writing from summer 2007

6/29/07 11:28 pm



I fried an egg and believed in the goodness of people. I ate the applesauce first, knowing it would stifle the pang of understanding the bad. It is 11 on a Friday night and I am alone in my apartment, all three roommates gone for the evening and my companion Bunny Rabbit has gone to bed. I went for a walk; to breathe air and see people, to hear sounds and feel the ground under my feet, to see the moon and the groggy river water that understands and sometimes communicate its own needs but can’t control how it receives them, the way a very sick old man knows where it hurts, but perhaps not why or how to fix it, or who to tell it to.

I walked and went over my tomorrow in list form, shoved it all aside and focused on not remembering the many times I had walked this path earlier this year, and the people with whom I walked and the parties to which I was going and returning from. I got to the dock and sat down on the side after dodging a couple bar-frequenters in short skirts and couples with dogs on late night excursions. Many of the other spaces between pilings were occupied by young couples or older couples or new couples but I didn’t notice this until many minutes later. The first thing I noticed, as did many of the couples, was the man fishing. An odd place to fish at 11 on a Friday night, but actually most of the couples noticed the young boy that was with him first. We all asked the same thing, or variants of it: “Catching anything?” To which the boy would reply “yeah, over here” and would turn to his father and converse quickly in a Spanish that assumed no one was listening. The father, busy with checking his several rods, hooking the bait, and whatnot, and the son, busy with playing with his net and walking around the dock to stave off either boredom or sleep, were skilled at ignoring the repetition of the well-meaning passers-by and was skilled in a way that someone who is used to being ignored learns how to ignore without being offensive – or offended, at that.

These are beautiful people I thought. Beautiful people speaking a secret language that is not woven in among the words of evolved Latin, but is woven in to the simple presence of each other and most importantly the presence of each other shared in the past that brought them here, to a dock at the end of a growing town where men used to earn their bread catching crabs and selling them and now it is all one can do to find them. Even more important than the language of their yesterdays is their language that exists in the assurance of tomorrow morning, with a story to tell someone of their late-night fishing and perhaps no lists to recite and memories to suppress. These are beautiful people who language resounds in teaching each other.

They have inspired me to make goals, to consider the importance and substance of happiness. As usual my thoughts have congealed around the stagnant satisfaction of true happiness, and the discomfort that results from the lack of it, the boredom of everything being well. The only way to counteract this is to take a chance at disrupting it and put forth an understood effort to change something, usually a specific something, and risk shifting all the good. Hopefully to your benefit, but perhaps to a detriment. And then? Then the goal is to again achieve an equilibrium of satisfaction that in the end results in boredom, or something of the sort. After years of going over this argument, like lists for the morning, I believe I realize that the only stagnation that brings satisfaction instead of wastes it, the only boredom that is still caused by effort and produces pure happiness, is that of love. And that God is the true end and bringing of the deepest happiness, but that the way we as human beings experience that is through the love of other human beings and the effort of loving in return.

These thoughts and the road I walk back to my apartment on bring the thoughts “If only he knew how much I loved him!” and another familiar argument returns. I settle this time though, knowing that the reason he left was because he knew he could never take care of me the way I needed to take care of him, and that indeed I loved him more than he was ready for. I am grateful that he made the decision he did, and unfortunately it made me love him more. But I do believe that I can speak to him again if I see him, in a friendly way, in a way with a smile that says how I forgive him but hope that someday I can love someone else like that and that this someone will love me the same way.

And I have put Old Bay on my fried egg and the applesauce is gone. But there are good people finding love in a dock and in fish tonight and I will breathe air in the morning and then…





7/2/07 11:36 am



I know a woman whose life is a painting. She sits in a corner, watching her world in the sky, picking out stars that become instances, lighting up her smiling, inquisitive face and falling through her fingers like yarn or grains of rice or water. I know a woman who cries when I leave her, whose eyes see her childhood and her parents and her dreams in my actions and whose eyes follow me when I leave. I feel danger when I leave her, as if there is ultimate safety in her presence, complete acceptance and a relief from time and people and space and questions. Only “yes” and each other exist.