Here Together
7/21: Sunday night doesn’t seem so dark, not along the rocky edge w/ music stuck in my head like heart ache and horses running. I took all lefts instead of right towards home. My body drives to the beach in the East End on its own, the moon full and blushing. When I was growing up by the lake, weighted summer nights found me creeping out to the lake to dip toes and dreams into restless waters. What else but weightlessness? What else but being held by something greater than me.
Alone, I am not alone. In the shadows, I am made of light. On the beach, a group of friends is huddled around a bonfire and I smile something American. The wood crumbles and burns while water licks the shore. I remember friends by my side on the dock until lovers found me, until it’s just me, until the property is bought up & belongs to someone else, until I can never come back. Home is gone and humbled by memory, by what was, by never again like that, never again until maybe something better. Tonight, I dare to dream of something better.
Fireworks pop unaimed in the sky and over the water, set alight by teenage hands. A few good pops of red and gold. The smoke hangs in the cloudless sky. Eyes everywhere and no one to call. I drove down to the shore to sit writing on the rocks where no one knows. No one to call and say what I want to say. No one to say what I think I need to hear, like, You’re losing your mind, like, Don’t worry, you don’t need it.
Someone swims in the shallow end of the beach. Three girls smoke a bowl on the rocks. Backwards baseball caps deflect old fluorescent street lights on picnic tables. Lovers, of course, in the shadows. Turkish dance music plays around the fire. I am on the rocks stripping and keeping to myself, trusting the moon to keep my secrets, to kiss my eyes before she goes. Call out for love. Call out for sight. I sit on the rocks and I am made of forget me nots on a timeless night made of water,
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7/22: Home on my porch w/ new bug bites and a full tank of gas. I’ve been kissing highways in my off time, letting the days hit me fast like slapping onto the water from greater heights. I sit w/ my blood at lunch, visiting my mom, my step father, my aunt, my grandparents, all the dogs. I sit w/ dark wood and rot iron and melting ice from the freezer. My parents drove up from Florida last week to spend the summer back home. They’re staying in the barn behind Auntie Dy’s, a house that’s been in the family longer than I have. I love the barn especially, alive in all its transitions. My step father’s old stables, horses and dogs and the boys moving in and out, cousins and brothers and friends, transitory tenants who wanted to hide and now, my parents working to make home or something like it. If you ask me, it’s nicer to have them just this much closer.
My mom has so many plans and my step-father only has so many hands. I remind them they have time. The news is always on the TV. The grill is lit. The dogs always trying to climb on top of you. I remember their routines. I remember 3 PM means dinner and dinner means the work stops for the day, means my mom talks and talks and my step-father grumbles and I help w/ the set up and clean up. I, the silver link in the silver chain.
I see what my mother calls, happy and I want better for me. I see my step-father’s impatience and I want better for all of us. Everyone’s happy looks a little different, I think. There’s sacrifice all over, scars that will always look fresh, choices continually made of conviction, of compromise, of containment. I was glad to get out in the fresh air where young boys run and scream and remember me from photos and last Christmas. I was glad to walk hip to hip w/ my mother. Was glad to tell Papa, No, I’m not having kids, but I’m glad everyone else is, to have him hear me and love me, hear me and love me. I will watch my family as it expands next week at the beach, the vacation ritual we do. My family that hears me and loves me. I hear them. I love them.
I sit w/ my blood at lunch and flip through the pages of history, my family now as it has always been. It means something, simply being who you are, simply coming from where you come from. A box in my car now, books I grew up w/ and left behind. I flip through and learn about myself again. I take my first copy of The Outsiders for a friend. There is a mysterious song on the wind, twinkling and alluring. Dancing wind chimes tease July August September. Music layered w/ the crickets, the cars, and a dream that is already calling me. I am tired and unfinished. Some kind of thread loosens and around a lavender night, a small thing let free.
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7/23: July dreams again of horses. July dreams of the Pacific, slurping up the sun. July meets up w/ us at the Eastern Prom for a birthday. Off the reigns as the wind blows w/ layered blankets, my friends and I on a Tuesday night. Today, we celebrate J two days late. The rains wept through the morning and now the clouds are here to watch. The circle gets bigger than more of us that show up, to sit side by side and play face to face. We dig our own hole in the ground. Friends for all time, alive in our humid city by the sea.
T brings the couch pouch and we pick up Al on our way over. Orne picked up pizza. GH brought bottles of root beer. M brought strawberry cake w/ 27 candles. Night w/ cake on his nose and in his beard. Peach passed a J around. I still had paint on my hands from the hour and a half before - green gouache coming off of J’s gift, a green portrait of our boots. The wind was making wishes before J could. We opted to yell Happy birthday rather than sing, to catch it before the candles blew out. We ate the cake w/ our hands, barefoot in the grass and whipped cream frosting on our fingers, sweet strawberry center.
Slow, slow the sun slipped left to right, nodding romantic at my friends, a smile in the clouds. Effortless and sweet and free, a day meant for J. We turned purple as Portland went black, our night together at the end of the roll.
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7/24: The Workshop Podcast, Pt VIII
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7/25: I’m walking in circles, going around by getting around. Ripples interloping. Swirling snail shells gathered in the mud. My head’s lookin’ at the ground, at layers of footprints made familiar. My friends talk about leaving and the city I love crumbles a little, erosion along the shore. I sat back in the purple bar against the window wondering when I became the one preaching commitment. The Rat found a charm on the table, pointed silver and a vertebrae under glass. They hold onto it all night. They sit next to me, close like family.
I went out w/ my friends after the Workshop. The poets were all outside passing around whatever they got, j’s and cigs and peanut m&ms. Finger graffiti in dust on one set of storefront windows and a new restaurant crossing its fingers, moving in to the space next door. We came out tonight to exhale the world we woke up in today. A weird couple of weeks, hasn’t it been a weird couple of weeks? Summer roughs us up to smooth us out. I dressed comfortable. I let my hair fall. I bit off honesty like munching a hole in a green leaf, chewing w/ my mouth open.
We start the night dancing. When our mouths are open, we let ourselves bitch, we let ourselves moan, we let our faces shift crazy as the lighting changes. Angle of nose is sour, angle of cheek is sweet, friends masked in shadow. I swing the mic and sing Danger Zone. I sip green tea that I poured into a fancy glass. I sit next to the doctor and tell her about Charlie XCX. I miss my friends one by one as they go, out through the open door and into whatever comes next.
The dice are in my pocket and I am fiddling w/ them, singing along when I don’t know what to say. I ask my friends about the ethics of sad songs at karaoke. Majority says, Anything goes. It’s the Wizard who agrees only up to a point. I’m inclined to agree w/ them, choosing a song for fun and not for feels, feeling like a liar a little bit. Some of these songs, man. A tear hangs over the curve of the lip and the disco ball doesn’t see. A face flushes under the red lights, breathing surrender to try and relieve the pressure. Somewhere between Like a Prayer and the Cure, I followed something invisible outside. Out from the corner, tucked tail through the crowd, through the curtains, out into the night.
On the street, I heard the bar through a conch shell. I half-expected to find something waiting for me. A closed bodega, a lit cig, an alley the moon hadn’t found yet. Empty-handed, I danced w/ the night, following its lead. Less like a night flower and more like a rogue flame. Echoing boom. Sparks fall into the sea. More fireworks on the beach. The window seat cleared when I returned to the Jewel Box, my friends quick to slip right in next to me. We came out to keep up tradition, to let a piece of ourselves free, something like Desire that we call something else, something like destiny that we infantilize. We pretend we have a choice, we pretend we don’t, we pretend we know what we want, we pretend we don’t, we pretend we know where the spiral unwinds and pretend to care where it’s going. Dress up w/ me and sing a song you know by heart, that’s all that matters to me, who are are on a Wednesday night all purple and bruised.
On the drive home, I play something like the blues, quiet quiet, always there. I drop the Rat off at their car around the corner and I drive out on the neck of my city, spit out where neighborhoods are being built, where the horses sleep now, the moon shining on stables and clover fields. I can’t blame the city for this fever, no, this one is all my own.
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7/26: Like the moon, the spider web in my passenger seat refuses to be photographed. Concentric weaving made in minutes, reflecting the sun off of the silk. The garden spider shakes when I start the car and lingers while I gather groceries. It hangs in the center until morning where I find it now, magnificent web between window and door jam. W/ the sun shining, I collect it on a Hosta leaf and return it to the garden. The spider curls up in the green, feels the sun, and starts weaving again. Silk slick and suspended, tying the world together.
The wind blows me where I need to go like it blows the pages of my book, back and forth, losing my spot. If it can’t be poetic, it can be honest. And if no one is pushing me forward or back, I am free to wave in every direction infinitely. I wear silk and my body mourns. I have packed bags by the door and projects on a breathing pause. What felt like too much yesterday feels more gracious in Friday’s mouth. The night finds me driving South and back in time. The moon hides half her face and I hide showing all of mine.
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7/27: Bugs suck from the juiciest parts of my thighs. I’m sitting by the fire w/ my family where the sun sets over Long Sands. We pass the smoke around, summer nights remembering belonging. Home, too, is a liquid. Family, an abundant mineral in the river, birthed by mountains. We are in the summer house, the beach town my extended family collects in for a week every year - more traditions, more babies, more carrying on. Appreciation, our sunrise in the mornings shining into Autumn.
Before Maine was home, it was home away from home. I put this seacoast in my snail shell, carrying home around w/ me. Maybe I’ve always been looking for home or trying to make it last - if I look back on my writing, sometimes that’s all I find. Place and displacement, longing and living, like twins always in the same mirror. I feel around for where I belong and I squirm. Trusting, believing, losing, looking. Covered in salt, I turn it all to loving loving loving - all at once, in blood and ambiguity. I sound a little like everyone here around this fire, accents and inflections and favorite words. We look like a family too, high cheekbones and everyone under 6” tall, our dead always w/ us.
At home, while I am looking for home, my restlessness is proof I have already found it. To feel goodness and know there is more of it. To grab a hold of love like the edges of a blanket, to huddle underneath it and find a whole world gone red under the muted light of the sun, to be sovereign and always a living part of history. I think about the wishes my family have been making w/ their bodies, generations and generations of wishes. A vineyard worth of wishes. Wishes carried across seas. Wishes cropped up in tiny city yards w/ leaking oil and cigarette butts and dandelions by the door in June July August.
I go on vacation and remember I have family. Aunts that want to move in w/ me. Grandparents that stay up late just to hear the talk around the fire. Cousins all raised together, too precious for this world and solid like evergreens. Every year my family puts money away to rent this same place, to walk down to the beach and walk up to the lighthouse, to keep playing cards in our pockets and love eye to eye. The nights trick us w/ time. The sun comes home hot. This is how eras are ushered in, how fruits ferment sweeter, how families continue beloved - drop of blood in the water. We know to wash our scrapes in the sea, young knees and old hands healed by the same thing, a world washed in salt and saved by love.
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7/28: In my dreams, I brush the tangles out of seaweed and on Saturday, I am driving and everything is green. Cowboy boots & Soul & satin & stripes. The green along the highway towards Hometown, NH and a garden by the lake. Echinacea makes me think of T. Black Eyed Susans make me think of falling in love in August. Hydrangea makes me think of M. Hollyhock and hummingbirds and good luck. And these red ones, Cardinal Flowers, they make me think of me. Vows exchanged among the bees. Blood pools from the center of me on the drive down. We sit quiet in the speckled sun, eyes helplessly wet from the love right in front of us. Our friends are getting married - more & more - our hearts show up for one another more & more. T and I have been to so many weddings but it’s been a few years since they’ve been so sweet, so simple, so strengthening. Our friends in love and believing in forever. Thank you for having us, we love you too.
W/ sunglasses on and T’s hand on my shoulder, we watched the step one-two through the grass. It’s not a tradition we trust, but we show up, show out, go all out, alive in the garden and wild on the dancefloor, a wedding at the end of July. Blossom & Dylan at the altar. Dylan’s face was red all day, the height of joy. Blossom walked through the garden slow slow w/ her father, patient w/ a limp and loving. Love is patient, love is kind. Their nephew in his little suspenders dancing all night like running on batteries. D and I ordering espresso martinis in tumbler glasses, dancing to all the same old songs we used to dance to growing up in the woods. T’s hair overgrown and held back w/ that headband from high school, upholding his own traditions.
In the garden, we heard the highway by the lake and promises made. Summer birds, bubbling fountains and violins through the Rockville speaker, violins humming, it’s better than I ever even knew. They say that the world was built for two, only worth living if somebody is loving you. Baby, now… Blood came fast, early, red in green and a secret my body keeps. At the party, I am always free. Everyone seems to be. There was a competing wedding on the other side of the barn and we stayed around the faces we recognized. My friends and I swam in circles while the night slowly came undone. Tonight is white and made of tulle like the bow in Blossom’s hair, strong and holding on. I have felt all of this before. Energy has an order. Alive high, alive low, alive when it is wedding season and I am red in the green.
I drive us the long way home in the black. We talk where we talk best, honest and facing forward, right next to but not looking. Love and how it leaks through everything, everything. A drop of blood and it stains. Love soaks through what we hope is strong enough - the quilted, patched up, passed down fabric of reality. A family all red and coming together, our world w/in the world, the beautiful cherry filter where we return to love.
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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