You can drink.

The part of me I landed on since even before Maryland I have pretended not to see but it's sitting here finally staring back at me.  This happens some days your one-eyed blindness comes a-reckoning.

There is fine gray rain-light in my back room at Ocean Pines.  The quiet truth is you can't go back again.  If you know me you know words flex in and out and taunt and haunt my head, you know fire propels and burns my guts and runs my legs and doesn't let me settle, you know the arrows of these things draw electric on my skin and you know the deep quiet places I like to disappear from it all into mellow trance and stare.  You also know there's a shine that transmutes everything and illumines the muscle of my heart and leads me and that most of all for this heartlight I will and do forsake all.

My father leaves for golf after coming back for a rain jacket.  It is near 60 out today.  My mother is on a plane to Mexico. Miles from here my cousins are in cozy nests each with their loves and this of course is the only thing that makes sense.  I try not to be jealous or misunderstand.  The first beach boy I ever loved has wrung me up and washed me out which is exactly what I came here to let him do.  All of it is past now Kel, can you be past it, too? HOME.  Where I stand it sits out like a soft grassy tump just above some fast moving blue waters.  They are crystal clear.  To write this makes me also see the Ocean City pier.  There is above it a sky that is soft and pink-yellow with the warmth of a season-worn sun.  The waters are tracking and quicker than they've been in a long time and yes, that's it.  I don't have to cross them, and that is what it is to stand here.  Because you can go back you can go back over and over and again to the many dark falls just behind you oh but to stand here, on the grassy tump with forested woods thick and deep just steps away from my feet--and so many cliff sides on the shore to the other side.  You also don't have to.  You also can just sit shoreside, and breathe.  You also can scoop handful.  You can drink girl, you can drink.  My god this thing will move you, you can let it, can stop the canvassing and cutting of jungle vines can stop all the bloody poison you keep ingesting in your veins.  You don't have to cross these waters again because there's no place else left to go. You can jump in, right here, and let the waters wash you through.

Or you can just stand, too.  Stand in this peace awhile, on this sturdy ground.  Appreciating the scenery.  The where you've been.

That dumb happy headless fury

It's been 17 years since I've seen this kid and we talk for hours each time one of us calls.  It just goes on and on.

He lives in Hollywood now and he knew me when love was easy as giggling.  My heart was whole and pure once and I trusted it and never gave it's direction any doubt and this was that last and final time, before the feeling of broken or thinking too much, before I felt afraid.  We talk for hours, we laugh until I have no breath and have to take my sunglasses off to wipe at my eyes.  We talk about Kevin and the memories are so tender at the edge it makes it hard for me to believe I ever let myself stop feeling that way.

We were kids.  He tells me he remembers when we first met when he was 13.  That I was with Konan at the Fractured Prune.  This makes sense, they had the best donuts in town and Ko and I were going up the alley by that age to buy cigarettes at the Quality Inn from the machine.  They cost a buck then.

I tell him about when I first met Kev.  I was 12.  He worked the Beach Club back when they still had video games.  He bummed a smoke.  Kevin's been gone 5 years.  Last week was the anniversary and that night I put a pic up of us on FB not knowing it was his memorial day.  I got teary when Ryan told me yea Wednesday was his date I thought you knew that and then we wowed low and quiet for a minute sure as we  have been a few different times that Kevin's the one reuniting us.  Then we told more stories and laughed and sniffled some more.  Ryan was his best friend.  I asked him remember that time you guys came up to a rave with me and we stayed with my mom and you never broke Beavis and Butthead the whole entire time and ma thought there was something wrong with you two?  We laugh that hysterical crying laugh that only the oldest friends do.

He tells me stories that happened in the years in-between.  I can literally see them.  I can see the faces Kevin made, his wide or black star eyes, see the postures Ryan took as he gives me each detail.  He's a story-teller and a carny and most of all one of the old school beach boys and talking to him is like finding a part of myself I knew for a long time was real but then eventually one day just decided had been made up all along.  It's like proving myself right after convincing myself for so long I wasn't.  A feeling of peace that matters finally and only to me. I just never ever thought I could talk about this stuff again.  Not with someone who was so immediately right there.  I feel so grateful.  I feel so living--in this certain kind of brand new way.

Kevin James was my friend since we were 12 and my love for a little while during a time that most people call the best summer of their life.  I loved him.  We shared the sweetest innocent romance and it was the last good and pure thing I ever had.  It was too sad and too far gone, too hard to think of til now.  I loved him with that dumb happy headless fury we love with at 18.  The memories are endless and I didn't even know they were there, all lined up side by side in some lost little corner of this sorta busted heart.   Who knew?  I feel him live as if he were here.

Life is funny.  That's all.

Me and Ryan, 1995

Kev and me, 1995.  Ocean City, MD.

Last swim

I hadn't swam since the day I went to go see Katie, not counting the last night with Casey at Fagers when we went partly (or totally, depending on who's who) skinny-dipping late night between closing-time for the bar and getting our regular 3am pizza at Mambo's. That last night it was us grls, the four of us that were left, and Todd should of been there too but he wasn't which maybe was cuz of me or maybe wasn't, but in the end didn't matter bc it turned out to be us a ladies nite, us bareskinned and the hot blowing wind and water warm as a mother's hand. I hooted a lot that nite and floated along in the rough top surf then made sure we all had blankets and sheets to wrap ourselves with from the collection in my trunk. Monday was gold out, the water was blue and the air so clean and I stepped on to the sand in front of the hotel where I go to write and look at the sea, and as soon as my feet touched down I felt the loop in my heart which was Yes yes golden yes and I knew that I would swim.

And in my $12 WalMart bathing suit that looks hotter on me than all the other ones, I went in. The water was deep and twisted and rippy at first, I padded through then up on to the sand bar and watched the water just barely then cover my feet. I stood a long time. I waited, I watched. My skin was taught with shiver bumps and I breathed deep to keep my self warm. I kept walking after a while, got to a place where the current seemed sullen and the depth was thigh high. I dove under and swam the whole while underneath the waves, just using the kicking motion of my feet. I expected to easily get out beyond the break, where I go to float, but the waves had a mind to their own and that is the first time all summer, even counting the hurricane, that the ocean and I struggled together in my swim.

So, I let her take me where she would, floating all the while on my back. I finally stood when I realized the water level was only knee-high. I laughed out loud when I stood and discovered this, I am, I realized un-self-consciously, laughing out loud covered in wet beach sand and clumps of salt water hair and goosebumps, three families in the ankle surf just yards from me, so often alive inside my own natural state of childlike, intrinsic joy.

It hit me then, it is October. Summer is over. It really is.

I heard a cosmic door close last week, one that I walked through several years ago. I am just about out of the hall. I am happy about it, I am 33. I am moving on. It feels good. And I said so, I said so in whistles and grins and empty hands in the air, I delighted and I cleansed in and then I thanked the sea.

Packing: 100% on the go

...and then, she begins to dance. She's practicing. A sense of mastery comes out of her, like a strong shiny shoot, because she's been watching carefully and she knows the shoot is going to flower. And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old. ~Anne Lamott

You're hard to get a hold of, he says. He's told me this before. And on cue, anticipating my coy defense, he continues: It's not a bad thing, you're out there on the firing line. Living life. 100% in the game.

I start to protest, to offer a rebuttal. To use my words somehow to make light of but still identify for him the 12 whole months of silence and alone, of nothing, doing nothing but sitting quiet, listening, crying dreaming writing screaming praying, alone. Way out there on the river, way out there with just Choptank, way out there with no TV and shoddy stolen Internet and often the ringer turned off on my phone. But he cuts me off again.

No no, I mean I know you go home and do your thing and find your silence and take your time to regroup and find your self, but you do it so you can get back out there to do your thing. To get back out there in the game. You like to go, you like to do you like to be. You dont want anybody who's gonna hold you back or down. It's awesome.

I am stopped, stilled a moment within which says a lot because we've been drinking coffee like the caffeine gods are about to go out on the picket line, I mean we've been slamming the stuff like shots all morning. And this is why I like him, why I've always liked him, cuz he's a witness--good at seeing people for what they are, for all of who and how they are. And he calls it like he sees them.

He's a bone collector. A gatherer strong inside and meant for good, deep things. He's always looking for food and women and song and money because he too is hungry, hungry as hell, like me.

We spent the day together while I should have been packing but sometimes that is the best thing you can do: shine the funny light on your otherwise darkened bones. Be with the people who breathe the life over you, whose air energizes your sinew and wraps you in muscle and makes you more whole.

When I got home I made kale pot and chicken broth which is like a chemical thing, or something, deep in the substance of me: it's what Teena fed me the first two months I was here. When I would come home cold and find hot liquid full of nutrient simmering on the stove. It was late when I was done and climbed in to bed, and early, and dark, when I found myself awake and up and ready to fill the boxes. Ready to pack. Ready to move.

I have this creative warehouse of stuff that's gone largely untouched throughout the year I've been at Chop: boxes with papers and card stock and markers and pencils and pastels and paints and canvas and fabrics and ribbons and stickers, brushes, sponges cardboard and glue. I have a filing cabinet and three bags, two boxes, and one shelf on my bookcase full of journals and writings and datebooks and research and facts. Archives. And six boxes of books. And these are the essentials, what survived after the farm. This is something I have always seen as my great problem: my inability to properly categorize and organize my creative "stuff." Thus, my inability to get up and go.

But I get it now, or at least for today. That that's just me, the unorganized which translates as that which is not meant to be contained. Same as the girl jetting over the bridge to Baltimore out late then up at 10 to kick it in Annapolis all day with a friend. Somehow, right now, one thing totally has to do with the other. Right now, they are one and the same.

I am laughing, smiling, quiet. Dancing. My life is spinning stillness, filled with song.

Bones & Love

Every night when I come home the first thing I see is the river. Or, what I ought to say: every night when I come home, the first thing I see through my windshield is the expanse of black above my head and the crazy mat of stars through the trees in the driveway. And I get out of the car, and the first thing I feel is the river.

No matter what my day's been like, no matter what is otherwise on my mind or bogging up my head. I pull into my driveway, ease the Versa far back near to the old boat that hasn't been used in more than a couple seasons, park and have the door open before I have time to think. And then, on impulse, as a matter of muscle memory and also, of something deeper programmed in me, some part ancient and respondent to firesmoke and the hush of trees, I breathe. I take a deep breath and let it all out and what happens is from inside me I get a soft smile, and I go still. And then, I can feel the river. I can feel her moving, can feel her in that place in my belly and on the back of my neck--same place where you feel when, say, a storm's coming on.

And for that brief moment, all is well. I know peace.

I moved here, to the town of Choptank with it's 20 or so houses, on the Choptank River, last November. I rent a room in an old house two up from the river. This house has modern painted gray-taupe siding but still looks old because it is. It was originally built in the 1830's. At night you can feel the life in its walls, all that it has breathed and seen. In the morning, where I come to the front porch to write, you can see the river out the window to my left.

At the time of my decision to move here to Chop, I lived in a six-bedroom farmhouse on a 400-acre-farm that grew soybeans and feed corn. That's a lot of land, a lot of space, a lot of air to breathe. I basically lived there on a deal with the owners to tend their property and upkeep the old place, the owners were distant inlaws of the magnificent man I was living with and was in love with and enjoying life with since the fall that I got out of college, in 2002. Brandon was my best friend, he was who and how I processed one of those strange times of transition that makes us humans so sketchy and uncertain: time of what-next or in-between. I loved him with every last blood inside my heart, I loved him so it was how my bones moved. A sweet, adoring love that saw nothing other than him, nothing else outside of us. He was all I knew, and all I ever hoped to know.

That same year my dad came back in to my life in a hands-on way because of a sad and serious depression at mid-life. And my mom sold our house, the one that me and my brother and her had always known, the one in the county between Annapolis and B-more. And she moved back in with my dad, first time in 15 years, to the beach.

Last night I was out late in the county. We met Brian, my brother Sean's best friend since they were five, and his little brother Little Sean, and their folks and our folks for dinner at our old favorite spot for crabcakes, Hellas. Their mom, Ms. Louise, helped raise my brother and me. It was her birthday last night, first time all of us have been together seriously since I dont know when. When we were growing up ma would drop Sean and I off at their place 6 in the morning on her way to work in the city. Ms. Lou would get us ready for school, breakfast, uniforms, carpool. Me and the boys would scream and fight or laugh and play. Nintendo and VCR movies on tv for hours. We were lucky, blessed, charmed-life kids. BMX bikes and kickball in the deadend when we'd come home from school. Anymore when I am home, like last night, I am so, so grateful. I am so aware of how good it was, and wistful in the most tender of grateful ways. And I miss it so much.

I was born in Baltimore City. I remember the market at Cross Street when I was only old enough to stand level with people's knees. I remember what Old Bay smells like on the salty Harbour air. I remember imagining how close the big boats were to the sea. I remember what it feels like, to have a river of living move under you, and that river be no more visible than the concrete at your feet.

It is hard to put this in to words. The bones of me, the true substantial life-time blood. I can say only that when the time comes to know you again, when the time comes to reclaim the flesh of who you are, you know it. You know it in a way that you will fight and pray not to recognize. You know it in a way that feels awful, like fear and hate and pain. In the most secret, darkest places in your brain, in the stomach tight breath that draws you awake at night, in the weight that sits just above your neck, you know it. And when you know something as distinct as Time, there is simply nothing else to know.

Choptank, you healed my soul. I am the river of me again. It was a fucking hard and awful fight and I hated how many times I had to let go. But here I am, on the shore again. How can I ever thank you? How can I ever thank you, Life? How can I ever thank you enuff...?

~~~

The song that helped birth this post: Wharf Rat, The Grateful Dead. O, Jerry. I love you. I love your guitar. You touch the myth inside of me.

"And maybe that's why I love you-

...you notice those things and you believe me when I make them mythical." ~Davka

i just came through this weird nebulous sometimes friendship sometimes love affair and the whole thing is that he made me believe in me, made me believe in the story of me. the things that i hold most dear. which is wild because the reality of me and him was always mostly just a story in my head, one that i told myself. one that he, too, sometimes told me or we together tried to tell each other. there wasn't a whole lot of reality, just a whole lot of what both of us tried hard to want to see.

storytelling is so important. life is nothing if not mythology, and all us, all us broken broken people are just doing what we can to cling to some kind of, or shape what we can of, a meaning. something to hold it all, to string it all together like so many little twinkling, barely there decorative lights that you branch over the cedar tree next to the garden outside in the night in summertime. and sometimes it rains, and sometimes the lights get lost in the dark green, and sometimes you just forget to turn them on.

i was with my homey prandy the other day it's the first time i saw or talked to him since six years ago the day of his wedding, in that time since we've both been in and lost our own hard, hard love. i fell crazy in love with him when i was just 16. we've had a sometimes trippy, often simple, beautiful road together since and i am happy he is still my friend. and he talked a long long while and then it was my turn and when we were both done i told him, i was coming through the dining room this morning and saw myself in the mirror on the wall and thought, i look so old. we laughed cuz the truth was i had just finished talking about spending so much time with cuzin erin and how youthful and good for my summer soulnheart that's been. but the truth also was that it was true--and i said that next. prandy, how? how did we get here, to now, how did it happen that i am suddenly 32?

and that is mythology, and what matters, and also why my truest gift is my story-teller soul. because here, him and we, we spent the four hours we were able to make for the other totally handing the other our bones: the stories of our lives, the important pieces that we hold dear. not the answers, just the steps. the steps we've taken on our paths, which, without neccesarily saying so, held the marks of how much heart in each place we actually laid down. and that is what counts, our own journey. the hero's journey is our own, every one. and how beautiful to me are the people that keep track with us, that help us see the march we're on, every so often, for the bigger version of what it is. no matter the lies or the details that we are busy trying to tell ourselves, no matter the pain of the reality: my heart is beating and bleeding but sharing our bones reminds me, i can feel! I AM Alive!! and this is what counts...our stories are what we own, are all we have...and there is relief in the little bit of medicine of this.

i am so thankful for dear friends. for sharing on their paths. and so, so grateful for what they do to illuminate my own....and today what i honor most is my own right, my own right to my own story and the understanding that i am capable, and most of all responsible to that. that my story truly is mine and the steps i take are up to only me, and my own mthology up to no one else but me to own, how i see things, how and if i choose to look....i loved someone a long time for his ability to see the life in me and that sort of got in the way of me being able to do the same.

hmmm. good medicine doesn't come easy sometimes. that doesn't mean it isn't worth it, tho