phoenix?

This town is beautiful when it's gray. Even tear stained by the gods it has a freshness about it.

It rained my first three days back in Boise, and it rained again on what were supposed to be my last three. It's waiting to rain now. The entire contents beneath the lid of the world are breathless with waiting.

When I was a kid, I loved going to visit my Meme in Louisiana. In the summer time the rain would wait in the air, like it was playing hide and seek with you. It would crouch under the atoms of nitrogen; bury itself in the oxygen and wait. You'd hear it behind you and turn around: swear you could feel it on your shoulders. only to see that it had reached out of the night air to tap you on the shoulder and then retreated back into the living breeze. It would hang heavy and then crack open the sky and pour down from the very needles of the pine trees. The rain made each and every point, leaf, and stem a spigot. When we were kids we would wait until God made every vertex a firehose and head for the nearest hill. We'd wait for the water to start it's frantic downhill rush through the deep drainage ditches and all 8 inches of water was churning with our excitement, and we'd plop down and let the waters sweep us away. It was a dirty bathwater slide through the kudzu of the south; it was bliss.

The rain here is more timid.

On my flight here, I had a layover in Phoenix, and when my plane came down through the Arizona clouds, I found the city aglow. Below me it was spread out like a living thing, interstates, freeways and thoroughfares lit up along the edges like veins in an MRI and the taillights of the cars were red bloodcells flowing through them; pulsing houselights, neon signs reflecting off the glass, the metal all streaming vital luminescence, overflowing into the night sky. It went on forever, and as we came toward the center I could not see a place that was not Phoenix, alive flowing. I was overwhelmed by it's beauty, and by it's waste.

I saw so much light and energy. I saw a thousand cars running with maybe two people to each of them. I saw empty parking lots aflam with flourescent reassurance. It was an abomination, and a miracle. In the middle of the red dirt desert sprawled this gluttonous creature, alive, breathing, creating waste, destroying and making a hundred thousand million thoughts and products and messes and people. I was so deeply touched and I couldn't stand the thought of the plane lowering before I knew whether the city was the cancer or the cure. As the runway came up to meet us, I felt cheated. I needed to know whether or not I was horrified or awed.

It's not really raining anymore here. But the clouds are waiting. Hanging in the air like they have something to say. Like the moment right before a breakup or right before the first I love you. They are the policemen waiting on the doorstep to give you bad news. There is a holding out sort of feeling, like if honesty can be procrastinated long enough, the truth might change, but the water will come again before the afternoon is out. There is news in the air; a charge. The hairs on my body stand a little taller.

There is news of who I am becoming. Of this place and of me in it.

I feel the need to apologize to this place, the trees, the wet concrete and the earthworms pulling themselves across it. My guilt at all the things which I have broken is sour milk breaking across my senses, but I am aglow wityh possibility. I just can't figure out if I'm the miracle or the abomination. I want to dance a thousand unholy celebratory dances beneath the mournful drips of a slowly cheering sky. I look at my fingers and see the glowing pollutant of a wasteful and miraculous girl. I see the freeways in the blue veins of my arms and against the misty pallor of the day, my metabolism sets me to the flamegolden hot glowing of the million Phoenix streetlights, each cell a home for forgiveness, and hope. I am a submerged in the expense of a human life and am brought to my knees by my willingness to revel in it utterly.

I feel too many cheesy things beneath the baptism of this day. Loss and hope are together, conjoined in airy coitus; all sweat and joy, tension and release. There are no lines between what I have lost and what I will gain; they are entangled in the making of something new. The over-Phoenix night sky and the Louisiana deluge's are bright and red-faced with the tender creation of brand new things. It has all made me midnight salty skin and deep muscle tired like a child who couldn't stop her fiery dirty feet from dancing.

It is all coming together, and from here I know it will diverge again into strangeness and the chasign chaos of becoming who I am, but today, just for today, I feel the tenderness of the branches of my time here brushing hair and sweat from each other's faces. There is symmetry, and there is the electric waiting of the skies to tell my truth. For now that is enough.


P.S. I swear I don't always feel everything this intensely. i'm just creepy sometimes