moment:

i let the new gps run for the whole length of the trip for the first time, and as i was pulling into my driveway it said to me, "you have arrived home."

how about that, pittsburgh?

(continuing) realization:

words will happen when they are ready to happen, and no sooner.

walk

oakland summer feet

black-tarred and blistered
flip-flops aren't real

step in, mud puddles on the shower floor
as soon as your feet hit wet

soap stains, all over

clean and worth dirtying again.

lesson:

you cannot speak Truth to those who won't hear it.

correspondence

letters i never meant to send

their pages never torn from spiral-bound notebooks,
protected by cardboard covers
more durable than paper envelopes

never graced by a stamp
self-sticking or otherwise

never read by eyes other than mine

words without direction,
messages without meaning.

cloudy-eyed epistles
waiting for the day someone finally decides
they are fit to burn.

question:

do you ever think about just how lucky you are that all of your sphincters open and close appropriately?

realizations:

high school never ends.

it takes a certain kind of friendship to redefine days of the week.

to Molly

so today is the birthday of a friend of mine, or, more accurately, someone who used to be a very close friend but who isn't anymore. a lot of shit went down for me after high school, and i don't really talk to anyone from there anymore. it's too much to handle most of the time because i am so far away from my past now that being dragged back into it makes me feel like i'm suffocating. i wish it wasn't this way, but it is.

this was the first group of people in which i learned that i could say anything, but it wasn't learned enough to put into practice at that time. i do remember a few of the first moments of believing it, and saying anything, saying the one thing you thought no one would ever accept hearing. the first time staying up on the phone until 2am when you had school the next day and you just needed to say everything, so that it would stop being nothing, that thick nothing which craves words and can't have them--tension like the humidity in the air before the rain, the drops just needing to get heavy enough to fall.

it makes me feel guilty when i think of people from my past who i didn't treat as well as i now know i should have, because i feel like i was not giving them my best self.

i never appreciated those lessons at the time, but i now see that there are much bigger ones, that these were only a step. and i love that time for what it was--a step--and i'm glad to know that there is no going backwards, that we can only do what comes next.

or, as i was reminded rather starkly last night when a book was closed in my hands, "Now is happening now."

so to you, and all of you, who i used to know but don't anymore, i love you, i miss you, i wish you well. i finally, finally wish you well.