that awkward moment when you realize your relationship with your mother has improved since
you replaced hugs with hand shakes.
Blue Whales
One of the truest joys in this world is explaining things to children. Trying to answer those “What”s and “Why”s and the step cousin “How Come.” I found myself, the other day, 22 years and 253 days old, at a graduation party. I was trying to explain 3-D movies to Sophie, a paper-skinned dutch child.
She said that her cat was named Anakin. She twirled and twirled about as she said this.
A couple of Christmases ago I was meeting my niece for the first time— Annabelle— a firey girl at only 2 years old. My brother was trying to explain watches to her.
“It tells time. Can you hear it ticking?”
She looked up at him patiently, with her big thistle-green eyes. Her tater-tot cheeks and vaguely spitty fingertips.
“time, well, time is…”
And they listen, mostly, and I believe they are appreciative and sometimes maybe they don’t learn anything at all. Like Annabelle and Sophie. But sometimes they do! Like my excitement, telling Lester, as we sat side by side on his bed
that blue whales are, in fact, larger than buses and larger than his little one-story house and he did not believe me at first but I insisted and what did he learn that day other than the magnificence and mystery of the grand, vast, great big world with its strange underwater mammals
with 1,300 pound hearts
that beat and beat like his and mine
and no, Lester, blue whales are not bigger than your dreams
your heart must weigh twice that when you coo your younger brother to sleep and hold his hand
And it’s okay to be excited! It’s okay to celebrate blue whales, and light sabers and things that tick quietly and steadily to keep us company
and all the “What”s and the “How”s and
How come we stop asking questions.
How do jellyfish work? What do butterflies eat?
And questions that maybe do not have an answer, or we take the answers from inside—
What’s it feel like to be a tree, to drop your leaves, to flower?
What’s it like to be born from an egg?
Is it worth it? How can I be better?
Bucket List
I don’t believe in bucket lists, because happiness, to me, is a complete enough life. Mostly, that just means fresh fruit smoothies and lots of sun,
and plants, and animals that are not caged.
And sleeping outdoors, or in sunbeams.
But not a bunch of verbs that I think might make me happy, or may or mat not make me humble or cool
that may or may not make me a better person, more polished with fine lines and proper shading.
So I’ll just do things as they come,
because me-right-now could not possibly know what will make
me-much-later
happier or more humble or more complete.
Even things that are difficult
I know a little something about finding perfection in the smallest things. In seedlings, blind and trusting, and up-rooting bits of earth.
In southward facing windows, in learning to love something new: blue-grey eyes.
This weekend, we had to stop and rest many times, laughing and carrying the 60 pounds of hanging flowers. One midnight purple and fragrant, one of waxy and sci-fi pink blooms. Our arms hurt and our tummies and our shoulders where the sun was bright, he swept the vines out to the side before setting it down. Tenderness is a deliberate thing. Like him letting my hair down, slowly and gently.
I was thinking about how we always do that.
Have misplaced fun, that is. Feel illogically happy— elated, even! Sprinting to catch our plane home.
Queuing endlessly.
Digging up 500 cubic feet of earth, only just to turn it over.
My father is a very impatient man and does not laugh with my mother in queues. But there is not that much time, you see, for laughing. For falling in love with new things— I tell him to blame the color of his eyes
for the gash on my forehead
I tell him to blame the way he looks when he’s sleeping.
the flask we took to the movie theater and pretending to be 15 again, in the make-out section we choked back Jameson and
And there is not that much time to appreciate the basil as it grows, or the rain-fall, or the dark dark purple flowers which we carried home, importantly, like a cure
to something that eats you from within.
So his father used to tell him that everything is a constant struggle for power,
for the final say. To wear the pants, as they say.
His father is not a poetic man, nor a rational man and
I don’t want the pants, anyway, and neither does he— they are itchy and do not fit properly
and so we are naked, instead, and maybe that’s why it’s so easy to
not give up on happiness
and laughing. And to not despair when it seems so plausible and fitting,
and to be 15 again, only to do it better because we know better, now, about compromise and being mindful and about gentleness
sometimes it’s hard
There is not enough patience in pixels
or our words, like pinball, between cellphone towers and
dark, rapturous lakes.
I didn’t even have flakes of his skin under my nails
to remember him by.
I could only think
of the dead possum March 16th,
the bike that clicks some, in the back, April 10th
I could only wonder if silence was worse than tears,
or putting my key, defiantly, in his door
turning up like the noses that we mocked over bubble tea,
his green and mine red, October 18th.
And accept
that I’d be the one bringing him breakfast, always.
Our different sleeping habits, or my slowly breaking heart,
to blame.
If I had to give one piece of advice
to my peers, to everyone, to anyone. The self-improvement that has most helped me?
Learn to be your own best friend. Really. Learn to enjoy your own company.
Don’t get me wrong— I have friends and I like socializing and all that jazz, sometimes. But this is something that some people never learn, or are forced into learning. The widowed, the newly disabled, those leaving a long-term partnership.
Hang out with yourself. Take yourself on dates.
Hey, even get yourself drunk and take advantage of yourself! I do it, it’s great.
That upcoming show? The movie you can’t wait to see? The new specialty kimchi bar? And everyone’s busy or uninterested or wants to wait until the thursday after this and so you acquiesce and you mope
and you watch youtube videos of that band last time they were in chicago
and nothing quite satisfies your kimchi craving.
Despite popular belief it does not make you a loser to go to a movie alone— it makes you a loser to be so dependent on other people… dependent? Is that it? Afraid, maybe, of appearances.
And, if you insist on bringing someone— bring your freshly cleared mind.
bring your latest art project.
Bring Nietzsche, who can only be read uninterrupted. Bring your shadow and bring your crystal vision, the sound of your heart in your ear and one person breathing
alone but not lonely.
Summer time means it’s time for the world to start doing street art again.
A memorable piece from last summer.
Botulism and nose-bleeds.
I was starting to think there were worse things to fear,
than being way up high,
or insects with six extra legs to our own two.
Where we were we couldn’t see the eclipse, but we were looking up the dusty sky anyway, turning itself over to the universe.
“extermination of the bees,” I said, “the process by which top soil blows away, far away into the nowhere and all we have is sand.”
I could hear the wind moving around small things in the dark— littered beer bottles, empty trash cans.
“Slow, public, microscopic deaths and rots. The kind your grandmother sleeps next to, now. The kind she feeds and tries to lift up when it falls.
The slow loss of the crease in the sofa, the one that was always deeper, and just half a foot away from her own.”
I thought I was probably getting at something. I lost all credibility, I guess, when he finally asked
“so what do you fear?”
