pomodoro, day 2. (1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

 Once upon a time, there was a girl. She moved  across the country to a place where the sky was largely grey. She'd fly back East for Christmas and feel awe as the sky turned a blue that was as sharp as ice and cut the eyes. The jetport was white concrete in the middle of the jagged buildings of Boston, pushed up against the water. As you took off from the tarmac, the plane cast a shadow on the white-capped harbor, and the sandbars grew larger the farther they spread out to sea, some with small buildings or lighthouses to warn ships ahead.

That girl, obviously, is me.

I've been to Boston most often in the winter time, and it is always very cold. It is an in-between place for me, a place I move through towards the trains and buses and airplanes and cars I need to take. In the lengths of time between these things, there are spaces. It is winter, and there is a small crusting of icy snow over the park. We're in the neighborhood where my first kiss lives. He's in a tiny apartment owned by his parents, working 18 hours a day in finance. I don't entirely understand what he does for a living, only that it's stressful enough for him to need a tiny oven that fits on his countertop. The oven has a scanner that reads your individually wrapped meals, and uses the data to heat the food to the right temperature in the right amount of time. You have to buy the oven in order to eat the food, but I'm not here to judge.

I'm here to tell you about the cold.

There's a park outside of his apartment. In the winter, the ground is an icy coat of snow. A bridge crosses over some water that is hard and grey like steel. People let their dogs run off-leash through the snow, and the little legs kick of ice crystals and glitter like shrapnel under the icy sun.

I'm here to tell you about how cold it is when I fly home.

The water in Boston Harbor always looks white-capped. There's a park by the airport, with a promenade that follows the shore before curling into a jetty. When you walk the jetty, the wind whips your face with your hair and then hits your face for good measure. You can listen to the water hitting the sides of the rocks and the roar of the jetliners overhead. I stop there before my flight, listening to the planes and the water against the rocks and losing feeling in my cheeks as the wind hits my face.

From the airport, you can take a local train downtown, then walk to the train station. The train station isn't warm. Even the bathroom is cold, with white glaring lights. You can wait in the space for your train, fill the time with a phone call to your family, and they will ask you about the wind in the background, about the loud static announcements overhead, about the chatter of the people on distant benches. It is hard to find a place that is quiet. It is impossible to find a place that is warm. There is a small chain doughnut stand where your mother orders a small bag of hash browns.

I have been to Boston in the summertime, but it was a long time ago. There were jellyfish in the aquarium, floating in a blue glow, and the profile of my first kiss's face cut out against the water. There was a long walk to Bunker Hill with my history class in high school, climbing 294 stairs to a small window that looks out over the city.

I did want to move to Boston once, but it was a long time ago, before I found warmer places much farther away. How far do you need to go to be warm? How close do you need to stay? Where is family and where is home?

This past summer, I visited the house where I had my first kiss. The family lives about forty minutes south of Boston, and it never is cold there. We were having tea and pastries, and his mother told us they were selling the house. I felt a physical need to go upstairs, to see the bed where I'd spent that night. But that had been many years before, and I wasn't allowed to just walk up the stairs to their bedrooms. I contented myself with looking at the couch. Ten years later, it was the same soft yellow color, faded with time and wear. He'd tasted of wine. I wore a sundress that pressed my small breasts flat. I'd sewn up the front buttons so the sundress wouldn't gape and expose the soft flesh, and later, he'd try to unbutton them that night in the bed, laughing. I snuck into the guest room early the next morning, still wearing his shirt, which is now in a small space of my closet carved out for past lovers.

That summer was very warm. 

The park was very cold. There was a layer of icy snow over the ground. His mother tells me he has a small oven that scans his food, very futuristic. The dogs run off-leash through the snow, kicking up ice crystals. I've come from very far away, debarked from a plane that flew in over whitecaps. I miss my home. I miss summer. I miss being warm in a place where the sky is usually grey.

~~~~

(This Christmas was the first year I've spent away from the family that raised me. I moved really far -- over three thousand miles to the other side of the country. It's way too far to drive home, and I'm not about to take a plane in a pandemic. The sky was grey here, but it was warm inside, with the fire lit. There were no trains, or planes, or cars to carry me through spaces. I woke, and put the kettle on for tea, and sat by the fire while I waited for the water boil.

There's something to be said for staying close, for not having to get on a plane to get you where you want to go. And how home can migrate across many miles to another side of the sea, and how much warmer it can be here, even if the sky is grey.)

moving from new jersey

I should just lie at this point; invent a story that starts with my mother giving birth to me here--maybe in Harborview Medical Center downtown, or in the more modern Swedish Medical Center, where Chris's nieces were born.

But that removes my mother from the story, and she gave birth to me in New Jersey, in a cesearan operation after ___ hours of labor in Morristown Medical Center. She moved to Jersey for college, and stayed there longer than she'd ever lived away. Long enough to marry, get pregnant, raise a kid, get divorced, and sell a house.

I've now lived in Washington for seven years, four months, and twenty days -- not quite longer than I've lived anywhere else, but if combined with college, I'm just a couple of years shy. The car that I drove cross-country still has the registration sticker from New Jersey's DMV, peeling slightly at the corner of my windshield. It's valid through 2014, including its one-year extension.

When I first moved here, I wanted to write stories about everyone's stories. No one seemed native to Seattle, so why did they move here? What adventures did they encounter on their journeys out here? I was 22. Everyone's story interested me. 

A girl asked me last week where I was from, and I just wanted to lie. She was young, probably 22, fresh out of college and curious about my story. She'd realized that no one seemed to be from here. I wanted to lie and tell her about Harborview, but I told her the truth. 

"I'm from New Jersey," I said. 

"That's so cool, I'm from Florida!" she said.

"I've been here for about eight years though," I said, not responding to the Florida prompt. At this point, Florida was as obscure a place to me as Jersey.

I read diaries of Seattle's pioneers in my free time. I finished a 300 page book about Chief Seattle. My boyfriend was born here (okay, in the suburbs, but we'll make it work). I can point out three skyscrapers downtown and tell you what restaurant I went before it was built there, or what bar I used to bike past there when I lived downtown, or how those condos used to be the Two Bells and they had a really good deal on Mac N' Cheese.

But there are still signs. The New York Times arrives at my doorstep Sunday morning. I take my eggs with salt, pepper, and ketchup. I really, really miss the beach, and think Washington's coastline is a sad excuse for a shoreline.

I really want to rip that sticker off my car, and I don't want to hear your story.

 hiiiii cutie, how you doing?
                             - text message from jessie, my childhood best friend

Yesterday, I quit my job. Yes, it's a pandemic. Yes, 10% of America is unemployed. A large part of me is trying to forgive myself for this, cajoling myself into believing that it is okay to not have it figured out yet. Just like seven years ago, when I graduated from college, and all the adults in the room asked where to next?

it. is. okay.

"Good for you for getting out of this monstrous place."

                             - courtney, my coworker

I'm looking at where to buy costco pants online, and wondering if this is crazy, when I'm about to be out of work. I don't shop at costco. I don't shop online. And yet, I am craving these black stretchy ankle-pants for $19.99. They have free returns, with $5 for shipping and handling. The pants are modeled by the woman who runs the goat rescue where I volunteer. My drive to the rescue this morning had a $1.50 toll. I need to buy gas for my car soon, which costs about $30. I went to the dentist after and spent $38 on a laser to clean the bacteria off my teeth. I bought toothbrushes and period supplied at Target for $8.00. I'm not going to have a job next week.

it. is okay.

I didn't grow up with friends coming over. I had an alcoholic father and a mother who took all her calls in the bedroom. I'd creep close to her door, my bare feet quiet on the carpet, listening to her words through an inch of wood.

My father moved out when I was in third grade, and took all his rage and fury with him. The house was quiet again. He returned again, and left again, and by then I was old enough to stay out late with my mother's car, doing anything to keep away--and my friends away--from home.

~~~~

I don't know how to entertain. I want to please everyone -- my alcoholic father, one mistake away from a horrible fury. My sweet, long-suffering mother, too delicate to consider. All my friends who gave me reasons not to go home. How do you entertain when you've never built a home? I spend long hours cleaning my house, sterilizing the surfaces, preparing food, hiding traces of my life.

 How will my friends feel in my space? Will they judge the moss growing on the patio outside my bedroom? Is the toilet clean enough? Do I have to hide every stack of paper? Why can't I just leave all these things as they are, and talk about them like a human?

As it is, I last had people over on Halloween, almost a year ago. I baked a pizza with hand-made dough in the shape of a jack-o-lantern, with pine nuts for its eyes and teeth. I put the camping chair inside and tried to get people to feel comfortable sitting down. I didn't offer alcohol--perhaps for obvious reasons. And everyone was sent home with a treat bag.

It wasn't casual, but there were people in my home.

~~~

How do I hang out with people, casually? How do I invite them into my home without putting on a show? I don't want to be the little girl hiding behind the door. I want the door to be wide open, welcoming my friends inside.

I don't write like I used to. Ten years ago, I was an English major, while for the last three years, I've spent every day drawing blood and doing lab work monitoring heart rates under anesthesia. There's no way I can come back from that.

Maybe the change isn't bad. Does the world really want me to wax on with every adjective I know, just because words are too beautiful to cut any out?

Or are the facts of the matter better, with a few sparse words I still remember thrown in?

them apples

There's an apple stand off the interstate in northern Washington state. The red barn rises out of the lolling hills and green.

 'FRESH CIDER.'

I've heard stories about how good this cider is: crisp and clear, perfect in late summer or all through fall. The stand's been there for the seven years I've lived here, but I've never been in all the time I've lived in Seattle.

Seven years later, I make it out there. I'm looking to get out of the city for the time. It's an hour and a half drive along a single four-lane road until you see the barn.

When you pull off the interstate, you make a hard round-a-about and end up at a dead four-way. The barn has a gravel lot, and the car tires crush then pleasantly, sounding like when you leave the city to get to your grandma's house in the country. The red barn walls rise in front of your car, the wood a little weathered now that you're close. There's a white farming family manning the place: an older dad and his son, freshly thirty, unloading cases of apples into a large machine that pulps them down and spills out their juice. Heaps of apple pulp lay in piles around them.

Corn fields press in close, swaying behind the barn and the dad and his kid pulping apples. I don't see any orchards, and the only apples I see are in boxes.

Inside the double doors, there are three small children, all tow-headed and under ten. They man the small check-out stand, strangely quiet and shy as two newcomers enter. Their mother works a larger counter across the empty barn, working the donut maker. She's making donuts from a pre-made paste and working the dough with her hands. We order a half dozen, and she pours out a vast plastic jug of canola oil, then fries the dough that's floured her hands.

"Do you own all the corn around your farm?" I ask shyly.

She's older, in her thirties like her husband. These three kids are clearly hers.

"My father-in-law sold all the land a few years ago. The rent it out. The renters plant the corn."

She doesn't offer more explanation, and I'm too embarrassed for her family to ask. Or rather embarrassed by our country, and sad for her family.

Because clearly, there came a time, when it became cheaper, instead of tilling the land the man owned, to sell if it to a large farming corporation, and found it cheap, and quite profitable, to plant lots of corn for cheap and sell it fast, to anyone who would buy.

But the family, they kept the barn. The order some apples--maybe from a local farm in eastern Washington, or maybe from some farm corporation because it's cheaper, and that's all they can do right now. The son, now proprietor of his family's barn, works with his own son to pulp these apples and make some juice. His wife makes apple cider donuts. His babies work the Square app at the counter.

"Do you take card?"

It's a nervous question -- we're already holding the half-dozen donuts. The powder is on my fingers.

It's a stupid question. Of course they take card. How would they ever make a living on just cash? The babies at the register, still shy and sweet, ring me up on Square.

just wait a second, okay?

five years isn't that long of a time, is it? it's not like a new decade started. it's not like I had time to get a second bachelor's degree. (I mean, I did. But I also didn't). I couldn't have changed my profession to science. or moved three times and lived on a houseboat without real plumbing. (the kitchen sink drained into a lake).

my mom didn't sell the house I grew up in, and I couldn't have driven a small boxtruck through a class 4 wind storm and four states to bring her her mattress and heavy wooden bed frame.

we couldn't have a new president. especially not one who thinks you can inject disinfectant into your body to fight germs??

my dad and I didn't visit the statue of liberty that one February, and he definitely didn't elope without telling me to a woman I met just one time. you know, that time in the dark, while she smoked cigarettes on their shared back porch. the one who lives in the other half of his duplex. in new jersey. the place I grew up? the place I haven't been to in over a year.

it's not like there's been a world-wide pandemic or anything.

five years. it's not so long of a while, you know?

Leaving for Magnolia

Bus 24 leaves downtown Seattle for Magnolia every twenty minutes. I'd pick it up on 3rd and Bell, where the homeless people sat outside the dog park by Dan's Groceries. In front of a vacant lot down the street, crackheads sell beaten up shoes off of a blanket. When the bus meets Broad Street, the line turns left under the Space Needle's shadow and barrels down a hill, leaving downtown for the bridge.

Magnolia Bridge makes this bus line. As far as bridges go, this one is pretty shit--grey concrete, no suspension rigs soaring into the sky, a lot of traffic. The Nisqually earthquake damaged the bridge fourteen years ago, but no one's made any improvements, and its concrete is crumbling. The bridge spans paved tidelands that now hold warehouses and cruise line terminals. One of the bus's stops is in the middle of the bridge, right there in the margin with traffic rushing one side of the bus and straight drop to concrete on the other. Old Hispanic men and young white guys in coveralls get off and head into Ivar's, a fish shop, or climb down the rickety staircase to the railroad tracks under the bridge. My first summer in Seattle, I ran out of time walking from Magnolia to downtown. It was the very end of summer, one of October's last good days. The blue sky waned, and although my face was sunburned, rain clouds threatened over Smith Cove. I stopped in the middle of the bridge, straddling the sidewall as I waited, one foot perilously close to the rushing traffic, the other dangling over a parking lot below. The wind picked up, licking my hair. The light dissapated into the aftertaste of blue sky, bringing grey clouds, and my skin stung with the day's sunburn and the briny air of the coming storm. In the distance, the Space Needle looked surprisingly large between the hill and the vast body of water. The bus arrived, pulling to a stop in no man's land, caught for a moment between downtown and Magnolia. The doors opened, swallowed me. I rode with my legs stretched over a row of seats, my forehead against the glass. The choppy waves disappeared as we crossed the bridge into downtown.

Magnolia is suburbs: it's babies in strollers, white people with money, mom and pop stores on main street. I love Magnolia. It's a Twilight Zone episode where the city is a black and white set where moms still wear house dresses and every house costs a million dollars. The neighborhood, set on a vast, fat peninsula, has only three roads connecting it to the rest of the city. Magnolia Bridge is one of the roads.

I used to go to Magnolia a lot. Their library is sweet--a Magnolia tree, heavy with white blossoms in the springtime, watched over their entrance. Everything, even their front doors, is made of big, beautiful blocks of wood. The interior is a single room of windows and low bookshelves and open space. The furniture was designed by a guy named George Nakashima, and each chair is estimated at $1500. Bus 24 stops right by the library, and I'd ride the line through the suburb's back streets, eyeing the trellises, the balconies, the Victorian charm. There were maybe two bus stops on Main Street; the rest were outside beautiful homes, stepping off sidewalks well-used by little feet. By wintertime, my bus ride was through the dark, and the homes would be lit from the inside like Thomas Kinkade paintings. Those bus rides made me sleepy. My stomach always felt warm.

One night, the bus stopped besides one of these warmly lit million dollar cottages. A girl was waiting, alone. She was obviously cold, rubbing her hands together despite her thin gloves. The street was empty for a mile, lit just with yellow windows set back behind hedges and trees. The bus doors opened, swallowing her, taking her from this lonely place to downtown. I felt a strong rush of affection for my city--my city--at the end of the line, in downtown. The indistinct sounds from the sports bar next door, the low wail of sirens through the night, and the look of surprise from pedestrians as I turned my bike around a tight corner for the alley behind my house. I liked leaving my front door with a ceramic mug of tea and walking by Tavolata and Wasabi, both solid walls of glass windows and people dressed in silk enjoying cocktails.

Downtown Seattle is dirty. The few skyscrapers of downtown seem gross and overreaching. Most of the city's bad is centered in Belltown, known for its drugs and decaying hamburger wrappers at the bus stops. There's a homeless guy famous for his "I want a fat bitch" sign. Third Avenue is the worst of it, with the string of homeless services giving berth to a population with an aggressive approach to passing women. Belltown is a mix of homeless, tourists, and increasingly, young techies with start-up money. Downtown is a paradox. It's living in a temporary space. It's the city--but it's not.

I've since moved away from Belltown to the Central District, which kind of reminds me of the suburbs of Magnolia, if suburbs were poor and colored differently from white. It's known as the gunshot neighborhood, which is ridiculous with the amount and rate of gentrification. We don't have a main street, we don't have skyscrapers, and we don't have a lot of stores. We're mostly houses. There's Cappy's Boxing Gym one block from my house, three bars, and enough Ethiopian restaurants to feed you for a month. But we're Seattle too.

Seattle is a bunch of neighborhoods someone stuck together and called a city. Each one is vastly different. Usually, there's a lake or a hill or a part of the Puget Sound physically dividing the neighborhoods from each other. The city has 149 bridges. Water makes up almost half of the city, occupying 41% of its total area. The Lake Washington Ship Canal literally divides the city in half.

All I'm saying is, there's a lot of no man's land. There's a lot of places, and a lot of time, to find a space here.

Last Night

People come and go. Sitting at this shore at night, with the I-90 bridge lit in a mile-long string of evenly spaced lights. The waves especially violent tonight. A plane roaring overhead before it disappears into fog. Pepper spray in my pocket from Easton, the night sky heavy and dull rather than hot with heat and sunset, me swimming with skinny boy that was my first Seattle best friend. No lover eating ice cream beside me, freezing in a thin rainshell. (Me, plucking at that jacket as I try to break up with him in Cal Anderson). The cool metal of the railing of this chair as I sit above the waves, Bellevue lit in golden towers over the lake, flickering red gems. Clouds low, my head nearly in them, slight breeze.
Mum, home, in bed, in her red checkered night gown, trying to fall asleep. Me, viscous with myself for not being there, for not being able to live in New Jersey.
My gloves smell like old climbing shoes and chalk. Faintly of cat piss.

It's comforting.

The slow span of car headlights breaking the night--flash of fear I'll be seen.

End.

this is gross. don't read it.

[Phone ringing. A girl is biking. It's the nice part of her ride -- the quiet neighborhood under Union Street where trees overhang single-lane roads. The world is passing very quickly in blurred green, black pavement, and blue.]

J: Fuck. Not now. Fuck, fuck, fuck. [Pauses a long moment after receiving the call. Labored breathing from the ride, or from the call.] Hey.
N: Hey! How are you?
J: Fine.
N: Cool. I'm at my house now. Sorry I missed your note about meeting up earlier, but is there any chance you're still in the area?
J: No...I'm headed north, past the U. District.
N: To Magnuson Park?
J: What? How did you know?
N: Because I'm  behind you.

[She has a desperate moment were she wishes this is true. She's biking around a curve, up a slight incline, her phone to her ear -- but still, she looks back for him. There's just a patch of trees, dead with winter.]

N: When do you want to meet instead?
J: [Still out of breath.] Tuesday?

[He takes a long time to decide if this works for him, going back and forth between, "Yeah...I guess...wait, maybe, let me think...no, Tuesday should work, yeah.]

N: How are you, by the way? How was your trip to the east coast? How's your mom?
J: [Short. Begrudging.] She's fine.
N: Is now a bad time?
J: Yeah, I'm actually biking.

[The world is passing very quickly in blurred green, black pavement, and blue. He laughs, and her front wheel jerks violently as she over corrects and almost falls.]

N: Okay, Jess. [Still laughing, a smile in his voice.] See ya.

[Scene's colors speed up until the green and blue are overtaken by black.]

Ceylon

I stopped trying to edit. I stopped trying to cut out the anxiety, the bills, the rejection letter from my last interview, my mother listening to records alone and two months out of the mental hospital, my rent, the anxiety. Stop, breathe, drink tea.

My job isn't terrible. I don't have to wear a uniform. We have no manager and no real rules. Mostly, I price merchandise and place orders for cups with cats on them. But a tea house is still food service, which means I also heat up blueberry scones and place them on trays with Early Grey. I wash a lot teapots.

Sometimes these teapots chip, and that's when I claim them. I dress them pretty in a box, and I take that box on a bus ride. Forty-two minutes later, the chipped teapot's home, sitting on my kitchen table.

I'm a little chipped too, a bit beat up and over-steeped. I'm trying to roughen my edges as I age instead of sanding them down--give myself a few snarls, wait for the people who want to take me home despite the cracks.

A lot of my co-workers at the tea shop are under twenty, while I'm almost a quarter of a century. I'm probably too old to be working at a tea shop, but I like it. Especially when I meet new faces around Seattle, America's next Silicon Valley. I like saying to the busy bees of Amazon, tech start-ups, and and the elegantly aging Microsoft: "I work at a tea shop."

This isn't very profane. I don't need to be smart to do this job, nor do I need to be motivated, creative, or giving. Rainy mornings find me rinsing Ceylon leaves out of teapots. I sweep a lot of toilet paper bits off the floor of the women's bathroom. Mitra, a Buddhist monk, is always at the third table translating old Sanskrit texts into English--which really means that he has conversations with Cody and Indryani about meditation and ways of higher being. The walls are yellow like a wash of flowers, and instrumental music plays from the speakers.

Software developers are generally one of two types: soft, kind in the face, living alone in a townhouse. This type is generally identified by their beards. The second type of software developer is "bro," meaning he wears button-downs, is clean-shaven, and drinks too much beer. Those with mustaches are a second, worse, subcategory. I've yet to meet a female techie.

And so we'll often meet--me, the ignorant, lazy, uncreative, and selfish tea shop employee, and he, the bearded loner or chiseled white man in a button-down, and we'll have this conversation:

"What do you do?" [Me, already guessing.]

"I develop software for Amazon." [Him, almost abashedly.]

"And what do you do?" [Him, a little excited now.]

"I work at a tea shop." [Me, really saying, "I'm a little chipped and broken. I don't have a nice, high-paying job. Sometimes, I take home broken teapots because I can't afford to buy them. I'm carving out a strange life for myself on the opposite side of the country from where I grew up. I'm twenty-three, and I don't really know what I'm doing. I work at a tea shop, and I'm poor and broke and far from home, but I'm glad I don't develop software for Amazon."]

My body wasn't made to be strong. I have fat thighs that make biking up hills a shitty time. My knuckles crack too easily. The bags under my eyes are their own pillows.

In high school, I was the kid who couldn't remember her freshman year. Forget that I started at a new school, rode the bus for the first time, experienced being thirteen with a fresh set of teenagers--literally, forget it all. None of this made an impression on me. I don't even remember the anxiety of my first class. I think I might have been late.

Or perhaps, the changes confused me so much that I retreated into myself, erasing an entire year of my life.

My body wasn't made to be strong.

Now that I'm twenty-three, I try to summit a mountain once a week, or at least make it out to hike. When I bike to work--which is every day--the ride is always uphill. I rock climb so often that my climbing shoes have holes after a month.

I'm making myself stronger, and I do it by tearing myself down. Sometimes I prefer the bodily exhaustion, while other times I revel in my emotional misery. How intensely can I feel something? How much can I struggle?

I have a blog that consists entirely of pictures of my face. After five years, I can now spend hours going through my face in stages. They show world travels. They show nights at home in bed with tea. Some show various states of undress. A lot of them are me at my most miserable, crying, afraid that I'm pregnant, having just failed an exam, suffering from a breakup. They're beautiful portraits of myself, and I study them with unabashed vanity, trying to dissect if I've grown through these broken versions of myself, if I've made my body stronger.

And I think what I'm most afraid of, is that under all this, all these masks of misery and struggle, I'm just a weak person struggling through all of life's different complexities. That at the end of the day, I haven't gotten any stronger. I'm simply miserable and afraid.

But I keep tearing myself down, telling myself my muscles will build back harder, and that the struggle will make me stronger.

It's near noon and there are things to be done.

I'm at that point where I hate everything I write.

The house smells like meat, slightly metallic or like burning fat.

When I was a child, I'd pull my shirt up over my head and run around the house like a stuck pig. I still do that, but only when I'm alone. Sometimes, even when I'm in public, I'll pull the neckline of my shirt up just under my eyes and squint.

I can't escape the smell of burning flesh by pulling my shirt over my head, or even by running out of the room like a stuck pig. I have nowhere else to go, so I feel my cheeks growing red from the blankets tucked around my body. The comforter is hot on my stomach, because I have the hem of my shirt pulled up over my breasts. I'm wearing my nude-colored bra, the kind you're not supposed to wear when you want to have sex the same night.

I'm not worried about having sex tonight.

The edges of my window frame are dark, and the clock reads twenty past eleven, so I know it's night. My bones feel heavy, and there's tension in my left thigh from where I stretched too hard this morning, so I know it's night. I'm alone, so I know it's night.

 The redness in my cheeks has moved up to my ears, somehow starting at the back and wrapping around the soft skin, down the curve, stopping just at the tip of the earlobe. Everything is hot and red, except for the window framed by night.

When I was a child, I'd build forts of pillows behind the couch. The wall back there was cracked with age, the plaster protruding forth in a great bubble of white paint and drywall. I was in one of my smaller forts the day I knocked over the lamp. The light bulb shattered, and I cleaned up the shards one by one.

The room's so hot, and I've gotten rid of my blankets and comforter.

I'm going to tell you straight: this is a story with a happy ending, even if it's a story about a girl who wanted to be a boy. She thought they could run faster, and she knew they were allowed to kiss girls. She had wanted this since she was a child, since she was three and running naked in the mud.

She cried more tears for this than she did for anything else in her life, enough that she could have watered her flowers. But salt water burns instead of nourishes, and she may have burned her skin dry with tears.

She fought everything. She fought her parents; she fought dresses of silk and cotton; she fought the people who told her who she could and couldn't be. One night, she fought breathing.

So she ran away from home when she was eighteen, skipping college and taking the train out west. She saw an old lady hitchhiking in the sun once, halfway between Denver and Santa Fe, with this woman trailed by a cop who couldn't or wouldn't arrest her. She felt sick and stuck to trains.

One place she felt safest was a city on the bay, with lakes breaking up the buildings and a cement troll hiding under one of the stretching bridges. There were bars with expensive drinks, or bars like English pubs, or bars with pinball machines in every corner.

In one where everything was rather average, she met a girl who said, "I don't care what you are. Boy or girl, you are a person. And you are beautiful." And maybe she didn't say it all at once. She took her time, drawing it out slow and true. But the girl heard her words, and thought they were simple, those words saved her. She stopped taking trains, and she stayed in the one place where she felt safest.

Here's the happy ending. There's a lake with the sun setting against the water and a spray of mountains, the scent of campfire smoke mixed with driftwood and salt, and this girl who wanted to be a boy--safe, not fighting--just a person loving another person, in a beautiful place where they were safe.

I like boys who are almost--but not yet--men. They are always older, and sometimes they have a beard, but never are they more mature.

I met the first man late at night in the kitchen. I was still in college, early in college, when you're still sleep-deprived from trying to hard, and you're baking in the kitchen at two in the morning to relieve the stress. His name was Jeff, and he was one of the ones who did have a beard. Two years older, and he was placing chocolate kisses on pretzels. He spoke as if he were a writer, or as if he wanted to be. He used a typewriter. I've forgotten much of what he told us that night, but I remember his brown eyes and the way he talked to me--like he had lived somewhere else, and he was trying to tell me with with the way he moved pieces of chocolate on the counter top. And every time I dared look, he tried to tell me with his eyes.

There was a man I met only twice, and both times, he swelled in music. The first night was a cool one during early summer in the mountains. He sang me to sleep. Neither of us realized that I'd move away before we met a third time, so he played fiddle all through the second night as the bar danced laughingly on the outdoor patio. Again with the cool night in the mountains, this time late into the summer. We didn't say goodbye. I don't remember his name, but he had a lot of sandy hair that hung over his eyes, and a soft way of talking that always seemed to laugh with you, even when you were sad.

Charlie wrangled cows for a living, and he brought raw milk to his friends because it was illegal to sell. He was the oldest of all the men, although I don't know any of their true ages. Charlie had red hair, a beard, and wide, slow eyes. I met him before he met me, across the room at a housewarming party. He was alone in the yellow light with his slow eyes and his hand closed around a mason jar filled with ice cubes and tea. I knew then and there that he was beautiful. And every time we met, he never remembered my name.

I stayed at one man's house when he wasn't there. He played the most beautiful music I had ever heard, because it came without thought straight from his fingertips. He never used a pick, and I can still see his wide fingers and flat nails moving over the guitar strings. He exists as a series of beautiful images in my mind. Early morning on a mountaintop, he and his bike coated with mud after a race. In the corner of a well-lit, well-loved room, putting life into a guitar while the entire house danced. Nearing dusk, when a fog hung thick in the cold air and we all wore sweaters, hugging me goodbye on the mountaintop as rain started to fall. When he spoke, it was as if his words were only for you. We scarcely spoke all summer, but when I needed it, he told me where to find the keys to his house. I can tell you he keeps a calcifying beer can in his shower, and seats from an old van for furniture in his living room. He doesn't own a can-opener, and I think he pries open tins with his teeth.

I have a string of "year-olders," who are so close to boys, but just enough to be men. One was saved solely by a fierce blond beard and gauges in his ears. He taught me everything, except how to love. Another lasted twelve years and brought me some of the best writing of my life. Reality moved us forwards, and we realized contingently that we fit better in memories of each others' childhood. The last was blond, as most of them are, with two scars by the bridge of his nose and hands that do nothing but ask to be drawn.

καταιγίδα

There -- in the back of my throat, hard against the warm, soft fleshiness, trickling down to my stomach and settling like a weigh.

My limbs tangle half in sheets, half in the air. Thunder sounds far away, confusedly outside or in my mind, and I stretch nearly imperceptibly to search for the drum outside.

This is the beginning.

The thunder is the longest drawl I've ever heard, longer than a full day's tides washing ashore. I don't have to guess at its presence any longer, for the waves slither through the night with the sensuous tread of a snake. They draw themselves out in lines.

A flash of lightning illuminates the trees, and the air holds its breath, tremulous.

Staccato bursts of thunder shatter the night, interspersed with lightning like hot peppers or chili flakes thrown to the air. They burn my breath, catching in my throat, choking me, and while I try to inhale, exhale, calm, feel less of the lightning and the thunder--a slash of white cracks the sky. My heads aches from it, and my skin shies from the roll of energy that fills the cracks left behind. The sky spills out of itself, breaking away from infinity.

In the deepening night, the lightning cools to a glow. A soft rain like static replaces the thunder, and I sleep.

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

"Howl" Allen Ginsberg

Music loud like buzzing against the wind, when you don't want to go home because the sun meets your bare skin with a kiss. Or the cable-knit sweater rubbing opposite your skin, when you're alone in bed with legs inextricably tangled in the sheets. Dirt under your nails from days of unshowered, unadulterated nature, walking in the dust and breathing in air and looking at muted stars.

You wrote a story last night, one about the sun and how it spun, and how the earth followed it angrily, exerting a pull of its own. Gravity, where even the earth is equal to the sun. As in somehow, you are exerting an force equal to the loud buzzing of the music. Perhaps sound doesn't apply to gravity, or gravity doesn't apply to sound, but something about the music settling in your chest feels like heaviness--and while gravity isn't heavy, it feels that way.

The music keeps going, growing and growing, until it's the heady thrum behind your eyes in a migraine and you can't feel anything except your temples. Everything just needs to be beautiful, but it is loud, so loud, like a drum of cicadas, or a star thrusting itself into combustion, or all of these things echoing at the same time in the small pockets behind your eyes.

It has only been five minutes.

You try to scratch at the sweater rubbing against your skin, or swat at the sunlight that warms your body with the heady sense of ultra-violent cancer--violet, not violent, but still there is something persistently violent about the sun's rays' refusal to fall on the ground, how they pick and nip at every bit of skin until you are dry with white lips of skin pursing upwards with gravity.

Six minutes now. Breathe faster, smooth the sweater, ignore the sun, and maybe the music will slow.

It started when you were small, when your hands were still balls of white flesh that curled into themselves and never wanted to let go. It started as a light tickle against your stomach, and it was soft like when you pass over a cloud for the first time and realize its fragility. But as you grew, the tickle spread into something more like the thrum of a hummingbird--still impossibly small, yet now impossibly persistent and heavy and thick with energy. It grew hard, like when you pass through a cloud for the first time and realize that its fragility is actually hiding a wave of energy. Like passing over and then through a cloud, it happened in a second. You were a child with a tickling wisp against soft baby skin, and then you were you, chased down by a wild thrumming that wouldn't stop.

Sixteen minutes, one minute too long, but the music hasn't stopped.

October, a half-month of learning what words sound like. Let the words sound in your throat; don't try for too much meaning.