Bicoastal Revisited

Whenever I miss the old Lebanese wonder that is my grandfather,

I take the bus.

After a day full of wading through post doctoral accents and aiming not to kill myself with the sterilization death contraption, its nice to climb on the bus and have the old man driving talk to you about how he never got into acting class.

Recently I've been having flashbacks to younger bone years. I suppose its because I will never fully be back in Richmond. My marrow is trying to lock in things like the Johnson and Johnson high from smelling my first shampoo.

Last evening, right at the light where everything looks like a Harold and Maude scene, it started to Virginia rain.

Huge drops like someone taking off running. I slipped out of the house and sat on the porch.

I could have been fourteen again. Just one or two posts under my belt. If an old brown mustang had come roaring down the street and done that slow turnaround back to its home, I would not have been surprised at the beautiful boy grinning at me from between the window beads.

That's another breed of flashback that is sitting at my door, an apology card with a cow on the front held in its hands.

Where that infatuation, then that love, then that weariness, then that emptiness used to cling onto, is a strewn about mix of seconds from my youth.

Lovely laughing in that kind of Virginia rain with a top hat and a cigarette. Him, one hand on the steering wheel, another wiping the windshield while cursing the old ingenuity of a mustang without defrost. The muggy smell of the leather, an odd orange felt hat that fell from the sky and returned the way it came.

Being fourteen again. Terrified. Sure of everything I did with the kind of confidence that comes when you are stepping into youth and then disappears until you realize how wonderful that time was.

Of all the things I have kept through the clumsy stone jump that is growing up, I appreciate two most of all.

A gold box with two cow stickers on it that my mother has been forced to promise she will not open.

It holds the pictures I took when it first feverishly occurred to me that I could document time as it unraveled. journals filled with silly obsessions. Movie tickets and a black and white photo of Rashka and I looking out the window. I could place all of it side my side and trace my high school years. My relationship with Lovely.

The second is this lunchbox. Nights when I feel that my breathing has come to nothing, I read through my years. It's getting to be a four year old child now. It comforts me that I have stuck with something. Not exceptionally well. But if some young gentleman asks me carelessly if I write, I can casually point him to something with history.

Its the same kind of feeling as an old stranger explaining the ethics of stoplights as he drives me back to my car. Of Rashka having a permanent indentation around his neck where I have held onto him for 5 years. Of losing Lovely, a soul I never had, but finally,

finally

being able to relish the brief memories as a nostalgic exhale from the past.