i'll let you know when i get there

I came across the name of a former acquaintance today and it occurred to me with some surprise that in all these years I had forgotten about him, he had continued to exist.  He's continued to live out the same hours and days as I have, in some removed unknowable place in the world.  He has had heart swells and truly terrible days and humdrum commutes and mornings without alarms and delicious meals and hurried meals and heartache and loss and sour stomachs and good laughs.  He's aged.  He's forgotten people of his own.  This is a mere acquaintance, I'm talking, whose regular presence and then absence from my life was hardly registered.   And yet he remains out there, continuing. "That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse." ok. But to what end?  Who even notices or cares?  Who is this play for and how is my small and ordinary life in any way a contribution toward something?  Though I do suspect that there's something ...

I could write about how perfect the air is here.  How I live on a mountain near the cloud line with a view next to god looking over the city.  How the waterway was lined with cars today full of seniors dressed to the nines, windows rolled down just taking in the day and the scene before them.  Cute dogs nearly outnumbered the people and not a turd to be seen. but instead I'd like to write about how I had to borrow a pen from a person at a cafe today because, despite time and freedom, I somehow forgot one of my own.  In a hurry to return it, I came around a turn quickly and bumped a man's elbow, causing him to splash two hot, full cups of coffee all over the floor and the woman he was with.  In that instant the whole world knew what a clumsy, useless human being I am.  How, despite my efforts to organize, I am a chaotic force.  Hardly adult at all.  Apologizing profusely as the world continued to turn, I wondered if I could ever return to this pe...

My life is a regular practice of trying to figure out what to pull closer and what to let go of.  Push away, even. What I do know is that there's been a recent swelling of words that I cannot stop.  Something in me that's wiggling into form.  A hand trying to keep up with my thoughts.  Digital notes deciphered later.  I feel helpless to it.  Overcome.  Like something I have only to remain patient for but keeps me in an alert, restless state. "I might be a writer someday," I tell him, testing the weight of the words against the hollow of my hope. "Probably," he says, without hesitation. So it is. I wonder what it would mean for me to surrender to it entirely.  Am I ready?  Am I worthy?  Does anything I do mean anything, actually?  At what cost?

In Vancouver, we stopped to look around near a one thousand year old tree in Stanley Park.  Visitors could walk beneath the hollowed area at the base of the historic tree.  I watched in horror as a grown man, with a woman and child in tow, took out a knife and began to carve into the underbelly of the tree.  I said nothing. A few weeks later, my silence haunts me.  When I was young, I had no problem calling out adults decades older for acting unfairly or inappropriately.  I can think of a handful of occasions without effort. Why is it that I find myself so timid, now that they're my peers? Rather than confront the man, I walked away so I wouldn't have to witness the abuse.  Complicit.  Was I afraid of how he would react?  Maybe.  But I think maybe the root of my inaction is more despair than fear.  So I somehow prevent the man from desecrating the tree...  There are a hundred ancient trees lining this road that his blade coul...

In my first years of college I was home for winter break, looking through a box of high school letters and photos.  I was newly Christian at the time, and looked at my "old life" with curious speculation.  I don't remember what prompted the advice, but my mom suggested I just get rid the pictures of my on-again-off-again high school boyfriend and I.  What was the point of keeping them around, anyway?  Besides, what if someday they brought pain or discomfort to my future husband?  Easier to just throw them out.  I woke up the other night suddenly with the memory of a small lock diary in my mind.  The diary that contained the narrative of some of my first experiences with men.  Thoughts and feelings and lists.  Aches and resolve.  Glimpses into my forming heart.  Now just nebulous mysteries, really; it did not survive the cut.  Those sixteen-seventeen year old words were thrown out, along with piles of pictures, in a sanctimoni...

The truly terrible cacophony of smells and noises. You try finishing your dinner with someone across the curtain shitting the bed. Someone in the hallway on the phone, crying.  "There's nothing else they can do for her." That was the third floor. On the seventh floor, a man with green socks gets to walk laps around the hall all day.  There's the obese man.  The young man.  Nurse Joan with a beard and venom toward Hillary Clinton.  Chatty nurses.  The nurses who zone out to your TV for awhile without really saying a word.  Packs of visitors who travel in a cloud of stale cigarette smells.  An endless ricochet of beeping IVs.  The neighbor needs help going to the bathroom for the fifteenth time since I've been there.  Wants to tell the nurse a joke. There's a look of desperation on everyone's faces, and not just here.  On the highways too.  No one's seen the sun in months.  Not really.  It's just a hurried shuffl...