Rant and Ramble

oh, the things we take for granted. i eat chili out of a can, and i could tell you where not a single of its ingredients came from, or where they were processed, or even how long that can has been sitting on my shelf. i don't know where my non-stick pot was made, or how it is made non-stick, or by what method the electricity is made that heats my stove. i don't know where or how the metal was mined to make it, how it knows to turn to 350? and stop, or how long it has been in this house. i don't know when the house was built, or who designed it, or whether behind the plaster lurks cinderblock, brick, or stone. i don't know when the third story was added to the rest, or if all the houses on the block rose at the same time or singly. i don't know what kinds of trees stood here before my house, or what kind of trees were felled to build it. i know that my water comes from the schuylkill and the delaware, but i don't know where it is treated, or what my pipes are made of, or how the water is forced from river to toilet and back. i don't know what fish would be swimming there if our filth hadn't killed them. i don't know how to make pickles or mayonnaise or glass jars, couldn't sew a simple shirt unless my life depended on it, and even then the seam probably wouldn't hold. i don't know how to start a fire without kerosene and matches both. i can't skin anything, or even it seems get a tomato plant to grow in the sun. i wouldn't be able to find my way out of anywhere by following the shadows or the stars or the moss on a tree.

how can i be twenty years old in the richest country in the world, and still be completely and utterly helpless?

i can't tell the weather in this city, with no waves to gauge the color of the sky, no sliding ratio of water to salt in the air.

cherries in my mouth; smooth, cool roundness against the salt of my lips. i hold each one just behind my teeth, sucking, until it feels warm again and the skin splits itself open from the pressure, letting sweet cold juices coat the roof of my mouth. the pit slips out, a hard grain of pragmatism in the midst of all this glory.

through the window comes a cool breeze that makes me glad to be naked and wishing i could go walk through some meadow and feel the wind all through me, but then a motorcycle rips by loud and gutteral, louder than i can imagine one sound being. at night the trucks rumble so that you can't hear the movie playing or the sound of his voice.

i feel trapped here, somehow moreso now that i know i'm leaving. i'm caged in this room, this house, this city. i want real trees and clean water, i want shoulders that ache and are strong from hard work done every day. this litany of desire i've repeated to myself so many times i can hardly believe it hasn't come true just from pure needing. but i'm still here, caked in frustration and occasional anger, sliding down steep hills of unexpected joy. i'm deep in love, a love that has been truer than anything i've ever known and one which i'm about to let fend for itself for a year while i traipse all over the goddamned world because i can't stand this place or who i've become in it. i am not the girl he fell in love with a year and a half ago, and it is testament to his faith in me and love and life that he didn't leave me for it. that he came over last night in the middle of the thunderstorm to soothe my unreasoning tantrum and fall asleep beside me just because i needed it. i have abused his love, i know it, forced him away to prove he'd come back, pretended callous pride in the gazes i gather from other men. and after all this, i'm leaving. i imagine he knows that i'd be gone months ago if not for the solace of his eyes, a balm that provided both capability and reason to stay. he would be enough to keep me here indefinitely if i thought i could survive it, but i can't take another winter in this city that tries to pretend that life doesn't change despite three feet of snow. we aren't meant to trump to class and work and the grocery store when the world itself has burrowed down and wrapped itself in sleep. the seasons show themselves sharply here but we are expected to ignore them. what i want is a life that understands the difference between autumn and spring.

anger sweeps in and wipes me away, so sudden i don't even taste it before i find my jaw clenched and my fingernails drilling dark crescents into my palms. i want to throw the phone across the room; i picture it shattering, the same way that later i imagine the sound of glass breaking and the blood that would pool on the floor if i kicked through my mirror. a heartbeat, and then sorrow cascades through me and i weep soundlessly, choking on air. i find three roaches in my bathtub when i fill my water bottle because the sink is too full of dishes to fit anything beneath the faucet, and i imagine a line of flames against the summer skyline. in between, i read a good book and feel soft and safe and calm, i delight in a thunderstorm and the rhythmic turning of the fan. i had an utterly wonderful weekend and now i am losing my mind.

i'm vaguely of the notion that the things i don't write down don't really exist. if i fail to record accurately the glint of sunlight off the delaware and the way it shimmered the trees, the swift darting minnows around my toes, the ache in my shoulders this morning and the fact that jason's fantastic great-aunt and i have the same watch, if i don't capture my first fireflies and the scratch of hotel sheets and the eight o'clock light turning the grass a lurid, livid green, then maybe it never happened and even though i fell in love with jason's whole family and the high wooded edges of northeaster pa, maybe its just one more day.

likewise and reciprocal, maybe if i don't mention how i'm leaving in a month, leaving again, how i'm terrified and torn, or if i omit the dull scent of regret that hangs all over everything like a reoccuring dream, if i describe the bird that careened down a pathway with most of a sandwich in its ridiculous tiny beak but not the way i felt when i got home to find my tomatoes dead, if i catalogue my joys but disregard my jagged fear, maybe i'm really okay, in this city, in this skin.

morning, sleep and sweat coat me like some ugly oil paint, too long to dry and letting my colors smear. i dreamt last night of love, a sitcom scene in a coffeeshop while he ordered bannana bread and i flirted clumsily. there are echoes of his laughter in my mind yet, though he wasn't anyone i really know. and now, the chaos of my room makes me edgy and angry, this house in its filth and mice and mold, i want to be gone from here and i'm terrified of leaving. the ivy in the corner makes me smile, its leaves falling down like tousled hair, leaning towards the light. i'm tired.

i'm halfway across the room, halfway dressed, pants in one hand, and the final bars of rock paper scissors tumble right into the opening notes of sorry i am, and suddenly i shuttered by grief, thrown against the bed, gasping. i barely catch my breath before cocoon begins and grey follows hard upon.

what am i supposed to do in the face of that?

i'm tired, heavy tired. i blame the sunrise, bland as it was, and i suppose the entire night that preceded it. the white glowing screen and the gradually lightening sky, the sticky roof and the stickycool breeze that blew across it. the thick misty skyline, city hall phantoming itself away as wave after anticlimactic wave of beige and grey filtered weakly through to herald the dawn. i blame the poems tumbling abortively out of my mind all morning, my total lack of food eaten today (with the exemption of my ham sandwich), and also my total dehydration. i blame the long and stumbling conversation that wound itself through the night, its long silences, its deep necessity, its acknowledgement. i blame - or perhaps the correct verb here, and all along, is credit - i credit the releasing of a sorrow carried so long i thought i'd made it part of myself, and perhaps the right word is thank, after all. i thank the long, warm night and the humble dawn, the renewed comfort of friendship that had been strained to the point of breaking, to the point of sharp edges and downcast eyes. i thank the clear-eyed gaze of honesty. i thank you, because this tired has, for once, a quiet soul beneath.

there was more, but i've lost it in the heat and my thirst that can't seem to be quenched.

happy birthday, love.

the sun set like peach sorbet, a soft contrast to the bass that throbbed insistantly, overpowering my heatbeat and leaving me gasping, gasping when it paused between songs and for effect. when ed and the boys finally came out, the crowd surged up, a writhing, screaming mass of good ole boys and their girlfriends, here for a rock concert scheduled between the demolition derby and the tractor pull. three rows ahead of us, two guys held their fists up almost the whole show, gyrating and headbanging and generally making me smile. after a few songs, the sun finally gave up the act and let darkness come home; a breeze picked up and sent us the scent of smoke machines, livestock, and sweat. when they left the stage, the crowd in the bandstand stomped their feet and the rest of us screamed and screamed until they came back out. ed sang a solo, acoustic overcome, which would have been plenty, but then they came out for another set, four more songs, beautiful. i fell asleep smiling during the car ride home, as my heart slowly regained control of its rhythms and my mind stopped soaring with his voice.

like the wedding dress she thought she'd have when we were nine, layers and layers of gauze wisping against each other and away, the clouds hover closely around the sun. ethereal but enough to create a cool shadow that stretches across the city, and the wind throws leaves and litter as trees toss their heads. my hair has curled all out of control today, falling into my face, tickling my neck. the library is cool and quiet, as libraries have a responsibility to be, and even the flourescent light seems friendly. the muted rumble of innumerable fingers on innumerable keys floats over the murmer of soft voices and the whisk of pages turned. i feel quiet and calm and happy, and will go swimming as soon as jason gets out of class and can let me into my house. unfortunate to leave my keys in California, but worse things have happened to me and airplanes, so i don't mind.

the kitten keeps trying to nurse from the pile of laundry on my bed. she's been eating solid kitten food for at least as long as i've been home, but she was taken from her momma too early and every so often she tries to suckle on my finger or some large, soft object - like the laundry. it makes me want to cry, watching her little blissed out face so futile.

she was beautiful. the wedding went like magic, rose petals and candles and sparking sunshine. as she started the slow walk down the aisle, i started to cry, and i didn't really stop until after their first dance. she's married. i was so flustered, i don't think i finished a complete sentence with anyone i spoke to; i know i could barely keep eye contact with even my mother, even silke herself, my mind and heart were so frantically looking for a place to rest. married. even now, i can barely wrap my brain around it. i've thought myself loved more than once, and certainly had a white-flowered daydream or two, but married? truly, really, legally married? it blows me away. congratulations, my darling. may you bring each other joy.

out the righthand window, there is only the rippling of rainhungry hills; on the left, only the ceaseless rippling of the sea, a pale horizon girdling each. we bank, and the beach pulls itself into view, whirring behind the propellors, blurring boundaries between ocean and land, just as we refuse the bounding of gravity and sky. beside me, a man flutters his wide, wrinkled hands in the small, helpless movements of age. i feel sure that once he held a newborn child in those hands, guided a dun horse over a hill, held a thoughtful pen and wrote words of truth. he strikes me as noble, and quenches a longheld thirst in me by simply nodding, smiling at the name of my hometown.

the long flight over the country bores me by now. i close the window and watch the inflight movie, read a book, only occasionally peek out to see great fluffly clouds borne by the same wind as i. from san fransisco to home though, i am avid at the window. when we first sweep over the ocean, something in me coils and unclenches. no matter how far away you are, the ocean never gets smaller. houses and boats and even the waves shrink to nothing, but the ocean gapes wide and undeterred, returns always to memory in the crashing glory of its truth. i love this place. i love its rocks and its trees, i love when we circle to land and i can point out my personal landmarks - there's the baseball field, there's morgan's, there's pebble beach greening itself in the fitful sun. green.

our green is different from philadelphia's. there is green there, yes, more than expected, but it has some quality of the forced to it, some selfconsciousness born of the steel and cement. the green of the pennsylvania countryside is lavish, lewd almost, dripping shades and shadows. here, the scrub oaks and the pine trees know their place. they've grown in the comfort of the fog and the cycles of waves, and monarchs, and wildfires.

my dress, also, is green, iridescent falling to pink. we have a cake, and chairs and candles and the invitations have been delivered and the flowers will be bought tomorrow. we went to pick up her dress today, her gown, and lord, but she'll be beautiful. i met the lucky man yesterday. we eyed each other somewhat warily but got along well. oh, my darling girl, about to be married.