In 2006 I bought a little black, spiral bound notebook. 500
sheets of unlined paper, front cover stamped with blocky silver letters. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness. It was the winter break before my senior year of high school,
and I was visiting friends in San Francisco.
That was my first time in a city, my first time traveling of
my own accord. My friends’ apartment: an upper-level studio. Mattress on the
floor of the walk-in closet, couch beneath the living room window. Kitchen,
bathroom, living room, closet. I could touch every wall with ten steps, but I didn't.
I spent so much time being still there, on the couch beneath the window. Watching
street lights, listening to street sounds. Laughter, and yelling. Broken glass,
and sirens heralding strangers’ tragedies.
Starving. Hysterical.
Naked.
Sixteen years old and my first time in a city. Wandering
through City Lights Bookstore, running my fingers along spines, and spines, and
spines. Everything feeling heavy; feeling meaningful the way you expect things
to feel meaningful when you’re sixteen and realize a city could swallow your
heart.
The day before, I navigated the slow-moving weave of the line
wrapped around a Western Union. Bounced on the balls of my feet, eager
to retrieve the emergency funds my parents wired 1,032 miles in the middle of the
night. I remember my mother driving 30 miles into town, the babies in tow,
after I called and said hungry. After
I called and said broke.
That day in the bookstore I weighed hunger against novelty.
I forfeited dinner for two things: the book that would redefine my life and the one that would record it.
Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down
on the rocks of Time!
New Years’ Eve and sixteen. In the city that swallowed my
heart I wrote:
“Poverty huddles in a corner, wears
a blue stocking cap, scrounges up small change. While four gay men flirt
shamelessly, and I wonder why I’m ashamed. Life dresses in white, head to toe.
He has change in his pocket, liquor on his breath. The city blooms like a
cancer you learn to love: a tumble of light and sound cascading down the hills.
There’s always rain, some days it just refuses to fall.”
I remember a white suit, and a cane, and a smile. All teeth
like something out of a movie, tipping his top hat with a flourish. The streets
that smelled like piss and sparkled like gold. Little piles of white powder tediously
measured in the back of the city bus. My friend elbowing me, whisper yelling Don’t look like you’re looking, but look.
Everything killdeer before I even knew killdeer existed.
This year Portland, Oregon. The summer heat broken like a collective
sigh of relief. This morning: my bare feet on wet pavement for the first time
in months. Everything easy like suns setting, reflected in mirrored sunglasses.
A blur of bridge and city and skyline. The dirty waterfront full
of human being stories. Everything easy, like That Girl smiling the smile that
makes my bones featherlight.
Real holy laughter in
the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the
river! into the street!
Eight years later there are 15 blank pages in that black,
spiral bound notebook. Across the top of one I scrawl I am 25 years old, and I am not sad. And I think perhaps that’s all
I have to say right now. Sometimes I hold this book full of loss/regret/despair.
There are so many selves caught between these pages. I am 25 years old. I am not sad. Scattered between the journal
entries, I find letters to a future self. And tonight (for perhaps the first
time) I’m glad I listened to their advice.
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