We drove into Wednesday. In raucous and self -percussion, drumming our excitement into one another. Singing reckless songs into an icy snow-less night.

But when the rest stopped to chat on the trail, I ran ahead. I wanted the quiet; to prepare myself I wanted to feel my body fight the cold. The heat in my calves forcing retreat from the air as they burned straight up the mountainside. I'd stop every few hundred feet, every few switchbacks, and turn off my headlamp and wait for the cold to come back.

It'd be near morning before we would see any meteors. Above the Payette, silver spilled-milk cloudy and splashdyed blue near the green-black midnight mountain was a swollen midwinter moon. The cloud conduit carried her glow in an arc across the river basin, and from ridgeline to ridgeline the sky pulsed brightly enough to make the icy rushing river as perfectly contrasted as a black and white photo.

So I walked alone to feel my skin prickle at the shy proposition the cold made it. The 20 degree wind with it's entreaty to tremble; coaxing shivers from exposed skin. The trail which steepened, and legs which answered, pushing up.

I reached the top and took my time undressing. Waited long enough for friends to catch up. The noise, the excitement returning. The freedom of near-strangers, and the best of friends changing in the night a white arm here, a stumbling foot here. White wine being unloaded, bodies unburdened bare to the sky, and then recloaked for modesty, for shamefacedness.

I thought I'd be lonely. I always am at the hot springs. The water heated in the gut of the ancient earth, spilled forth as what? a gift? the excrement of a sleeping earth? I find baptism in the joy, and am nearly always silenced by it, humbled and quieted. But I wasn't lonely.

When we climbed back down it was 5 AM and the moon had refused to set. The boulders in the river were still onyx shining with near frozen moisture and the river was a thousand shades of blazing white, and brighter than the moon in it's return of her light. And 5 of us snuggled up in the back of the truck.

My friends, talking in two's beside me until the the clouds started to clear, and the meteors came. Insisting on being seen, on outshining both the bloated moon and river. And we were children, squealing with delight.

Fat meteors dripping down molten through a sky. Me, silent in the middle. Alone, and entirely unlonely.

And I think maybe when we drove back at 8 AM, all of us humbled, exhausted, content, listening to Elephant Revival, I was looking for something bigger.

The rest of the world was getting up, and dressing for their day, for hump day. Coming over the top of things and cresting the hard times, escaping their bottoms, their darkness. I'm not. I'm at the bottom of a great big canyon, and climbing up, just to climb back down, and fighting the cold just to feel it tug at my skin all the better. And there is so much to be done, so much to push through, and Wednesday is just another day.

Yup, I'm at the bottom. But there's no darkness here. So I think I've got it right

Oh, and...

By the way.

I'm back.

I've missed you.

To He-Who-Holds-the-Corkscrew:

    If time, or science, has not given back what my eyes have taken. If i am still walking home, the three miles home, to our home, when I meet you, when that day comes, and I walk in that door flushed, and cold, and wondering how sight took so much from me; when i have an armload of breakfast groceries and a bottle of red wine, and my hair is a mess, and four cars have catcalled me, when life is imperfect, and I couldn't bring myself to call you to come rescue me,  and when the plastic bag's broken, and when I did not wear enough layers, please still love me. No matter how I look, or feel, or sigh for the moment. Please open the bottle, and open your lap, and open your heart. Because I walked all that way to you.

love, the girl who stomped half a block, before she remembered you were waiting and couldn't help smiling again.

"Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you." 

-- Alexander Graham Bell

Those were the first intelligible words uttered through a telephone.

Even then, at the dawn of a new communication era, the telephone was not enough.

And in a world where Facebook, Twitter, texts, and Skype are supposed to be enough, they are not.

Still our hearts cry out over the din if imaginary connection --Come here, I want to see you.

behold: the hat of dreams

you see, this is the hat in which my arms are lithe, and always reaching.
this is the hat in which my skin is not bumpy and tired from the winter.

this is the hat in which I do not sleep until noon.

this is the hat in which I do not feel like my skin is too small for me.
in which I see a prettier shape.

this is the hat of dreams

this is the hat from under which I will bat eyelashes that don't clump
at the man without a motive.

this is the had that will walk me over cobblestone streets
while I say everything that must be said.

this is the hat that will cover the hair that was too busy living to have slept the night before
to have been curled this morning.

this is the hat that will find the words, and give them the courage to fly their freckled beauty.

this is the hat that will break the silence.


but herein lies the problem;
it is just a hat.
and I am the one that must chase the dreams.

but really, the hat couldn't hurt.

They did not sit together. Next to, but not together. In the inky darkness they sat sweating in the late night noon, with the moon marking the starting point, directly above them where the line separating them started. An inch apart, maybe less. Maybe it was only the width of a single half truth and the denial of insult that kept her fluorescent leg from his. The poles of their misunderstanding pushed against one another, maintaining that malignant inch.

But they sat, hamburgers in hand, their discontent in the distance being soaked into the hungry bleached wood of a neglected picnic table, and did not waver. She shifted her shoulders to the left, banishing them further into the night air. She suffered this awkward position for the latent hope that it was the proximity that allowed the salt from his summer solstice face to burn the scratches laced across her pride, but not quite to scorch them beyond repair. But a woman's body will not lie and before she could think, before she could turn away the honeyed estrogen which would make her shift to him again, the moon to the earth, her shoulders had realigned themselves with her betraying hips, and closer still, the depth of a breath was between her shoulder and his. Splayed, parenthetical, she was curved toward him and in an unholy half second of negligence their heads might touch and her merry lie would be forfeit.

“Tell me a story.” She said. She would not ask. Every word must be more brazen now than ever, so that she might seem unashamed under the scornful gaze of her rejection. The need must be squelched, and the indignant flame quenched.

“Ok. You have to just believe it though.” He opened his hands like a book, comparing them, and then made a cup of them, the top two joints of his fingertips overlapping. He looked into them as if by will the very lines on his hands would magnify and he could read the story from them; and then he did. His words came out like the echoing of his heartbeat through his larynx quavering it's way through the desert air; the even rhythm of a slow reader trying to learn his favorite story.


His identity was comprised of this story and his creator had raveled it round and round into the circles of his fingerprints so that it could be packed along without hindrance into the very fires of hell. And it seemed as if a gypsy had read his palm, she might have begun as he did, and read it the same from start to finish. The cadence of his voice said that in his tomb his creator would come again, cup his hands as they were now, and read him this last bedtime story scrawled on his own skin.

In the silence that followed, the hours, and years, she dreamed of taking a single cell from his fingers or his tongue and amplifying it with God's own ears, as he does not appear to be listening anyway, and being sung to sleep each night by the humble back-patthing rhythm. And she loved him a little, in a faraway way, because he then spoke a simple truth.


He talked into the air, still reading from the tablet of his cupped hands, but for no one else but her, of a young boy, 16, who mowed the lawn. That was all. Of a moth that was injured and had to be moved from branch to branch so as not to be disturbed, and as it was cupped in those brown hand-tablets etched this magical story in them. Of a moth which had to be helped, in tender, small hands, whom the hunger of a spider had grounded. Of eaten wing tips, which could no longer catch the air.

And she sat letting her spider-eaten cynic heart lament uselessly flapping wings. It was a short story. All of three minutes he spoke, still with that slowness. When he said at the end of his tale that he sat on the steps to his house, with a tiny body flanked by spun smoke strung across the faintest floss in his hands, she froze. She feared so deeply that he would crush it, and put it out of it's misery, because the world is not full of flown away moths and the joyful reconciliation of broken wings and the air which would not carry them brokenly.

But he spoke of sitting. Of watching. Of holding. Simple, small, hopeful, dreamwords which were so far from her own troubled days. And then, she cringed at the ending, almost as much as she might have cringed had he forcibly ended the moth's sorrow.

He sat with her, until he watched her fly away. And in the honest percussion of every word, she felt her whole self tremble with fear at the juxtaposition of so much hope and the tiny breath of a chance that such a hope might be fulfilled.

 And in the story she heard his lie about not wanting her for what it was, she heard the truth of his hope for her chasing behind each clopping word like a child crying after a parade horse, but there was nothing she could do. The breath of similar polarity remained between their shoulders. Her curls did not brush his arms. And still, they could not sit together, despite the magic mothwing happy ending. The lie had been set loose, and it eclipsed the happy truth.

happy friday!

Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

I'll be back on monday, with something with a little more me in it.

these messes i'm making

there is pinot noir on my ceiling.

last night, when the corkscrew snapped off the bottle opener, leaving me with both an irremovable cork and screw, I couldn't let things lie.

It's not enough, you see, to throw up my hands and say I tried.

So I shoved the cork back in the other way, 

and Emily and I,
we drank crunchy red wine by the fire.

This is all to say, I'm ready to give it another go.
And I'll be having my wine one way or another.