscene word when it drains the body so; the days merely pass, get cold again, it is fall and we won't know what happened. We sit at the bar and don't know where we left off; I don't even try to find out.

I wash the island wear, fill up another suitcase, brace myself for the task ahead. The train leaves a sunny station and heads into monsoon country out west. Weekends are booked well into october, I know it will end in a puddle of inertia. The rain turns to hail along the railroad tracks.

Symbolism is a slap in the face.

Barefoot

And above all,
love what you do. 
Don't do
what you do not love. 
It's that simple. 

(concert notes)

Gloria

Quiet calms lull us into archipelago life. Mornings turn into afternoons, into evenings, into new days and slightly more freckles on the skin. I walked down to the ferry dock one day and received visitors from other towns; we trudged the bit back to the house in carefree giggles and breathed the country air.

But in the soft summer evening, she found a golden ticket with my name on it, and how soon again we felt the ground in sweltering asphalt beneath our feet. The rain passed, our clothes drenched, my cigarette papers melting between my fingers, but the sun returned and brought Patti Smith with it, what were we to do? We squeezed further into the crowds, let a thousand breaths and arms and laughs warm our bodies, and we gave in to the magic of poetry.

How beautiful an August night in the Venice of the north, how sweet the late sunset, how soothing the skyline of ancient houses and tall-masted ships behind the stage, how quaint the little city that calls itself home. We have a million opportunities, the world is ours for the taking, and the moment doesn't need a restless urge; it is fine.

And yet. Patti dances around on stage, with her wild hair, with her swelling heart, with her passionate rage and lifetime of baggage, and she whispers of words yet unwritten, of songs yet unloved, and I know. In a world full of uncertainty, in my ragged maze of a lifeline, in my wrong turns and failed promises, there is but one truth. One day, when the years have grown too many, when the missteps have amassed in my suitcase, when regrets pile up and I imagine that simple life I could have chosen if I'd only let silly notions of madness go, I pray I may remember this moment, this feeling, and know that this was right thing, that this was the one truth. I must go home to New York. 

There is no other way. 
And there never was.

and Ages

I hear waves crashing to the shore. All night I hear them; I cannot explain it. The sea outside lies still, the woods silenced, there is no sound. If you hold a shell to your ear, can you, too, hear the steady beat of the ocean? Perhaps old age and tinnitus catch up with me. Perhaps it is merely that lurking insanity, finally able to make its voice heard when urban cacophony lies miles away.

The entire day passed in a fog of indifference and rain clouds that never made good on their threats. But evening came with such a calm to it, such soft August sunlight, I made my way down the slippery hill for a swim. Not a sound, not another human around, I slipped out of my clothes and into the water; it deceived me with its velvety demeanor, it was freezing. I twirled around underneath the surface as the last rays of the sun set fire to the trees. By the time I came up, it had set behind the metropolitan area in the west, the light was gone, the day over. My skin felt entirely new around my limbs, my heart felt old in its rusted cage of ribs. Such are our lives.

The blood courses slowly,
in the end.

How

Bright sunlight and the last ravenous chapters of a book, I sit on the veranda and let my skin sizzle. The halter straps of my bikini folded down around my back, I don't realize till later I am a replica of my mother in the late 1980's. Cheek to shoulder, my skin is not the youthful plump expanse of softness it once was; we fight the inevitable demise of our bodies by maximizing sun exposure, by painting our bodies that fresh, golden color as far as our modesty allows. While I ran around the sea shore, picking shells and excavating ecosystems, my 35-year-old mother would sit, just like this, staring at the sun patiently until there was none left to be had. My chest freckles now like hers did then. We will never be 15 again.

The thing is, writing words is the only way I could ever make sense of this world, of what it is to be alive in it. I said once I'd sacrifice my unborn children for it, and the years that have passed since then haven't quite managed to wash the reality of such a thought from my veins. The proximity of Real Jobs, of normal lives and steady incomes, of proper housing and vacation plans for the coming year, may have made them less threatening, more imaginable. But they carry no less the scent of defeat than they did before. I am not ready to give up.

I guess I know by now,
that we will meet again,
Somehow. 

Baby, Sometimes

Vacation days and you forget there was ever a time of early mornings and busy days of someone else's bidding. Shuttling to the train station, picking up and dropping off angels from other cities, other lands, every day is a parade of lazy meals in green grass, unmentionable amounts of coffee, drifting conversations and hysterical laughter. You show them the city as if it is your own and it makes you adore it as you never did. Look, there across the water, there's my church, do you recognize it? They never love its beacon like you do. They have not seen it burn in the midnight sun after drunken stumbles homeward, like you have. This affection creeps up on you, catches you unaware, softens your violent adjectives.

Still, the phone seethes with friends unseen, nights unlived. Your heart weeps at missed connections, at the endless time remaining until your paths may cross. You try to balance your commitments and fail. There aren't enough twilit nights in one summer to satisfy your social heart.

It beats steady, now. You enjoy its vitality, while it lasts.

4:43 a.m.

A ferry that left in the middle of the night, and we arrive the mainland at dawn. A quiet bus ride through sleeping countrysides, the grass is covered in ethereal mist. Folklore whispers that these are elves dancing, and I am comforted in the memory of what magic such stories held in my childhood. That there was a way to explain the world without a god, without a fury, but with spirits in connection to the earth, to the cycle of things. I watch the thin veils drape the landscape, while sunrise casts a tangerine glow on the resting houses, the still trees.

We cross the bridge at the south end of the city, my south island spreading out before us like a giant in repose, the churches, my churches, standing tall at the top of their respective hills, keeping watch. We dive into a tunnel and emerge at the other end, in the old town, with its ancient buildings and narrow alleys, and for the first time in all these months, in all this treacled anguish, I love Stockholm and am grateful to be here. The sun continues its steady gait across the spires; I rest.

Gammelgarn.

The tent is cool in the night breeze. I stand outside it looking at the stars, no sound but that of the sea, comfortingly rolling to shore with the repetitive hush it has. We hadn't planned on swimming tonight, the evening was windy and cold, but as we stood and stared at the crashing surf, we couldn't help it. The brackish waters poured against our naked bodies; we laughed like children and rolled along the waves.

Later, in the bathroom mirror, I saw new tan lines had formed. Soft white streaks against scarlet collarbones. Tender skin, I couldn't help but smile.

Summer has arrived, at last.

Delirium

Just make sure to pull all the plugs before you go, the hostess said. Early morning, the party was winding down, she was leaving the old barn to go to sleep. We weren't ready. We turned up the music, ignored the rising sun, and danced until our legs gave out underneath us.

Hours later, the sun warm across the wheat fields, we stumbled giddily to our tents. The remains of the party lay scattered around us, bales of hay upended on the floor, empty liquor bottles strewn across the tables. We felt 15, as though the whole world had stopped for a while and there were only these bodies, our bodies, beating steadily into the night and laughing. My tent-mate said she had never seen me look so awful as when I crawled, limp and expended like a ragged balloon, into the tent that morning.

The day after passed in a cocoon of agony and manic laughter. I lay in the grass for hours bemoaning my existence and the shame of my frivolity. But in every painstaking breath, I knew. Madness is always worth the aftermath to come.

Pitched

This is the way, I remember it now. There is the farm, there's the house, here we are. We crossed the sea in black of night and by the time we arrived, dawn was creeping across the island and into the fields.

There's a silence about the country. It makes your nerves unwind, but it makes me restless. A calm that does me no good. Before we had closed our eyes, the roosters were up. A thin mist crept along the grass, the homestead seemed perched, waiting for mad things to come, preparing by keeping still. We closed the tent, my wide eyes staring into the blue nothingness an inch away. She slept in an instant.

Morning without night before is a most delicious occurrence. When the world lies quietly waiting for your next step, when it belongs to no one but you who are awake to see it. We must savor those moments; we own so little, once proper morning returns anew.

Lights On

We stood outside a convenience store and looked in. Dark July night it feels like autumn, but inside shone a bright, cold, icy light and shouted its wares to the street. Tragic coolers stood half empty with bottles, screaming colors painted themselves against the window canvas, and in a corner hung a sign saying Send Your Faxes Here! The scene perfect for a camera lense, I missed mine, I wanted it there to help me tell the story. To help me say that the picture made me inexplicably sad, at the blaring white inside, at the peddling of unneeded items after hours when the kids are drunk. My words cannot say them, enough.

Green grass grows slowly in my lungs. With every breath I melt into the bed and let the inadequate letters slip off my tongue. They matter little now. I will get you the picture, instead.