September 29th, 2014

Two figures against the backlit church side. They sit on the wall
of a raised garden. One is a round older woman and the other a
skinny child. He crawls all over the garden and makes a game
of his movements. He stops and leans on the woman and for a
moment they are a picture. Then he bursts from her and nearly
runs into the street. The orange streetlight rests on his hair like a
hand. Stop right there, son, it says. And he halts sharply and then
slinks back to the woman who still sits, unmoving, amongst the
silhouetted plants of the raised garden. This animated story paints
itself under my eyelids and I see it still as I slowly turn the corners
to home. In my mind even now the two remain, the boy a trembling
life about to break into being, a tightened string, the woman a rock
around which waves and wind break. They stay like this, turning
slowly and mechanically in my mind, like figures in a music box.


September 23rd, 2014

I can knot my hair on top of my head now. It has grown.
These dreams though, they continue. Two in a row now.
They start in my brain and travel through my body as I
dream them, making my hands open and close like a
fish's mouth, making my legs kick off the blanket, and
in the morning my stomach holds onto the dreams and
I call out of work and cry, except there is no water left,
so this crying is the kind I do in every movement of my
body. It is more complicated now. I am acquiring more
hearts. They hang on a bloody string and I pet them
gently and offer them my own blood when I can squeeze
it from my crumpled, wrung-out heart. There are many
things about this that are wrong - one is the fact that I am
still talking to you in my head and dreams. Goodnight.


September 17th, 2014

Everything is art he said standing on the edge of the sidewalk
Music is art. Fashion is art she offered. Fashion is absolutely
art he agrees. Food is art. These lines in the pavement are art.
The light turns red and we cross in a crowd. It is art that we
cross in a herd; it is art that I walk directly below the stoplights
half-hoping one will fall on me so that I can rest for a little while.
It is art that I always watch the white lines of the crosswalk
below my heels, whether or not I keep to them, and sometimes
I do, and that is art too: when I do and when I do not. It is art
that later that night, though I don't know it yet, Jeremy and Caitlin
and I will drink and then cry together in a movie. We will sob
together over love and birth and death, some of us louder than the
others. Even later we will sit with Alex in a windowless bar and hate
things together. I will lower my head to my arm and count my breaths. 

August 26th, 2014

I was jealous, actually jealous, of the 8th grade boys at the convocation. They
were quiet and well behaved, and yet their sidelong glances, their swallowed s
nickers, their dancing eyes, how light all of these things. I didn't listen very
well to the speakers, the mayor, the superintendent, and neither did these boys
and I felt like I wanted to say, we are together in this, in our rebellion, in our
mirth. I raised my eyes to one of them and he held my gaze steadily; creature
to creature we stared. I could not look away and when I did his eyes remained
on me. It was then that I understood how we are each, every person, a lock.
He wondered what it must be like to be a teacher and I wondered what it must be
like to be in eighth grade, and we sat there immersing ourselves in wonder at
the other's existence. Tomorrow I will meet people I have not yet promised my
heart to, and yet, I know they will have it fully for the next nine months.
Tomorrow I will enter a room full of locks that is waiting to become a room full
of open safes, and I am honored to hold the keys.

August 10th, 2014

What is creator? Pressure heat and time, he said, with the
confidence of a king from his couch. And though he meant
to steal some warmth from the night his words only served
to stoke a fire that was burning very deep, beneath the carpet
and the couch, and the eight floors of apartment. And though
we had danced in hot rooms and and whispered in corners and
ran our bodies over other bodies and away from them, this was
better and worth so much more. With every word you speak you 
lay a path others may walk on. This feels like work, like the
sighing and satisfied muscles after a day in the field, swollen,
breathless, fully aware of themselves and beautiful. When you
crawled into bed finally at 6:30 in the morning, you heard birds
bathing in the neighbor's pool. You fell asleep to a fully risen
sun and wild and secret baptism. 



August 9th, 2014

I got worse at spitting the cherry pits into the flower pot full of cigarette butts on regent
street as I neared the end of the cherries.  I lost the last two pits, one to an overspit and one
to an under, and this seemed important, although I know it's not. The temperature is 84
degrees, but in other words this means I can wear a loose tank top and nothing else as
I sit on the front stoop spitting cherry pits and talking to Brett about love, again. I am
always talking to Brett about love and he is always listening and offering advice, but mostly
the slow nod of companionship and the yes, yes, these are strange things, the desires of the
heart, the impulses of the body. I tell him how attraction doesn't always have to do with the
eye and how I have tried on different kinds of love like dresses and the one that I like best
isn't the most flattering on me. I don't say these words, but he knows what I mean anyway
his nod assures me. Earlier when we sat on the patio David drew a heart on my left arm. It
was elongated in its shape. Now while I sit next to Brett talking about love, he snaps a
picture of the heart and when I see it I think of the verse place me like seal over your heart, 
like a seal over your arm, and how I still have many muscles to tone.

August 7th, 2014

You are my God. Where shall my heart go but to your throne?
I have found it hiding in desert caves on vacant nights and
cowering in lovers' arms when the moon's hollowed eyes stare
blinklessly through the naked window. I have found it wandering
a forest it no longer belongs to in which there are many traps and
the leaves whisper ghost stories to each other as it passes. These
places no longer hold their hands out in gentle invitation, but
rather they offer the embrace of a prison. So, my God, you are
where this lost heart must abide, but to lasso it and reel it in is
work for a strong and fearless one, and that I am not. I will fight
every demon but my own and lie bleeding out my fruitless victory
as the night bears down on me, and that is when they gather, the
bloodsuckers, the thirsty fears. So, take me because I can not take
myself. Here I am, lead me into your courts and burn me clean.



August 6th, 2014

The moon, although it is hazed, turns the tall grasses gold in its almost-full light. The clouds
around it are lit like the edge of the sea that barely reaches the light from shore. This is so 
beautiful you cry, too loud, with a moan that comes from a deeper place than you have known recently, a place even deeper than your well of sadness. Sure Alex says, as if he is so accustomed
to this beauty, that it is a fact and to speak of it is redundant. Caitlin trails behind and takes
pictures of the sky. Your soul feels a little less bruised, it has been elevated and iced and tended
to by them, with food and drink and basketball and a moonlit hike, and no matter what happens,
and even if they don't know it, this is what it means to be okay. Still there are tides coming in at
this time of year that wash away all the monuments to your freedom you've been building out
of sand all summer long. It is hard to hear your own foot fall on the hiking trail and breathe
in the sweet smell of grass and leaves and feel your body respond to the air as it brushes your
neck and breast and not think of him. It's all the moments of the lifetime you lived together, the
small moments, that fall like waves against you, but the rip tide is not very strong now, and you
will last longer than its pull. 

August 1st, 2014

The second campsite offered better sleep, but also, there was less magic. This is okay. Magic needn't be in every place or we would habituate to it and never notice its gentle tickling of our imagination. Joe and I woke, missing Caitlin, and walked down the road to find breakfast. When Joe left I lay around in the tent and the sun half dressed and wishing I was not alone but also very glad I was, and when I wandered in a half-dream to the bathroom a man who spoke with a thick accent was cleaning the sinks. I hope you know why I am here he said. Of course I said, bashful in only my bathing suit but still needing the mirror to put up my hair which has, as I imagined it would, grown out in such a way that it snakes from my skull, a wild brood, I am grateful for clean bathrooms. Well, I will clean it very well then, so you will come back. I smiled and looked down, pulled the final bobby pin from my lips and secured my hair. As I left he yelled Congratulations! You are very beautiful! I walked a mile to a coffee shop, and it was a very long mile, but the coffee was good and the internet was free, and the man with the braided goatee behind the counter was disarming in his desire to serve. Is there a liquor store that is walkable from here? I asked. Yes, he said, I know all of them because I used to go every day and it is something like a wine skin splitting the way his honesty makes me feel.

July 30th, 2014

Perhaps this is when the magic came back. This trip. Things are frightening again in only the 
way that magic can be. She said as she drove through the dark. The moon hung low over the
horizon (the moon was always hanging low on this vacation) which looked like mountains (but
we are by the sea and it is mostly flat here). It was thin and red, a sharp hook that made Caitlin
shiver, and yes, it was strange to see the white light muted by rust and so small. In Chatham there
was music in the park and all the children were friendly to each other. Two boys stopped a couple pushing a stroller to bend their 8 year old heads down to the baby boy and coo and giggle. The
baby reached for their little boy beach hair and they laughed in delight. A family walked by and a lone wail from a child of about 5 rose. My icecream! My icecream! His mother turned and said simply you ate most of it. Now a bird will have the rest and the child stopped crying and quietly considered this as he trailed after his family. Earlier, while we walked through Provincetown a very old man dressed as a pilgrim walked up to us and said "All is well because you three are here". Caitlin believes I was fighting demons in my sleep when I stirred and gasped and wimpered, and always
in the morning, the birds, I swear, were speaking French.

July 28th, 2014

Even still, in these notes, I hear him, and for a moment it is not terrible to remember
things as they were. This tiny postage stamp city, a moving picture of love and life
before me, fades into its own scalloped edges and I am in a field dreaming of some
boy who said I love you and then disappeared into the wide world he needed to know
and be known by. He is years and years from me in a different city right now, and I
am on vacation by the sea with people who have taught me how to be loved, not just
how to love. Now that I understand both I am ready to begin again. "You're working
all your muscles" Brett said the other day. "First you learned desire, and then to accept
being the object of desire, and then that there was still room to feel, and then you
exercised the muscles of conflict, and now you are ready. Now you wait." It's family
week in Province Town and we are a family, Joe, Caitlin, and I. We make no apologies
for our love or loveliness or the headlights in the campground at one in the morning.
Love, like water, takes different shapes, and now that I have been near the sea, I cannot
go back to smaller tributaries.


July 27th, 2014

There was a lot of talk about the ocean and its endlessness from the pulpit,
and how grace is so much deeper than we know, though not deeper than we
can feel if we allow ourselves to feel it. I went home feeling an awareness
of the depth, though not the depth itself. I lay myself across the white concrete
of our front steps and closed my eyes. I spread my hands out on the concrete, my
head tipped back to the grass and dirt of the yard, and lay there feeling the warmth
and texture of everything beneath my palms. I prayed wordlessly about all the things
passing through my mind. The clouds became a little heavier, and little closer, until
they broke over me and I welcomed the water on my bare skin. I prayed the rain
would fall heavier and heavier until my lace dress was soaked through, and it did.
Ezra took off his shirt and joined me and we laughed, open-mouth and squinted eye,
as the rain fell in huge summer drops. When we were saturated I felt clean and
submerged and even reborn. I rose to wring out my dress but first turned to see the
pale dry on the steps where my body had been.