we don't exist right now.
Ā
āwe donāt exist right nowā¦kinda nice, isnāt it?ā the words drift back over her shoulder on a cold blast of steam and i smile in the dark. half because sheās right, half because iām not sure i want her to be. 4am and weāre ghosting around a loading dock, dirty and tired at the end of the worldāan end of the world.
a desolate spur of western alaska. salmon and shorebirds and the ājust add moneyā armature of industry. this is where things come to disappear.
the place itself is a paradoxāa less glamorous version of that giant hand sculpture protruding from the chilean desert; an inexplicable, sprawling thing sulking here in the tundra, square angles harsh and conspicuous against the hazy flatness of moss and sea. color is a whole new animal. sound and fury.
sharp greenāneedles behind your eyes and the scent of ginger.
smoke blueā a dry breeze, heaving lungs, dust shaken from hair.
rust orange and ochre-- bitter and mechanical like chewing the side of your thumb after an oil change.
flowers are everywhere, low and tiny. an explosion of pink/white/yellow/violet. the air faint but heady with the faded Ā honey/lavender of a quilt washed 800 times. sweat. sun. rain
the sun sustains life and will eventually kill us all if humans make it that long. if we donāt self-destruct. itās refreshing to know the sun is already middle-aged. half way through its life cycle. we got about 2 billion years. makes the fact i missed that boat today almost inconsequential. makes other stars less important cause they are. how many stars can support this much bullshit?
āI just want to bury my dog and go home.ā
itās an off-center scrawl, pages from anything else in my notebookāmeans i heard it somewhere and liked it enough to write it down. i remember the voiceāa manās, older, quiet and frayedāand maybe what he was wearingā¦that he held something in his hands, that the place was too brightly lit. not much more. itās unusualāhaving to search for a memory. usually i canāt avoid them.
a handful of sparse, folky chords and that out-of-style, balls in a vise, justin vernon indie whine and iāll be in portland, 2008 maybe, sardined into a window ledge at holocene with jess and travis (still in love at the time). skinny love. and pin-drop silence. they talked about it for hours, for years, stoned and laying on the rug while it rained and i paced over creaky floorboards trying to decide when iād be leaving, and to where.
i remember one time traveling rose and i were trying to decide where to go next. back to el salvador so she could re-unite with the gum salesman (chiclets to be exactāchiclets on chicken buses) or advance north to the mountains of guatemala. we made a listāwhere next. we wound up going forward, north, but i will always have this nagging feeling of what wouldāve happened if we went back to Santa Ana? it wouldāve only taken a few days travel time, it couldāve been true love. instead we followed the ex-professional soccer player to antigua where i self-destructed slightly and drank all the whiskey and made up regrets for the year. follow your guts. next time maybe the pro-con list would get us closer to mexico and eventually reunited with friends, but following your traveling partnerās instinct may have been worth the adventure of going back the way we came. it doesnāt always have to be a new city, a new volcano, a new country. maybe familiar, same street corner, same chicken stand, returning home, isnāt failure if you wanna be there.
in the end it doesnāt much matterāwhat you want, where you areā¦nature doesnāt care, right? isnāt that our tag-line this season? weāll say it laughing, picking at piles of bleached bones, at spilled coffee and rotting vegetables. you are āhereā (map of ak). you leave footprints that disappear, you have a shadow no one sees. fucking revel in it.
sometimes i used to look at my life, at my lack of responsibility, and iād get this tight cottony feeling in my throat/chestāthe kind where my head starts pounding and my stomach turns and all i can taste is blood and time. iād feel like i fucked up and almost wish i were a little dumber, so i could stop wondering if iād missed the bus to adulthood.
āā¦whatās in that tupperware container? youāre decomposing a bird, arenāt you?ā i did miss the bus. Iām not, incidentallyāiām rehydrating some shiitake mushrooms for soup, but i give it a longish pause anyway. āwould that bother you?ā i ask casually and she shrugs. āno, iād just be jealous.ā at least iām in good company. Ā āare you drinking lemon juice?ā āyou knowā¦sometimes you just want to feel different.ā
sometimes you just want a kick in the ribs. a reminder youāre human. this is the point at which i usually begin making bad decisions. actually, i wouldnāt even call it that, because i donāt tend to regret things. maybe iām not human after all. oddly enough it doesnāt concern me, just means i donāt have to worry much about desire or failure, i can assume theyāre both relative, situational and at least 1/2 bullshit. iām okay with that. is it apathy? is it dangerous? maybe. i dunno. kinda doubt it. sometimes youād just rather dance to prince than attend you own graduation.
āi love you yoga mat.ā that is the story of my college graduation. i was 28, my hand was infected because after my last final, Probability 301, I just had to go out downtown, get blacked out drunk with my buddy Stephen, and decide to race him to the next bar (the polar)ā¦but all i did was run as fast as i could right into the pavement, landing all 160 drunk lbs on my handā¦.and i refused to wash it.
i woke up late for my graduation party, bloodshot eyes, bloody hand stuck to the nightdress i'd attempted to take off, one boot on, half in my bed. fucking classy. i called my friend to come clean me up and to bring cocaine. the only way to bounce back. i got to the bar iād spent the last 3 years working at, slinging bud lite to pay tuition, books, also a good way to get free drinks.
anyway, the party was a success, drunk speeches were made, i stayed high partly to numb the pain and to drown my spite for my boyfriend who wasnāt there, people like me donāt go to actual graduationāi just spent 4 years paying for a BS, last thing iām gonna do is spend more money on a cap & gown or stand in another line. no more lines, hoops, or inspirational academic speeches.
so anyway, my absent boyfriend bought me a yoga mat in celebration of my success. he told me had boughten me an ipad but returned it. iād been demoted from ipad to yoga mat. he was in medical school so perhaps my undergrad was only deserving of a plastic mat to sweat on. iāll never know. we broke up shortly after i graduated. iād spent years waiting to have one day to myself to appreciate my ability to think still, and hand in papers on time, but felt robbed somehow of closure.
next time i wanna celebrate an achievement iāll crawl into a cave and sit in silence.
ā¦.so pretty much what weāre doing right now? ā¦cellblock 4, platinum pen.
