“Police! Thieves! Back you devils! Police! Thieves!”

I recognized the quavering shouts in the hall as belonging to the tenant in apartment #8, the only other apartment in my hall. I didn’t even flinch. This tenant, John Moses (who everyone just referred to by his last name), seemed as old as the apartment building himself, but was actually about ninety, a tiny old man smelled like dust and cigarette ash, like musty stacks of newspaper. His hair looked like handfuls of cobwebs, and he always wore the same ancient Reed College sweatshirt, and old dirty Levi’s with a black fine tooth comb peeking out of the back pocket.

Half-awake on a Wednesday morning, in the middle of a lackluster March, I slid my back down the porcelain edge of the clawfoot tub in my apartment until half my face was submersed in the now tepid bathwater, lilac and geranium scented soap floating at the other end of the tub, causing a layer of filmy suds to slide over the surface of the water, my ears submerged to muffle the noise. Staring out the bathroom window, I could only see the shabby branches of the cottonwood tree after sliding down so far – I could no longer see the tops of the apartment buildings, the baseball field, the grocery stores, the music venues, or the Fremont Bridge which leads travelers north across the river. I still woke at eight thirty every morning, even though I quit setting my alarm. I wondered how many people had stared at that tree from this exact spot, in this apartment building that was once a boarding house. I wondered if boarders would stare through that window with its crooked windowsill, and dark wood starting to splinter and bubble. I imagined, as I had so many times before, that I didn’t live in this apartment, but that I was just staying a night in the boarding house, some other winter, in some other year, maybe 1897, right after the building was built. I closed my eyes, and my pockets were full of blueberries and tobacco, I played banjo in a band for a circus, I was waiting for the next train south, and I would soon be gone, eating cherry pie, wearing handmade poplin dresses and a pair of old lace up boots, borrowed from my brother who had outgrown them.

“Commie bastards, eh all of you…pinkos!” I heard Moses muttering over the sounds of doors slamming. I hear my doorknob being rattled, but was in the habit of locking the door always, just for occasions like this, when Moses forgot whose apartment was whose.

I didn’t think about my full voicemail box as I lay in the tub; I didn’t think about all the messages from my friends, wondering why I was missing our weekly routine outings, I didn’t think about messages from my dad, wondering why I hadn’t answered his emails, I didn’t think about the calls from my boss, the messages he would leave that were full of words that would render concern, but were spoken in a tone that sounded accusatory – “I hope you feel well enough to return to work soon…We really need you back.”

With my eyes closed, I couldn’t even see the tiny green tendrils sprouting on the branches of the cottonwood tree, the tender buds forming on the branches – the first sign that warm weather would soon burn away the winter, dissolve the clouds that bore rain on the city, that bore rain on the shoulders of my coat, on the top of my hat for the last six months. The apartment I moved in to in the winter, felt less cozy by early spring. The friendships I formed with my neighbors and people in the neighborhood felt less delightful but more confining, like responsibilities. Weekly events, nights out, movie and Thai food nights, craft nights, I began to dread them all; I would wince whenever someone sarcastically asked if I couldn’t come because I had a headache – not because I felt bad or because I had a headache, but because it meant that my excuse had been figured out, thus it wouldn’t work anymore. I began calling in sick to work, mostly because I hated the work but was too scared to actually quit. In some way, I knew that this excuse would be exhausted, and maybe I really wanted to quit, but didn’t know how. Even the walls in my apartment, once sea green-blue looked gray, and as I lay in bed at night, the sounds of the heater, the city train sliding down its tracks, the water dripping in the bathroom, all these noises seemed horrendously loud and jarring, filling the tiny space of my studio apartment even more, as I shivered in my tangerine sheets, listening to the rain on the roof, as if I could hear every drop.

Climbing out of the tub, reaching for my scratchy yellow towel, I looked at the imprints my wet feet left on the cream mat outside my tub, perfect outlines of tiny feet. I heard a loud rattling of keys and a tenuous guffaw from the hall, so I knew that Moses had found his way into his apartment. All those days, in that winter, where I called in sick and couldn’t even motivate myself to read a book, I would just float in my apartment, laying in one place to another – from the bath to the couch, still in a towel, or back into bed, to look through some old magazine or journal I’d written. Usually, I would make a cup of black tea, sweeten it with sugar, and sit on the front stoop, a little shelter outside from the rain, and smoke a cigarette. I don’t know how long Moses had been smoking cigarettes, but when I think about it, I wonder if it was more than fifty years. Our cigarette breaks often coordinated. My interactions with Moses were varied at first: when I first moved in, if I asked him a question, he would crane his neck towards me, the white prickly hairs on the back of his neck looking like the gruff of an old hound; his eyes were a dull blue, and I knew that he was only pretending to listen, that I wasn’t speaking loud enough for him to hear. He did this with other people too, at the coffee shop around the corner, where they usually let him eat for free. I wished I could ignore people like he did, sometimes, just let their words pass by my ears, nod, and then be done. Once I became more familiar to Moses, he would speak to me more often. When he saw my septum piercing, he squinted his eyes, pursed his lips and said, “You look like a prize bull.” Other times he would say, “I feel bad for you. You’ve got a crush on me and I’m too old for you.” Another time, I opened a door for him and he said, “You’re just like every other woman I know, taking charge! I won’t have it!” Occasionally I would just pass him in the coffee shop or on the apartment stairs and ask how he was. Sometimes he would tell me to “mind my own damn business,” another time he said something like, “Oh, just thinking back on my past affairs. Some lovely, some I’d care to forget. You know how that goes, you’ve been around the block a few times, I’m sure.” My landlord told me once that Moses was a friend of her father’s from college, and that they had fought in World War Two together, and Moses later had fought in Korea. I never knew for sure, but I’d heard that they didn’t charge him rent to live in that apartment anymore.

I sighed and looked around my apartment, #7 – jars half full of water, chipped mugs, mismatched saucers cluttering my desk and table; knitting projects, tangles of yarn, needles and fabric; piles of clothes – clean, dirty, needing to be hung up, needing to be folded, needing to be washed; crumbs on the counter, stacks of pans in the dishes with dried on food that would never come off. I sat and leaned my head back against the wall, regarding all these things with the same apathy as everything else.

*

“There aren’t any fruit trees in this city,” I had said, looking over at Moses, whose small figure made the weather battered plastic lawn chair look large, months earlier, sometime in January. As I took a sip of tea, much too hot, I watched his reaction to this – he wrinkled his nose, furrowed his brows and looked to the side, as if it took more time for my words to find meaning as they passed from his ears into his mind. I exhaled a slow, smoky breath wishing my mouth was full of the taste of oranges not cigarettes. I remembered when I lived with my mother in the Florida Keys, in a small blue house. I hardly remember the house, I was seven when we moved away, but I remember my mother lifting me up and walking around with me on her shoulders, her curly black hair tickling my thick legs as we would walk under the two blood orange and one lemon and one lime tree that grew under the webs of power lines, between the telephone poles, the only trees in our tiny yard. I stretched to reach the oranges, then handed them to my mother, who would stuff them into any pockets she had on her dress or sweatshirt. Then I would sit on the concrete patio and peel orange after orange, lime after lime while my mother read Ramona Quimby books to me. My fingers would be stained from the scent and color of the rinds of the fruit, punky fragrant pieces shoved under my fingernails, pieces of dark blood orange slices scattered around.

As I sat on the porch stairs, Moses in his plastic throne, I eyed my cigarette, and felt how acrid it made my inhale, how much tighter my chest was, and I wished I were seven and covered with sticky citrus juice. I wished I were anywhere that wasn’t my apartment, my neighborhood, the coffee shop, the bar, or a friend’s house. I wished I was pulling apart a blood orange, warm from the sun; I wished that my mom laying in the grass next to me, wearing her favorite green blouse, asleep with her book covering her face from the light and the sky. I remember the afternoon I tried to climb the tree by myself, but tumbled out of the tree, unable to capture any of the pulpy treasures hanging from the end of the branches. I sat with my legs straight out in front of me, puffing with tears, rubbing the scratches on my face and arms. “Oh, you have a thicker skin than that, you’re okay,” my mother had said, both comforting and scolding, as she knelt to wipe my arm with a dishtowel in our dark kitchen. I still wonder how thick my skin is supposed to be.

“Ah, fruit trees!” Moses exclaimed, finally realizing what I had said.

“Those bastards. When I was…” he paused to tilt his head away from me, looking at me with one quavering eye, that seemed to be hiding a wink, “…a much younger, more attractive man, if you can imagine that, I was chasing this girl who’s father had a plum orchard. This was years ago, when I lived in Minnesota. A plum orchard. Christ. I worked there a summer, thinking I could woo this girl. Well, those trees were more trouble than it was worth – trimming, picking, raking. It was a hassle,” he particularly emphasized the word hassle, nearly shouting the word.

“A storm came through that summer, a wind storm, you know like sometimes happen here. Well those trees have shallow roots, but wide. One got blown over, then a whole bunch of others when with them. The thing about those fruit trees is that their tiniest roots held on the hardest. Once the big roots broke loose, well they were done for. But I could hear the tiny crackles of the..the little roots…the littlest ones…holding on to the earth as long as they could. Ah well. That storm ended my summer work. I probably spend the rest of August drinking whiskey or some other rascaly business. But you know nothing about that do you?” he turned his face towards me, mustache bristling with a smile, saying “do you” less as a question, but a statement. Whenever he spoke, his voice would get quiet and then loud, oddly emphasizing words in some way I could never quite decipher. Phrases of words would be spoken simply, phrases of words would be stuttered, fumbled with, and then one word shouted. Maybe it wasn’t intended to be meaningful. I asked him what happened to the girl he was trying to woo.

“Well, being the cantankerous hooligan I was…” Moses chuckled, “well, being the cantankerous hooligan I am, I found something or someone else to chase. She got married or something, had a slew of kids. I can’t remember,” and he took another shaky drag of his cigarette.

Running my tongue around on the insides of my cheek, trying to wash out the taste of my cigarette, I looked down the stairs at the street, at the empty city train curving up the hill, at the scraggly trees planted by the city on the sidewalk, their trunks so thing I could fit both hands around them. “Well, I wish we could have some plum trees around here. Or oranges. Or anything other than this weather.”

“Fruit trees, eh. Well, I don’t know about that. Won’t grow up here. But this weather…well I’ve been here for quite a few winters, and the thing about the weather here, in eh…the weather here in…” Moses looked down into his cup of coffee for a moment, his face cloudy with irritation, “Portland. The thing about the weather here in the winters in Portland, is that it doesn’t keep any secrets from us. Not one,” he said, pushing himself slowly up and out of the chair. I stood, seeing tiny splashes on the thin white paper of my cigarette, feeling drops my eyelashes and pulled the door open for Moses, who shuffled inside, dwarfed by puffy blue jacket. I wondered what sort of secrets wintery Portland had, what sort of secrets the rainy weather wasn’t keeping. I wondered if this too, like Moses’s emphasized words, had meaning or not.

*

Maybe I was tired of staring at the mess of my apartment, or I realized I hadn’t left the tiny place in three days. When I looked out the window in my bedroom, the one that was only three feet wide, but six feet tall, white paint chipping of the frame, I saw that it wasn’t raining – or at least wasn’t raining yet. The sidewalk was wet, the trees were dark and wet, the sky bright, not in a sunny way, but only because of the thick, gray clouds, which somehow reflected light. I got dressed and pulled on some boots, my old gray wool coat, a thin blue scarf my best friend sent me from Colorado after she moved there, and decided to go outside, on a walk, to get air, any of those things people say are good to do - not even taking a bag, or my wallet, or any cash, just a cigarette I’d rolled dangling from my lips.

I stopped on the front porch, cupping my hand to light my cigarette. It still wasn’t raining, but drops of water were splashing down from the eaves. Moses was sitting in his usual perch, same puffy blue coat, and a gray stocking cap, folded over twice. I glanced over to see what the paper was that he was holding to read – I think it was #4’s electric bill. If Moses wasn’t re-reading Nietzsche essays or War and Peace, he would read our mail. Moses had gotten better about taking mail that wasn’t his, but usually I would find my letters and bills opened, re-folded, then tucked under my door. He nodded at me, smiling with his old teeth under his bristly mustache. I folded my lips upward into a return smile, and noticed his eyes seemed sharper, less dull, like shards of old blue glass bottles. As I padded down the twelve dirty cement stairs, under the brick arch, landing on the sidewalk and turning to the north, a small fuzzy object was caught in my periphery, nesting in one of the scraggly sidewalk trees. Pausing, then walking closer, I saw a tiny Clementine orange, peeled, fragrant and spicy, wet from the earlier rain shower tucked between two twiggy branches. Looking at the two other trees on the block, I saw tiny citrus gems placed between the other branches. I turned, stood under the arch which had our apartment building’s name painted across it in scrolling hand painted letters, cupping the tiny fruit in the palm of my hand, wondering if Moses’s fingers were stained from the color and scent of the orange peel. Moses snuffed out his cigarette. As he stood I saw how hunched he was, how his sitting posture and standing posture were not so different. He hunched down slightly and pointed his finger at me. I thought I saw his mustache twitch, like it did when he smiled or winked, and then he turned and began fumbling with his keys. Pulling the main door open, I saw the back of his hat tilt upward as he surveyed the steep stairs ahead of him. Grabbing onto the handrail, I heard him grumble to himself, as I had heard him say so many times before as he fought his way up those stairs, “Dammit, Moses! Get a hold of yourself. Keep it together

laundry

i spin this line - weave this
string, used to pin my words -
like soaked linens to dry.
and the words, as they hang
become lighter from the sun
or
battered
by the wind.
you collect them,
unpin them from the twine,
and choose to fold them
or wash them again yourself.
but since you do this
in silence
the line sways empty,
and emptier still;
i don't stop spinning it.


wednesday

and so,
another glass of wine
or another mile away
your hands clench,
so i know where you think it's going.

slow trains
thunder even more slowly in Indian summer,
even more slowly in the heat.


this heat is different
dry, not thick or musky
like it was in your cold bedroom
walls painted like crepe paper.

it was warm in that room too,
the air smelled the same
but felt different as i pulled it inside me,
dense, peppery dew.

tonight, or late afternoon,
it could smell like november.
if i closed my eyes
i could still see highway twenty nine


but i don't

because one time, i think you told me,
asleep in your twin bed
by the broken heater
which sparked- your arm covering my head

that no one else would ever
love me like you did.
i think of those words, wild and sweet,
now
and understand in a way
so bittersweetly profound.

i hope the grapes keep turning,
but for reasons other than they sound
early ripening to create a coppery berry liquid,


if someone else "loves" me like you did
i promise
it won't be about wine and miles
it will be about trains and heat.

i feel that, to some extent, as an adult i can put myself in situations and places to gain experience i need, to refine myself, to polish myself, to work out flaws and become stronger and have the important experiences we need to grow up, as grown ups.

it's not the same with childhood. childhood is shorter, and those formative experiences - silly journaling, coloring, summer classes, swim lessons, camping, learning that the world is grand and big and full of places and opportunities - these aren't things i had as a child, and aren't things i could have learned then, and are things i don't even realize fully that i need to learn now.

a different variety and set of objects are framing my periphery. things i used to worry about, people i disliked, thoughts i used to think, they all seem different. the worries i have are legitimate - about work, about school, about writing. i began this year taking a writing class with the mindset that i was a reader, not a writer, and now i'm thinking with some longing about getting even an article or essay published.

it's the small things like hanging up my clothes that have begun to derail -- it's the weekends i'm entirely alone that i manage to keep it together, it's the weekends that i'm entirely alone i have enough time to see the cracks in my own thinking.

camera lenses, refraction, sheer cream fabric, plants in pots, tea in cups, making better breakfast, the good bread, the coconut oolong, a glass of wine while homeworking, a new neighbor, and old friend, and those who have slipped out off my sight...these are as simple as it's become

She’s going to do the earring thing.

As if happening upon Taylor wouldn’t have been enough of a fiasco, I have to do it when she’s on a fucking date. Suddenly I’m remembering all those songs I can’t listen to anymore because of her, how I can’t smell jasmine or even think about pancakes on a Sunday morning while wrapped in blue bed-sheets without a sentimental panic, how my lampshade still has her grandmother’s old broach pinned to it from when she was undressing and stuck it on there so she wouldn’t forget it. Now it makes this strange abstract pattern on my wall whenever I turn on the lamp to read by its half-light.
It’s funny, of all the places I’ve avoided – the farmer’s market, the Crow Bar, our favorite coffee shop on 19th, not just those places but whole neighborhoods and streets – to run into her here, eating Vietnamese noodles, with some curly haired man that is wearing tight gray jeans and some big gaudy turquoise ring on his finger. Well, I’ve imagined this happening, dreaded seeing her and having to face her with those green eyes, with those red spots in her left eye that always reassured me that she was so unique, but I can’t even figure out how to handle this – it seems to be worse than any encounter I could have imagined at the market. I imagined we would have had to ask each other blank, not too personal questions about how we’ve been living, how life is since we’ve been apart for the last six months. I could handle that. We would distractedly act like we’re selecting the ripest mangos or something. We would pick up and softly squeeze the fruits in their skins, poking them to see if they are soft, as I would pretend that I haven’t missed her, that I’ve been inspired and productive with my sculpture, that her broach, shaped like a bee with its opaque agate in the middle isn’t still pinned to my lamp as if she were going to wake up tomorrow, give me a side smile, embarrassed that she’s forgotten it for so long and pin it onto her scarf.

She looks good today, but I’ve seen that green dress before, I’ve even seen her wear it with that black cardigan. I know she is going to do the earring thing with this guy. I’m sure this guy will be a sucker for it. She takes her long red sideswept bangs in her palm, this tress of hair that has a perfect wave to frame her face, but is horribly dry at the ends, and smoothes it aside, then she pulls tenderly at her long earrings – the silver ones with cloudy amethysts – she always wears them. For some reason, as she does this, her neck looks fucking perfect, even her ears look fucking perfect, and it does this thing, or at least to me, that makes you think she’s the craziest, most beautifully flawed, best woman imaginable. She’s doing it now: the hair smoothing. I should walk over there, walk to the restroom, maybe she’ll see me, maybe she’ll turn her short dark eyelashes towards me and dump whatever hipster fuck she’s with.
But as I’m watching her, she’s doing the clever earring tug, this perfect endearing fidget, I can’t help but watch this whole seduction trick unfold but only see her canvas bag with the calla lily print on it, and those books peeking out the top that she would carry around but never actually read. I see how she’s pursing her lips ever so slightly as he speaks, laughing as if she’s interested – that laugh that rings tinny when disingenuous – I heard it when she met my friends, and seemed completely at ease, until she told me later that they lacked intellectual capacities, that one of them clearly doesn’t understand the subtleties of semiotics or something.

For some reason now, I think I have seen that earring tug exactly one too many times to be charmed by it again. And for some reason now, I don’t know if this realization or missing her is the greater loss.

He sits inside the bar, pulling at his top lip with this finger and thumb, watching her cross the street – seeing the new darkness that now exists at five in the evening, seeing only sheets of rain, a light gray coat, edges of her dress, her brown boots with the broken buckles. She has on her orange knit slouchy hat, always that hat which sat back on her head and revealed only the wet ends of her straw hair. He knows that dress is really a summer dress, remembers how he could see the outline of her legs through it when August light pushed through the sheer cream fabric with its red and brown round design, how that dress smelled faintly like clementine oranges, citrusy and peppery when she wore it, when she sweat in it in the summer – when they would ride their bikes to the river or the market for peaches to can. He sits with some apathetic irritation, watching her look up and down the street, back and forth at the traffic signal that forbids her to cross the completely clear two-lane street that would lead her across 42nd and into the bar. “She’s prolonging it,” he thinks, looking at the scratches in the old glossy wood of the table, looking at words people carved after he takes an amber swallow of his pint. He knows that she wasn’t prolonging it – not consciously at least, because her inability to jaywalk had bothered him for as long as they had been seeing each other – three or for months. It bothered him in the way that some innocent quirk or habit bothers anyone about the other – it’s minimal and personal, so to bring it up would seem aggressive and hurtful, like shaming someone for the way they hold their fork or for the way they discreetly play air guitar. He didn’t say anything, but it bothered him. He didn’t know why, but it bothered him.
He had chosen this bar because it seemed to be a safe middle ground: not the comfortable dark, red-and-green striped booths of his favorite pub where he was a regular, because it would make her uncomfortable; yet he couldn’t choose some hip new place because that idea seemed terrifying and required too much effort. Thus, he settled for the Moon and Sixpence – quiet enough, enough things hanging on the wall to look at aimlessly, enough noise to sink into his ears if she got drunk and started talking and talking, close enough to home to stumble, in case he did.
She walks in, through the oversized red door that dwarfs her as she passes through it, and stops to unwrap the coral scarf from around her neck, twisting both the scarf and her neck in strange opposite directions so she can look around. Not seeing him, she walks past the three middle booths to the back, and into the bathroom. He watches her from the corner booth on the left, by the window, where she walks straight past him, still soggy in her coat from the late November rain. He sees her dress, peeking out from the bottom of her coat, and that the fabric is soaked through, and he knows that she won’t smell of spicy tangerines, warm sun, bike rides, grapes stems and peach pits this time in that dress – that the dress will feel different now that she is wearing it over her rough winter skin. He knows that she will smell like she has just showered – which means that she will smell faintly of dampness and the lingering scent of pear shampoo, vanilla lotion and the talc-y smell of deodorant. Mostly, he will just remember that she smells like wet hair and cigarettes in the winter. He takes her overlooking him as some last and final sign that clearly this whole thing hasn’t been working, as though people meant to be together should be able to recognize and find each other in any setting, in different lifetimes, bodies, states, times. By this point, the beer only has one last warm sip, and he doesn’t even feel the need to chide himself for such blatant romanticism. I just don’t have it in me, he thinks.
She’s been in the bathroom forever, he thinks. She is prolonging it.

The bartender keeps serving drinks and running tabs not as if she is working, but as if she is swaying to some constant wind that is pushing her from one motion to another. Seamlessly she reaches over to turn up the stereo and some song that he remembers from college starts up, and it sounds to him like the noise blushing would make- not embarrassed blushing, but good-feeling blushing – a haze in the face, a slow mellow warm that sunk down to his feet, so that he finds his broken-in old brown oxford shoes silently keeping rhythm in slow waltz time to the soft thump of the drums. He recognizes some of the lyrics from this song that he remembered listening to years ago, back from before the singer had killed himself. He remembers the song carries itself, even though the singer’s voice is something that could either astound you, or cross over your ears without forging its way in – depending on who you were. He leans back in the booth, rests his head against the back of it, but to the side so that he is still looking at the street she crossed, at the stop sign, at the traffic light, at the empty parking lot of the beauty school, which is as far as he can see in the foggy downpour.
She finally sees him, still in his big khaki coat and rough darkest blue sweater, his hand brushing through his ginger beard, little lines forming around his eyes as if they had been drawn in pencil and then erased. She comes over and pulls herself into the booth across from him, slides across the black plastic leather, which squeaks awkwardly as her soaking wet coat slides across it.
He looks over without remembering to tell his mouth to tell a smile, he sees her and thinks that he’ll always remember that she was pretty, even if he just remembers that hat, those spectacularly big eyes and black glasses. Pretty, I can’t even think of a better adjective, he thinks with some unfounded dissatisfaction – he doesn’t even know if he’s dissatisfied with himself or her. The line “Got me singing along with some half-hearted victory song,” and the guitar beats that follow fall into his ears from the song that is almost ending, and the line resonates perfectly- at least in his mind- as they sit, and stare at each other, knowing that they don’t even need to say what they thought they needed to say, knowing that Portland in winter is a strange, if somewhat rhythmic existence.

the thing about this weather in portland oregon, the rain and completely gray canopy is that the weather doesn't seem like its up there, happening in the sky it's not something that you can look up at and observe but feel detached from, like the great uncontrollable force it is, as it rolls through. the weather in portland isn't detached, it's on your shoulders and in your eyes. it covers your clothes, it covers your feet, it changes your face. it's oppressive, part of what you breathe, part of what you think.

and then it clears


and when it clears i dont know what to think, because i'm used to having this thing that really is just precipitation and clouds on my shoulders above my coat. but on days where i have no need for a coat and don't have to wear heavy boots, it feels like all i want to do is sit and pull every breath into my chest and feel my chest expand fully - deeply - and wide across because i am unencumbered by the atmosphere, which shouldn't have been my responsibility in the first place.

the ancient man that lives across the hall and i sat on the porch, and listening to the rhythm of the city train cross on schedule, he said to me, "well that's the thing about portland in the dead of winter...it doesn't keep any secrets from us, does it?"

then we saw the tiny drops of rain on our cigarettes, and shuffled inside.

i just feel inextricably strange tonight. maybe the word is solitary. maybe it’s because the apartment across the hall is empty. maybe its because i feel like i can’t keep up in conversation, and then the words im typing can’t keep up with me. the whole thing – whatever it is, feels very fragile. sometimes when I feel like this, or the other night, when I half climbed half fell out of bed, partially drunk, partially hysterical full of dizzying thoughts, Iisit and watch the Fremont bridge from my apartment, across the city. seeing the diminished frequency of cars as they pass the upper and lower decks calms me, as though the whole city is falling asleep, or is feeling the same, or hopefully, not feeling the same at all. i dont know why this physical structure, with its two red lights blinking in perfect time makes me feel calm, or rights my mind. sometimes i pacify myself with cigarettes, but hate the ash they leave behind, burned out, hollowed out, smelling ugly. there is no music for this, no soundtrack, no epic ballads, just the strange sound of the heater turning itself on because I forgot a window open, as I fight for sleep, covered in quilts and comforters, but still shivering in the tangerine sheets of my bed.

i've been washing my face at night with grapefruit and honey soap hoping that i will wake up fresh faced and smooth. fresh faced, smooth, tender. it's all right, soon enough we will be eating tomatoes and greens that just had their own dirt washed off them, soon enough we will smell like apricots, be smooth as violets, and smoking blueberry tobacco, drinking tea, visiting in the sun, remembering why we study the books we do, remembering what it was like before - and remembering what it's like just to be a person again, and turning our ribs to honeycomb.

chainsmoking weather

sunday morning i'm sleeping past what i should, am awake for only an hour before i feel like i either need to chainsmoke or nap, and both are equally upsetting urges. i like thinking about what is a thousand miles away. i think about the things i want, when i have them, when i don't, and when i'm too malcontent to know the difference. i think about when things are too late, or if they ever are, and also i think that my soundtrack is both songs from before i met you, before i moved, but i can only hear parts of their choruses through the radio static. this small room, that old chair, that big plant, it all makes it feel like these thoughts are ok.

oh oh cheri

i didn't go to class because i didn't want to walk in the rain. today is one of those days where i woke up, lay in bed, moved to lay in the tub, got dressed, and re-dressed, and have been reading and stopping to wonder if today is one of those days where i am not greater than the sum of my parts, or if today is one of those days where maybe i am best being defined or explained by my belongings or what i am wearing - that i am just a green tweed hat and typewriter key earrings - that i am a messy car and cluttered apartment. for some reason, that seems calm and still, for i expect little and have little expected of me...a day that has been reduced to, or at least punctuated by tea stains and tobacco, literary theory and lost spectacles, an old sweater, and shoes falling to pieces.

spring jasmine

nearly a year ago, i had a dream that i have often thought of, but never written down. this dream was both nightmarish, and oracular, and it woke me up, feverish but subdued, at that really early morning time characterized by half-light. i dreamt that i was being shown a book that had pages made of leaves, green and glossy, bound by twine and twigs. in this book were photos of the most bittersweet, elusive, and fantastic memories - photos of he and i laying in his twin bed, near the heater that would spark, photos of my brother, photos of my mother and i when i was young and she was carrying me up the stairs, photos of me laying on my aunt's outstretched legs while grandpa fished for catfish. the oracle, or shaman showing me this book had a deep gravely voice, and i feel sure that it was grandpa. in the photos, above my shoulders were three small captures of light, like dust. but i was told that this was actually three evil spirits which i carry on my shoulders, and that are always present, even in the most simple and sublime of moments, moments like the first time you touched me, or moments like when you first brushed your hand on mine to hold it. and i could sit now and try to describe in some new way how much this dream upset me, but i can't. all i can say is that it did, in one of the most profound ways i have ever known. and though nightmares should elucidate and disappear when you wake up, and put on your shoes, and walk out to the street, this one never has. it feels as confusing in my mind's vision now as it did that morning i woke up, in that bed that wasn't mine and i saw the white sheets with small seaglass blue dots, and the light beginning to tear through the bamboo shades on the window, my hair tangled, my eyes still with sleep in them.

poppies

i like saying i'm from california.
and i was thinking about how it went from home being in lake oswego to not having a home for a few years and freaking out about it to the one day i said "yeah i'm going home for a week" and referred to home as california. it makes it seem like that's how it's always been, and, and it should be, like my parents met and married and split but my family my roots are all still down there, hanging out, excited for me to visit. maybe i like this because it will envelope everything until i was seventeen and push it away, and that's how i'd rather remember things

in the middle of a shrieking laughter, of absolute joy and hysterical delight a sobering thought ran through my head as we were running around and doing what we do - making things with fiber, filling our lungs with smoke and dousing our bloodstreams with alcohol. in the middle of this creative bliss, as we were walking i suddenly thought, "this too shall pass." and though those words are often thrown out in heartbreak or sadness as comfort, i realized that he was right, happiness, like everything, comes in waves, and i thought about it passing. and i thought about holding on to things, and that grasping is the greatest source of disappointment and sadness, because its never really ours, its just a series of events that involve us. people are never really ours. or at least you were never really mine.

needles only prick

the spring wind was not as it should have been: a thin zephyr playing with our clothes as it whips through the trees. no, that day, the day i left home, it was the kind of wind that is frustrating and intent on making you close your eyes because its stabbing them with your own hair and blowing your clothes against your body in the most unattractive angles.

my mother and i stood in the strange circular driveway of the house on 4201 haven street. we stood underneath the huge fir trees that grew all over the neighborhood, dwarfing us, two women of approximate equal height and weight, two woman of equal determination, two women who were acting though they hated each other, and only acting that way because they both know they didn't. i shouldn't say "two women" because i was 17, and in age and maturity, a girl. we stood, eye to eye, a few feet apart, it some strange hypnotic staredown, neither speaking.

it began as some sort of manic dream a few months ago, when i called my mom to say i was still unhappy at the college she had chosen for me, and that i wanted a change of scenery, and that i wanted to go to california and spend time with my father, who i never really knew. i've examined my intentions time and time again, and have had years to do so, to think and rethink about why i did that, if i moved away like my mother thought because i hated her, because i hated how she raised me, because i was ungrateful and abandoning my role in their family. and i have come to the conclusion that those things weren't true, but have also grown to understand why she thought so. i have thought that she has abandoned me - and at the time it was hard to understand it as any other way - she took me off her health insurance, she told me i could never come home, not for holidays, not ask for money, and told me that she knew what i was doing, had been where i was going, and that it was going to be a trainwreck. california was not a golden utopia of free thinking and promise in her mind - it was "her old stomping grounds" where she rambled about, and apparently, did not care to see me visit.

and as i stood there that day, i knew that i had no idea what i was in for. and, at seventeen, isn't that the thrill of the world? preparing yourself go to out and experience "it" and having no idea what "it" is - and not knowing i would find myself in different houses with different roommates - find myself living with a circus, with beautiful women and men, finding best friends, realizing age is inconsequential but also inextricably binding, losing innocence, finding myself in houses with numbers 29, 1964, 1323, 2759, 3548, or 1122, reeling and wounded from relationships, euphoric from sublime nights of running through barky twists and tangles of grapes, seeing fires, seeing oceans near fields of callalilies, seeing almost every mile of the eternal interstate 5, and ultimately having if only a minimally clearer sense of who i am when i wake up in the morning.

even then, thinking now, i was excited about bad relationships, heartbreak, cars breaking down, getting lost alone, working bad hours for bad bosses, though i didn't consciously think those things, but i think i was - because it was new. because it seemed important. because i felt like those things had to be experienced. because those were the stairs that break underneath your weight but allow you to feel like you have some immeasurable amount of treasured independence.

but all this, and an entire world more was to come, and i knew it, i could feel it, and it terrorized my stomach and raised my pulse, and like screaming and crying and laughing all at once, it was unstoppable. it was compulsive. it was pleasure, it was pain. growing up young, being treated as child but held to the responsibilities of an adult, all of it felt like it had funneled into this day, the day i moved out for reals, for forever, and this set into motion a series of events and stories that could only, for lack of a better name, be labeled as a girl growing up.

my mother and i just stood staring until my younger brother came outside. weeks of exhausting phone calls and fights, weeks of packing, and i had come home to get a final few boxes. after this there would be finals, my first year of college behind me, and my dad would drive from california to pack my entire physical existence into his subaru, and drive ten hours back down california, where i would unpack and try to orient myself in the dizzying mass of new highways, jobs, and people. but i think mom and i stood there in silence because we both were too confused to speak for fear of crying, or for fear of saying more mean things. and we had done both.

so i sighed, but couldn't hear it over the terrible wind, which was now pushing streams of pine needles and small branches down onto my car, onto my mother and brother and i. i knelt down to hug my brother, but as i did, he didn't put his arms back around me, didnt push his head into my stomach like his normal hugs, he just stood, stiff and unwelcoming for a few moments while i squeezed his small 10 year old body. suddenly, i felt him break in my arms, instantly melting into a wave of sobs and weeping, and his small fists began to wrap around me and pound into my back, eventually until he was both hugging, crying, and punching me all at once.

my mother stood watching, and began to slowly shake her head. she may have been wearing sunglasses, but she could still see right into me.

my brother turned to her and buried his face in the skirt of her green corduroy dress, fist fulls of the fabric, still sobbing; my mother's head was still slowly shaking.

i reached to hug her and she reached back. for about five seconds we stood hugging, my brother huddled between us, the wind blowing pine needles onto us, pricking the back of my neck. then i eased back, my mom let me go, and i stepped a few feet back towards my car.

my mother stood watching, still shaking her head, reaching down to console my brother, who, i was told much later, slept in my bed for weeks after i left; who, i was told much later, cried himself to sleep on my pillow every night.

that was it. it felt as final as it ever would. i turned and got into my car. as i backed out of the driveway, the scene was unreal: seeing the wind bend and curve the trees, completely silent and still in my car, as i brushed pine needles out of my tangled hair, watching my mother stand in the exact place in the driveway as she picked up my brother, much to large for her five foot frame. seeing the trees fold to the wishes of the wind. watching as my mother did all this while still slowly shaking her head.

"the end of summer" only means anything while you are in school..or does it? what is it about the end of summer that is so bittersweet? ending a romance at the end of winter isn't the same, or with spring, or with fall, but what about summer makes it so painful and pleasurable? and thinking of that, i was thinking of all the times i have laughed and screamed and screamed and laughed and cried all at once and wonder if those are the times when we feel the most alive, or if its at the late months of dusky summer, either way, it feels like dust is settling and now we can see it because its all on fire, the sky, the city, the winter.

but we were so much better then
is this twenties? is this city life?
is this portland? just getting better at
rolling cigarettes and seeing with rain in
our eyes, avoiding literary theory at all costs

you don't have to open yourself up to everyone,
you don't have to open yourself up to anyone

we were so much better then, with callalilies ahead
and turning up the best part of the song, saying the best things
now i don't know who is asleep on my couch or what i've been
doing in my apartment for the last few days
or if i want to stay in portland
or if i was so much better than i am now
low eyes, blowing smoke at the fremont as i walk
into the hollow, wondering if this is as good as it gets

we were so much better then

i'm thinking that life can't be moving in any linear way, in any straight line. it has to be spinning...and that's why i want it so badly to slow itself the hell down. what moves in circles what spins records spin and the faster they spin the more obnoxious and distorted they sound, and sometimes something comes out of it thats well and ok...and usually not...and pottery wheels spin, and the faster i kicked the wheel the more quickly the clay would be thin when i was raising its walls, and if i focused and was careful i could make something come out of it that looked ok once it was glazed and fired, but was structurally unsound, but when i wouldn't focus it would fall in on itself, a wet slow mess and thats because it as spinning, spinning so quickly

its not that i wouldn't pick you, if it were just up to people you know, if you could just pick a person, i would always pick you. but you have to pick people and situations and timing and behaviors all at once and i can't pick those things can't control those things

i feel honestly like my body is refusing the past few weeks, like i've been consuming and consuming and not thinking and pushing and clawing and its ridiculous and finally my body had to refuse it, had to reject it and render me delirious and tearful. and it strangely felt like that's how it was supposed to be.