when all you need is time, marching forward slowly

the summer after 11th grade, i promise myself i will never say anything untrue,
which is why i let you do all the talking and i fill in the gaps:
with laughter like precipitation (maybe hail, maybe something else)
and with questions, because there are so many things i am trying to figure out.
so many postage stamps i bought before i knew i wouldn't use them.
will this horizon swallow me whole as i run into it?
will anyone be on the other side?

when i hear that you write your grocery lists on pieces of scrap fabric
using a fabric pen from your sister,
and that quarters fall out of the sandwich bag that replaced your wallet in march,
i say a silent prayer:

thank god for pine needles and empty pasta sauce jars,
but sorry you lost your only pair of scissors.
sorry, because i took them,
and i used them to cut up the letters you sent me
i put the pieces in jars and the jars on the stairs outside
and it was so windy that dirt and pine needles blew in
and little insects made their homes in your words.
it was beautiful until it wasn't--when too much time had passed.

in the amount of time it takes to be able to answer the phone without my heartbeat pounding in my wrists, i manage to fall off a retaining wall twice and lose my wallet once.
i write eight poems and rip three of them up; i learn a new recipe for scones.
i keep my promise to never say anything untrue, which is why it takes so long.
i still have the scissors.
i still have precipitation laughter,
but my open sky questions mostly have answers now.

Coming, but also going

I went and then came back again. What do you call it when you're getting off the airplane in a place that's so familiar and everything's the same down to the dust on the car picking you up? Because it's the same thing you call the train stop that's yours on the return journey and the four flights of stairs to where you live right now.

I've been thinking a lot lately about vocabulary and its limitations, but mostly our own inadequacies in wielding it. How our words shape our world, and often we are using the wrong ones.

It was nice to be in Alaska (home?) (back?). I remembered, briefly, who I was. That if I want, I have a wonderful place to return to. That maybe I wanted to. That maybe all of the things that seem to matter in such an intense and present way right now are not worthy of the heartache they are causing. But aren't they?

The last two years of my life in Israel felt like a dream during those weeks I was in Alaska.

Except then I returned--4 flights and 3 continents and 2 days and 1 lost suitcase--and now my trip to Alaska is starting to feel like a dream. Like was it only two weeks ago that I was in Value Village with Valerie? Was it only a few days before that when we were making enchiladas and watching She's the Man? And with the quickly evaporating sense of A-Very-Real-Place-Where-I-Just-Was also goes the confidence in familiar surroundings and faces that I felt so fleetingly.

If coming implies a beginning, and going implies an end, and "coming and going" means a temporary middle, where are we all at right now with our lives and our verbs?

Things that don't connect

The watch guy fixed my watch for free on Tuesday.

Maybe because it's a garbage watch and I've brought it to him three other times for the same problem and he's just taking pity on me now.  Maybe he didn't recognize me though.  Maybe he's just nice.

He told me it was broken for real this time and I pointed out to him that the hands were still moving and the back just needed to be reattached.  So he put some scotch tape on the inside and then closed it.  It was $18.50 from Fred Meyer years ago, and I like it, but not that much, but so much more now that I've fixed it so many times.

***

I've been very committed to keeping things clean lately.  My organized desk is making me want to write.  I learned two new guitar chords (bar! chords!) this week and threw away all of my old bus tickets.  That my floor is cleared of dirty clothes is representative of the small measure of control I can exert on my section of the universe.

(Note:  Not that I've ever been inordinately messy, but there were always people to hang with, flat tires to inflate, dump clothing to try on, etc., and putting away laundry just fell by the wayside most days.)

***

The sunset was really beautiful tonight.

I didn't take a picture.  Because yesterday night I was trying to video a friend singing and ran out of space on my phone and subsequently spent this morning deleting photos and there were many, many, many of the sea and the city rolling down into it and the sky waiting at the edge.

Because also I was sitting on the bus coming back from the beach and reading an article about suicide in small Arctic communities and sometimes things just don't connect.  Like where I was and where I am now.