cosmic narrative

“You can write a narrative for the stars in your sky,” she reminded me

It was never that I needed permission, but I did in fact start seeing the quiet hour I spend alone on Wednesday mornings differently, and noticed how the smell of my coffee reminded me of childhood weekends spent in the pop-up camper

In my narrative I am outside, at night, my feet touching earth. I am simultaneously with you, our toes in the ocean, and alone in a lush flower patch next to the creek, my hair dancing wildly. We smile, I smile

I am at home in my narrative, but I am at home here, too, in this quiet Wednesday morning hour. The stars forever an onward guide

When quarantine is over...

(written April 29, 2020)

When quarantine is over…

I will miss how quiet my apartment is at night without the 5R bus line whirring pas with calculated precision, rattling the window panes just enough to make me question if it’s actually an earthquake every. single. time.

I will miss making endless homemade pizzas with increasingly strange toppings, and cutting them in any shape I want because there are no rules now, this is anarchy

I will miss the way my muscles hurt so good from walking 35 miles a week to maintain a safe commute, and my sanity. I will miss the empty streets and the irrelevant traffic signals. I do not miss you, tourists

I will miss how sidewalks have become chalked canvases, and boarded up windows dueling grounds for creative hands

I will miss getting to hear your voice over the phone for the first time because let’s face it, we thought that art was dead. You sounded good by the way

I will miss being able to read as many books in two months as I normally would in a year, omg I may never resurface

I will miss the vicious cycle of cuddling Comal incessantly, and then spending just as long de-hairing my entire apartment

I will miss how I thought eating a clove of raw garlic a day would protect me from the virus, only to be rewarded with a week-long case of the fieriest heartburn I e’er did see

I will mss how much I’ve come to love the creases in the corners of your eyes, because I can’t see your masked smile

I will miss being able to sleep so. well. every. single. night. how. about. you. you. too?

I will miss having enough time and space for creative thought to imagine five alternate realities for myself in vivid detail. Still deciding which to actually pursue. But they all involve a backyard and either chickens or goats so there’s that

But mostly, I will just be really fucking glad to see you again.

quarantimes

It’s day five of quarantine and I’ve already thought about playing Scrabble against myself more than three times today. It’s not that staying home in the company of just my cat feels difficult to my introverted soul, it’s that I’m finally not spending so much mental energy on thinking about how I should ‘probably be doing something else.’

These days, poetry has adopted an entirely new layer of beauty. A long, slow walk to the ocean has become much more than just exercise. A lady smiled at me as we passed in the street this morning; the kind of smile that seeps instantly to the heart’s core. I smiled back.

Yesterday, I spent the entire day walking on the edge of Completely Losing It. A uncomfortable kind of dance in which folks could probably see tears in the corners of my eyes as I chatted with them about completely normal shit. I’m not one to lose it. But it’s hard not to when you feel the weight of your entire city (world) slumping into uncertainty. I just want you all to be okay. I want to be okay.

Do you think the fact that I’ve been eating whole cloves of raw garlic every day matters? (gross) Does it matter that I’m paying my baristas for a sweater on their fundraising site rather than for a latte? (rad sweater though) Does it matter that I have to use an entire box of gloves to feel ‘safe’ working with the public all day? (sorry Mother Nature) What, in the end, will matter?

The downstairs neighbors are fighting again, and my curry smells good simmering away in the kitchen. In this moment, it’d be easy to let myself think quarantimes were all a dream, if not for the noticeable fact that life finally pushed me back here, to you, ol’ keyboard.

Want to play Scrabble?

Notes to Myself on the Morning of my 30th Birthday

Today, on this morning of my 30th birthday, where my visions of “who I want to be by the time I’m 30” and “who I actually am at 30” collide in a rather ungraceful but coincidentally fortuitous manner, I vow to spend the next year being a badass.

I vow to not just show up in the moment, but to push beyond it in ways that will surprise myself. To not just finally repot the damn plant, but to turn my studio into jungle of a greenhouse for the afternoon in order to do it right even if it means I’ll be vacuuming up stray dirt three weeks later. To allow myself to surrender fully to the fact that gray is my favorite color (thanks K), and let go of the notion that it’s dull or wrong or just so…gray. To not spend an hour wondering if this post is “good” enough to publish, but to sit awkwardly and comfortably with the fact that it is, because I decided it is.

I vow to say “I love you” to myself more often, and to my people, and let myself believe and feel it when I do.

And I vow to cling to fact that every way in which I failed to become “who I want to be”— the texts I knew better than to respond to but did anyway, the day I lost my phone and allowed the my grace to crumble very unpoetically around me, the time I forgot to bring money with me to a first date—were really all just life’s way of throwing me a sly wink because I cannot envision a more fulfilling reality than the one in which I find myself sitting this morning. I’m lucky. Old and lucky.

Glass Mostly Empty

He walked out on our first date before even finishing one beer.

“I should get back to my work.” Oh, you mean the work you just old me didn’t need to be finished until 5pm, the next day?

I’m pretty sure my confidence, sleek leather jacket, and the comfortable pace at which I finished my glass of wine confused and/or startled him.

After he left, the waiter stopped over, eyeing the empty chair and half glass of beer next to me. “Are you doing alright?” The glint in his eye held a certain sense of knowing—the question was more about me being walked out on, rather than if I wanted to order something else. “Oh I’m all set, thanks.” And I was, because I’m just not into folks who leave half glasses of good beer around, you know? I should have added, “It’s for the best, he was lactose intolerant anyway!”

Too much with myself

“I want to be roller-skating while I’m listening to an orchestra at a concert hall. I want to be a McDonald’s quarter pounder and still be a clerk in a the product-control section of a department store. I want to sleep with you and be sleeping with my girlfriend all the while. I want to lead a general existence and yet be a distinct, separate entity.”

-Haruki Murakami

The Almond Guy

Last week I took a serene, solo ten-mile hike on a trail through Point Reyes National Seashore. The park was fairly empty and the path I chose wound through lush forest for miles before it popped out on cliffs overlooking the sea. I was relieved to take a rest break when I reached my chosen perch near the Pacific. Sitting in such stunning beauty with no people around is an undeniably rare moment.

Just minutes after I’d sat on the edge of this cliff and took a few swigs from my water bottle, another hiker meandered down the path. And kept walking towards me. And then sat down about five feet to my right on the very same cliff. Now, I realize I’d chosen an optimal stopping point for its views, and perhaps it has a well-known (unbeknownst-to-me) reputation as such, but you can imagine my subtle confusion when the only other hiker I’d encountered on the shore chose to sit within feet of me on this expansive path.

“Hi,” he said. “How are you?”

“Hi, I’m good, how are you?”

“I’m good, it’s beautiful out here!”

Oh what, so now we’re old buddies? Thankfully, the conversation then slipped back into silence, but he was sitting too close for me to comfortably pursue the journaling I’d hoped to do amidst such inspirational beauty. Eventually I took a bag of almonds out and started snacking, ever-conscious of the volume at which I chewed.

“Want an almond?” I hoped my gesture would ease the tension of his closeness.

“Suuure.” He reached for a few, then we both fell back into silence, looking seaward.

When I packed up and started trekking onward, I threw him an awkward, “Enjoy the day, it really is beautiful out here!” as I sidled past him on the edge of the cliff.

Maybe it was coincidence or maybe it was the universe in action—having humanity pop up so close in an unexpected place. Or maybe the spot I chose to sit was actually that guy’s spot and he was just too polite to let me know. In any case, whenever I look back on that hike, it won’t be “the day I took a ten mile solo hike to the sea,” it’ll be “the day I took a solo ten mile hike to the sea and the only person I saw shared almonds with me at the edge of a cliff.”

And I’m probably better off for it.

Kettle Calling

How would you react if you found an electric kettle plugged into the outlet in the hallway of your apartment building, and it was boiling, unattended?

3:18

I thought I woke up at 3:18am because I’d had a glass of red wine before bed; always a harbinger of patchy sleep. But as my eyes fully opened, so did my ears. The downstairs neighbors were definitely watching Speed (trust me, if you heard it, you’d think so too), and they definitely got a new subwoofer, and I felt like I was as good as on the couch right next to the encroaching, night-owl viewers. Would have been fun if I’d actually been invited.

March 19, 2019

Yesterday, the man standing next to me at the crosswalk turned and said, “Have you ever thought about how many people you’ve stood next to waiting for the light to change at crosswalks? Thousands, probably. Thousands!”

I think about it all the time, actually. How in cities, we’re mere ants, passing unbearably close to brilliant or bruised lives, never stopping to figure out why the woman with the scarf is smiling SO WIDELY, or why the important looking man is walking so quickly, or what the bum repeatedly shouting “Mother Nature wants you dead!” went through to get, well, there. We learn to bare the fleeting nearness of it all; there’s something beautiful in the almost-touched. It’s the way you feel right before the first bite of meal after an exhaustive day, or your last blink before a first kiss— the long, beautiful, anticipatory seconds you never get back. But here in the streets of San Francisco, the feeling goes on forever, if we let it.

March 18, 2019

March 17, 2019

1.) The subtle comfort of a morning in which coffee in bed is possible

2.) The way the spring warmth inspires scrubbed floors, open windows and green things (now, to finish scrubbing my floors)

3.) A podcast episode that covered a topic that’s already been too much on my mind. Now, I try to let it go

4.) The way the sun feels on my bare shoulders for the first time this year

5.) The quick smirk from the lady who knows exactly how my day is going without having to ask; she’s been there

panhandling at sunrise

I'm not on a quest for money this early in the morning (though maybe I should be). I'm out for a run through the 3/4 mile long "red carpet" of a park that leads up to Golden Gate Park, called the Panhandle. It's out the back door from my apartment, and I like to come here in the mornings. So do many others, it turns out.

a middle-aged Asian man stands poised on a square of pavement near the public restroom, arms raised to the sky. I wonder, if I knew how to practice Tai Chi as well as it seems he does, would I be brave enough even then to move my body so artfully in this public space?

A homeless man with a full salt and pepper beard ambles across the pedestrian walkway near the basketball court, large gray blanket rolled and slung expertly over his shoulder. He is walking SO SLOWLY as I approach the white stripes over which he inches across. I think of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road and wonder if anyone has ever asked if they made it all the way across the road or simply posed in the middle for their album cover shot. I wonder where this man is trying to go and hope it's nearby, because it's going to take him A LONG TIME to get there.

Two middle-aged white women stand on a patch of grass nearby talking and watching their dogs play. It feels Hollywood somehow. I'm sure these ladies are talking about their husbands, or ex-husbands, or their close-minded bosses at work. Life has worn them down to a place in which they've been forced to realize their own full worth and also the value of canine companions, and they've never been happier. 

I make eye contact with the east-bound runners as I head west, and try to imagine their glances back at me are saying "wow, I'm so impressed with your running style, and I want to know what song you're listening to because you're absolutely killing it!" even though in reality I know I'm THAT RUNNER, the one with holes in both sneakers, holding a full set of keys and a credit card in one hand (just in case) and a wired phone in the other, who is sprint/walking, never running. How many inner eye rolls or silent cajoles have I actually caused?

The eucalyptus tree looms over me as I circle back towards home. They say it's the oldest tree in all of Golden Gate Park. It's weird to stand in awe of this natural monument with the Stone Temple Pilots blasting through my headset too loudly, but it's also exactly right.

The stoplight at Stanyan Street changes and the armada of cyclists sprints forward. It's spandex rush hour for the helmet-clad here in the Panhandle. Biking to work is considered not only the coolest form of transportation in San Francisco (you have to be pretty legit to bike in such an inclined city), but also the fastest. These people are all tech gurus. They've done the math. They know. 

I jog past a man sprawled out in a sunny patch of grass (he's been there for God knows how long, and I'm not sure weather to feel sorry for him or jealous) toward Masonic Avenue, back home. Another day of Panhandling and not a penny wealthier, but all the richer for it. 

29's magic carpet

If I had a magic carpet escorting me through this new year of life, this is what the carpet would look like in writing:

This year, I vow to show up in each moment as fully as possible; I'll pinch myself if that's what it takes to stay WOKE. I shall allow life to flow through me as it will so long as I ensure my best guides remain at my center, flames aglow like my favorite candle (which, now that I think of it, needs to be replaced soon): love, growth, creativity, connection, humor, passion, pride, adventure. I promise to dress myself in strength each morning and to keep my heart tucked close in my breast pocket on the days I don't feel like wearing it on my sleeve. I will forgive the branches that have fallen from my tree and allow their rot to nourish my roots, and lean into the days when it's clear that too much ice cream needs to be my spirit animal and not a sin. It's just a day, after all. I will give, and it will be raw, and honest, sometimes crooked and sometimes beautiful, and I it's okay if you don't like it but I hope you do.

Catch you on the other side on my slick carpeted ride, 30.

the snore next door

I never pass anyone walking through the halls of my apartment building. I rarely hear noises from my neighbors, except for the occasional THUNK or SHRRIIIIK from apartment 21 during hours that are traditionally reserved for dinner-making; I assume it's cabinets and pots. I like to imagine it's someone who makes excellent ramen from scratch for themselves each night. You know--the quiet, sagely type, but someone who really knows how to cook. I like to image we become fast friends, and share our lives over hot bowls of ramen. I like to imagine someone would make a movie about our unexpected friendship one day.

But at night, when things are quietest, I reliably and clearly hear snoring while lying in my own bed. Not rude snoring, or intrusive. It's not coming from someone with sleep apnea or sinus issues. Nothing weird or jolting or grotesque. No, this is picture book snoring-- a soft 'honk shuuuu' a metronome would be proud of. 

I can't tell if it's coming from the apartment to my left, right, or below me. I can't tell if it's coming from a man or a woman. I can't tell if it's coming from someone who went to a job they loved, and came home so fulfilled and exhausted that their only choice was to surrender to sleep, or if it's coming from someone who dealt with draining financial issues and problematic family drama all day and their only choice was to come home and surrender to sleep. 

I want to ask them.

who loved you today? was it fulfilling?

who hurt you today? and how? and where?

are you lonely? yearning for solitude?

is anyone lying beside you?

what did you laugh at today, and can we laugh at it again, together, now?

did you eat anything memorable?

are you okay?

but my questions float into the night unanswered, and I drift into a slumber of my own.

apartment 22

i like the way the range hood fan spins when the wind blows through my open windows most mornings, even though it probably means the fan is broken or old

i like the light pink tile on the shower walls; it brings to mind a poem i would have written if I'd been alive in the 70's. i still might

i like hearing the St. Ignatius church bells toll on the hour; a too-jovial song rings out once a week, reminding me it's Sunday

i like the paper snowflakes hanging high in the foyer window. hope held fast to something that will never come

cheers from the bar downstairs rush in, any time of day. must be a sports game on 

the 5R bus zips down its route, overhead wires whirring. "Fulton Street: Ocean Beach." the automated announcement. trapped in the heart of the city, or 10 minutes from the Pacific expanse? you choose

at night the fog sits heavily over my window view, but I never feel alone. sometimes it's a vagrant's distant shriek that fills the void. mainly it's the wind