Iron and Sugar

My mother bought me a new winter coat to keep me warm.  Small poems walk past me on the street and I hide them all in my new pockets so I can read them over when I feel the bart doors snap shut. I leave the larger poems of tragedy on the sidewalk where they lay- my heart isn’t big enough to carry them home.

I don’t mind the pull of a steady train.  Someone ended their life last night at Powell street station. I found nothing in Tolstoy’s Confessions to explain this one, despite his amazing and succinct definition of the world and the reasons why.  I hadn’t been told for sure if that indeed was the reason.  But I felt it logically. I sat in the dark tunnel and thought about them. They bled iron and sugar. I read it when I got home.

Was it the haze in the air? What spiral did they see between the tracks?  Was it as quick as they hoped? People were cursing on the train.  They were late for their coffees or dinner dates. Their feet hurt, they missed their children and sweethearts. The platform was alien and cold. San Francisco turned the clouds red across the bay, Oakland had black clouds moving fast.

The woman I spoke with had lipstick on her front tooth but I was too polite to point that out. I stared at it, determined it to be a well chosen shade.  When she smiled, further exposing her decorated tooth,  the wrinkles around her eyes revealed two fish where her eyes had been, eye shadow making the scales and smeared eyeliner from a day’s Work As God Knows What defining the tails. They faded back into her skin when her smile drooped at the word “Suicide.”  You work “as” something.  Or you “are” something. Or you “practice” your trade. She was a fish eyed smile, an awkward walker.  I am a glorified yard duty, a transitional care taker.  That is what I is. I was a smoker, now I am not. I was a student, now I am not.

 A person laid on the tracks. Then they were not. They were iron and sugar, calcium and protein. They were sadness. Now they are not.

 Define/Redefine.

I feel ruined when I walk home from work. The walk to work is full of purpose.  The sun passes through the chapel and fills the top floor with colors. I sit in there and yearn for the others when I have a quite minute. I don’t pray. I do something else. Quietly and with purpose. Sean does not approve of this. The end of the day comes too quickly and without enough dollars in my pocket to satisfy all the material glories I want. I desperately wish he would turn water into wine instead of sell it bottled by someone else.  But he will in his own way and no one can tell me that’s not true. They don’t know what I know. So I wish they would stop talking. At work they call me an overachiever. I find this absurd. I take pride in my work. Why be there at all if you don’t contribute? Why be HERE at all if you aren’t creating something?

I know my best friend is getting married. I know another is carrying the ever growing future inside her.  I want it too, I want it too.  But now is not the time for me.  I will busy myself with unimportant things and give my heart to strangers.  I am filled with rocks and glass, but my skin is soft to the touch.  And my rent is high.  Too high. But the house is more full of love than I’ve ever felt.

When his cheek brushes mine and I can feel the warmth, I want all of life to happen immediately.  Right now.

“Tomorrow/will it really come/tomorrow /and when it does will I still be human?

Just Put your arms around me, I won’t tell anybody”- Morrissey (Yea, I know, emo. Don’t laugh at me.)

It is hard to know whether or not to shake hands, kiss or hug when you first meet someone who is close to someone you love. When you know you may only meet them this one time, that they are going into a war zone in a matter of days, it adds to the confusion. But when they know they are going into a war zone, what kind of closeness is desired on their part? The touch of another, a safe other. He gripped me like a dance partner after 3 or 4 drinks and then let go like it was the most natural greeting possible. Mutual observation. The brother of my love is leaving. I am his brother’s love. Closeness. Eyes. He smelled my hair. He was curious about his brother’s girl. Like I was by definition an extension of Sean.  Early the next morning, without words he simply crawled under our sleeping covers on the floor and embraced us. Both of us. When I woke up again, he had gone back to his own bed. Zero sexuality, total familiarity.  

I might know what he wanted. We all need the touch of those who can hold us safely. Even if we can’t admit it.  He’s in Iraq now.

Sean left for Sonoma right after he graduated. I spent quite a bit of time there in the last few months. The drives to Sonoma are incredibly beautiful.  I am always surprised by how little I know about this part of California. Like any small town, people use low tones when discussing the underbelly. These tones are not shame, but more an unacknowledged pride. Under Sonoma’s sun, Sean shines a little more quietly. His friend’s are clever, unassuming, welcoming. But I can’t see the place clearly due to perpetual watering eyes and the need for a tissue. Sunburned grass and ineffectual breezes keep things blurry.

Just

Sometimes the devil will blow on your neck and you will laugh it off saying it’s just the breeze.

It was just an orange bucket in the road. So I just swerved to avoid it. Just as my tire hit the shoulder, my front left tire decided it was done obeying my orders, thus beginning a mechanical rebellion. Full fast traffic, Fremont, 80 miles an hour, nothing on the radio to sing, my hair undone and my calm complete. Lane one, lane two, still spinning in Lane three, and there it is –INTERNATIONAL FREIGHT- I read clean chrome and speed. 24 foot freight truck hurtling towards just me. No sound but one voice saying one thing one time: I am going to die……………..But the glass just shattered, pieces all over me, Everything shattered- I just gave up.    But my subtle bones, the ones I’ve never seen but have always known are there—just fine. Soft flesh, loud pulse. Eyes wide open.  Well then, self? What now? What do we do with our bones now?

 Side of the highway. Just men are around you. He’s hugging you, his shirt is rough on your cheek, he is taking something from your hair, he’s talking at you, no grammar sounds comforting—glass on the ground, on your toes. Bottle caps, a ball of  shiny brown tape from a tape deck in the dirt. Has that been there ten years? Who listens to tapes? Why are people throwing tapes out of cars? Hand on your shoulder, People are touching you, pay attention. You look up and lock eyes with the smoking man. Has he been smoking this whole time? “You smoke Marlboros?” Your voice pronounces a few things. To the back of a police car. “Oh, yea uh just finished college. Yea,  was on my way to meet someone for lunch.” “You know, Miss, you were just hit by a truck. A big truck.” I never saw the CHP officer’s eyes. But he said mine were the color of his daughter’s. He was having his lunch while I sat in his car waiting. Why did you become CHP? “I was a middle school teacher. I discovered its easier to enforce the rules than teach people how to break them intelligently. Kids are tough. People are easy.” Its just that simple. He walked straight across four lanes of highway with the confidence of a dead man, like he was picking up after a messy child. He threw pieces of my Honda over his shoulder so they landed at my feet.

Dance charts from the days of actual dancing always had black and white shoe prints with bee trails to illustrate the steps. Tire marks are there to teach the living how to dance with the devil, blaring black on bright pavement, signatures of tangoing cars. I told sean I had just seen my tire marks. He remembered me saying this. “You saw your own tiny dance steps?” Sean knows how to love just so.

For just some crazy reason, only men pulled over that day. I can’t explain this. But We all just hugged and laughed. They held me. I know why. I know what they wanted. We all need the touch of those who can hold us safely when we feel the closeness of death. Even if we can’t admit it.  We are always dancing with death and if the steps get too complicated we just fall.

I’m leaving Santa Cruz. I wish I knew where I was going. At least I know who I’ll be with…

The cosmetics company Clinque uses the authority of science. The clerks wear lab coats, the whole look of the counters is meant to display a shiny, new, mercilessly well lit future, a more technologically advanced answer to your beauty problems. White, clean glass, sanitary plastic, bright lights, modern couches, no fuss, just clean. Surgical. Sex is not what Clinque sells. That is not the message…At Clinique, you are not ruled by a little thing, a messy thing, like biology.  The name “Clinique  Labs” is an obvious give away. This is not a natural answer to a better you, this is an advancement in the art of facial manipulation, just short of altering your DNA. And oh, I buy it. I love it. But how far can this go?

 That’s all I can muster right now. I can’t justify writing things down when things are so disorganized. I am a financial miscreant.  An academic dilettante. And I just can’t get it together. Even worse, I’m pretty happy anyway.

Igor and I explored cemeteries. This was a common tangent for us on our tiny road trip adventures. We would just point at a map, pick a weekend and fly out of town on a Friday morning, back late Sunday night. Our eyes were open and we walked with our hands palm to palm.

  The place was all damp summer grass buzzing with unseen companions and angled sun. Our journeys are so jumbled in my head now, I can’t remember the names. It was above the city, so the sounds of the rare car or distant laughter from the two restaurants would echo off the Monterey pines and bounce between headstones. It was small, so typically Mendocino county, with a perfect red chapel, like a school house from the 1800s. I guess it’s a schoolhouse still in a way.  We parked my little red acura in the dusty parking lot and wandered amongst the dead.

Family plots reveal more than single headstones. Relationships—“Look, she died in childbirth in 1922. See, she’s next to a small stone with only one year on it…” Sometimes, “Loving Husband, Brother, Father” will be resting  near by. His dates may 20, 30, 40 years later. I love to stand and murmur the names and dates, tracking the generations. Entire novels whisper in cemeteries. But the volume is low.
I separated from Igor, wandering over to a particular stone that looked unloved and well worn. Obscured by dried up weeds, this one had rocks on top. Disorganized. I reached down to brush these things away, sensing the abandonment of this grave. Igor appeared at my side just as I bent to my task. Realizing my intentions, he grabbed my wrist, with force, yelling “Stop! What the hell are you doing? Don’t touch that. Its meant to be there. Those are rocks. Its on purpose. You NEVER disturb a grave.” We locked eyes as I stood frozen, red shame blurring my vision. He was horrified. I was horrified at my own ignorance. I burned with shame. Thank God he stopped me.  But I learned. I learned this lesson well.

What bothers me is how sharp experiments in failure tattoo their lessons into our eyes, so they flash back into us when we blink.

I blinked in a cemetery in Romania. So I told Jon A. about how I learned to never touch anything, Igor’s voice ringing still inside my head. I am “older and wiser” in this cemetery, but this cemetery is older than any I have ever entered. I’m not sure about that actually. But it would be very close.  We were in the heart of Transylvania, the town of Cluj. Cluj is small by almost any standard. Its obvious you are nearing the graveyard when every other shop for about a 4 block radius sells coffins to suit every taste. Rough, unpainted, sharp angled wood to heavily lacquered,  liberally padded satin tombs where the rest would indeed be eternal. No shop keepers that I recall. Just empty coffins and noisy traffic exhaust on the sidewalks. Jon and I joked lightheartedly about getting locked over night in a Transylvanian cemetery. The hot of the day was waning fast as the sun was setting. We promised each other only a half hour. How big could it be? The dead of hundreds of years in Romania piled grave on top of grave. Narrow paths separated the stones, the large fenced off plots, the ancient ones, the new ones, the candles and bundles of flowers. Small statues, strange names I’m unable to murmur. Occasionally, the sound of small brooms made of collected twigs would travel, mingling with the uneven hum of Romanian voices as they tend to some dead relative. But the strangest thing about this place, this totally overwhelming city of stones and geologic layers, was the sound of the “Cluj Birds” racing the sun back home. There is nothing more surreal than seeing a sky blacken with birds. As we ambled back to the gate, promising each other we would return and explore properly, I squeezed his hand and asked him to remember this. I looked him in the eye and said “Right now. This. We’re happy right now. Remember this.” He promised. Intelligent gaze, hopeful expression. We were filled with wonder and adventure.

What bothers me is how sharp experiments in love tattoo themselves into our lips, so the scars build  when we kiss.  
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I was gripped suddenly by panic yesterday. The best way to cure it is, I’m ashamed to admit, go to Walgreens and buy a whole bunch of cleaning products and useless cosmetics. A sense of renewal and control by controlling my space and masking over all my human flaws with lipstick and lotions. (as if it makes a difference) Then I blaze home, stereo screaming as loud as me, and set to cleaning as a meditation. I reorganized the upstairs of my loft. Removed the table on loan from Igor Z and Vladislav.(With Cathy, couldn’t have done it alone.)  I dusted, scraped, and vacuumed wrapped in a Russian style head scarf and a boy’s t-shirt. But then came the boxes.

My mother’s handwriting described the contents. Box after box lugged around for years. “Tiny Gifts, little notes, Misc. Crap. Pics.”  Love letters worn from being read a thousand times, tickets, wadded up papers, useless items that must have meant something to someone at some point  Pointless. Meaningless.  But the “someones?” They are ever present, if not physically here. But the most curious part of these boxes and drawers is the notebooks.

Nothing is more shaking than seeing patterns emerge from your own scribbled notes to self over the course of eight years. And I never kept a real “journal” until recently. I wrote stuff down when it would come out of my pen voluntarily, usually much to my own surprise. I’d look down in the middle of class and realize my brain was telling me stupid  things in my own margins. So I gathered a few examples. I won’t include the years, or who they are in reference to—I don’t think it matters really. I’m not too proud of these but I can see my sense of self shaping on these pages. Its not pretty.

“Pulling me down is this feeling of save me, I’m small, too small to handle you. So just fold me into the stability of your life and please don’t tell anyone that my stability is all falsehood and acting.”…….”But your stability, once I get there, is crushingly boring. And you don’t recognize a goddamn thing in my eyes. You just like your own reflection in the glass of my pupils when I’m done crying.”

 "Will I ever sleep again? And why can't I sleep with the doors unlocked anymore??"

“I wonder where I’ll end up. What do I want anyway? I want my secrets to be mined out of me by some sort of diligent treasure seeker that can see its in there so I don’t have to hide. I don’t want the shelter of a relationship to become a prison, as day care for a large child. I’m more than that. Aren’t I? A protective instinct is nice. But I want to be considered worth protecting (from what anyway? Life itself is dangerous, and if anyone protects me from that I might as well kill myself. How useless.) But I want to be worth protecting because I want to be seen as precious or rare. Not vulnerable and incompetent.  That would be a lie though. I’d be fooling them. Nothing precious or rare here. Nothing. I should be thankful I’m loved at all.” 
--- I find this whole paragraph fascinating. I was younger and more afraid then. This particular note was filled with predictions that came true two years later. I knew what I was doing. Why didn’t I listen? Maybe I pulled a self fulfilling prophecy. I should try to be a prophet of good fortune and not self hating bullshit.

“Why do I break the windows after I’ve securely locked the door? I spend all this time building spaces then once I’m done, I look around, realize I’m in a swamp and burn the whole fucking place down. Again, again, again. Will I grow up? Or just continue being an asshole???”

“I will have no Phd to speak of. I will be a large collection of coulds and shoulds and woulds. I hope I don’t prove myself right. I will probably end up some godawful quilt of failed expectations.”

I’m not too proud of this never ending string of “Who am I? Where am I going? When will I be home?” And it worries me. It worries me that this appears to be the theme. I guess it would be wrong any other way. But by now, I thought I’d broken the cycle. Maybe I have but I won’t know it until a few years down the line when I stumble over all this mess. I'll probably laugh with a kid on each hip and show my hypothetical husband. Or maybe to a few mewing cats and a lady friend or two. Clarity with age? Or maybe just new sets of self absorbed phobias. Forgive me my adolescence. I think I finally have. Maybe.

          I bought fruit juice to make myself sweeter. I’ve been nothing but booze and smoke. Pretty Blue Smoke fills my house. The invisible syllables we pronounce take shape, the words and smoke mingle making conversations tangible. I fear that maybe we’re more than literally “blowing smoke,” but by the time I scamper up my stairs wrapped in a blanket and your smile, our conversation has shifted. The smoke echoes the words of our worries and dreams up to our nest in the loft. And we wrap ourselves up, ready to sleep safely and sweetly in our own ambiguous gray matter. 
"When are you coming home? -- What home? You mean your house?"  

He said my hair is me. He Said.

 He loves to watch me battle with my curls. He smiles.   He watched me attempt to restrain them. He said “they are beautiful,” they can’t be held down or conform. He laughs when I try.  Its freeing. He doesn’t criticize my humble cheekbones or my brazen eyebrows.

Cathy and I sat on the floor of Logos books late one night. We were searching for solutions, what we found were options. I was going to buy a book that would teach me to do things that I was unsure I even wanted to do. Cathy- in her kindness and continuous understanding, took my chosen option from my hands. As she shelved it, she told me sweetly that she knew that wasn’t in me. I still don’t know if she’s right or not, how can I know if I don’t try? But I have the sense that she often has a bit more sense about my boundaries than I do. I’ve been seeing less of her due to life accelerating and slowing down. The companionship is strong. The feeling of reading aloud from an absurd volume, without a care for who heard us, laughing until tears streamed down my face. This is Cathy and me at our best. Shameless laughter is the most honest.

I want to write about Ruby. She fell asleep on me making nap time an immediate reality as small children can. I felt her smallness and her warmth and her sweet humanity. I love her. Absolutely. She will probably not remember me much, as I’m sure that Baby Claire cannot possibly remember me. But a small part of Claire’s brain absorbed the words that spilled out of my mouth until she spoke them with grace and confidence. Ruby is highly verbal.  And she proves the ability of the human mind to make logical connections in an innocently whimsical fashion. She is so small. So infinitely tiny and growing all the time.

She asked me why if she is growing bigger all the time, why I’m not, and Mopsi and Popsi aren’t growing. She says, Mopsi and Popsi and I don’t grow. So why does she? I love her questions. She is a tiny Buddhist monk, my small philosopher, making beautiful sense of her life in the park, with her toys, her paint brushes and tiny shoes. “Juudee? I’m gwad we awr awive.” “Cos’ the wowld NEEDS new flowers!”

But who wants to expose a blissful three year old to the pains of aging? Of course, I explained the process as positively as I could, but it raised other questions. Are there parts of us that don’t age? Or at least, which parts of us flex the least under gravity and burdens of experience? Which parts are most easily transferred to be repeated in genetic patterns? I once saw Igor B. standing in the kitchen next to his father. There is a resemblance but nothing that would make your jaw drop. They had their backs to me, reading something on the counter. The pose was exact. An exact replica, as if on purpose. Angled head, angled knee, foot cocked to the right. My mother once gasped at the way I hold my feet. Toes up, heel on the edge of the bed. She paused, looked at me and said “You’re Grandfather sat that way. Exactly.”  

Youthful photos of the elderly are often alarming. You can suddenly see the young person in the photo smiling through the wizened elder in your current dimension. Its in the eyes usually, or the expression, or is it the gaze? And then voices. I have been thinking much about voices. I don’t know where this is going. No where, I suppose.

I spent a Saturday with Alex in his apartment. I adore this mad genius of a man. I could never describe him properly--I’m simply not talented enough to frame him in words. He is hilarious and threatening. Brilliant. Tough. Original. Irrepressible. Swarthy. Haughty. Arrogant. Vulnerable. Handsome. Truly Handsome. Mischievous. Quick. Cocky. Self Satisfied. Daring and under pressure. Its like he’s processing too much information and has too much energy. Too much. I can’t get enough of the guy. And he calls me out on my  bullshit, which I love. He is quite harsh with me sometimes. But he is so often right, even brutally so, that I listen, wanting to laugh at my own foolishness put into clever phrasing. Conversation with him is a chess game but all my moves are lightheartedly defensive. He can’t be trapped by his words, but he knows exactly how to reorganize yours.   He crosses every line.  I met him in an airport shuttle in Paris. I thought he was an absolute prick. One of those guys who know they are handsome and women will fawn all over them. And fawn they do! I don’t know how many spectacular pick ups I’ve seen Alex pull off. But that first impression was quickly replaced. He has experienced quite a bit. Respect.

I got too stoned with him though. I knew that would happen too. He is a guy you can’t say no to, the line in the sand will be erased like a dare and pushed just one foot further. Just one. And then you react, and have to laugh. It was a good day. A peaceful day. He is rare. I enjoy him for who he is, as if I even know who he is. How presumptuous of me! What I Do know of him, what he has revealed, is priceless. A feel better knowing people like Alex exist. Renews my faith somehow.

I think its interesting that when I read through my journal, very little is about my internal experience. It is entirely about others, as if I am only alive in terms of the people I interact with, the scenes I witness. If I was alone, would I shrivel up? Expire? I know I would.

            I spent the weekend in LA. But I will write about that later. It hasn’t been filtered yet.

Last night we fell asleep laughing- our laughs kissed instead of our lips. Happiness. I have faith in Sean. We are so lost and so found.

Driving home is always a strange experience. These are the roads that taught me how to drive. These are the roads that taught me how to ride a bike. These are the roads that shaped my little existence framed by mountains and dusty burnt grass hillsides. As a kid, I believed that the lines on the road were law, not to be crossed, like walls shooting straight up from the pavement. Once you are holding a steering wheel yourself and you are no longer a sullen adolescent passenger, you get to cross the lines. I am very good at edging my wheels just slightly over the line, not too far so you go over, but just enough to hug the curve and feel the pressure and pleasure of gravity and space.

I often chronicle conversations with lunatics in my live journal. Madness and frailty completely fascinate me. I exist on a different plane when I talk to these people. I call myself “Julia” or “Claudia” and as either of these women, I get to make their monologue a dialogue. Last week, it was Aspen Leaf Rose. I met him at Coffeetopia again, which I’ve decided has some sort of magnet for those of us with an off kilter internal axis. I was writing, exactly as I am right now, when I felt the pressure of eyes on me, I turned to see  bright blue eyes with pin hole sized pupils and frenetic blonde hair framing a weathered beach face. I had my headphones on, but covered my screen with my hands to communicate he should NOT be reading my screen. He mouthed “sorry” and quickly got up and left. Later, Cathy and Kyla joined me for a cup.

We went outside, me with so much coffee to drink and no lighter for the much needed smoke went to the smokers area to ask a girl sitting next to our yet unknown hero. “You, Girly, have beautiful red hair.”

I sparked, lit, nodded, exhaled, smiled and walked away.  Moments later he appeared before us. “Rose or Gold?”  Rose. Absolutely. Gold sounds materialistic. “ASPEN LEAF ROSE. That’s good, I like that. I trust women you know, without women, we men just go crazy with war and guns! ASPEN LEAF ROSE. That’s my name now, thank you. I have to protect the dynasty you see, so I need a name to maintain peace in the face of evil. Surfing and Orange Juice keep me strong for battle”

“Well, that’s an excellent name Aspen. And plus you have the whole botany/plant  thing going for you. I like that. What are protecting the dynasty from?”

I’m being haunted by terrible dreams of a man coming to tell me I have failed at loving my friends from home. He pulls off my ears because I can’t handle what he tells me. He says they died and I didn’t know it. Its awful. An invasion into the safe place I thought I’d built. They just keep returning! I think I will never escape the guilt of people I have failed. I’m just not big enough of a person.

Over beer and joints, we discussed Karma. I don’t believe in Karma. I believe in chaos and situations that cannot be replicated. I knew a man named Phil who I used to discuss meditation with back when I spent quite a bit of time exploring that realm. He  taught me about Karma. And he taught me to dispel it from reason.

I washed my favorite skirt so I could be fresh for Easter festivities. the bottom of the skirt had been sullied by the Moscow streets in the summer and fall. I soaked it until the water turned that horrific sludge color so familiar to me from laundry days in Russia. But every drop I wrung out felt like I was letting Moscow drip right out of my hands. I think its official. I’m probably never going back and I can’t let go. I thank my friends for so patiently listening to my unstoppable references to Russia. But every drop of used water leaving my Moscow skirt felt like washing the sheets after your lover leaves you.

--

I didn’t know that Freedom is being able to do the twist in the deli section of Staff of Life. Sean has totally set me free because I can dance if I want to, and he will match it and push it further. With a gapped toothed smile and light in his eyes.  Cathy and I discussed independence and dependence. Independence is highly over rated if you take it to mean proud self sufficiency. I am not at all self sufficient. But I do have a very independent core. I am comfortable in my skin and in my flaws. (I don’t value the shape of my face much. I remember little slights that scarred it permanently. But that’s alright. Scars give you character, right?)  I tried to be “independent” since its showered with praise and esteem – its always taken as sign of strength. But I simply cannot make it alone and damn know well that I wouldn’t want to if I could. I need these people to love and be loved by. I think it takes strength to recognize  that. And I refuse to apologize for relishing the little loves I find. Simply refuse to apologize for happiness. I will be thankful though. I am so thankful.

This quarter is infinitely better than the last. I may actually get better than decent grades for my last run here at UCSC. The question of afterlife is looming and screaming. Sean and Cathy are huge players in where the hell I will end up. It should be pretty close to heaven if I can keep my bohemian loves to share the days and nights with. I’m fiddling with the resume and asking everyone I can what their plans are. The beautiful girl in front of me in Roman history with her fresh off the bike complexion and organic disposition told me in an off hand way that she’s working for an NGO in Ghana. “You know, just a little volunteer work.” I stared at her back all through lecture wondering what it feels like to be her. So put together! So honestly herself and focused. I was hung over and wearing my boyfriend’s sweatshirt  with his paint stains desperately wishing I had sunglasses on. At 9 in the goddamn morning. With no NGO to speak of and no desire to have one. What is wrong with  me then? She is also applying to law school. And she will surely get in. I like and respect her very much.

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I don’t have nightmares anymore. Instead, I had a dream where I was the Japanese Prime Minister, Koizumi. (?) (Forgive me, I’m not sure of his name. He loves Elvis and recently left office) Instead of dealing with diplomacy, I persuaded dignitaries to just go nuts and have a dance party to work out our differences. It felt amazing to be the Japanese PM for that flash in my sleep.

My old phone has this problem where it saved msgs instead of deleting them as requested. Today I sat and listened to 41 saved msgs. Some were over a year old. In 13 mins and 45 seconds, my last year in santa cruz spoke to me through this tiny teleport. Old boyfriends saying I love you when they still did, old bosses asking when I would be there tomorrow, friends just parking their cars, invitations for beers, strange questions like “have you made that difficult deicision yet?” reminders of bdays, warnings of traffic, thank yous and a thousand “call me back when you get this.” Should I comply? Would they even still want to know what I had deicided? What did I decide?

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