Where Lost Things Go
Where Lost Things Go
June 21 - June 28 / Nightmares & Morning Pages
6:21: On the longest night of the year, I don’t sleep. I just watch the blue turn darker shades of itself and the moon as it tugs. Full in the sky, a light beyond the fog. When there are fires in the West, the sky here is like heathered wool, warm gray and soft, clouds up above and carrying ash. Peonies dead on the kitchen table but they’ve been like that for a while.
I've been keeping this candle in my pocket, a light in the dark and dripping. In fleece again, daring the flame to jump again, burning holes again, warming skin again, ruining something again. I stay still. I’m home after snaking through my city and I am older, wiser. I am on speakerphone and I am free. The cats take turns meowing for me in the window, calling me in, animal impatience. Feet up on the firepit while the night finally cools off. I keep the flame to myself tonight. Keep it dark. I do what I can to not burn it all down. I’m on the phone w/ an old friend, our memories are mostly make believe. We talk about where we’ve been and what heartbreak felt like the first time. I remember riding fast, lightning hitting all the wires, lights going out and losing power. I remember the candle in my pocket and I’m fidgeting. No light to lose.
The night breaks apart in flashes, fireworks vehement and beautiful. I find beasts in the branches, the face of a wolf against the sky. They tell me I sound sad on the phone but I don’t mean to, you just caught me while the moon was full. My blessings masked and feathered, disguised in dark clouds, twisted smiles, there for me dressed as something else.
I imagine the weather staying warm like this forever, like how my friends and I are loyal forever when the world doesn’t hold us like we want it to & how the smoke clouds roll in forever when the fires catch the tops of evergreens. I can only point to a few moments where the arms around me let go when I was ready, the times I first thought of forever.
Forever has changed every time someone has said it. I’ve felt forever in a moment that meant nothing. I’ve run from it without leaving. I see someone else’s forever before I see my own. I understood it best at my youngest, but I’m starting to see it unfold itself again, spiraling out and beyond. I understand forever now as an energy, unbound and above. The way love never dies and death is certain. I watch forever go on without me, without all of us. This was never about trust, just imbalance. It is self-reliant. It is annoying. This world that asks of us a wide berth, going on and on, always having the upper hand - we surrender, what else?
To be an equal, even thing. To be eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder, soul to soul, feet on the same ground, to be roots and branches, to be growing and growing still, to be growing and growing until, to fall to flame and rebuild, to hold water like love in our hearts like our mouths open in the rain, thirsty and bottomless things. To be buried. Forever is lost at the bottom of you and me.
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6/22: Missing missing something missing and the kitchen, wide and empty this morning. The house that misses the sun. T is w/ his brother up North. Fireflies around their heads while they sleep. Cell service only at the top of the mountain. I wore slouchy jeans in my city last night and went out w/ the ones who call themselves lucky girls. We find parking right up front, a car basket w/ whatever you need in a car that doesn’t lock. We catch fireworks over Hadlock field from the bridge as we drive downtown. Tiny tops, big jeans, filterless j’s passed from the passenger seat. Friends make each other feel brave.
Summer in my city when it feels like someone else’s city - growing, growing - like, what is this, New York Fucking City? We have to laugh. Tits out cat calls, squealing taxis never seen before, a band that plays all night for tips in the park between the scaffolding and the bars w/ $14 glasses of wine. My friends and I eat fried chicken and we don’t look at the mirror right in front of us, cramped in the our city. Then we walk for a while. We walk lazy circles around the buzzing. Summer visitors in satin and suit coats, flies.
I brought the lucky girls where lost things go, the bar I found while on the phone. The lighting is warm and it’s quiet, pillows behind our backs. We trade rings on fingers and talk about the art on the walls, disjointed. The owner tells us his brother painted my favorite pieces, the big abstracts in warm reds and greens. Everything else was collected over time. A record that was left behind, the old fire extinguishers from the business that was here before, gifted lobsters and roosters, local artists, angels and devils. We stayed until the doors closed and saw Orne on a midnight bike ride while we took the side streets home.
A girls’ apartment all red and saying goodnight late into the street, twirling around still warm. And my yard, my yard still green in the blue, no lights on and sand in my shoes. Strawberries bloomed under the moon. I was trying to make sense of miracles.
Wet, the water runs, always moving. My cats prefer to drink from the faucet. There are sickly things in still water, they know. Mosquitos hover and mud grows. Water that doesn’t move rots. Love that doesn’t move becomes infected. I am grateful for my lover like a river. I am grateful for my friends like the spontaneous cooling rain. I am grateful for my family like the slow drip through time. I am happy to be carved out, to make room, a path in the mud pointing down down down. I am changed in the rush, the overflow, Earth and I changing shape. The rain on the island finds its way back to the sea, disrupting the dirt below M and I’s feet. We were walking today, an afternoon sleepy and wet like still morning.
Tonight, I get into the bathtub when midnight comes around and it is all quiet again. I touch my body at 29 and realize I am solid. I’m not going anywhere. I am not so easily diluted. Soft, not soluble. Stepped on, I still squeeze out love. Mud on our shoes in the overgrowth and walking on.
My city is close but I am home and alone w/ the water running, the kind of love I can give myself. I make a short list before getting dizzy. My heart beats fast in here, under the water where I am surrounded and in surrender. My body is a different shape than yesterday. My heart, a little different too. There is a slow leak down the drain and I am listening to it. I sweat like weed and patchouli in my open air womb, my bathtub after midnight. I walk dripping to get ice water from the sink to cool my head, to get to somewhere less desperate. My doors are locked and it is beautiful tonight. A trusting night. Freedom w/out trust is something entirely different, like abandonment or something worse.
I write on the side of the bath while the water cools and my muscles let go of some of my youngest dreams and who I was expected to be w/out me. I trust this book to hold my words, to stay dry. I watch my hands, my elbows, the smudgy drip drops. The way my eyes close but I trust myself not to fall asleep in the wet. I am left w/ my love and my salt, glittering and winking at the moon, the moon belonging to no one.
I massage my womb in the bath. It is still my womb whether I use it or not. Tenderness is just one of those words that I skip over when I’m reading, just one of those things that hurts to touch. The phrase starve the womb comes to mind. And out loud I say feed the belly though I hear worship the breath. My womb and I can agree that it all helps and that gentle touching is the best we can do right now.
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6/23: I always thought I had to be a stone thing, diamond or concrete, but I realize stone is still little bits of earth like dirt is little bits of earth like you and me and ashes, ashes. I realize we are made up of so much. Everything is each other. I realize we make each other stronger and we all eventually break down again. The water rushes over a stone and turns it smooth and polished, like what love does to us. I can’t get past this one, this stagnant image.
My stillness is a new kind of cruelty and an old kind of kindness.
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6/24: Appetite lost and shattering. I need to believe I’m going somewhere unalone and fruitful. I’m mixing meaning and metaphor in the mirror. Loneliness is pervasive. Is everyone determined to misunderstand or am I determined to be misunderstood? To make of my mud not homes but roads out of town. To make of my freedom not a nest but a revolving door. Gotta be more.
I welcome friends into my home of heart when the spiral splits and splinters, sparking off in the dark, not like fireworks over the lake but like metal meeting metal, welding like mending. The world is all dark except for the brightest fire, precise and controlled and defiant. Maybe it all burns down and maybe stones are meant to smash. I am wondering what to make w/ the broken things, what comes next, what eternity rings.
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6/25: I find time to dance today - and sweat and sweat and sweat. My spirits lift salty under the sun and my friends are waiting for me downtown in the living heart of my city. Youth slips off of me like silk through thighs and I am unafraid of singing July. I call myself back into the rat race. Havoc had in the hot nights.
If you get get out and away, get out and away looking up at the sky. Cast your gaze beyond. Cast your gaze in the glory of Now.
I am not light on my feet these days. These days, heel-toe digging, green cowboy boots every day and the skirt of my slip hiked up in the unbelievable heat. Body follows bongo beat. The tip toes of my city are restless too, a breeze that doesn’t alleviate. A view of Hell through all the open windows. We stick our heads out to call the cool winds back from the sea. The world dares us to melt and we are dancing. Hot days becomes hot night and we are growling for it.
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6/26: I make my wishes at odd times of the day. I spend my days often w/ people who love me. I love what my eyes see and the sweat of me. I love the sand I’ve found in my cowboy boots from the beach that curls around the edge of my city. Under a jaded moon, my friends and I met where the music was, in the East End. We had our thinnest layers on, our skin shedding, becoming more animal as the moon climbed and fell into the cloudless heavens.
They keep it dark in the warehouse brewery. The band set up in the blue light. Everyone piled in and faced the corner where W.I.T.C.H. ascends. I was buzzing, seeing the only band I would have wanted to see this summer and right here in my city. GH met me in the park and we walked our way around to where the drinks were all too sweet and our friends promised to meet, J and Orne and Al dressed for an open oven. We stashed our stuff in the dark by the barrels and made our way through the crowd towards the front. We danced as soon as the music flared and we didn’t stop until our hearts beat crazy, hummingbird hearts in the music hall.
Jagari was in our city w/ a full band to back him up. The bongos, a drum set, a bass, two guitars, two stunning singers, 3 mics. Jagari is an original member of W.I.T.C.H. from the band’s formation back in the 70’s and everyone else filled the room w/ their ancient sound. They played Introduction and I believe that time is a continuous, rolling thing. The singers wore red and black and green, ruffles and large jewelry and coostumed celebration. A band is a kind of tribe. The singers introduce themselves after the band exemplified their sound - Hanna Tembo, (who’s name in our country means elephant, but she is no elephant, right? Maybe embryonically an elephant, Jagari says) and Theresa Ng’ambi, who grabbed the mic, thankful thankful, calling herself the Bad Bitch WITCH.
They play Living in the Past for the recent past, the reeling past, the revelatory past, the past that escapes and returns from exile all the time, the past covered in sand and dust and ash, enough to cause fires, the past where blood was still red, still blue, and look at us now. The past the past the past, for are we anything w/out it? Lost, lost, lost. The back and forth past, on our tail past, instinctual past that scars us and scratches and reminds us to learn from our past, the past that houses shame and surprise, the past that makes the Future feel suddenly so free.
They play more of my favorites, songs I would have loved at every stage of my life. Earth-born riffs, a constant shaking. Ghosts dance w/ us in the warehouse and I can feel them looking. I close my eyes dancing here like volcano, feeling the pressure and letting it go. Spirals projected on the walls and the crowd moving closer in. Jagari grooves, says he’s looking for family, someone to take them in so they can stay in the country. a little longer He pulled grapes from his pocket and chewed between lyrics. He send high fives to the front row and we ignored his voice cracking through the ages. He sang the praises of life while here in Maine, over 7,000 miles from home.
I was living up from the roots of me, carried by the bongos in the back, the beat my body craves. Up and up it rose - the heat, the energy, the power frenetic - and it touched all of us, every part of us, all of us at once. I am under red lights w/ the beast of me and I worship the hunt. I breathe in the blue light w/ friends at my back aligning w/ surrender. Spinning the skirt of this slip dress around like palm fronds in the breeze trying to create a breeze of my own. Nature manipulates nature for survival, for relief.
I’ve been thinking of the hunt, lately. Dance and devour. Been thinking of how to be patient and then quick, hungry yet certain. I’ve been trying to wrangle my urge for more and more, figuring out how to get it all for myself. I am getting interested in hunting to eat, both poetic and animal. I think of my cats’ teeth all going bad, their food all packaged and preconditioned, can’t do anything for themselves. I toy w/ life like I toy w/ my food, tracking it down and stumbling forward, taking small bites and feeling them in my mouth.
There in the warehouse brewery, I am only motion in a crowd of motion and no one moves like me. Lost in the hot hot hot, in the shallow wind I create, in the sweat that pools in the corners of me. I float thoughtless next to dreaming. This is my ritual. This is how I let go. The weight in my arms, the full range of my hips, the mysterious breeze at the back of my neck. Someone had firecrackers out on the pavement before the show and I feel them now in my brain waves, electric little sparks, quick and sharp, calling me to attention. Sweat until shining and celebratory again.
The night never cooled off but the five of us peeled from the crowd in the dark, started walking along the tail of our city. A stop at 7-11 and then, To the sea! J and Orne and Al and GH and me, to the sea where we swing off of the ground and dip into the water and kick up sand. From concrete to grass overgrown to the salt and shells of us.
Atlantic like ice water, we wander like smoke, untouchable and swirling around. W/ my friends, I remember I know what I’m doing after all. I remember that what I want is rooted in what I have. That energy is renewable and shared, what makes a life. Even this morning, I had to remind myself. I know my Future as well as I know my city, as well as I know my friends, my friends who know me as well as angels, who are angels barefoot on the same sand as I am.
NOW: There is a bunny on the side of the road while it’s late and I’m talking to myself. Slow leak in the sky. What does winning look like? And who has answers to our burning questions like What is our purpose? and What is going on with my car?
After the Workshop, we packed up and MC said, $20 today, is Venmo good? I said, Yes please. I said, Then maybe I’ll hold onto it. Maybe put it towards rent or something worth having. I made a joke about cash and slippery fingers and magic and then I followed the glittering Wednesday children across the street where another list opened.
The night hot and liberating, our friends trying not to melt at the purple bar. We all got on the list for karaoke but it was a busy night, end of June. Most of us left before we got through. MC sang Lana. Benjamine sang Goodbye Horses. Someone sang Drops of Jupiter; M texted me and I texted my mom. It was tight in the Jewel Box, fights almost breaking out, the room yelling along to the heartbreak. I spent most of my time w/ the Rat tonight as the corners grew darker in that diamond bar and yes, if I have cash I’m giving it to the guy sitting in the empty storefront next to where we are smoking and dressing funny, singing our songs weightless to the world.
I don’t think too much about how it all looks these days, I just try to know me and go from there. Sometimes I’m more solid than others, sometimes I’m more solid for the benefit of others, sometimes, nights like tonight, I’m pooling under the door yelling, A fevered night, a fevered night in the city!
I massage my throat on the way home, talking to myself and getting used to listening at the same time. I’ve been hung up on my words and getting a little lost when I talk. Thesaurus.com has been my most frequent search. I consider trust and how else I can give it to myself. It’s more discipline and more belief, more determination, more planning, more patience. But tonight, tonight I just had to make it home and brush my teeth and be kind to my body.
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6/27: I meet my friends’ eyes and something glistens. A voice worms into their head, I think, my voice beyond me, saying, Hey, please don't ask how I've been doing. There is a protective layer around my joy and when I see you I am sucking on the sweetness. A night turns purple to black and in the melting I am left w/ seeds half dead. Give you the best of me, here and now. What's dead on the kitchen table was still be dry and brown when I got home, has been dry and brown for a while now. After the trip to the emergency vet, I cut daylilies crying, changed out the water, changed out the litter. I came here to celebrate w/ you but I’m shaking out some dead leaves. I love you, don’t let me leave too soon. I can only touch the edges of celebration and you, you deserve hours, hours, oceans, oceans. It sounds small but I feel inferior to time again. Time w/ you is never wasted. If there is love, it is not wasted. I’m feeling funny. Sit a little closer to me.
The sky isn't falling but it hangs low. My cats’ mouths are both aching now and I am buried under imaginary numbers and flimsy pieces of paper. I am triple booked, both overworked and worthless. I think about where my money goes and it is a leaking faucet from before my time - there is love there but there is also a drip drip drip, wet and rotting slowly. I think about where my money comes from and the annoyance slips in despite me, a little here, a little there, devalued despite effort and the same shit for a while now. A voice in my head that says, Forever? Like forever forever? Like this forever? Different parts of me are all shaking their heads in fear of familiarity and unfulfillment.
I am making decisions for money I don’t have yet and for things I love to live longer. I am burying myself again, unworthy and overwhelmed. I call my mother and cry and curse. My mother says, If it’s not OK, it’s not the end. I tell her, That only matters in the end. T is home making lasagna before leaving for work and leaving for the weekend and in between I am squirming closer to him. It is my turn to ask for help. It is my turn to receive it and be grateful, if for no other reason than to be able to give it back in the future.
Little pieces of paper that burn people out of our lives, blood and bond. Did we create something powerful or are we making shit up again? I do the math and collect myself. I separate the parts of myself w/ fists up and tell them to cool off. Dry eyes. Gaze upward. My friends’ laughter somewhere in the air, something I can follow.
I think about all this as my city makes all its money for the year, on the wharf where the oysters are like gold and the visitors dance in their fantasy. It rains for the two minutes I am walking in the city. I hold tattered silk above my head like a shroud. It is my best friend's birthday and I am leaning heavy into love.
There is a place downtown where we all share the food and sit five by five in a booth. Everyone working this season is irritated and unhelpful. We have to laugh, putting in our orders and feeling unwanted, having grace. Together, we get what we need.
There is a drain inside of me, love like water swirling and gurgling down. I can’t show up how I want to but I hold compassion in the center of me, extended out to friends trying to reach me. M is gorgeous in Gunne Sax and dreams coming true. The waves rush over me and you, sparkling and tumbling forward and back, washed up to shore together like treasure. When I am shy and fearful w/in myself, I am still a part of a loving thing, community like always and celebrations every year. I am soft inside my shell, expensive, salted, pearlescent. I give myself to my friends for free. They love love love, pulling me in from the periphery.
J texts the group chat, saying, Hanging out feels like this and links this video.
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6/28: I have been getting caught up in the details, wiggling my roots below the Earth to keep myself awake. I’ve listen to the same song every time I’ve gotten in my car the last two days. I am an echo in the well I left myself long ago. Great acoustics down there. My ambition, a lost boy and finding friends. They’re all singing up to me to the funk beat that moves my body, the only way I can listen these days. Movement that opens me. I stand all day at dayjob and SPACE, use the same irritated micro muscles to support my wrist and knees, force my shoulders down and back. I come home alone and unraveling a bit.
Hey! Everything I own is stained and pulled - an echo, lived in lived in - everything I have will ultimately be lost. I am hung up not on futile things but on the futility of things. All my clothes undone somehow, unraveling like I do, like I’ve been doing, the slow unwind, loosening up while I hold on tighter. I fear the life I’ve been fighting for all this time. I look for the edges of dreams like I can sew them all together somehow into meant to be - I lose the needle, lose the thread. I pull the five of cups - over and over - I toast to an empty Future. Steel myself. Steal myself, me from me if from no one else. My whole life, feeling like a thief, tattered & entitled, no good reason for nothin’. I keep myself true. I find the good reasons so easily in the good company I keep, the ease in which I find sleep. Grateful breath after grateful breath. The beliefs that keep me young for my age are the same ones that keep me loving, a little surreality might save me. Me, I hope that I’m crazy.
Before I can continue dreaming, I have to fill the cats’ bowl w/ wet food and water, have to mix it together, have to set it up in front of my girl where she hides now under the bed. She can’t tell me but I bet she hasn’t eaten all day. She’s been avoiding food and getting more skittish. When River’s teeth were bothering him, he would wriggle his tongue around and shake it off. When Mallory’s teeth bother her, she jumps up high in the air and meows low and long, attacking an inside thing. So she hasn’t been eating and her heart’s been beating fast. I sit on the ground and watch her lick around for a while, letting something like relief move through my body. The longer she eats the farther it travels through. It stops around my chest when she has a reaction, shaking her head fast, backing up, letting out a whine and sneaking away.
I look at my cats and remember they are 12. I remember I am 29. I worked at the museum tonight and made $13. The Beehive Collective were presenting three huge prints of delicate linework. The Collective created storytelling illustrations and were touring them on their move from Canada to California. Complex systematic & cultural histories were alive through incredibly detailed and thoughtful drawings, creating intricate metaphor and doing their research. In each tapestry, the cyclical nature of our world both organic and manmade.
The True Cost of Coal covered the history, the now and the hopeful future of the coal mine industry in Appalachia. This piece took 9 artists 3 years to draw. Plan Mesoamerica took 10 years to complete, taking various perspectives on the debt cycle and Western exploitation of Colombia. The Collective was represented at SPACE by two of the artists and a couple, their children running around throughout the event. Their young son was a part of the presentation, reciting a rhyming folktale on exploitation and resistance and lifetimes of struggle. Their younger daughter ran circles around the space, demanding her parents and friends pick her up and pay attention to her. By the time I was locking up the coolers, her red dress was up and off over her head and she was running around in pampers.
Home alone and listening to Bowie, wondering why it’s so hard for us to bet on ourselves, to let someone love us, to feel love under our feet, barefoot in the grass, the sand, the sea.
I listen to the album my uncle recommends from the dead. I decide on life again - shaking off something ancient. I welcome feeling like such a small thing, let me crumble for a while and take up less space. Let the world build me up the size it wants me, the small places I’d fit, where no one would look for me. This is the feeling that lives in my shoulders, the one that seizes the muscles when someone hugs me so tight with love. It does not live with me forever, it is not welcome here for more than a long plane ride and a lonely night. But it’s here now so I listen when I hear my uncle singing Bowie, singing Somebody lied, I say it’s hip to be alive.
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
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