Let Me Go

Super moon, blue moon, rising above the mountain ridge, we stood staring at the perfect orb made golden by wildfire smoke. Later, I sat under its spotlight, watching it wash out the stars, the sky like a lavender blanket, the air full of cicadas and silence. The days are passing too fast without doing anything at all, running and standing still at the same time, the restlessness spinning like a whirlwind that doesn't go anywhere. 

I look at my to-do list, see the asks of outsiders begin to dissipate. Thin, now is the time for it.

Think,
now is the time to live.

(memo)

get to work

your life is calling.

Impatients

The days pass from under you, crawl uneasy underneath your skin, you begin to pace in just letting them pass. There was more you wanted to do, there is more you want to do, it claws at you in the early morning silences then retreats in the loud days. This isn't what you'd meant to do with your time. You long for the wild, for the space beyond time, long for a place where all you have is words. 

It is time to pack up and go, again, is time to set back off on the journey you began when you crossed the Hudson River, you have grown too soft and comfortable again, and nothing wild ever came
from doing the least
of what was asked of you.

Sink

The morning begins quieter than you've been used to, the last of August still stretching its tendrils along your shoulder blades. The deer come down from the mountain, so early in the season, you are both reading the temperatures wrong, both preparing for the chill even as the flowers wilt in the sun. You look at off-grid cabins in New Mexico and try to remember the momentum that propeled you all the way here, try to remember the fire that drove you from your sleep. 

The space is growing around you, the ground preparing for your moves. Nothing is lost that cannot be found, nothing is past that cannot be made present. He says I'll get the bus ready for you, and you think the road beneath you has all the answers you'll ever need. 

Think there is magic up ahead
you haven't even known to wish for.

Waxing

The silence begins to eat at you, it follows you around when you haven't room for it and asks questions you cannot answer. 

This is exactly how it should be. 

It is only when the silence begins to make you uncomfortable
that you move forward. 

It is only when the questions begin to
itch
that you can begin
to uncover new layers
under your skin.

41

I hope you remember to choose Freedom, and Creativity, and Joy. I hope you do not settle for anything. I hope you look back on the year that was and feel a lightness. 

You are 41 now, you lucky bastard. Everything that is to come, lies ahead of you. I hope you feel that. 

And I don't care to wish you anything but that. 

Pitch

The car is in the driveway, a hundred degrees and a burning steering wheel. It smells like your youth, like back-to-school and promises yet to be fulfilled, it feels like home on your skin. He writes to ask for pictures, for stories, he tries to dig his nerves into your awareness, while you hesitate to glance at his; too many obstacles in your line of vision. The canyon is unseasonably green, inviting, the desert gives way to the whims of the universe, you coast along as best you can. 

Their faces brighten your afternoon, their imaginations feed your own, 13 years you've been coming into the folds of each others creativity and the gift is not lost on you. One day you will thank them. One day a little girl will fasten herself onto printed pages for good and it will be because of them. The gift is not lost on you. 

He says your life is intriguing, it seems so free, and it doesn't take much effort to see what he means. You built for yourself this playground of color, this land of adjusted rules, and for every day you've doubted your rickety sand castle, all it takes is one day of recognizing your face in the mirror to feel at peace with the crooked road you've paved. 

Another birthday waits in the wings. 

You greet it with open arms, at last.

Port

Summer nights in the Rocky Mountain West, the heat returns to hold your skin, the sunsets are long and poetic, telling stories across the hillsides as they go. Six years ago you sat here, too, your body made new, your heart stirred, the possibility of the Word turning you into your own homing beacon, you were a lighthouse.

We've gone a long way into the circles of hell, lately, waded around the bottom where all things go to die, but oy, it was not always such darkness, you were not always two eyes matted by hopelessness. You were a lighthouse. 

You think maybe it's time you were,
again.

Lag

I went to bed early. Not because I had to, only because I needed the space. Woke in dark night. At 4 a.m. no one will intrude. I sat in the deep breaths of silence, sat in the stillness of contrast, and counted my blessings. 

One, how suddenly I have all the freedom my little heart can desire
Two, now matter how I use my freedoms, I am still firmly ensconced in the hearts of those I love
Three, I dreamed of the world and suddenly it is here

A new story painted itself inside my eyelids, as they always do when you let them. Perhaps that is the biggest blessing of all. By the time dawn rose in cold pink breaths across the mountaintops, I had already lived a whole day in the cities of my interior. 

It is easier to share a life, when you have some of it to yourself. 

Tändstickor

You see yourself gather kindling around your feet, watch your hands full of dried leaves, surely I had matches here in one of these pockets, strike anywhere they say and I ready myself to do as I'm told. 

It's wildfire season. 

You pack your bags
and head into the woods.

Feels

The transatlantic flight is more hours of alone time than you’ve had in three weeks, the silence rings in your ears, and you try to remember how to breathe on your own, without the structure of a schedule or the lives of others dictating how your lungs move through the day.

All that appears is words.

Stories, ideas, plans, poetry swim around the spaces within you made soft by time and rest and love, tumble out of your fingertips so you cannot keep up, you don’t know why you ever doubted that this was the spirit that sits in you. You vow to ignore the loud voices around you who try to say how a successful life is to be lived. They do not want what you want, so you do not have to aim for what they’re trying to reach.

All I wanted 
was to go to New York City, 
live madly, 
and write.

All I have to do now, 
is listen.

Windmills

Airplanes full of crying children, airports full of anticipation, I am a wet rag emptied of air, emptied of all the energy I brought on the outbound journey, filled with a magic of being seen entirely. The gift of chosen family beats in your chest like you don’t know how you got so lucky, like you don’t know why you ever feel a void, because you filled all your emptiness with them and they will not go away.

He says, you know as well as I do, speaks truths of futures you are not yet ready to see, even as you bend your worlds to meet. You book a ticket to New York, and it feels like ease, it feels like New York City is your home.

It is.

You return to America all the same as when you left, but twisted somehow, molded soft by loving pressure, fall is waiting in the wings but you feel like you are only just beginning to take off, feel like you are only just lifting, in that way it feels when spring is new and all the land lies ahead of you. An old station wagon waits in a garage, a mint green typewriter sits in quiet anticipation, you are full of love now, full of whatever comes next, there is nothing ahead but the open road, and you are ready to set back out on it, because the things to come were too fantastic not to tell.

The gifts are not lost on you.
You will not turn them down.

Forevers

The beginning of forever looks different, when you already have 23 years together under your belt: a rear view mirror summary from 75 people who knew you when you were all still children, a lifetime built by a village of love. Inredulous reunions after decades apart, faces older but minds and hearts the same, you recognize your self in their eyes, remember who you are based on who you were and how far you've come. By the time dawn arrives, the last few stragglers sit by the water with half drunk bottles of wine, with half spoken sounds of truth. He looks at you and says, I will wait however long it takes, and you don't know how to explain that time is different when you are free. 

Realize that your freedom is worth more than any other promises,
even love. 

It took you a long time to get here. 

You will not leave unless you can bring it with you
where you go.

On.

Suddenly, you are given long moments of time to yourself, slow silences in large houses, the easy life of a small town family. You revel in the space, metaphorical and otherwise, but float on top of the existence, like it is not yours. 

It is not yours. 

You love these people like family you chose, their stories sit in your very bones, and you want all these treasures for them. But you do not want them for you. The insight is surprising, somehow, you examine them from the outside with the curiosity of a toddler, who hasn't yet discovered bittersweetness. You can want this for them and not for you. 

You can be happy with what you have. 

Recovery swims in your lungs, rolls like waves across your muscles and softens your spine, you sleep in peace and wake happy, it is such a novel concept that you want to ask people if this is how it feels. You asked for the road and when it was not quite given to you, you went out to find it. You're on the on-ramp now, you're on the right track now. 

All you have to do
is go on.

Trained

Ride the bus early, with only the long-way commuters bumbling aboard, resigned to a life of long journeys and early mornings. They're all wearing autumn clothes and a determined frown. You realize the time may not be right for you to move back. For the first time in years, this insight does not cut deep inside your chest like it always did before. Get a brief moment alone on a train, think how you should be working but your entire being says you need to sit still in silence and see only the landscape pass by outside your window. 

An old couple in front of you discuss the towns you pass. She says, You know this town. You used to change trains here every day. He looks out and says, I did? but it does not appear to pain him. He forgets where they are going. Something about how life is short and long all at once passes by your internal field of vision, you realize you have more stories to tell now, you long for the neverending silences that the West may bring and the words that might appear with them. 

You long for things you do not know the names of, yet. 

Look at New York City apartment listings, look at houses in New Mexico, look at weather reports for any manner of worlds, 
feel nothing
but free.

Rönnäng

Find a familiar face on the familiar square, everything frozen in time except the worlds of wisdom that lie between you. Take the commuter bus out of town, past the throngs of people, see the city give way to rolling hills and late-summer greens, valiant flags braving the autumn chill even as the humans wrap themselves in more layers. 

A new house, a new promise, crooked floors and dated wallpaper, endless potential hidden within the folds in the old fishing village. Late in the evening, we bike down to the cliffs and dive into the water, no one there but the birds and one misguided jellyfish. The sun sets in that melancholy way it does in the North, just before the season ends. You pretend not to see it, revel only in the salt water on your lips. Bike home with a chill on your skin, adore a freedom you know only in memories, sleep like you never knew fear, 

there is something here, an answer telling itself to you in parts, you begin to piece it together,
believing at last
that you might.

August

Days pass in a blur, you forget where you begin and end and think perhaps you exist only in the eyes of those who’ve loved you for decades. There is no greater gift than to be seen and loved in spite of it. 

The summer comes to an end, but it trudges on with its last powers, you do not resent it, somehow. Perhaps you have something to prove, but for a short minute, it is irrelevant. They already know. 

Eventually you will have to return to New York, you think. 

You can not live your life only

in the eyes of others. 

Islands

The boat won’t go in the choppy waters, he yells from across the bow. A storm moves in from the west, floods the little city on the coast. We run to a bus instead, drag bags to a car barge and find another bus to take us to the edge of the island. Here it is, the endless sea, rages against itself, against cliffs and houses that have weathered its incessant tumult, you cannot ruffle the inhabitants here. No man is an island, but these people know what it takes to be one, they remain steadfast. The food is delicious, the hostel quiet on a cold august evening. In town, the festival begins. Do you remember when it began? You heard Regina Spektor revel from the other side of the woods. 

Do you remember who you were then? It seems impossible, now, to imagine. So young, so full of why does everything happen across the other side of the woods. I’ve come a long way since then. 

I have so far still to go. 

When they ask you to have a home you say, take a deep breath, remember how you know me. I am a heart full of woods, I am a life full of one day I will go through it, 

And sometimes that day

is today. 

En train

The train rolls out of the station, early morning but still well past dawn, eager Stockholmers making their way to work after long vacations and resigned endings. It feels like fall. People on the platform wear sensible wind jackets, I shiver in my bare legs and wonder what happened to summer. Think in New Mexico it is endless, still, and the thought warms me even as I feel stretched across the continents, torn at the seams.

Late at night, the evening before departure, I could not sleep. Tossed and turned in all the large questions, while counting down to an alarm clock that didn't have to ring, I was out the door all on my own. Oh, but life is sad, and strange, and beautiful, you feel tendrils of home bury themselves on her borrowed balcony, look out over a water that once belonged to you, look at the children you should be knowing better, you feel home bend itself into bus seats and subway trains and the familiar tint of people's hair and accents. You know traveling twists your lenses beyond distortion, know that if you lived here you would always be slightly askew, know that New York feels like your spine aligning, but 

oh,

In the late nights that refuse sleep, in the quiet, sandlime brick houses along a cross-country railway, in the cool crisp water of an evening swim, and the melancholic wringing of a heart already inflamed, you allow yourself wonder. What if this was home, and I'd never have to wander again, 

It's a thought too to big grasp. I nap no the train, instead, look forward to another reunion and another question of it this what it is to be humnan?

The answer I'm only just beginning to fingure out.

Rodeo

Your bags lie half-packed, clothes strewn about the room, your life in shambles, shards of people you might like to be. An airplane ticket sits in your pocket, it makes you feel calm, safe, right. 

You realize now when they ask you questions, none of your answers will suit them. You are homeless, now, you do not know where you will be a month from whenever they ask you to clarify your plans, they cannot grasp you. They've known you this way before. They've lost you to the whims.

This, too, feels right. 

So you are not sorry.