Starbucks just isn't a place I hang, my computer keys stick from sand grains, it is hot out. Pennsylvania hills hundred and five and climbing hot, I am on the road.
Not on the road on the road, not yet. I am here in PA taking care of family business, roadtripping as I always do on the East Coast to see to those I love. I leave for me, for wild me, for roadtripping for Kelly and No ONE no thing but me and the wild spirit in one week and two days. Starbucks is a place I want to hate. They were playing Billie Holiday when I walked in, then Feist. Billie and Feist!? And now a very sexy just dirty but clean-shaved enough dark-haired badass walked in. Come on life is this your way of saying get un-rigid get un-closed with your mind? Like the time I was so poor I had to eat from the food bank in Oregon and go back to shopping at Wal-mart, after years of Walmart-hiatus because all their goods were Chinese-therefor-workers-rights-terribly-abused-produced, and so I closed my mind to them, til I couldn't afford to shop anyplace else?
I've typed or sat down to write in a Starbucks exactly never, and I came here today because about five miles from grandma and pap's house was this local coffee shop next to a health food store. I stored this info in my vegetable body bank for future use years ago, but in those years since the local place closed and Starbucks came in, which greedy greedy logo is why I hate you in the first place. But here we are, and you know what, the my-aged or older sweet barista who served my double espresso over ice is probably making more hourly than I did all winter, managing our "local" java cafe. So what the hell do I know, really?
Mom and I said our goodbyes. Wednesday morning, it was hot out then but still with the salt-beach cool in the air. Minus the oppression. I hugged her goodbye and then she started to cry then I started to cry then we were crying and choking and clinging to the other, and then it was officially over, the time I lived with her, the time we were roommates and adults. My time being back home, me, mom and me, the beach. I cried like that, she did, we did when I left her in Crownsville when I was 18 in 1995 to move to the beach. I left her like that, us like that, same driveway at the same beach, in 2004 when my brother pulled me and him away so he could drop me back to Brandon, who then Upward and Onward drove he and I away across the country to Oregon. Mom is flying to Tennessee next week to move my brother home again. He gets back in to town the day I leave. He is texting me to stay. Little shitball the only thing that would hurt me worse would be if he didn't.
I got on the road towards Pennsylvania with the shallow full in my chest that tells you you are alive because oh lord how I can feel my heart. I didn't listen to music I just appreciated the draping green and sunlight of my for the last 13 years home which is the Eastern Shore. Eventually I got my phone out, Wallace had texted, this was when mom and I were hugging and crying our goodbyes. Thank you life I sighed to myself when I saw the text from him. The first thing that ever happened the night I left Brandon and moved out on my own, my first step first breath towards adult independent woman making choices for her self for her own heart real and beating and true, that very first night was the quiet. And I asked myself what, what is it you want? And the silence there was stunning. Extraordinary. So, so close. All the answer that was answered: quiet.
It was weeks before an answer came, when it did I rolled my eyes at it and called it too indulgent.
I just want to move to a beach where it's warm all the time and write. And maybe teach ESL again. That's all.
Haha that was two and a half years ago and when the answer strong and clear came I wrote it down in my dream journal and under it wrote Talk to Mike Wallace, who, right after college, moved to a beach in Southern California. Where it's warm all the time. After I wrote it down I saw in my head the quicksand of reasons falling in the no, no no's and that's too crazy an idea to ever entertain. But I held it in a little corner of my soul all that time even though it moved more and more away, distant like a fantasy island and the eternities of oceans between me and what I want. I still see it, far away as it became, me happy there on a warm beach doing my thing, easy as it is or was to mistake it for a mirage.
I got to Erika's and we cried, too. She gave me a present and I gave her hers, and they both were about letters. And letters are about marking the process, nous. The process, the holiness of which comes in signs from Life, and dream following is about the signs and equally about the confidence fired in our hearts to be willing to see, to say yes. Yes yes yes I see, I see oh Starbucks o family o roadtripping traffic and smudging my vision heat, I seeeeee
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