Callao

 

I wish others could understand, but I'm glad they don't have to.

When a father leaves a child on this earth with nothing to be proud of- when his sisters forget his ashes and get the gravestone wrong- it hurts to remember you come from a legacy of disappointment.

It's been four years.

Every winter I play the fool- I look at the calendar and I tell myself not to worry- this year it won't hurt so bad. And boy am I ever wrong. March comes around and I find myself in the same spot.

My father was a failure. He was a drunk. He pawned my birthday presents, left me on the curb, delivered me to evil women. He never taught me how to expect men to treat me well. In order to properly mourn someone, you need pride. You need legacy. You need something that connects. By all accounts and purposes I've got nothing.

That's where the dog comes in.

By the time my father left this earth I did not know him anymore. I have been searching so damn hard for four years to find him again. This week against the better judgement of absolutely everyone I decided to bring home a foster dog. And now I can't stop crying at stoplights.

It's never been just me and a dog before. Sitting here on my bed with 60 pounds of fur and bones asleep at my feet, I feel complete. And I feel like my dad is so much closer than he's been in years, dead or alive. Even when everything else failed- we both spoke the same language when it came to this. I'm glad I can still speak it.

This is not permanent- I still have to go west before I take full responsibility of such a regal creature. But I know he would be proud.

And for the first time in four years, I'm proud he would be.

Man on Fire

I messed up.

In running back home to heal I accidentally stumbled upon something beautiful.

And I am heartbroken.

I have never had the courage to live alone. I have always seen singularity as a weakness. But that has changed.

When the one who loves Rock and Roll left after a week in my land and my new apartment, I drove home for dinner. It was grey, I missed having a companion. And then something happened. Somewhere between exit 185 and 183C, I got tired of being lonely.

And I thought back to my entire life. I am the only kin. My childhood consisted of entire days of me wandering the hills of the country, playing with the sky. Because there was nothing else to talk to.

I have been alone my entire life. I will be alone for a good portion of the rest of it. I decided I was done being lonely. That even if it killed me, I was going to learn how to be happy being alone. I was going to find solitude.

Unfortunately, I found it a lot sooner than I expected.

I found it in a little apartment three floors up, with french stairs and a view of the river. I found it in the crazy dining room table I somehow designed and built. I found it in the peace that comes from knowing my space is exactly the same as I left it. I found it in the introspection that a warm winter brings. I found it in not having anyone else to blame but myself.

I have become more patient. I listen to the words of songs now. I sit at my table in the mornings and drink my coffee and read the news. In the evenings, I write, I paint, I dance with Apple to Rock and Roll. And part of me wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

The problem is, this peace seems to only exist in this space. Solitude vanishes when I open the door. And it makes me wonder if it's Richmond I love or simply my own world.

A world I completely control.

I am so stuck between this peace and the west. Of moving into a house full of lively strangers in a very far away place and going into a program that is going to rock my world and my career. I wish the electricity in my bones had settled down before I found peace. If I never go west

I will always regret not knowing.

But I am so scared of never finding this peace again. It is still so fresh, so young. It is not quite muscle memory yet. I keep looking down to figure out how my feet landed so surely.

There are moments in my life where I am fully aware that I am living in the past. There's a calmness that comes with going through motions you know are fleeting. I felt it in pieces at Hampshire, and I feel it here.

Who knew peace could be such a difficult state to exist in.

What I Know

For just one day,

one. day.

I wish that I could pause.

The reason I fear spiders is because I work the same way as they do. There is no single thought, no single experience, no single moment in my life. There is only web.

I spiral and connect and get torn apart by wind and time and forces too large to comprehend. I often find myself floating on the dying thread, trying desperately to get back to center.

And I get there. And I spin. It is so much a part of my essence and my being that I am only able to recognize it in glimpses.

Very very rarely, perhaps only a few times in my life, I have been down and out to the point that the web loses its symmetry- the arrangement of its complexity.

And then that night comes.

The kind of night you begin with the resignation that it will be lost in the pile of countless evenings. But the right people are there, the right experience is there. And you fall asleep with the vague awareness of preemptive nostalgia.

It is not the adventure that settles it. It is the sense of unity. The feeling that you remembered how to spin, and that it is beautiful. And especially, it is beautiful because of the sadness it comes out of.

I do not yet have enough years to know if that is the soul of youth or simply the soul of life. Maybe I am not meant to pause. Maybe the need to spin is a reminder of how incredibly I am alive.

Maybe spiders have it figured out.

Chicken Little

It's uncanny what happens when the sun sets before you are prepared for the night. It's like dialing a number you have always dialed, only to forget the last digit.

And you sit there.

Staring at the phone, trying to figure out which passing thought that day was one too many. Which one pushed muscle memory over the edge.

That is winter to me.

For as long as I can remember, I have dreaded the changing of the clocks. It almost seems absurd how shocked I am when darkness comes too early. Because it always comes too early. Summer is a time of action, and winter one of introspection. I have come to name November and April the months of inertia. Just as I have fallen back onto the beaten path of movement and sun and skin, the quiet time comes.

I am more afraid of winter than summer.

And I know why. It is easy for me to pass by introspection. Summer comes with a built in auto-pilot of warmth and sunroofs and long drives and rock and roll. When winter comes, I don't have a choice. I have to face the paperwork that time has left on my desk. I have to acknowledge that six months ago I was living in New York city with a man, a job, and an entirely different life.

That I ran for the hills.

That I am alone now.

And more importantly, that I need to be alone now. That no soul on earth will ever make me happy as my own. That in being lost, I am in the right place. That this is the year of the three point turn, of making sure that my decisions are grounded in what I want at the core of myself.

That being said, I still miss the sun.

Back In

Well. Hello again.

 When I was 14, lost in Soul Coughing and having just heard the rumbling of Lovely's car down the street, I started For the Right Price.

 It is amazing how the most indelible experiences in your life are often done without much thought.

 Since I was here, I have loved and lost, settled in and been run out. And yet, lunchbox has always been here. A time capsule and a reminder that my youth is only my youth because I am looking backwards. I am sitting on my couch looking out over the river of my motherland. I have graduated from the north, failed in the iron jungle, learned and argued with the remnant of an LA lifestyle, and come running back home.

 Rambling hides memories from you. It creates a sort of stationary discontent that obscures the enjoyment of pausing. But the other day, I was driving to my original home with the windows down and everything came crashing back. The smell of fall. The lighting. Lovely's childhood home. Memories of youth before I went out to see the world for myself.

 I still don't know if I will stay.

There is an invisible blanket that covers this land. I had thought it was simply youth, but it is much more than that. I am afraid to leave just as much as I am afraid of getting stuck here. Of buying a house and getting a dog and starting a career and growing old by the river.

 I am just as lost as I have always been. But the unknown is simply the absence of hindsight. I'm not ready to know so much as to find out.

 And what better tool to bring with me than the Lunchbox.

High On Your Own Supply

Lunchbox has followed me everywhere.

Last night, in a moment of need to step away from quantifying loss for the end goal of a very expensive four year receipt, I pulled my words off the shelf and settled in to fifteen year young thoughts.

It seems that since the inception of for the right price, I have been trying to run.

Times are different. I succeeded in escaping, and escaping, and yet again breaking away. My desk has shifted from the chilly warm room of high school to the worn free thinking grain of the north. I have tried the soil in what is becoming a memory box full of addresses. I have a plan, I have the man behind the camera, I have won a game of hide and seek with quite a few ghosts.

And I am still running.

I know now that I am not trying to get anywhere. Right before the north, I spent a breath in Richmond, and Mealticket took me out for a goodbye dinner.

It's not the first, and it will never be the last. I said goodbye, and driving back in what always seems to be the pink evening before I depart, I felt a comfort.

Preparing to leave is no longer a strange feeling. It's what pulls everything together.

I just hope that one day, arriving will stop feeling so strange as well.

This is Bat Country

Summer is over, and the north is finally calling me back.

I am sitting at the window of an old church that has given over to the new loft of the one who loved rock and roll.

The city put me in a state of suspended motion, so I found a plane and came to the other side.

I got into a car with the one who loved rock and roll and we drove. I saw the desert for the first time, the mountains, the flatness until forever.

Through hours of this and appreciation for the warm strong coffee of truck stops with their sustainable community, I got somewhere.

The one who loved rock and roll represents everything I want to be able to walk away from, so he was naturally the perfect road partner.

That, and he and I have the beautiful addition to our friendship where we can be in the same place for hours and yet be light years in other directions.

It was difficult at times; there are moments I am not want to let go of.

We made it through the southwest and Roswell and pickup trucks and shooting guns in the country, and Vegas. We made it through Vegas.

We came back to this old loft and I was the first one awake from the afternoon great sleep. Sitting at the window I got that chest ache that seems to arrive at the end of everything great and the cusp of everything that is the next.

And the next is the north,

and bat country is the only way there this season.

La Ritournelle

To be completely honest, I thought this was going to be a lot more fun.

Move to the city. Work at the incredible internship. Figure out the roots of division III. Get away from everything you are

wrapped around.

I think I got away from everything a little too much.

The first few weeks, I assumed it was simply inertia. But as the summer sweated by I found myself alone and wandering the city. I evolved from solitary curiosity to the tightness in my chest that there was not a soul to turn to while waiting to cross the streets. I have spent too many aimless afternoons this summer walking towards and away from nothing while knowing that I was somehow ironically missing out.

What is worst is this feeling that I just cannot for the life of me clear my head. Last year I ran home and came back to the north having had a few breaths to myself.

Here, I am nothing but trapped. There are decisions to be made, contracts to write, glances to steal, moments to enjoy.

I cannot do anything unless I make sure I am where I need to be to ride the consequences down the road.

I am planning a grand escape. I hope it works.

At this point, I wouldn't be able to tell you if I tried.

Little Black Train

I am sitting in ethnography class listening to a division III radio documentary of a girl who is trying to understand the facets of her father’s death. Is it a mourning tradition for those who lose their father at Hampshire to eternally academically dwell? Are we simply trying to make sense of it?


My final project is forming around perceptions of miscarriage. I assumed it was about birth. I am realizing the opposite. Why am I focusing on the shock of death in the waiting expectation of life?

Experiencing awareness of mortality at Hampshire leads to a specific type of division III. All of us in the club, no matter what we say we are studying, no matter how random and scattered our projects may be from each other, are researching the exact same thing. We are all working on trying to learn how to understand. We cannot move on to the rest of our lives without this knowledge, and I suppose a year long educational thesis is a way to start.

We’re all at different stages. There’s Anna, who cannot get through two sentences on impending death without falling into pain and looking about desperately for somewhere to put the tears. John, who quietly keeps a photo of his father by his bed and doesn’t seem unsettled in these moments until you see his hands. There’s Josephine, whose temperament leaves her with a solemn generalized gaze to the floor and the exploration of pain through the running away from running away.

I look at them and I understand. You can’t know it till you know it. We are all viciously, resentfully, thankfully bonded together by our collective grasps in the dark to not let our pain obscure our lives. Our division III’s are part of that.

I suppose the time has come to discover where I stand.

Shift

I distinctly remember one sunny afternoon when my home still consisted of Rosecroft.

I had wandered into my mothers room as one is want to do when taking a stroll around the house to look at the silence. I remember walking up next to my mother's dressing table where the sun hit the carpet and reaching up to measure the height of the ledge compared to myself. With my arm holding onto the wood that had my mother's touch etched into it, I twisted the rest of myself to look at the full length mirror I was also standing in front of.

I remember peering into my reflection.

I remember sighing in a way that no youth should have knowledge of.

I remember knowing that this is what it meant to be three years old.

I remember that I already missed it.

From the moment my growth chart jumped off the lines, I had been given a vantage pointed promise. Where my father lifted me up is where I would one day stare at eye level. Where my mother stood towering above me, I was promised the possibility of gazing down at the top of her head.

I am sitting here, sprawled five foot ten legged across a chair and a desk.

I am twenty-one and a half years old.

and I will never for the rest of my life forget that appreciation my reflection held in being nothing but young. I knew that I would never have this vantage point again, and I cherished having the stray wisps of hair on my as per usual unkempt head barely reaching the ledge of the desk that my mother sat at every morning in the dark.

It hits me more often than it should. Sitting in a coffee shop on a Thursday afternoon reading and once again positioned in the spot where the sun hits the floor, I already miss it.

Driving down an unknown country road with the sun on my face listening to rock and roll to clear my head of young worries, I already miss it.

Perhaps this is why I love the sun. It has been my constant companion in these silent moments of mourning what I have not yet lost.

I suppose it wouldn't have it any other way.