Desire Paths
Desire Paths
July 29 - August 4 / Nightmares & Morning Pages
7/29: My mom this morning says, The ocean is angry today. I sit w/ my laptop open on the island and I watch the world wake up: my family, one after the other, alive on a Tuesday. The babies all nursed at the same time. Pancakes flip and are buttered. Blood that is shared ripples easy w/ laughter. Eyes open new to a summer, a world of obvious love. First words & first steps are proof that love that helps us grow faster; faster safe, faster supported. Four generations make up a family.
At the beach, mothers tell their children of possibility. Maybe a bird, maybe a fish, maybe a boat in the water. Folding chairs set up in a circle. My family sits facing each other in the sand, the sun overhead. In the center, toys and towels and drippy sand castles, soaking wet. The whole world wants to know how the baby is doing. The whole world wants to see the baby grow. Nana lets the babies gnaw on her knuckles when they're teething. My mother stays home today but everyone else is there, down by the water when T & I roll up. Umbrellas litter the beach in front of the ancient arcade. Lovers hold hands and nap in tents while the tide sneaks away. On the best days, my family says, It’s the hard times that make you appreciate the good ones.
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7/30: Sleeping in the sun means it all goes red - lava fills the rivers, eye to eye with the sun - means kicking, restless, stretching our hips out to release the aching. It means freedom, not trust.
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7/31: Come home. Tell no one. Rain soak. Damp outline left in the world. Concrete wet concrete drive wet concrete swirl drive early early behind the concrete mixer the first red light after the highway heading home, drive in sweatshirt in my mother’s fleece, drive w/ the AC thinking about legacy and the concrete mixer still churning never not churning swirling staying liquid. Tell no one. Home before the rain.
Spiraling, never still, concrete liquid over concrete solid concrete of my father and my mother’s tarnished silver. Spiraling gray highway North and away. Spiraling North and away. Spiraling quiet so no one knows, spiraling. My lover’s hand at my throat like maybe I'm real after all. Beloved. Cool cool drink of water. Spiraling beloved. Spiraling beach house. Spiraling be right back. Spiraling ghosts in the rooms we share for a week in the summer. Loveseeds spill on loveseat. Primetime in Paris. Look, the middle child smiles at Death.
At the beach house we have plenty to eat. I throw joker after joker after joker, lost the card game, joker swept to the floor and left on the table and jumping out, joker jack in the box, playing cards always on the table or nearby, left ready. Nana turns the lights off and dumps anything we leave out. It takes up all her time. Restlessly. Helplessly. Picking up. Putting away. Don't leave it out if you don't want to lose it. Don't walk away from something you want. Hold on tight, my family says. Water returns to sink and gullet and concrete after the storm.
My friends are all out w/out me in my city. In the center, in the sand, I toy w/ never returning. Lit up marquee on Congress St. and a shooting on Forest Ave. I am midnight top deck w/ my family and we are huddled close for the summer. The rain soaking the empty. The moon yawning in my ear. I drink French 75 everywhere we go. I wear silk and redefine meant to be.
Nana dumps more cups of water down the sink. I share a bed w/ my niece. I lose an earring and bleed through something. My niece dead asleep and next to her, a video plays. Tapping fingernails. Sands slipping through time. I sleep through the ASMR by pretending it’s something else. Tapping nails on a keyboard. Hard rain on a tin roof. Youth slipping like sand through fingers and back to the Earth it grew from, sand sand silt silt.
I wear sweatshirt, my mother’s fleece, when the moon crests over the sea. It's too hot and hangs too loose. Click clack on concrete I go, black and white and gliding through summer’s secret city. Drip w/ blood. Click clack click. Give a five to St. Patrick and listen to him, let him tell me where he’s going, where he’s been, what the city looks like where he stands. I tell the cops to move along. I tell the world I'm OK. Tell my mother not to worry. It's a good night for a vampire movie.
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8/1: An afternoon Thinking of You letter to the ocean and all of Americana as it sits on the beach surrounded. I come here to be w/ family on the first of August, salty in surrender. Cherry red in the sand by the ancient arcade and how many times do I have to write cherry pits in the sand. I hang around my family to pretend I’m alone. My childhood daydreaming and dancing in the woods like the sister in silver from the vampire movie last night. I pretend I’m alone only to find out I’m not (how lucky, thank god, how lucky, thank god).
My blood so sweet, always looking out for me. When I wander the beach, it’s Papa who goes out looking for me, saying, Better safe than sorry. On vacation, Papa is always w/ us at the beach. Papa drops off the chairs. Papa runs w/ the kids to the water and lifts them above the waves. Papa holds down the fort under the umbrellas w/ me as they fly away in the wind.
Right now, he’s next to me saying, It’s an age thing.
Everything is, it seems, I say. We are the same age somewhere.
It is crowded on the Pacific. Carnival colors in the sand at the free family beach on the first day of August. It’s my best friend’s birthday in Brooklyn. Every year I text her from the beach, telling her my mom says. Hiii! The sand is cooked and my sandals are rubbing again. I take the raw to the water, to my favorite corner of the beach, here where the rocks are. I wash the wounds away. Holy water, salted spit of God. It still seeps here by the rocks, rocks breaking down, sitting in the mouth of the whale, getting wetter and giving way, seashells, seaglass, crabs and crags, broken things in the mud.
Here, where there are warm pools and barricades, children dig and squish. Squeals up and down the beach. From the pools, shallow rivers rippling soft in the sand, always flowing, returning to source tide by tide always. The sand turns to scales, snake of life slipping stream by stream, swirling, never still. Dirty arcade, empty mansions, raging ocean crowded and carrying. I am on the rocks pretending to be alone, like I told you. When Papa found me, I was collecting rocks and arranging them in the mud. I started in the center.
I looked for rocks the size of my hand or smaller, my only criteria. I did not pull any too hard and I left the snails alone, the algae alone. I carried the rocks close, getting filthy. I looked around me, wider w/ each armful. I was drawn in by the orange among the brown and black but sought balance. I nestled smooth sides w/ rough edges, shoulder to shoulder and spiraling around. I dropped more than a few and kept the pieces of the stone that cracked, sat the two pieces together, keeping them whole. I thought of baby G at the beach w/ Papa and stars shining in the ocean. I thought of Smithson and Mendieta, of the spiral jetty and blood in the sand, of this - the beach I’ve visited my whole life, of 89 degrees in August, playing among the rocks w/ silver catching the sun.
I remember I will only be here for a finite amount of time. I remember blood flows on forever. When I go home, I take the desire paths & I remember my birthright, simply to be.
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8/2: The city is my body. Heaven is my bedroom. Hell is where I go to dream. I lap from puddles and digest this life - like nothing, like everything. Everything moves through me. Run a fever w/ me, Friday to Friday. Let Desire carve backroads and alleys for us where the moon winks, and says, It won’t be like this forever. It is summer & we’re still here, trudging our ways to work, sweating from the sea of me over shared cocktails. Do you feel closer to home when you hear the ocean or do you need to see it to calm down? Waves and whitecaps and crashing crashing.
Feelings on the ceiling, summer spiders and rogue waves. There’s something coming. Someone talks to me like a caged bird. I am clipping my hair back, unsure of which direction to go. Trying to remember instinct, I go to the lake. I go to the beach house. I go to the art show. At the end of most nights, I go home. Some nights, fire. Some nights, water. Lately, rainbows.
Lately, I am nothing but hot air, steam expressing freedom, a great exhale like I’ve been imagining, training for. I follow what’s alive like GH told me to. I hear the roar but I don’t always turn and look at what made it. When I can’t look in, I look out, I know that about myself. I know I’m not alone there. I see the ways I become enflamed, how I puff up, how I create a wall for the world to bounce off of & then I wonder, I wonder where I go when I’m not catching spark to flame, when I’ve been all but washed away.
Is this what it feels like to walk past the third door? A door w/ infinity inside, a room of yes yes yes, and for how long? Retrace and find again, where we found it before, like the waterfall when everything was frozen, a door w/ softer sounds on the other side. I remember the sounds I grew up listening to. Dishes and dog whistles, a static of waves to fill in the dead air.
I go to the art show to find what I live for. I find my friends. I find art & immersion. I call it all family. Honey is in town, her bags stuffed w/ silk, yards and yards of it. We’re here to see her first art installation at 82 Parris1. I and my freedom walk through webs of heat down Parris St.
Soak red grapes in plastic glass of water. Get lost in the texture. Consider the Void in plaster and hot glue. Finally, approach the back room bathed in an orange glow where Tending Pathways is dressed in silk and draped into volcano, suspended from the sky and bonded w/ silk ribbon, w/ silk rope, peaked and piqued and performed w/ care. We know because there is a video projected on the wall of Honey w/ her hair up assembling the whole thing in real time. We know because everything Honey does is performed w/ care. She wore a pair of black silk pants that she sewed and hung up next to a charcoal sketch where the ribbons look like people and the rope looks like chains.
Each one is tied up differently, yeah, she said when I asked. Silk looped like a halter, lassoed and hanging low, wound over and over, spiraling, constricting, hypnotizing. And many, many left dropped or tied off, curled around themselves or leading like rivers to another, up and around mountains and valleys.
Oh, everything is a landscape to me lately. I dream of eruptions and floods. I am in my corner of the world weaving webs in my city, starting over, starting again, working slow and smoking on the job.
When the wind blows, my friends and I sniff each other out. I see Honey and she hugs me so tight, so sweet, I could relax into it, I could give it right back. She hugged everyone tonight like that. Love, an energy. Love, a verb. Love, a hallelujah. We twist like silk and we sweat in the small museum. We float upstream where there is art all over the city. Tables set up along the street. SPACE’s 22nd birthday. New art up in the skate shop. First Friday in August. M and I sitting outside in those European wicker chairs and remembering Paris. We watch Night skateboard on a double-wide down Exchange St. when it’s busy. We dodge the drone zipping in and out like an insect. Our city is in a rush but we have whimsy. We have a wide open summer night and something to celebrate.
I want to give M and Night a microphone. I want to give Honey a studio in Room 206. I invite anyone I love to dream of Future w/ me. I sip a ginger beer and sit w/ Honey at the poets’ bar. We are outside giggly and effervescent. I give her a ride home, wishing the whole time that she could stay, that we could stay yapping - our lives in a strange unison, same same but different. Humidity affects us both, her hair frizzes and my hair flattens. We are in love w/ home now, where it is still warm and being written.
When I get home, I am still lost to that orange light. I pull out Honey’s artist statement, curled like a treasure map all night. She writes [Tending Pathways] asks how we approach new relationships. How some relationships get strung up inside of us. How some get abandoned so others can lift us up, up into the sky, slung from the rafters. How we wrap ourselves to tightly around those we love and find ourselves suspended, find it all more real than we could have been imagined. Honey steamed 100 yards of silk organza after pulling it like magic from her suitcase. The ripples and creases were all a part of the performance, like wrinkles on the skin. She is so careful walking through the silk. On the wall, I watch her wrap around, wrap around, wrap around, meditative, weaving. Everyone she’s loved, in landscape. The Earth changed forever one person at a time & the ground below our feet.
I ask to be a peak as wide as a circus tent, tied simply w/ a silk bow, to stand tall for you, where you can fit under and still see the world through. My friends, I ask to be free as the rivers flow. I love your dirty feet and charcoal fingers, plastic glasses w/ lipstick stains, your phone dying and it being fine. You’ve shaped my world through eruptions and gentle rain. We move slow when there is something so small in the way of compassion, careful now (thank you). We move in and out of the orange glow and share a seat at the table of dreams (thank you for daring me).
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8/3: Bumping elbow to elbow, toe to heel, my friends and I walk crooked through our city. Side streets, afro beats, a cat that runs away brick to brick and stone to stone. We are at the brewery w/ racks of vintage clothes. We were sweating but then we went to the river. T and I jumped off the bridge. We held hands for the jump but let go in the fall. This morning, I woke up to a familiar sorrow and my throat was like a dam, insecure and reaping. The heat the heat the heat & It’s the humidity that gets ya. Headache, naked, pacing. I rearranged the G room and floated in the river like maybe Heaven is closer than it was before. We went into the city just to do something w/ our Saturday. T came along only because I asked him to.
Horse racing playing cards, trying on vests, kickin’ in the East End. We got all split up when the sun set. J, Al, Jill & I wandered up and down hills and watched the streets turn blue, taking the quiet routes through. We puffed among giant hydrangea - stylized residential buildings w/ untamed gardens. We brushed fingers through tall grasses and took short cuts through the world. J led us a new way towards the water, past abandoned brick, past medical offices, past the new parking garage and all the green in between. Impossible to miss the massive cruise ship in the port, holding millions. Despite ourselves we were drawn in, looking for a way to board, to see if we could. As we got closer, conspiring, the ship bellowed through the city calling all the visitors home. It was as if the ship knew we were coming and wanted nothing to do w/ us. Three hard groans sending ripples all over.
Dodged headlights in open-toed shoes we turned around, found the boys again in the East. Found fresh paint on the crosswalks. Found Cocktail Mary overflowing into the street. It’s going to be busy anywhere we go. At least that’s true only in the summer, only in June July August, now nearly the end. At the tavern on the hill, we slinked outside and claimed a dirty table in the back. Stagnant air, playing cards, feeling a little trapped. We pluck out the strangest things in our wallets. The night turns over like a pancake, sizzling. My lover and friends w/ hands in my hair.
We pass an apple tree blooming in the dark, sweet green in the trees and trash left at the base. My summer crisp and right on time, time we kill, time we miss, pain at the pit and what sweetly swells around it, what grows green, what eventually grows red, what grows juicy and drips down our chins. I chomp into life in the last August of my twenties, thinking of rot. What bruises, what oozes, what is tender - do you eat it anyway? What else is left free in the streets of our city? What kind of forgiveness do we leave in the sink? Seeds we swallow and seeds we spit and how we choose our reasons to live all the time, in every second, in every action, never running out, is there ever enough appreciation? I am dehydrated from this mornings defeat but the rains come, the rains come. Tomorrow w/ the windows open, letting stray drip drops through to silk, to sleep, to the linen sheets. Tomorrow, juice.
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8/4: What is this August rain that relieves nothing? Drips on, drips on, absorbent world unwinding. Patience sopped up and squeezed in the sink. We put our feet up in theater 11, J and I, cherries and peanut m&ms. Today, it is morning until dinner time, the way Sundays can be sometimes. A dream you had when you were in love once, looking out a window while the sun signed on and still drips on, drips on.
Our floors are clean and it’s hot in here. When I apologize for my impatience, it is w/ impatience. We let that be what it is. Our love is left in half-drank glasses of water we leave around the kitchen and the condensation that pools. Buckling wood and rings left behind, drips on, drips on. Drips cool on the backs of our necks, hair held up and glistening, dripping south. Hallelujah where we can get it. We think we know everything on blue couches in the middle of the day. Hallelujah found in the weekends we give to our friends and the apples that peer through the trees promising Future.
Future on the move, a thing we worship together or not at all. My friends and I, we talk about running, running to where excitement goes when the lights change and the dogs are whistled home. We do our howling in the last hours before sunset. We jump into the city holding hands and lose each other in the fall. All the friends I want to call - across the world and busy busy and carried to me voiceless through the floods. J and I see the new M. Night Shyamalan movie and I repeat a pattern. W/ my best friend in high school seeing Sixth Sense, w/ my best friend in college seeing Split, w/ J now seeing Trap - riding the twists together. Friends make each other brave.
Feet up, shoes off, the theater goes dark. The ads all tell us to get jobs. The hospital, the shipyard, indeed.com. Get a job to pay for insurance. Get a job to afford your ungrateful children & buy from Amazon. Get a job so AI can do the jobs you want, the AI that is inescapable now. We talk through the trailers, noticing. Everything remarkable is overproduced in the sequels and remakes and adaptions. The bastardizations we pay for and the bastardizations we refuse. The movie theater w/ too much space and the parking lot growing damp w/ rain. We reenter our world and it looks just how we left it. We are richer w/ another Sunday together. This rain is sensational and slow, cooling hot heads, letting it feel easy. Hallelujah, love dull and gentle in August.
I interviewed her about the whole experience & you can read it here
This entry is a part of my Nightmares & Morning Pages series, where I write every day and share the good stuff. Subscribe to keep up with me & share what you like (please).
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