No longer using this account. I will be starting a new blog as a sort of rebirth of sorts. It will be a lot more engaging, interactive, healing and based more on art and culture and life as a young adult, I suppose. I will update and let you know where I moving my site to soon.

there in evaporated spaces lies the winter and the summer

In the shower, I bend my head in silent forgiveness. What seems like a reign of tears travelling the length of my forehead, hanging onto dear life at the peak of my nose, out of control and down the curve of my lips, kiss my chin goodbye as if to say,

"we've heard your prayer."

I'm made of tears--we all are. I wonder if we could be swept away by the sky, evaporating into a light fog high in the lining of space's layers. Until we all pound together in unwanted friction, numb and so cold, we don't know who we are, or that we've become clouds, so heavy; and sometimes we are white, sometimes we are black. And when we call the night home, we fall because we are made of water, or tears, whichever one wants to call it, and we don't want to be friction, we just want to get away from all the lightning.

I wonder if I'll meet the sea again, the lakes, the rivers and tiny ponds that seem too naive to hope that they could grow because we all seem to shrink in the summer months. We evaporate because we are water, or tears, whichever one wants to call it. The sky begs to claim us, we raise our hands for it to take us. 

We aren't ever so certain are we? Even the iced over ponds break in the frozen winter months, you know those months that make you wonder if you are in fact living in an ice box. I'm surprised all our tears don't freeze into a permanent scarlet letter, in the shower, in our beds at night, walking alone in the streets, past the cars where everyone is but no one sees. Our parents tell us to be careful on the pond with our ice skates, they tell us to watch for the cracks because if you aren't feeling you could lose your grip and fall in and fall out. Maybe it's because they were us once, walking over it, daring it to break the only truth we led: that thin ice is strong like us because it has to be.

Nothing is ever so solid, so why do we think we are?

Hot water at night thaws our ice box hearts. We are amass with tears, and that doesn't mean we can't skate a figure eight like we used to, even in the summer months with our rollerblades. 

They say that the sky is heavy with gravity--it catches what needs be and throws it back. So what about our forgiven prayers?

I can't evaporate anymore though, I hope you don't either. 

(listen to this when reading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBcknwgUKeU) 

Journaling

   
























An era has ended as I now say goodbye to my old leather journal and welcome in a new time of my life, hopefully a little wiser, a little brighter. I was sent this new journal, one that I now call my youthful travels. Fitting, I think. This first entry is about the welcoming of spring in New York. 

March 20, 2012

When I think of New York, I think of my future. Phoenix renders me in riddled dreams of the past, mine and those forlorn ages cradled in green.  Thursday morning, the darkness pulled back until eyes wept in a golden glaze. The clouds frothed back and forth, rolling waves of a calm sea. The storm of a heavy night of restless talks and thoughts of the heavy autumn rush, a falling kind seemed to heave its final cry.  And all that was left was the morning dream, waves like blankets.  They seemed so close you wished you could roll the thick, double paned windows down and let your fingers swim in the clouds. Do what you knew as a kid.  I turned to my side as we descended into a communal fog of neither the heavy or light kind. It was just there. The pink and yellow, deep blue of an earlier time rose so high, it stayed behind, it said goodbye. I was approached by a baby’s eyes—welcomed into this new city that would be my home for a week.  Its mother whispered, “Good Morning.” I smiled at him, he laughed.  His eyes widened in excitement, raw and young and free.  I couldn’t help but laugh too because this was a new era.  I was away from something so heavy: the past.  But I was in flight, I was a bird like I always imagined young and in bed drifting away to bedtime stories.  The airplane was like a boat descending the sea, nothing was as serious as it seemed.  These past six days have blurred my vision of self, or it has awakened a new sense that has always been there, that I have never seen.  When I landed, I grabbed a ticket and trusted the yellow taxicab that seemed to be waiting to take me into New York City.  I pretended to know where I was or where I was going.  The traffic was the only thing keeping me from something bigger than myself. I spotted my best friend, Jackie, in her purple NYU sweatshirt. I didn’t even realize the 10 dollar tip I handed to the driver.  He didn’t say much.  After Jackie and I grabbed breakfast at this cute french bakery and restaurant, Le Pain, we joined the routine of the subway: the music, the people rushing and stopping, the incessant swiping of metrocards, the wind of those fast, frenzied underground trains. 

Our first stop was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  The waterfront, broken windows and graffiti art with cats and teenage hearts. We sat on the ground of this thrift shop, Junk, and held pictures that was once the property of lost families and dearest dears.  I wondered if they were missed.  We sat on the ground and held them up until the sun shone through.  That evening, we ventured to the markets of Chelsea, explored galleries, and drank don’t-mind-if-I-do glasses of wine. The crepes back in Greenwich were lovely. In the early hours of the morning, we walked through Washington Square Park, cast by the hazy shadow of the massive white arch.  Frozen and cold, we made it to St. Marks where I held my 99 cent pizza for warmth.  I felt more than what was, and even now my memory begins to fade.

Running on what seemed like no more than two hours of sleep, we awoke to a rainy mist and the brooklyn seashore.  I joined Jackie and her wonderfully artistic friends she made through photography. I couldn’t stop smiling at their eclectic blend of personalities that seemed to mix so well, and the way their views of the world painted itself beautifully through pictures (inspiring, might I add).  We were the only ones on a shore ridden with broken glass and bottles—a mosaic array that reminded me of stepping stones we used to make in Garden class in elementary school.  The shattered treasures became the sand itself, the bottles that washed among the current like an ancient celtic folklore clanged together with the tune of chimes dancing in the wind, not cradled by the lull of a waters edge.  It was so beautiful and untouched even though they say it was once a landfill, forgotten and left in decaying grace. I collected glass bottles, green, brown, clear for my future and past. A sacrificed present to the gods. I wondered who held these once, what apothecary named these Bella Donna.  My feet soon dragged on this cold, English coast.  We pandered through golden fields and found our way back to the bus stop, our noses and lips bruised blue by the cold, until we gathered for final warmth in Snice coffee shop with tea, bagels and cookies. 

St. Patrick’s Day filtered the city in green people. The bar hoppers started early with their green shirts and green, sparkly hats--an obvious patronage to the Irish spirit.  However, Jackie and her friend Jessie and I met some lovely old ladies, dressed in style at the famous "off broadway". We perused the shelves of a book store, novels and the likes painting the walls to the ceiling. We stopped for lunch at Cafe Lalo, a two-hour affair that was enjoyed over coffee and talks that perused the very living.  Central park bloomed cherry blossom and white daisy trees, the Guggenheim museum a marvel of art and photographs of Francesca Woodman that seemed so sad because maybe her life’s end was so sad. I lost myself in translation that night. Starting off the night in one of Jackie’s good friend, Maddie’s dorm room, I met some lovely, sweet and unique people. Swayed by influences that seemed to bubble in happy fever, I held a cigarette to my lips and knew that this is what my five-year-old self was thinking of: cool and burning like the embers lit.  We were fumbling over our high, unfiltered laughs.  Coughing the smoke away, sitting on St. Mark’s stoops with our 99 cent slice.  I didn’t want to leave these people. I wanted to collect every moment and sense. 

Walking by myself around west village, I noticed the movement of trees and flowers: nature in such a high rise city garden.  We look for what is more than ourselves, hoping to lose what has been garnered real and vaguely this. Words are lost when attempting to pinpoint each encumbrance.  If only I could envelop the words of all the great poets and novelists, but I find that I am only left with an empty sugar packet and a dehydrated cherry blossom.  My tea bag of apricot orange has floated, or descended to the warmth of a grounded city. 

“I am living,” I laughed uncontrollably under the sway of bubbly, happy fever drinks. 

 I am living. 

Raisin Oranges

My mother and her best friend sat at our kitchen table crying and smiling, watching us children jump and sink like titanic on that lone raft in the pool—we were the sailors, our dog the captain. it was summertime and the sun was hot and heavy, but freeing like the smell of citrus from the orange trees in the backyard. I stood on the cool kitchen tiles looking out, but not looking back. The table was bare with just their hands. My own felt like raisins, pruned from the indian waters, wrung out in nervous predicament. My mother played with my hair, and I told them about my break from this child’s play of the populars, and they laughed over a possible poplar tree, “populars or poplars?” I couldn’t understand how trees had anything to do with being popular. I can’t understand how I thought they had nothing to do with being loved. My pronunciation was no good; I was young and knew I wanted to be neither.

We aren't what we say we are

Blueberry Bliss, Ginger Vitality

A godess's homesickness for the romanticized

I couldn’t look up any longer; I couldn’t speak up any louder. I just lay on the ground and imagined myself in some distant landing. If I closed my eyes, could I make you and all of this disappear? My pulse sighed in rendered dreams of energy; there I was, my final release to therapeutic presence. Immersed, faded and invisible like one who’s already experienced and channeled. But I haven’t experienced, I have yet to channel. Yet I feel so old. I feel so withered and old. A raisin in the sun, a child looking up at Shel Silverstein’s pizza sun. But I remember being young where the sun engulfed everything you touched and felt and said and cried. I dreamt of nothing because I knew of nothing to dream. Time didn’t find me; it didn’t stalk me until I knew pain. I could cry and it would be the dark ages. I was so young and already eye level with the sun and moon—friends of transcendence in flight. The must of my grandmother’s brown and white lace curtains stuck to my skin and eyes, relics of a golden age where rock-and-roll and desert sun made waves in the sand, and oasis’s in velvet pools and string bean rope trees. Because there you were. There it was. Time meant nothing, it didn’t weigh this energy of now, brief and fleeting and, hold on, step back, cheap. Hang on, wait up. What’s wrong? I’m not now. These tears can’t be taken away. You can’t just keep on saying that someday, someday now I will find a way to forget those goddamn hearts and flowers. Because what if it will all only take this one day, these one tears to say that you aren’t alone in what you fear and what sears every nerve and childish cry. Why did I care so much about that key and the lock to the aged, rosewood Grandfather clock? I would follow the swing, and hope to grow as tall as the wall of vanillin books, ripened with age and travels and voices. Goddammit relinquish control—let me fall and hit hard. Let the sand wash me away so I can sail the seven moons. The sky tells us we can’t go back, but we can live between the two, night and day and eye level all the same. The yin and yang of a child’s heart, or maybe just homesickness for the romanticized.  I’ve realized that it wasn’t the specificity of time, but the release of time itself, the ignorance and innocence of a child in relation to an era. The road only went for some time until it was you and the wild—people were wild, not tamed and estranged. What a calamity to no longer feel the wind’s silky wrap, watch lips kiss smoke, feel the sparseness of change and a pay phone, the haunting of all those people before you reaching for the call of home, honey and wine to nameless, weathered voices.

Sweet child of mine, you feel that your hair has grown too fierce and coarse for the comfort of a mother’s hands, soothing the tangles and brushing away your gasping fears that seem to yank you to the floor in a broken water depth, a dragging jerk that pulls you fighting, a cold recluse with no breath. You can’t seem to escape the sea, lying broken in your mother’s hands. Sweet child, you’ve seemed to have forgotten those healing hands, touching your forehead in a pause of hope and light, honing those sun rays and the moon’s pale, seeping chill until breath returned, your chest fell heavy and still. You weren’t blue, you weren’t black, you were coral peach, the dip between the two. Sweet child, you were taken by the sky. You wish to feel the braid of a mother’s hands, the stories of nostalgia and its cratered heart; you wish to smile all the smiles you’ve heard and seen and felt. Lived all the moments, black and white, coral peach, cradled in the lights of stop and go; a mother’s hands balmy sweep and butterfly dance through turbulent and anxious tidal waves, until you are soothed, you are healed. 

Wild skies, freed hearts seek solace, “will you ever win?” Those words carpeted the Shirley curls of orange shag, the strung guitar that my mother once held in gypsy rhythm, individual and soul, and me, healing those strings in smiles I’ve heard and seen and felt. Nostalgia fluttered and like melding stars in poetry, glowed like the goddess itself. I was surrounded, a child dripping in nectar calling for the monarch butterflies until they amassed as fields of flowers in the sky—their arched wings each a broken piece of holy, stained glass drenched in golden light, each a broken, wild smile of heaven—the true cathedral in all its pure divinity. I looked up, I spoke, I was overcome.

Listen while reading: http://crystallizedhope.tumblr.com/post/16207156171/crystallineknowledge-her-breath-is-the-wind

Coffee Shop Text

I’m growing hard and cold in this tribal world. I don’t think you could say I am happy. With this constant chatter of unrest delving to rest inside my head; they are putting up camp, I can tell, they can say. There’s this perpetual expectance from society of what to be, how to say and why to live. I don’t know if I can ever grow to understand this type of living. I grip Excalibur inside the fist of my hand; it hangs loosely from a silver cord around my neck, claiming to have been pulled from the formidable rock where no one else stood to understand that it takes grace and patience, not sure strength. It’s as if I’m waiting to be saved, to be sure of protection from all of this pounding energy—consuming, eating away my vitality. Who’s ever really sure of their existence? I want to be told I am okay, I am going to make it through the day, that I am good enough. I want to be held and be seen as true. I’ve been thrown out, no packed bags but the clothes on my back. I have no home now, left to wander through tempos unheard of. It’s weird how people look at you, like they know where you stand. People have forgotten the language of telepathy, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t communicate, wordless. We aren’t ever really alone, because in some sense or another, people always know what you are feeling. They meet you--sad, betrayed, this deep seed of resentment and label you as unhappy, depressed. No one can explain how they know specifically, they just do. It’s too much for the comprehension of words. I don’t know how I feel about that. I could easily leave this barren place, with people who feed jealousy and fight for the funniest funny, an attack on the weakest link, but I wonder if it would change anything. Would the people really be different, would I make friends and feel content? Maybe green really is my color, and that is what I needed to realize. I guess I am just tired of feeling below the rest of society, when I think so much too. No one seems to understand my need to be at one of those colleges where thinking is revered, books a well sought-after perfume. I want to sit in those grand libraries; you know one of those brick, home-in-front-of-a-warm-crackling-fire ones? I want to live there. Create a home there. Drink my coffee, study and sleep there. Modern isn’t my thing. Ironic, when journalism is on its last limb, surviving by the newest new—the search for obliterating human communication. Give me a typewriter and that will do. Storytelling must never die. Faces must never fade.

I think confrontation is needed. To go out and be okay with falling down, once, twice or numerous times, you know. We must be open to meeting so many people, even if we don’t necessarily talk to them. To just interact with their energy is good enough. To sit in the open, alone, is the bravest of all. Because you are telling the world, I am okay by myself. I am okay meeting you. We may all be suffering, but I am still okay.  I love this feeling of essential rebellion.

A farewell to nobility in loneliness

The leaping woman arrives in an ambulance of starlight. Take heed young warrior, wanderlust vagabond—these stars burn for only so long; they can fall and die en masse of clouded fire, its grip reaching for a death experienced together, not alone like everyone else. Make a wish, or this search will be your downfall; see there, light-years scrape across battered and bruised skies encased in flaming trails of golden chariots. They didn't race ahead, star-bright, to fall in vain. Once, only once in a lifetime, myths braced for the constellation of gods splattered among the cosmos. Oh, see it pass you by now. Adrift a torrent of wind and sea and deserted dust storms, that leaping woman bathed in starlight felt as if she was rusting as burnt and red as iron. She was no "holy city," so she looked to the moon and waited for its milky cradle, a boat in a rather black, brash sea—a sailor’s friend in Poseidon’s tidal pull. Waves of stars took its shot, they rose up and hit like a tsunami's sucker punch until she clung to the orbit of impermanence. Her family always told her about the principles of practice, but what did they do other than call her a kind of lazy susan, waiting for the heavens to guide her home. So she leapt and she fell, and she snagged and cracked with each broken branch, until she lay still, very still, most like those monastic monks, waiting for the brush of enlightenment and the tongue of its tempters beneath a tree and its grassy roots. She was on the roof of the world, her name known only as Ngari, the remains of a celebrated and ruined kingdom, a place for the rather vast and few. Magical, divine—a final state of nirvana—a place to pilgrimage and find what all those stars lost, alone "to fly high and never fall." No need for another emergency call, this was her final search for home. 

Dear Journal

I have my days of worshipped dreams; wishing, living in New York’s lights, Europe’s sacred grace. But today in Phoenix wasn’t so bad. Phantogram in concert was more than anything I have ever experienced before. It was trance-like. In a small urban venue, I closed my eyes and swayed back and forth to the local beats that grazed each ray of light—in sync with the crowd’s pulse. Tonight I felt okay, more than okay, I felt healed. It’s been a long time. I danced how I wanted to dance. I was alive, crazed, one with the music, one with the moment. Encore and all, however, it had to end. I gripped my leather jacket and braced for the new cold that has finally found the Arizonan desert and called its fall. My ears were numb from harmonized souls, but there I was, throbbing in a high of something utterly unforgettable, something I could finally call an experience worth something. 

There is breath in the things you cannot see, in what cannot last

Where do moon tides dream when you lie beneath homemade stars? Deep inside, wear off the devil inside, and just breathe. It comes in waves now, that pulling feeling to go back, back in time. The streets curve as you move. There we all are. Moving, trying not to slip and break the liquid glass. Mirrors to another place, another universe. And we think, we are fragile. This is all fragile. Tiptoeing hesitance, cutting the blade in a perfect figure eight. Who’s keeping count? Landing on our feet, we are the edge of the water’s sleep. Nothing more than autumn leaves breaking with each footed grace, pumpkins lining the streets, young faces painted in midnight disguise. A revolution of its time, before the snow covers summer grass and fallen color, and skies darken with the bitter cold. The desert doesn’t seem to know so much of a season’s passing. Time slows and dust settles in a velvet cloth. Mountains are to be climbed, endless roads have to end somewhere. To get there. To rest there. To watch there. Away from those lights and those people. To just lie there with open eyes screening stars so real and far away for some message of salvation—some message just for you and that magic carpet.  A wolf’s call can sound there in the calm of the night without fear or danger, just wary like us. And loyalty. Oh, where we just question and they just breathe. Where they act; weightless, breathless, firelight free. Dust passes in a divine trance—quickly enveloping above, frozen, thick and muddy within. We turn to one another, each a ghost in some slow and precise dimension. Our voices, a muffled dance; our ears, a symphony  ablaze with a droning hum. We etch our name into the white sky, hoping to paint the sunset somewhere above us. To feel again in that moment, alive. Like we are the only ones that made it out from some broken apocalypse, under siege. Maybe everything follows a flight plan. Plane after plane landing and leaving, never breaking off-course into a new city, a new year, a new you. Every person following one another, hoping for something better, scraping the dust of far above stars, just breathing together.

Sure there are things we cannot see, but that doesn’t mean we cannot feel what is free. I wish I could feel it all for you.

Published writing

My writing was just recently published in NASTY Magazine's September Light Issue. Here's the full piece, if you want to check it out go here--it starts on page 45!

I was also named as an editor for the magazine, and helped write some of the previews for the issue:

Someplace away from Home

Finally posting about my roadtrip this summer. Taking the grapevine down LA.

There was something about this place that touched my very soul, cleansing, healing. The water swayed as it spoke, and I broke like the waves and the sun's setting gaze. Closing my eyes, I said to myself: this, this is what letting go means. I think we are all worshippers of the sea. Pulling, tugging, returning. We can all move on, but we can't all go back.

Hearst Castle.

This is divinity.

Me with Janey. And then again with Jackie.

 These are my best friends, Jane and Jacqueline. I'm going to college with Jane in Arizona, but Jackie is off in New York. They're like my sisters, and I miss them dearly.

Main street, Disneyland. The sky was unreal, just like its surroundings.

Home I go. South on the steamboat. 

Palm Sunset. Pismo Beach, California. This is where peace is.

The tea cups can spin us out of our own misery, you know. Blur our surroundings until we are left with only ourselves and the people we love. 

 California Adventure rave. Bathed in indigo, bathed in light. And we were brought together. Who would've thought, strangers from around the world; one.

 Santa Monica, California

 Here we all are. Though Eeyore is my favorite, I always loved Tigger as a kid, too. He was light, bouncy, and had a way of leaving everyone else around him a bit brighter. I always wished to be a bit brighter.

And then it was done. Just like my favorite series. My childhood. Gone like the last page, with tears streaming down my face, a plane dragging me farther away from my home, friends, family and everything I ever thought to be permanent.  Riding down sunset strip, riding the clouds, the mountains, the sea. And I couldn't do anything about it. And all I could think was just that.

It all ends.

Eagle Spirit, are you strong enough?

I don’t see any painted sky. Why does it have to be so blue all the time. I look each way for something new; my compass has no news of golden treasure, rains of enlightenment. There are things I have to be doing. This map doesn’t let up, I tell you. I know that it will hurt when I break away from some dotted line. But I can’t see you cry anymore. I can’t hear the disappointment anymore. I can’t hold your weight anymore, or watch the lines crease your face anymore. It’s the same old, same old. And where’s my news? Who’s reporting for me. It’s not timely. Books crowd my head. The christmas lights hang low, reminding me, taunting me of times, safe, and alone in my bed of green. I’ve lined these pictures and they grow old too. When will things stop growing old? When fire meets skin, and I blow away into the wind; blowin’ in the wind. Watch from the watchtower, won’t you? I’m not sure what I expected college to be like. Independence, new friends, variety, possibility. But there’s not much new but an old new town and dirt roads that now pave into palms and cacti. The bunny mountain isn’t so big no more, camelback’s not that small. I’m still waiting for power in crystals, and wolves with their mother moon. Luna, la lune. Native American legends in adobe mountains and sedona’s vortexes heal, you know. But I don’t know. I can’t feel. I want to feel. Young and used, I’d sit in the back of an old red firebird, my head resting against another window that trapped me within circumstance, and I’d watch those painted skies change each way. A compass that finally moved somewhere other than North. I wanted to melt with it all, like the sky with the heat, know the map and the treasure. ‘Cause fuck, it gets tired always searching. I wanted to just be, or know that there was something that followed after me too. Skies of maroon and gold, and magenta too. It was beautiful. It was heaven. It was homemade circumstance. And the past didn’t end, but danced in ritual’s hands of fire and sand. Dust storm take me away; wash my skin, cloud this view, make mud out of my sense of direction. Am I strong enough yet, blowin’ in the wind, burning in your eyes, El Dorado’s dusty Hidalgo? Look up towards the sky, and turn, side step, work your magic shaman king.

College

Due to the haze of what seemed like an ending, and yet, never ending last summer at "home," and a new wave of debilitating emotions over my move to college in Arizona, I haven't been able to post much of my writing lately. 

However. 

I did get back from a roadtrip at the beginning of August with some friends to Socal, and I have a lot of pictures and various writings/journals that I will post soon!

So don't leave. 

Strength in Broken Shells

Great danger, they let their guard down.

There was tank fire. There was artillery. There were airstrikes.
It was hard to navigate—tank fire, artillery, airstrikes.

How could this happen? Who is this man, the self-image of an African “king of kings?”
The latest news read:
Not a single sentence makes sense!

A loudspeaker blared, “we will remain,” in revolutionary refrain.
With a weary smile, the men were terrified.
Rebel fighters kneeled on the ground, belts of ammunition draped over their chests, and, prostrated in prayer, they recited: “God is greater than what I fear.”

Not by choice, the youth had begun to lose hope.
Human—an old man with a wrinkled, sagging face, muttered baffled and embarrassed.
“He is just a man. This will come to an end, finally.”

To an end, flat and open, shouting at the top of his lungs: “How long can we stay like this?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03Libya-t.html?pagewanted=1&sq=1943&st=nyt&scp=6

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/lynsey-addario-its-what-i-do/?ref=world

So this was a found poem I wrote for a new york times contest. Thought I’d share.

I will go down with this ship, and always will be

 When the sun sets I'm 7 again, where dreams melted like rocket popsicles, push pops, hands sticky, stained the color of the sky; purple, pink, yellow, orange, burnt red. Sometimes I bring myself to a swingset, and just sit. I peel back and push my feet off the ground, kick my legs and hope my skin doesn't stick. That tree isn't there anymore, but I was in a different world then, a long-distance country, where you were here and I was there. The Gods above blessed me with wings, smiled down and lifted my eyes to blue skies and deep seas and the heavens as one with here and there and the in-between. Higher, closer, I'd make my way to the clouds, the sails, soon cathedrals and Ancient Greece and the Tower of London with the Eiffel Tower from peak to peak. My hands curled in stretched white grip. My knuckles and bones holding onto another side where I was free from you and me and this whole damned world. God, I didn't want to let go. I closed my eyes until they hurt, and let my head fall back, my hair mid-twirl, brushing the sand beneath and the sunlight that danced rays of white and gold in the mess of watercolor. Back when I was 7 again, where the beach was as close as the park, the water fountain, the ocean and a sandcastle as real and sturdy and naive as a disney tale, you and me. Where trees were an easy climb to the top of Mount Everest; the world in the palm of your hand, in the smell of the forever evergreen pine breeze and view of the city, so small and weary. Back when walkie talkies were your best friend; top secret missions took you to the Sahara, a camel and the sand and those boys from next door. Football every year, those boys don't know me, a girl can play just as mean. Summertime meant baked lemon chicken, a call from mom, the sun still high, baseball with fallen pine cones, the goal: that mean dog-haters window, backyard, mom and dad won't see. The pool, as rough as the Indian Ocean, no place for a doll and its tupperware boat. But that didn't mean you didn't want to see someone else sink, not me. The frontyard with all its leaves, plants with the goopy saliva and broken trees; a medicine cabinet, a chef's kitchen, if you may, brewed potions for a childhood of young love and magic and time's relentless chase. Sun tea with lemons and things lost and forgotten beneath the blue tides and the backyard tent with s'mores and tumbling, jumping, laughing high into the night kids. We'd walk through the center, sure and unseen, broken boards to the right and Jack and Rose and the Titanic with all its ghosts, loyal and brave, "I will go down with this ship," you'd hear them say. And you'd say. Where pets deaths were your first glimpse of this hard, sunken world, and they meant funerals and flowers and the whole neighborhood brought together for kind words and seances. But no one could replace that friend, or that curiosity in the glimpse of what death meant and the finality in that underground sentence. And in that california sun, and its cruel high noon, where you and your bike took crusades to save the orange and black caterpillars, the butterflies of its day, that couldn't make it to the cool pavement, the broken shade. And then you'd close your eyes and pray, and cry, and hold your hand out with that stick, scared to touch a creature so unlike you where moving faster didn't make sense, could not be done before the day was done where wings were grown and the sun and wind understood. I guess when the day was done, feet slipped, they struggled to kick, but could not kick. And the sand dragged down your limbs and eyes so high, until you and I were making circles with our eyes and we jumped, 1, 2, 3, like a bird in its first flight. The sand crashed in a tsunami wave, shielded our eyes from our otherside where we were young, happy and I was who I was meant to be, young and happy with wings, colorful and free and understanding of death, the sun and wind and the in-between. 


And yet there was no white flag above our door. I'm sure that that makes sense. 

Swallowed in the sea of green and gold and the lost and homeless

Wasn’t graduation a time of celebration, when hats raised to the ceiling meant transcendence of time and space and the in-between? You were out. Out of that prison, that prison so many called home. Skewed perception, am I right?

But that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t some holy night, some speaker of the peace. A flame should have been burning in prayer. But it was distinguished, you could feel it, see the smoke cloud the sun and wash away those green and gold colors so many came to paint their very skin. 

Not mine, no, no, no, never. What is life when all you ever feel is the moment candlelight is blown to ash, and wax hardened to the mold of your finger, that desire to burn like the rest, like you, inside. 

And when I stood before those people, I imagined what the person who called himself my father must look like; what he might feel, if he feels the desire to burn like the wax in its liquid heat, or the wick consumed in flames. I couldn’t stop myself from wishing he was gone, away from haunting my life, my existence, my coffin of safety I made to protect myself from his very draining, needy being. 

He was there against my wishes. I was only a child they say, no coffee for you, but go to college and get a job and pray; I grabbed my diploma, I grabbed my friends hand, my face red, my eyes watering, songs that whispered “they’re just spies,” raced along the inside of my ear and tired mind when I left that stage where so many failed to clap for me and my soft-spoken tears. I faced that doorway where I could see the man I hadn’t seen in years wait with caution. Vines stretched out to me, trying to tangle me up in devil’s snare. Deep breath, walk, “Hey J,” “Hey, hello.” And on I go. Wave of my hand, head bent, what do I do now, now, nothing, sit down.

And afterwards when I could find no one else but that very man who handed me a poem that spoke of pride and love only for blood and made-up words that was a testament to the imagined of what it would have been like to watch me grow from that “baby with blue eyes in my arms to a girl who holds her own.”

All I could do was hold my own, and care for someone who only cared when they had someone back home in their bed to hold and replace that loneliness, burning loneliness. 

Where did holding my own go? When I couldn’t say all the words I wanted to say, that slithered within with such sharp grace. Fake it. Thanks. Appreciation. I have to go. And to go guilt took nest within my gut of monarch butterflies. Can you feel that? Humanity, it’s energy all together and red and yellow and green and blue and purple. I closed my eyes and walked forward with increased speed. Where’s my family? What’s that? Do they exist? 

Nod of the head to a boy that lingered between the two; my face red, my eyes heavy in blue. Did he notice the way the green sweat its grasp as I increased the gap? The way my face held its own despair, regret, need to care and protect. 

And I was near breakdown, always working, pretending for others. And this was just another day; graduation, what did that even mean? I spoke of it to those people who did nothing but fail to notice, rather prizing in judgments. They looked at me with no emotion, I gained power with daggers of words. I told them. My one moment for truth. Beat the butterflies from my stomach, my lips and mouth and tongue dry from fear. Below you, who are you! I cried in nervous speech. Here’s me, here’s to my hard work, pain stakes and broken betrayals. The truth of how they made me feel, how no one notices one another, and we all keep going on without a care. How friendships were made throughout the years for a one-time playmate in the sandbox. A free for all, contest for the rich and famous and loud, yes the loud. I told them, I wasn’t sure of myself, but I can hold my own. With a glance to the boy that lingered between the two, always guarded, I wondered if he heard what I said. If he even cared. That it was done, over.

Like my graduation, like the kindergarten judgments, and stars that shone above an aqua lagoon, me on my back, weightless, my eyes looking for anything to call home. 

Open up your eyes, home is where the heart is, they say.

And good God do I want to know what that means, to give me heart, give me soul to patrol, patrol, survive and control where I can finally hold my own and say that this is where my heart is.

Tree of Life

Roots stretch through cold brown dirt; they intertwine together, linking arms, connecting the past to the present to the future. The tree, the roots speak of our family history, so long and forgotten; no one really knows the beginning, no one really knows the ending. Mind racing, braking, slowing to a drowsy stop painted leaves a tinge of green, roots a dripping brown. As kids did we one day think we would become this? You know, from that age where we held onto a yellow balloon with all our might; don’t let go, don’t let it fly into a space so black and glittered with stars and suns and moons and red planets bigger than our thumb and eye. Where spaceships flew and air was hard to come by. And without warning, the balloon leaped your grasp, and you cried out for help, for someone to bring it down, away from the unknown that was so dark with no night light to keep you safe. Leaf by leaf hung delicately to each branch and root, and we grew to become shy with our big, forgiving eyes. It was that first moment, that first realization that the rest of the world didn’t love us unconditionally like they used to, and they didn’t cry out for the yellow balloon that flew into the unknown, so dark, so constraining. They weren’t there when you painted eggs, blue, green, pink, yellow, purple, and you asked which sticker was best to finish it off. Which sticker, that was it. And there they were, your mother, your brother, your grandparents and adults that seemed so close because they were. They sat there and they smiled. “Which sticker do you like?” “I like you.” And a grin, pure and naive, broke your face into a million little pieces, and you spread your roots into the ground, into that one memory where easter eggs and stickers and people that loved you radiated in rays from the sun above; your biggest night light from the blackness of space and sky. Because we grow and our trunks age with lines that hug in circles, so deep and clear. And the roots wrap with such grace to connect our past to present to future. And like trees, we were alone, yet connected from leaf to leaf where we fell from innocence and youth and the summer breeze one after another, each changing like the seasons. We reinvented ourselves, cleansed in a sort of rebirth from the old ways of desire for unconditional love from the mass of piling, decomposing leaves. To love, to cry for the love of the roots we dug so deep, without a night light where we realized that no one loved us like they used to, that we were different away from our family, our roots. As trees of life we cried out for a yellow balloon in space: “This is not the end.”