In Search of the Miraculous
In Search of the Miraculous
July 15 - July 21 / Nightmares & Morning Pages / Cover photo: For Cynthia by Maria Vargas, more inside
7/16: Can I have some sun on my face, please? Is that something we can negotiate? These early nights can’t be trusted. The sun has learned to take her time, it’s a question of whether or not we respect it. I consider dinner. I consider shock art. I drive into the city to meet my friends where we try to roast our frustrations like marshmallows over the fire. Quick, the sweetness burns. The fire grows when we feed it, grows beyond us, reminds us we are nothing. The future’s not certain, the end is always near! Woke up this morning and
Woke up this morning and got myself a beer! Time untold and disinterested. I’ve got some anger this morning. I sit at my kitchen table and try to believe that I am alone. How far can I go, if I just start walking? I take my time with these sips, something gassy and full like a new planet in my belly. I carry the bottle, not because I’m finished drinking but because I’m ready to smash it.
Ceaseless glitches in the timeline of comfort. I imagine bullets zipping past and cities decimated. I imagine monuments overturned. The chemicals are off again. I see a terrorist manifesto on YouTube and I see a bomb get dropped and I choose a portal. Do you think of me at the end of the world? Running around believing in the fall? The way a whale falls dead in the ocean and becomes an ecosystem sustaining deep life for decades at a time.
In the abyssal zone, the whale is picked apart by larger creatures first, of course. They tear and shred, a prophetic feast reduced to skeleton. New creatures move in and colonize until all the tissue is gone. The sulfophillic stage - chew the fat and we get hydrogen sulfide. The chemicals change and we get energy. The smallest creature moves in and the next creature sits on top of it and soon, symbiosis. An empire is formed. Fearful in the wait, hopeful, watching. I wonder, will we ever feel safe here? Even foolishly?
The summer steeps like tea bags tied like rat king in a pitcher in the fridge. Strong, sweet, tangled. I write, now, on the back of a mechanics’ receipt in a waiting room. Cherry pits in the bottom of my paper cup, paper cup full of water. I sweat w/ inevitability. Sip slow, dreaming green.
Poetry is canceled tonight. Summer brings aggression. I see friends anyway. This morning, I had a funny, open feeling. I got dressed in the sticky mouth of July, picking at myself like candy in my teeth. I cried about the same shit when I first got the shirt I wear today. A lot has changed in a year but it feels like I haven’t moved. The circle finds its own bleeding beginning and rolls through it again, again. Cherry kissed after a summer morning cry. My home sinks further into the dirt. I am still digging, but this time, this time I am digging up - facing the sun instead of the core.
✺
7/17: What do we do w/ feelings of inevitability? Death and loss and meant to be. I haven’t been talking much about myself lately, just my body. Poison ivy and asymmetry and tricks of the eye. Will you think me weak willed if I admit to fear, to resistance, to grief? I make an admission and I am in the mirror of the world seeing fear, seeing resistance, seeing grief in each of us, each of us and our reflections, high as hell and desperate in July nights when things break. Lightning cracks the sky.
Last night, I sat on the floor w/ Al, relaxing like petals in the heat. We’re listening to Waterfalls barefoot w/ our toes dipped in some prophetic river, winding, unclean, refreshing. She knows every creek in her apartment and moves around quiet. I count the spirals in her place, the cobalt glass, the sun tucked in treasured corners. I show up when she’s out of work and lay on my back on her bathroom tile, inserting the Monistat I grabbed on the way over, laying there quiet for a while. Summer blows in from the window.
Before I show up, Al’s eyes were tearing. She says, This keeps happening. When she’s alone, she looks in the mirror while she cries and says, I’m so beautiful. We talk about energy and sensitivity, the times we saw our parents cry. We talk about crying as bodily and embodied. We learn the world doesn’t need to change w/ every tear. Crying is a part of patience, crying until we get there.
I’m in my Al era and she is in her G era, except she tweezes her brows and I am fearless walking in my city. We’re melding, nervous and wishing, wishing and working, working and missing. The sun shines through the end of day in this girls’ apartment that has seen enough. We’re hazy, going to the Zoo.
There is a DJ and the threat of rain, J already there and waiting for us. I borrow a blue layer. We park up the hill and walk down while the sky flattens, sky cloudy like my piss lately. It’s periwinkle up there, covering something up. The music playing out from the bar. Periwinkle catches fire for just a moment. All is revealed in a flash. Our Future lit up and layered, reaching back into the cosmos while we huddled under umbrellas and the patio. The Zoo says, Whoa! Orange flashes across the heavens, deeper than we knew, deeper than we could know.
My friends and I are at a house party the city threw, smoking elbow to elbow. Angels electric and barelegged, stacked silver in the summer. There’s an intensity building like oceans boiling and a drum beat that makes us dip low and lean into our hips. Won Pounds sitting like Buddha on a cloud, layering the Now and the Always, the broken bits of me all working it out on the remix. Inhibitions deflate as the rain rocks steady steady, heavy heavy. The rains meet w/ conviction, certain as it falls plump on dirt and concrete. My friends and I worshiping the water and eating up the crumbs of life yum yum yum.
Into the rain, we can really move. We were under the roof w/ the DJ and the rest of the city but we’re moving out from the drunk thumb of the Zoo and back onto the rocks. There is a pop up tent like the one T has. The air flow is better than the cramped lean-to, company better too. We are over where the trash is but we don’t mind. We step into the pour to dance. J and I let our hair down in the wet like all the best days before. Al says, You’re going out there? J says, G will dance w/ me anywhere. I nod and I wiggle. Al says, Are you crazy? We respond in song, Looks that way, looks that way, ahh as long as we’re not alone. The people I love aren’t going anywhere right now and while the heavens erupt, we dance in our city.
What do we do when inevitability sits in the front seat? Watching. Waiting. My eyes find my friends’ eyes w/ a question kind of like this one. Eyes a little red, kneeling in the crowd and squirting in eye drops. Leaning close under the tent in the rain, J’s eyes sparkled like they do, dreamy w/ adventure. The lightning picks up and her eyes catch a spark. She starts telling me she’s been back in her bad behavior - giving in, wasting time, running all over. We admit to crutches and dreams and dependencies. At this age, we lean away from the things that could kill us, the threat of that stopped being funny when life became miraculous again. But we are not free, not free from distractions and old messes, lagging behind while the sun shines. Holy stupidity! We look for hard candy and color TV, full moon, full crowd, dancing close and forgiving.
We talk about energy and the heat. Shouldn’t we be getting busy? Why am I acting like I’m 14? July in the throat of the storm. The daylilies in my yard last a week. The cut daylilies in my kitchen last only a day. Quick fiery blooms alive in a flash and living in a full gasp. Aren’t we something like that? This storm is the first in a while after so many stingy sun showers this season. Life lived hot burns out fast. Summer means nursing our energy until it is bright again - water w/ the sweat, fruit w/ the sun, always more time at the end of the season.
A few months ago, I was talking Magnolia unfolding layer by layer. One damp petal after the other, pink and peeping at the top of the tree. Now, the fevered season, teenage by the shore, blissful while the oceans reap. All our bad behavior, the petals that brown first and feed the earth. We will grow more and more. We’ll change colors and see what dies when the sun gets too hot. For now, we are soaking wet and walking to the car, exhaling hallelujah after hallelujah. We bloom uneven w/ our remarkable wet planet.
✺
7/18: Dog-Ear, free to read for now
✺
7/20: Saturday southbound traffic, hot concrete, damning grooves. After all the brake work, the Soul is touchy when she has to change tempos. Me too, turns out, aching in my hips. T says, There’s either construction or someone died - driver’s seat in the back up - but I’m not convinced. He says it straight like that, too, his mind a highway. One to two to three, just like that, racing like that, racing like flash of red. I dress in black and white like I am his checkered flag waving, telling him, Go baby go. Free flowing, I see him at the start and at the end. I am open. I move at an amorphous speed, my tempo more like two, four, sixteen, eight eight eight. Rodriquez playing on the radio.
Traffic clears around the bridge. No construction, no dead bodies, just traffic bottlenecked between states. All of us in machines squeezing our way in. Saturday swimming as we have always swam. As free and as foolish as everyone else, carving Desire into the current. Today in July, so many of us are in packed cars w/ swimsuits and sunglasses behind the wheel, on highways that loop around the green.
Summer is a season that hurts to step into; sunburnt and hazy, feral and filthy in the sand. M and I walking last night in the same step-in sandals, mine black and hers white and every year they rub raw in the same spot. We lean on the bricks of our city putting band-aids on and drawing swirling faces to peer around familiar corners. M has a self-portrait up at 82 Parris, a gallery Bayside, and there’s a performance at 6:30.
The sun peeked in to see my beautiful friend’s spine wilting in a bouquet of herself. For Cynthia in a golden shadow of forsythia. Antique shades of blue and yellow and body pink and alive. Small, summoning you in. The doors wide open to her. The world open to her.
I clomped in just as the performance began. In Search of the Miraculous it was called. Patricia Brace in helmet and elbow pads and blue suede rollerblades. Welded lightboxes and little videos playing, red blue green cast on unfinished concrete. The moon and its full cycle. A body backstrokes in the blue. Self-timer dancing, a suit in a living room during lockdown. A photo of the artist and her step-mother, whom the performance was dedicated to.
She spoke to us plainly, like, Look, I’ve been practicing! She skates backwards during the solar eclipse. She does a circle move w/ the full moon. She swims even though she is afraid and a camera zooms in on the sea. A pitcher of water held uneasy and spilling everywhere, into a casserole dish at her feet like a gutter, a pool, and our artist face down and blowing bubbles. She paddles and paddles and paddles on solid ground, face down. She’s back on her skates again, huffing past us in the hallway. Oh! She says, Shows over! I think of the living room choreography and front porch theater I did growing up, my mom w/ stars in her eyes.
On we walked across the outstretched arm of our city, M and Night and I as the sun set and the show changed stages. The lovers sang in sync down city streets, making life sweet together, making up the words as we went along. The moon came out bold and embodied. My car key snapped off of the fob on the street. M and I wanted to go dancing. Before Night drove off, he lent us a pair of clamps from the toolbox in the back of his car. Turn key awkward and successful in a car door, turn the Soul over w/ the broken pieces. We cruise down to the East End on a Friday night, the kind of Now imbued w/ vitality, living the meaningful memories w/out realizing (I realize now, I realize forever). We’re dancing w/ our friends again while the night truly closes.
Today, I sit passenger side w/ the spare key in the ignition, my soul on fire w/ what I’ve kept in reserve. We drive around Hometown, NH to see old friends but we don’t touch the green of home or what used to be home. We swim on the other side of what we once were.
✺
7/21: The full moon wakes Sunday near silent, a sunny glare on the portrait, portrait of the world gone white and wilting and the moon still there in the shadows. I start re-reading Still Life With Woodpecker. I wake before T and take my coffee outside. I spend most of this summer getting called out and gazing up at the moon, gazing up at the moon and catching my own tears, lifting tears from my cheeks and no longer pretending I don’t know what they mean. I wasn’t given to life alone and yet, I open my eyes on my own time.
I work w/ the morning like wetting the palette, dripping the wet back in and swirling it around. I am awake in color, undead in alchemy. I am on the wall, staining the world. I am awake at once to the sun through my window, slow like I promised I would go. Slow baby, slow, from dark into day, tepid friction where love is made and lost in each instant. I can’t help it, I get excited. Joy that burns up quickly in a cancerous life. If you catch me, I’ll move w/ you. Keep up, move w/ me too. Meet me in the middle. I hope you love me for my inconsistency.
On the car ride home, I drove the Soul down Main St. of Hometown, NH, my end of it. I looked into the black Beyond that beams away from where I came from. Not born, but brought into, brought up in, the lake and the green, my home that slips towards Winnipesaukee, foundations laid into rocks and gnarled roots. I want to swim in wider waters. I want to visit a world that will feel w/ me. This afternoon, the lake was wild and we were swimming. It was as simple as it’s always been.
Black behind the wheel, I tell T that if I did everything my emotions wanted me to do, my life would look very different. He asks, Better or worse? because he’s always asking better or worse. I say, No better, no worse, no way to know. I say, More chaotic, that’s for sure. More unstable, more uncertain, more creative, more free, maybe, or maybe I’m more free this way, no better, no worse, no way to know. My lover and I talk about control. He talks up efficiency. I talk up experience.
We float in the black tonight like we floated today on the boat in the blue. Awake in the same places w/ the same conclusions w/ differing lessons taken from fear and differing capacities for love. He says, Living out of your emotions makes you stupid. And I’m not making a judgment, it just, gets in the way… hard to make good decisions.
No, I know, I say, and I circle my heart compulsively. I want to disagree but only having my own experience to speak on, I say, I haven’t always trusted myself, or my emotions I guess. I say, I don’t want to be a thing that feels and doesn’t think. We agree: Balance - whatever that means. My life of whipping around in circles in the face of my shadows and floating back to center. The boat bobbing spirals around the anchor. My heart dangling low like bait, hanging on a string down from the moon.
The moon, romantic all by itself. Full & in the clouds, of course. When we get home, my lover and I are older again. Past and present blended and painting another layer onto the future. The Future deep and purple and hard to find in nature. We are moving slow as home invites us to, getting to OK through touch and easy leans into our strongest parts. We are awarded another July day, our hair in the sun and our colors mixing. We become brown. We become one, one made of many crumbling, earthen parts. We are left how life has crushed us. We are the pigments of pain and magic, chromatic and fading from time.
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).
My messages & chat are open for inspired journal prompts or anyone who wants to pick apart the world with me. Catch you on the next go around 𖦹
G