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.

What Would the Community Think?

For all those wonderful months spent living independently for the first time, I have acquired a misstep in my personality.

I have stopped talking.

So many things have built up quietly while I was busy listening and not trusting a soul.

I haven't spoken to my stepfather in over a month. He got in my face and told me to shut the fuck up.

So I did. My mother is furious at me with the kind of anger that only I can understand since it runs through my veins.

When she questions me, I can just feel the tears well up like the piles of my things that I have simply stopped picking up.

Along with the job that my body refuses to wake up for, the cigarettes my mouth refuses to stop smoking, the sad lonely kind of drunk voice mails from my father that collect unreplied, the friend with whom I sit and listen but never explain my own swirls of discontent.

The only one I've ever felt okay to trust, Rashka, gets older every time I run away to the north. He will be collecting dust before my diploma even makes it to the shelf.

Where Lovely used to be is a large hole of turning my head so I don't see his old house when I drive by.

I'm scared to death of my career. I am so afraid to fail.

God am I afraid.

The other night, Jersey called me for the first time this summer, and she talked so fast about her own problems that I set the phone down and smoked a cigarette. She didn't notice.


I scream out for the Shire in my sleep, but I would be just as unhappy there.

I don't remember how to talk. The only thing I remember that serves as a hot enough shower for my mind is this lunchbox.

Hopefully my brain doesn't refuse that too. Because then,

There would be no more talking.

Everything is just so melted together that I'm not even sure where to pick things apart.

Hello in There

Richmond and I are slowly making amends.

A gentleman yesterday asked me if he could write me letters when I am in the north. Technology has become so ingrained that the idea of words that breathe a moment or two before they are read fascinates me.

Loneliness has been quite a faithful companion. Mealticket has been there a lot for me. I really do care for the soul, but I cannot rely on one person to rest my mind on. Many times I worry that I put too much on him. Each draws me back a little more. It's been a long while since I have had a close friend, and this point is usually where they disappear into the backdrop of their own lives. Its understandable that I'm testing each brick before I gamble with weight on it.

I realized today how much I hide from every passenger that takes a seat in my car. Every friend that ends up drunk on my shoulder. Listening is a beautiful way to keep your thoughts hidden.

I've become so serious recently. Every time I close my eyes I see the Massachusetts roads and gentle hills that never stop growing upwards.

There's a secret orchard near my school that I have taken very few. If you blink, you will miss the opening in the hedge. I used it many a time when I needed to sit and let the fact that I was where I belonged sink in.

An immortal oak tree blooms at the top. It has lawn chair roots and you can just lean against the bark and see for miles of hills.

I miss that breath of air you take when you finally reach it after the climb. You breathe in what you see.

I ache to my marrow for that. To walk around the campus right before the sky begins to warn me that I have missed the night, when not a soul exists except for the painter in the barn who just couldn't sleep with that charcoal image burning in his brain.

I should be sleeping. I have to get this young body downtown tomorrow to work in a lab. I fucking hate it. There is no spirit in checking plates for bacteria colonies. This job is fantastic in that it confirms that I would kill myself if I wasn't around words.

However, I am there for an aunt, and there's no getting out. I tell them what I want to do and they stare back at me with disinterest before turning back to their pipettes.

Science is nothing without life to go along with it.