brightness, darkness, lightness, happiness

There’s nothing left to do in my day, the space heater is on and the yellow lamps are burning and my dogs need nothing from me. Outside it’s dusk, the bright fall day turned indistinct and then twilight blue, the damp cold air embracing everything. I ate parsnips and beef cooked in bacon grease and a pile of salad greens, if I lay down right now I’ll fall asleep.

I was thinking earlier, having just arrived home, sitting in my trailer and eating some chocolate, about the difference between the way it feels to be “home” and the way it feels to be “not home”. Both places exist in the same reality, with the same molecules and the same air, and there is no definable difference between them- but when I am tired, and I have been “not home” for a number of hours, walking the leafy streets and riding my bicycle and going in and out of various cubical buildings with their warmed, circulating air- and then I arrive “home”, and step across the threshold that is the busted metal step of my twenty-foot trailer, something magical happens. I am no longer “outside”; I am no longer “not home”. I am no longer plodding the weary paths of life, marking off the miles, scratching things off my lists and watching new lists grow in my hands like magic. I am “home”, and even though the only thing between “home” and “not home” is a piece of plywood and some siding, it feels absolutely different.

I put on sweatpants. I drink a mason jar of water. I stop holding my breath. I turn off most of my brain, and put a kettle on the stove to heat water for dishes. My heartrate has probably slowed.

I’m barefoot.

My dogs immediately curl into donut shapes on the bed, putting themselves into standby mode until they’re needed again.

While the water heats up I lay in my bed on the fuzzy tiger blanket that my dogs love so much, and stare at the copper plate of Pablo Neruda that hangs above my dying maidenhair fern. Potato sidles up next to me and lays against my thigh, but he won’t let me pet his scruffy face because I’ve got some hippie salve on my hands and he doesn’t like the way it smells. I wonder what it would’ve been like to be Pablo Neruda. I wonder if Pablo Neruda ever got tired of being Pablo Neruda. I wonder if Pablo Neruda ever got tired of writing poetry. I think about the things that’ve happened this week that I want to tell my friends about when I see them. That’s the upside of spending so much time alone- you have plenty of time to figure out just exactly what you want to say. I’d like to tell Seamus, for example, about the tripod yorkie that was at Fernhill park today. Cruising around on three legs, lopsided and oblivious. And then there was the squirrel I saw- I had just turned out of my driveway, and was biking away from my house sort of slowly- when a squirrel zipped out into the street, placed a walnut in its big green husk right in front of my bicycle tire, and zipped away again. This all happened in about a half second, and it made me laugh out loud. And this morning, when I was making a batch of chocolate candy, having suddenly become enamored with the alchemy that is dark chocolate, coconut oil, peppermint oil, and honey- and I spilled half the double boiler in the sink. Into the right side of my little avocado-colored enamel sink, the side where the dishes were piled up. I was running late so I left the whole mess, and when I returned this afternoon and pulled the dishes out the chocolate had hardened, and I had a chocolate-covered sink.

I’ve been feeling appreciation lately for the little things. Maybe the tattered prayer flags in the courtyard of my yoga studio are working their magic on me, when I sit on the concrete bench after class and stare at them, steam rising off of me like a plume. I am loved. I let love in. I am kind to myself. Hot yoga is turning out to be a sort of magic in itself, like letting myself be melted down in a double-boiler and reshaped into a calmer, more pliable version of myself. And the way I’ve been eating- mountains of vegetables, browned in bacon grease or floating in chicken stock, mixing bowls of salad. Bacon, steak, roasted chicken. Plantains fried in coconut oil. Pears. And my sleep has been incredible, almost indescribable- ecstatic. Ecstatic sleep. Like when I was a kid and sleep was a magical journey to an enchanted land. The best. All in all, I feel calmer than I’ve felt in as long as I can remember. Maybe ever? Who’s to say. And what is linear time, anyway.

I can’t believe that just a little while ago, I was feeling apprehensive about the wintertime. I’d forgotten that, given the chance, winter can be so good- winter just wants to be good. Winter wants to be like the sweetest twilight, like introspection. Like rest. Why can’t we rest? As westerners, as modern civilization. Why can’t we let ourselves rest.

I came to peace today, while walking my dogs in the autumn sun, with the fact that this winter is going to be very restful for me. I could push myself really hard, I think, if I wanted it bad enough. I could start something hugely ambitious and get really stressed out and make myself really “busy”. I could consume lots of stimulants and tell myself I’m not good enough and set my alarm even on mornings when I don’t need it. If that’s what I wanted. But the problem is that I don’t want that. I don’t want it very much. I only want it a little bit, and not nearly as much as I want a lot of other things. I want, for example, to be in my body. Grounded on the real physical earth. I want to have roots that go down to the bedrock. I want to be as slow as the ocean. I want to be like a boulder at the edge of the sea.

Also, I want to learn how to be a person among people. I want to work to accept the irreconcilable contradictions of the people that I love as givens, instead of as puzzles that can somehow be solved. Also heartbreak, disappointment, disillusionment. Failure on both the microscopic and the macroscopic level. I want to let all of these things inside of my heart. I am the sea, my heart is the sea. The sea can hold everything.

And there is appreciation for how my heart is beating. Wildly. For the people that I love. How fucking lucky I am to know such brilliant stars in a dark and endless universe. How achingly sweet it is. Somehow communicating to those people how special it is that they are, how I can see it, like magic, like seeing the earth from space. That alone is a whole life’s work, the endless repetitions of love that wear down our daydreams of isolation. Like sand and wind wearing canyons away. Knowing what is important. This is what is important.

So that’s what I want, more than anything. To be in the world, to be in my body. And the sweet-dark of wintertime, with its questions and its mysteries, closer now like clusters of stars, seen from a clearing in the forest. Introspection that goes outward as it goes further inward, swirling across the sky like the milky way.

 

 

torrential rainfall and the disputed kingdom Protista

radiolaria

It’s been raining torrentially all day- this morning we took the dogs to kelly point park, the superfund site where the metallic Columbia meets the sewage-filled Willamette, and big cold drops began to pelt us as soon as we stepped from the car. We walked along the path through the woods, throwing Emy’s ball before us. The poplar trees, huge overhead, swayed ominously in the wind from the oncoming storm, and we watched in wonder as limbs broke off, now and then, and fell in slow motion to the ground. Let’s go to the beach? I said. A tree might fall on us? But the beach was too exposed, the wind beating us like a newspaper and the rain splatting us and the lights from the grain barges on the river. Back in the forest, we watched the trees. Woo woo, they said. The air was grey with condensation. Along the trail nettles grew hopefully, taking up nuclear waste from the soil.

Now I’m in my trailer with the space heater up too high, and it’s still raining torrentially. Earlier I tried to study, laying in bed with my big floppy biology book, watching the water run in rivulets down the little trailer-window, but I fell asleep instead. Before I fell asleep I’d been trying to focus on the disputed kingdom Protista, but instead I was thinking indulgently about summertime, and houses I used to live in, and meadows I have known.

I’ve been feeling a lot of nostalgia lately. Maybe because it is the wet end of the wintertime, maybe because I have been in the city too long with only crowded backyards and superfund sites to retreat to. And it’s funny, because when you finally let a thing go, sometimes years after you first realize that you should be done with it, you never think that it will come back all draped in the soft colors of nostalgia. But that is how I feel today, tonight, about all sorts of things- and I am thinking of them longingly, here in my little driveway-house full of warmth with the rain pounding on the aluminum roof.

Where do they go, these things that happen? Our experiences, our disembodied stories? Apparently there is a compost heap in my brain where they are recycled into magic treasures, more whole then they ever actually were.

I think of North Dakota often, it is one of my muses, if I am using muse in the correct sense, if a muse can be a thing other than a person. Also my friends are muses, people I have known, mostly old friends who cannot get their shit together, who are propelled helplessly through life by their own irreconcilable contradictions, who are moved about as if by mystery. Who do not use logic. Who are painfully beautiful. Who always seem more alive than other people but also more ungrounded. Which is maybe the same thing.

And North Dakota. North Dakota from a freight train- the train goes fast, because north Dakota is wide open. The train could be said to hurtle. On both sides of the train, the soft gold grass. Bent at the tops, like an ocean. The native prairie that grew back after people fled to the cities. Just the grass and the train and above you, the glass observatory of the sky. Now and then a broken down barn, melting into the grass. A stone fence, half-finished, built from stones fished from the ground. A shiny ribbon in the prairie is a stream, flat and clear, like you could float down it on your back. Wind, and sometimes clouds, charging from the east. Lightning.

I used to do whatever I wanted. Travel all the time, move back and forth. I ate dumpstered birthday cake and slept outside under forgotten clumps of trees and that was ok, because I was young and needed nothing. I thought that everything was too fucked up to invest in anything, but then investing in nothing made me feel like I was already dead, and that made me wish that I was, and that feeling was confusing because I had no reason to want to be dead. It was like I wanted to be free so bad but then when I was free I realized that there was nothing else. Like when I was little and I would try and play the video games my brother liked so much but all I cared about was finding the edge of the world, moving my little man into all the corners of the screen to try and find some place beyond what you could see. But there’s nothing else, there’s just the tunnel or whatever, and it’s all set up for you, you’re supposed to jump and get the coin and stomp the mushroom and it’s supposed to make you feel good.

When I was younger, I never thought about what would happen. I figured that the world would just end soon so there was no point in thinking about it. The world felt old, tense, used up, on the brink of something. Everything felt so extremely precarious, like if I touched it it would fall over. It didn’t make any sense to me to put my efforts into something that would just end anyway. I didn’t know then that things that fall over build themselves up again, over and over like magic. It took me a long time to see that.

I used to not need anything- not money, not a home, not any specific food. But there’s a lot of stress in that lifestyle, and loneliness, and eventually your adrenals get worn out and you wake up one day and your body hurts and you can’t do it anymore and you need things. Or you throw yourself off a bridge, because the world hasn’t ended yet and you can’t keep bluffing.

I’ve been in Portland for a year and a half straight. I used to leave for about half of every year. Also notable- I’ve had my dog for a year and a half, I’m starting my second year of undergrad next term, and March 18th is my one-year anniversary with Seamus. I turn thirty this year, and I’m so grateful that this shit is getting easier. And it feels sweet, this nostalgia for the way I lived for so long, tonight, sitting in my trailer with the rain coming down- memories, dreams, popping up like treasures from underwater. Sometimes I feel anxiety about it- like I’ll never be able to travel again, because I won’t have the money, and my body can’t handle the way I used to travel, for free. Waking up on the freight train, sided somewhere in Minnesota, watching the dawn bleed into the sky. Shoplifting grapefruit and sardines. Spending days in a bramble thicket, reading Steinbeck. Walking for miles in the dead of night, looking for water. So many moments of feeling so alive- stacking up on top of each other, making the universe hum like an electrical current. Like it was just me and the universe. The universe moving through me, like I wasn’t even there. Have you ever felt that way? Like you can actually forget yourself enough for the universe to go about its business right in front of you. Like in any Farley Mowat book, when he’s been in his canvas tent in the snow for long enough and the wolves decide he’s just a bunch of lichen, and they start playing with each other and acting out all their wolfy dramas in front of him. Like he’s found the secret place at the edge of everything, where there’s something else that no-one knew was there.

I haven’t been working on my book for a while. I took too many credits this term, and I moved, so I haven’t had time to write. And I hate being really busy. It gives me big fluffy piles of anxiety. Too much of my brain is devoted to thinking about stuff like colors and shapes and patterns of light and very little is devoted to time management and schedule planning. So I sort of freeze up if my life gets too complicated and then I can’t do anything. I need large blocks of time to stare out the window and think about sea creatures. I need to be able to accidentally fall asleep while studying. I need to be able to be ten minutes late for everything. I may not actually be ten minutes late for everything, but I need that to be ok.

I wish I had another three month stretch to work on my book. It’s my ladder to the moon- I need it to climb out of here. But you need a really strong ladder to climb out of one way of life and into another one, and it takes a long time to build a ladder that strong. Right now I’m doing undergrad to prepare to go to school for my master’s in Chinese medicine, because that’s my other dream, besides writing. But when I look down that road I see full-time school for the next five years and then after that, working full time to pay off my student loans, and then working forever until I die. And there’s no time for writing in that anywhere.

How do you do it? How do you be an adult. How do you want things hard enough to make them real. It’s like I woke up one day and all the rules had changed. Or I woke up one day and realized where I was- in this body, on this ground, with this rain coming down everywhere. There’s no place at the edge of everything, and yet there is. And I can want both worlds, but so far, I haven’t figured out how to have them both at once. And that’s painful, but pain can be good. A motivator. Soothing, even. I feel pain, therefore I exist. This sucks and I want something else, therefore I exist. This sucks this sucks this sucks, I exist I exist I exist.

thanksgiving

It’s late and I can’t sleep. I got up this morning, made the stuffing for the turkey (“Eddy”, he was ultimately named), and then went back to bed, because I was grumpy and hadn’t slept well, and was being a general pain in the ass. So I had a nap in the middle of the day, and now I can’t sleep. Seamus is asleep, I can hear him snoring, my little dog is asleep on the couch next to me, beneath a blue hoodie, Emy is asleep on her dog bed- everyone is asleep but me. I ate too much pumpkin pie today, laughed too hard, shouted too much, had the most fun thanksgiving in memory. Felt so appreciative for my chosen family. Felt such a strong sense of community, the real feeling, so rare, visible only in flashes, and when you least expect it- like a white-hot light beam straight to the heart. The turkey turned out amazing, thanks to a whole team of dedicated basters, some cheesecloth, a shit-ton of butter and the steadfast guidance of the Joy of cooking. I think the stuffing was good, but I had so much food on my plate, I ate so fast, and there was so much noise, that I feel like I hardly tasted anything at all. I’d gone for a run beforehand in the rain with EmyLoo and I was starving, but then I’d eaten some candied pecans and ended up feeling like I wasn’t quite hungry enough. I remember thanksgiving dinners at my Grandparent’s house when I was a teenager, being so hungry by the time we ate that each bite of food tasted like the fucking miracle that it was, chemical reactions exploding in my mouth, winter and spring and fall and sunshine and a nostalgia for everything that could have ever happened, like tasting the whole history of the world. I never helped cook, though, and when you cook a thing and smell it all day you can hardly taste it by the time it gets eaten. I learned that working at the hippie hotsprings last summer, cooking for hours and not being able to taste anything when I put it in my mouth, having to trust that it would taste good, finally tasting it eating it cold with a spoon out of the leftovers fridge the next day, like a fucking miracle.

 

I am thankful. I am thankful for my health and my friends’ health and for my date and for our dogs. I am thankful that the heavens split open and rain down goodness and unbelievable decadence upon us again and again, like the universe is a slot machine and I keep winning and I’m shaking the machine and saying why do I keep winning? But the money just keeps pouring out, gold coins piling around my feet. Of course it’s not just winning it’s being able to know when you’ve won, and being able to say “yes, this is good enough” and then, later, realize “yes, this is as good as it gets” and then “one happy thing is every happy thing”. And there’s also giving up hope, realizing that hope is a form of capitalism, a belief in infinite growth and if there’s not that constant moving toward some other thing then you’re dead. Giving up hope you stop looking around you and you look down at your feet and you realize that you can’t even see them because they’re buried under about a foot of gold coins. And you feel so rich you don’t even want to move, barely want to breathe, because you’re afraid it’s all so fragile like a screen made of grass blades pinned together with chestnut thorns and that it’ll crumble if you look at it directly, like your gratitude is a strong wind that’ll blow it over, like how the sun can fade a photograph.

 

Over-eating pumpkin pie is one way of indirectly showing one’s gratitude towards the universe. There were three kinds of gluten-free pumpkin pie at dinner, and I ate as much as I possibly could, spacing it out all night until, in retrospect, the evening blurs together into one long taste of dull pumpkin, maple sugar and baking-soda crust, like an IV drip of pie. The best thanksgiving food, tho, will be the leftovers I make for breakfast, and the turkey sandwiches I make into infinity, thanks to Eddy the expensive (but priceless) co-op turkey.

 

I love feasting with my friends. I am thankful for so many things- but mostly I just want to catch this moment in my heart, this moment of being alive- because I am undoubtedly alive- and sometimes, still, that blows me over, even though I have been on this earth for nearly thirty years already. How is it that we are alive? Still I cannot believe it. In the great straws-draw of existence, I wonder if every single-celled or multi-cellular-complex organism doesn’t once in its life stop to wonder how they got so lucky as to be embodied in such a way, here and now, when there was so much that they missed, and so much that they will never see, how they ever got to be alive at all. And sometimes, when I stop fidgeting and stand still, I feel that time stops with me, and if I hold still enough, I feel that I can almost keep from startling it into motion again. And this always works except for when it doesn’t, and time passes but it doesn’t pass, and in the end, I always have it, even when I think I don’t.

s u n d a y

Overcast, warm unless the air is moving, reading Anne Carson,
I went running in the forest, in my old running shoes, that need replacing, on the narrow dirt path, squishy with mud. Finn and I, and the small dogs, like squirrels, out of place, which would wink out of existence, immediately, if western civilization were to collapse-
at least the Papillon, the chihuahua would survive, would dig a burrow in the dusty earth, eat mice, insects, grasshoppers, chicken bones, the dried stool of other animals, buts of hair, earthworms, clods of mud, grass, birdshit, discarded hamburger buns, would survive, would procreate, would carry on for all of us.
The forest was beautiful, cool and damp in all the right ways, like a breathing animal, without urgency, an animal who does not feel excited, anxious, who is infinitely calm, an animal like a grandmother, as old as a grandmother, the world’s grandmother. I’m finally bleeding, the storm clouds have broken, my heart is a wheatfield in the sunshine. I ran and ran through the forest, high on advil and the euphoria of baseless optimism, or rather clumsily jogged, although in my imagination I am an antelope, and nik nik is a squirrel, and our spirits are birds, and we will live forever.
For breakfast afterward I had happiness, contentment, bacon, greens, brown rice, eggs scrambled with fresh herbs, and a chocolate muffin that I had baked without sugar, at first had though was awful, had frozen, and now think is particularly delicious, like flourless chocolate cake, only with coconut milk in there, and mashed bananas.
I am going to try to blog more, unless I do not. I am going to the forest for a month, (I think), unless I do not. I do not particularly believe in things happening, in the future, (or continuing to happen), but I go through the motions, so as not to seem insane, and am constantly pleasantly surprised when the earth continues to turn, the sun continues to rise, I continue to find pleasure in affection, my dog does not leave me, only snuggles closer, while I sleep, spreading herself along my ribcage, resting her small snout on my armpit, breathing her small, good-smelling dog breaths on my face.
I have no hope, but I am grateful, and I will not curse this life by declaring that anything I love will continue to exist, and I will attempt, instead, to write its creation myth, so that we can somehow understand it, without looking directly at it, like the most distant stars, which exist, and do not exist, and show us the shape and depth of space-time, everything happening all at once, all piled up, there and not there.
Life is a feral dog, and by avoiding eye contact I hope to gain its trust.

the curse

Once upon a time, in this life of some other, at some point, somewhere, I was unlucky enough to have a curse put on me. I don’t know what I did to deserve this curse but then, no-one deserves anything, and life exists within the context of two irreconcilable realities- the wonderful and miraculous and the terrible and cruel, and it is our failing as a species that a spectrum of this size does not fit neatly into our field of vision and so in many ways our reality is actually incomprehensible to us. But a curse! A curse fell like an apple from the terrible/cruel side of the tree and hit me on the head.

There are worse curses, but I cannot imagine what they might be. There are comparable curses, perhaps- the curse of the external processor- having to process all of one’s feelings and the complex minutia of day-to-day living with whoever might be in the room. The curse of the depressive- for those who have been stitched entirely from heavy, damp wool, and tossed into a world devoid of significance.

My curse was the curse of the cuddle insomniac.

I was given a curse wherein I would not be able to sleep when in bed with another person. I can sleep alone, yes, more often than not, and for this I am grateful, but with another person- it is as if their very existence is reason enough to be wakeful. My god, this person is living and breathing! Dear jesus, the miracle of life! How can I sleep when I am barely a foot away from the sprawling multitudes of heaven and earth, neatly encapsulated in this warm living skin? Oh, for the love of freckles! And so I lie wakeful, long after they have fallen asleep.

And then, in the morning, when the first birds sing, and a breeze blows the curtains, and my bed-mate barely stirs- Oh, what is this radiant heat? What sleeping hands are these, with their warm soft palms? These arms! So long and folded! I will wear them as a shawl, and it will be everything that sleep is not. Oh, but it hurts my neck to lie this way! Perhaps I will roll away, and sleep some more. Nevermind, I am awake!

And so it goes.

And then, of course, dear fate, the people I grow fond of are the ones who value sleeping with a lover more than almost nearly everything, and for sure it is for them one of the very topmost reasons for having a lover at all. Oh, and it pains them! I try to explain my curse, I paint elaborate pictures in the air of the trials and tribulations of my cuddle insomnia, of how it hurts me, of why I must sleep alone, many nights, if I wish to be productive or focused at all in my day-to-day life, if I do not wish to simply fall into a downward spiral of sleep deprivation, unmotivated anxiety, and exhaustion.

But they do not understand! They wring their hands. Why don’t I want to sleep with them at night, in their bed, with the gentle breeze in the curtains, and everything so pleasant? Why am I depriving them of this thing that is so meaningful and wonderful and beautiful and precious? Aren’t we going to have babies together someday? Aren’t we going to fuck on a bear rug? Aren’t we going to go to Haiti?

But yes! I exclaim. Lover! We are going to do all of these things. Only let me explain! But the words are like marbles and they fall all over the floor and jumble against each other and do nothing, and a small sliver of misunderstanding grows between us, a tiny elephant in the dim corner of the room. And I will starve the elephant! I will sleep over ever night until I am exhausted! I will forgo the sweet peace of my lonesome sleeps, in my big ship-bed, in order that the tiny elephant might starve. But the elephant does not starve! And my bad boundaries only make the misunderstanding stronger, and the elephant grows! So I will slay the elephant! But the elephant has become solid, as if made of hardwood. So I will burn the elephant! But the elephant does not burn, because it is a cursed elephant! So I will set out on an epic quest to find the answer to my curse. I will wear all my best wool and carry three months’ worth of sext-messages for sustenance, printed out on sheets of birch-bark, wrapped in a red hanky, tucked into my left back pocket. For company I will bring my new housemate’s old cat, who is black with yellow eyes, just like an animatronic TV cat from the nineties, and who yowls like a dog when you eat turkey sandwiches. I will leave in the spring, after the crocuses, but before the cherry blossoms. Am I getting the order confused? Betwixt the daffodils and the tulips? When the willow buds are prime for salve-making? That is when I will leave. I will build a raft from planks torn from the sides of condemned houses and float up the Willamette, towards the mercury-rich waters of the Columbia. Each day it will rain, but the rain will be warm, because it is spring, and this is how you tell spring from winter. I will light my raft with stolen beeswax tealights in clusters of mason jars, and every day I will write my intentions on pieces of birch-bark and burn them in the jars.

today I will see a heron.
today I will catch a fish, and deign not to eat it.
today I will leave text range.
today I will reach the ocean.

At the ocean the cat and I will be sucked out by the tides and we will float for weeks, on that pure big mass, in whatever direction it is that the currents pull us, perhaps into the north pacific gyre and the island of trash that lives there, where we might find objects with which to build a new life, or sodden textbooks that teach us celestial navigation, that we might escape. Eventually we’ll find our way to Siberia, the cat and I, grown very thin and weathered, and there on the wind-swept shores we’ll meet an old woman who lives in a hut built of smooth stones mortared together will moss, and she will take us in and feed us bone broth thick with caribou hairs and tallow. And I’ll sleep for forty days and nights on a shelf of rock laid over with skins, and the cat and I will have visions. And in our visions an endless night that is sort of like death will spread out in all directions for as far as we can see and we’ll wake startled, terrified, the crusts of tears on our cheeks and in the corners of our eyes. The woman will be rolling wicks of reindeer moss for her seal-oil lamps and she will look up at us, wise, and she will say

Sleep is not death, you know.

And I will be cured.

are you out there?

Dear reader, did you know that I can reverse-spy on you? I have a statcounter and sometimes I look at it, and it tells me what city you’re in, and that makes my head spin, because you’re from so many different places, places I have never been- little towns in the desert and along both coasts and up into Canada and on Tuesday someone in Mexico looked at my blog three hundred times, which sets a sort of record for most page-views from a single browser. And still I wonder- are you out there? Where are you, right now? How old are you? Is it morning, afternoon, or evening? Are you in the midst of making breakfast, checking your email, scanning several blogs at once? Are you leaning on your kitchen table, has your cup of tea gone cold? Are you late for work? Is life ever so ordinary? No, there is always something else- stormclouds threatening on the horizon or just above, feeling like they might crush you, like you have to run, run to keep ahead of them, attempting not to fall. Something tragic has always just happened, or is about to happen, to you or someone that you love. And if not, the boredom of life! What monotony! Or joy, that rare thing, that so many of us exhaust so early in life, and can never manage to find again. But right now you are cooking breakfast, in spite of all of it! These moments, that continue to pass! Are you not as astounded by it as I am? And I am curious for your story, dear reader. You have some of my secrets, and there is part of me that wants some of yours. But no matter how hard I look at my computer screen, good-hearted stranger, I will never see you. The audience is always dark and I am up here all alone, and can only write you anonymous letter after anonymous letter, from now until forever. But they are not anonymous! They are for you, after all. I may not know your motivations, hopes and fears, I may not know the color of your hair or the foods you eat for breakfast- if it is always something different or the same thing, day after day, cooked in a cast-iron skillet the way I cook mine- but in a sense I do know you. I know you like I know myself- and in a sense I do know your motivations, hopes and fears, because they are my motivations, hopes and fears. In a sense I know you because I carry you around inside of me, everywhere that I go- the way we carry the ocean around inside of us, the way we feel a familiarity for the stars, the way we long for things we no longer remember- and as much as we wonder where it is we are, as much as we wonder who we are, and where we might be going- it has to be, right now and tomorrow morning- it has to be enough that we exist. I exist, dear reader! And this is my letter to you! My personal letter to you, like a real paper envelope that the mail carrier drops off, with dented corners from its long overland journey, clanging in the metal mailbox, on the best afternoon of your life- because I know you, dear reader, like I know my own heart, like I know the way the winter rain feels, cold and dense, like being underwater, and I wanted to write to you, to remind you that I haven’t forgotten- I haven’t forgotten about you! And I wanted to tell you that I believe, with all of my guts and soul and everything, that YOU EXIST TOO.