Prime

3 o’clock on a weekday and I’m sitting in my room, for the third time in two days, sucking the coating off chocolate covered raisins while an able-bodied shirtless man digs trenches in our yard. Of the two times I’ve met him, it’s the first time I’ve hidden upstairs, watching Say Anything with the speakers on low. It’s the second, however, that I’ve been wearing pajamas.

            I managed to spit out a “hi” as he walked in the kitchen. A friend and I were huddled over the counter, shoving pieces of cheese-smeared bread into our mouths and cackling over one another, when heavy steps announced a presence behind us. Turning around, I watched him melt into the room, subtly drinking in its color. Abs and face. “Hi,” he smiled, wiping gravel from his brow. “Can I have some lemonade?”

            And I forced myself to wonder, flapping there like a reed in the wind: could this be the way it works? A gorgeous man wanders into my kitchen, asks me for a cold beverage; and at best, I’m left with a flash of Desperate Housewives and a handful of halfhearted stabs at harassment? “Seeeeeeeriously,” she cooed, balling her shirt in her hands. “It’s soooooo hot in here, I just haaaave to take my shirt off.”

            “Reaaaaaallly,” I echoed, wondering how I could flick off my glasses without trying too hard. “Do you guys need me out at the pool?”

            To his credit, he took it like a champ. Scarcely one ropy muscle moved out of place as he cut us up thick slabs of watermelon, nor did he bat an eye as I shamelessly photographed it. Could be he didn’t notice. Or perhaps I just don’t care.

            Click.

            “We’re primers,” my friend said after he walked back outside, leaving us to our counter of sticky-sweet juice and compound conversation. “You and I.

            “We’re the ones who spend time with these guys right before they end up in relationships. They say they’re not ready, then BAM! Long-term girlfriend right after we’re gone. I’m betting my ex is married this year.”

            I stared at the fridge, a mosaic of paint samples. I wanted to peel them away. “So basically, we do all the work, let these boneheads repair in our light, and then don’t get to reap the rewards?

            “Precisely.”

            And it’s true. Of the widespread experience of her please, not you, a disproportionate number of men in my life have tacked on a But After You Fix Me. Pretending I hadn’t sought out the pub where he’d be, somehow knowing he wouldn’t be calling me back; the work had been done, and he’d met her. Splitting hairs over soft nights in Bali, accepting the tragedy of one whose religion condemns making love before marriage, then sighing the huff of the damned when in four months, he's taken. There’s the guy who didn’t want commitment, who’s so grateful for the kindness I shared, who suddenly dives into life-partner realm with a girl whose parade of bright photos are captioned with songs: yet all I can manage to say is, “that shithead.”

            Shithead.

            And what does one do, anyhow? You can allow yourself the luxury of small he’s too dumb for mes, but ultimately, you’re still the person Googling “my toe hurts” and reading nutritional facts on a bag of Hot Cheetos. At the end of the day, you’re still the one wondering why the first coat never feels like enough.

            The key to the equation, of course, is each man’s seemingly wondrous capacity for withholding the truth: for whispering, “I just can’t be with anyone,” not admitting, “I don’t want to be with you.” This reality, while brutal, is an awesome release; if not from the tape of insecurity, than at least from the pond scum that accompanies such blatant selfishness, the exhaustion of resources that leaves nothing, nothing, but a measly handful of pine needles and a bewildered Cindy Lou Who. Which I accept, every time, because he “just can’t be with anyone.” Because he wants to be my friend: be my friend, which is only a cop out, and a pass to redeem any time she does something annoying. Just in case I have anything left.

            The other night, I went on a bad date at a bar. Though his voice said twenty-seven, his face said forty-five; creased with worry, his eyebrows stayed low. I thought that the rum made him dull, that the thrum of the crowd was preventing a genuine spark; and perhaps, could we try it again?

            “So wait,” he began, eyebrows dangerously close to disappearing inside his nose. “Am I like, gonna call you? Or are you gonna call me? Because I don’t really get this at all. Like… I dunno, I don’t need your attention. To be honest, you seem kinda mean.”

            It was then that I realized—crowd or no crowd—that I hadn’t a droplet of interest in seeing this person again; and if forced to meet up, I would probably re-watch a season of Friends just for something to do in my head. I asked to raincheck out of shame, out of wanting so much to be liked; and ironically, seemed “kinda mean.” What relief, then, to watch him walk off; he locked eyes with a friend, gave a violent shake of his head, and was gone. Because he didn’t like me, not one bit. And the clarity of it was bliss.

            So I’m waiting. For what? For this moment as frustration melts into love, and I can be genuinely happy for each time I’m let go: happy for them when, indeed, they find her. It’s not like I wish I could be her; even with those impossible mornings, the ones where I feel most alone. For the moon on a soft July night, snapping thoughts of each moment before; then a new friend arrives, and he casts a long shadow against the fine grooves on the wall. We danced like that; puppets of light and lack thereof, staining the brick with our hunger for change.

            “If I knew what I loved, I’d be doing it,” he told me, our shadows growing taller as their distance increased. “Because this is it. I’m in my prime.”

And me, I’m in mine. Even here in my attic, watching John Cusack wait out a rainstorm, payphone pressed to his ear as the cold water runs down his face. I gave her my heart, Corey. I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen. Outside, they’re still digging up trenches; tonight, I’ll make shadows again. There’s this hunger, this hunger to feel.

All the priming I’ve done is an ode to that crave: the first glaze, a deposit of color. Even when other layers get seen. “Whatever,” Julia said. “Every canvas needs gesso. Otherwise the paint would just sink right through, and it’d be harder to get the details right. We essential, baby girl.”

We begin.

And regardless, we stick.

Out of the Frying Pan...

         It’s hot. Really, fucking hot. And not “cute” hot, not the watermelon-on-the-shorts-pocket weather that teen movies are made of, which renders many a prepubescent boy inert on his way into a freezing movie theatre: no. This is a fierce, unruly hot, the type that sticks to vinyl bus seats, and makes sleep a distant dream.

            I’m sitting with my legs fanned out in front of me, double window flung open in a desperate “ah,” waiting for the night air to fold in and eventually, blessedly, replace the stink of day. Here in Southern California, we don’t like heat. Warmth, sure—a thin Pashmina in a cool restaurant, or the spray of salt over sun-bitten shoulders—but the moment it gets icky, we want out. Last week, in the middle of teaching high schoolers the joy of improvisational theatre—not itself the least uncomfortable task in the world, but whatever—one of my students squirmed from her cross-legged seat. “How are you?” I inquired, knowing that if high school was anything like I’d left it, she probably hadn’t been asked in a while. “Ugh. I’m just so over this heat,” she told me. “It’s like, really awkward to wear UGGs in this weather.”

            And so it went. Santa Barbara was subjected to temperatures crowning 100-degrees, civilians forgot how to drive, and workers pooled their sick days. Artists clung faithfully to air-conditioned coffee shops, and a hundred UGG-booted teenagers followed in suit; ruminating, in an accidental sweat lodge of our own unease, upon the question at our sticky hands. What happens when we’re truly uncomfortable?

            The answer: we want out. By any means possible, as quickly as possible. Someone tells us that drinking hot coffee lowers body temperature, and we let it scald our throats. A comment made in passing sends embarrassment to the cheeks, and we hide inside a bathroom ‘til the pinky stain of giving-a-shit trickles back from whence it came. As a general rule, we’re not cultured into waiting—wading—through moments of discomfort, but rather, to claw our way out of the boiling pot. When someone sends a message that I’d rather not read, I tend to “lose” my phone.

            And why not? We live in a society where there’s a pill for this, an app for that: a glass of wine to curb gracelessness, a paint to dab on any zit that threatens to spoil school picture day. The moment a relationship is more than laissez-faire, one party can make eye contact with a girl across the bar, taking her outside to tongue the corners of her slightly-downturned mouth, because—oh!—is it not a little better to break something than feel strain? If we wait a little longer, there’s a chance that we’ll feel pain.

            However, if we wait a little longer, there’s a chance that something infinitely interesting will happen. I reminded my quasi-boyfriend of this, the day after he found another girl’s mouth at the bar, and watched as his own lips bunched up in discomfort at our conversation. Staring out the window, 4:00 p.m. heat pouring in, I resisted the urge to do what I always do: to mend it with chatter, fill in the holes of our awkwardness in order to rescue us both from the pit of confrontation. In that moment, self-doubt gnawing at my core, the bloom of humiliation flooding my face like ink, I would have done anything to leave. But I didn’t. I imagined tracing my fingers along the inside of a pressure cooker, the same one he had placed himself in—“I don’t know, it was moving so fast, I got scared”—and felt what it’s like to just be. No judgment, no scraping my way out of the pot. Not running, just being: angry.

            Which, as it turns out, is a new one for me. The genuine rush of anger as it arises in our gut—not rooted in blame, nor as a cop-out for another, less tangible emotion—is a fascinating thing. As opposed to frustration, it seeks not to destroy: simply to burn, self-contained, until the ground is clear for takeoff. As human beings, we have three panic buttons: Fight, flight, and freeze. The latter is especially dangerous for women, and by far, the most common; when it comes to getting good and angry, some of us don’t. We’re steered away from it. However, it’s like swallowing a cold stick of butter; the nausea comes from the edges, from the weight as it sinks like a stone. A minute in the oven, however, and that shit’s as smooth as gold. Throw in some other ingredients, and forget it. You’ve got cookies.

            So. A minute or two of watching this beautiful boy—mouth getting smaller by the minute—swelter in a prison of his own making, I thought about what it means to sit through a moment of discomfort, allowing it to blaze: not demolish, just burn. “I know your spirit animal,” he told me once, over wine and the glow of beginnings. “You’re a firebird.” And indeed, as I rise from the ashes—relishing what has been burned, because it means something new—I’m beginning to think we all are. Firebirds, that is. What else could possibly explain the Bikram Yoga industry, if not the subconscious desire to cook one’s organs in an airless room, just for the chance to emerge into the crispness of night, and for doubt—like sweat—to be left in a puddle behind?

            Meanwhile, in the hills above our beloved, blistered city, the worst drought in years rages on without pause. My mom keeps her valuables in a kit by the door, ready to jump at the first sign of fire. I sit in my room with my back toward the wall, thinking of my own blaze, my own heart. “We are powerful,” a friend told me, tugging a strand of my gingery hair between her fingers, her own crimson locks sweeping across her face as the Santa Anas blew in from the east. “Don’t forget, firebird.” And I won’t. Not today, as my mother makes signs for her house, designating what cannot be burned. Not today, as a buildup of tinder spills out on the hills, and our lake is as dry as a bone. When checked, wildfires are natural; they consume in a cycle, returning nutrients to the soil, chewing up putrid plants to make way for new seeds to appear. It’s the buildup that’s cause for concern.

            Next week, it might be cold. And that might feel just as awful—in its own, stuck-in-a-tent, icicle toe type of despair—and it might be marvelous, too, in the sense that it forces some change. In truth, it’s discomfort that saves us. It’s sitting through moments of out, I WANT OUT that’s the detox: emerging, we’re altered. We are bent, but with bravery: warm, slightly softened. Like butter. And better, somehow.

Once Upon a Lucid Dream

          When you’re someone who goes to festivals, it’s easy to forget that there are people who DON’T. There are people who think “energy healing” is a form of Clif bar. There are also those for whom a “transformational” gathering—complete with fire-spinning, sage-burning, and copious amounts of face-touching—is something akin to a weekend in hell. “I think Patrick might like to go to Lucidity,” my mother told me; meaning my stepfather, the same man currently puttering around in the garage, and the proud owner of nearly two dozen paintings of poker-playing dogs. “Don’t you think?”

            I looked at her, trying to find the best way to say no, I think he’d rather spend a week under military torture than have hundreds of gorgeous hippies ask him about his feelings; however, I just laughed. Who am I to judge what person will benefit from three days under the oaks? Just because my tent looked like I sneezed out four pounds of glitter, who am I to say that someone who sat in silence for the duration of the festival—feeling, perhaps, that he was in the exact wrong place, wishing he could be anywhere else—didn’t transform just as much, if not more?           

             6,000 festivals just happened, oftentimes within the same person. Oftentimes before breakfast. There is no such thing as one “festival experience”: the whole is woven of countless little threads, each one leading to a particular version of heaven. Whether heaven was pounding a dance floor, covered in dust, or the rogue avocado that got squished to your pillow—it’s all part of the cloth, and heaven just the same. All I have is the way that I feel; so here I go, tugging.

            The week before Lucidity, Jill asked me for fashion advice. Mind you, I’ve never considered myself to be a “festival person”; I still forget earplugs, and at least once during each gathering can be found hiding under the covers, wishing my face didn’t stink of patchouli and sunscreen. I’m no more well versed on the intricacies of festival season than I am on any other season, baseball and television included. Still, when asked, I can provide a pretty accurate orientation on the rules for dressing at festivals: mainly because, there are none. Feel good, I told Jill. Feel silly. Because, after all, bound up in the intense ephemerality of festival culture—and the fact that whatever you choose to glue on your navel, braid through your hair, or stuff in your boots, it’s all gotta fit in the trunk of someone’s Volvo—runs a deep appreciation for the absurd: the chic, the dangerously zany. “So,” she asked, palming her hair from her forehead. “If I bring a pink boa and Valkyrie hat, I should be good, right?”

            Correct.

            Fashion within chaos is one of many ironies bound up in festival culture: the most glaring of which, perhaps, being to ‘Leave No Trace.’ The fundamental concept of creating a temporary city out of thin air leaves, well, a bit of a trace—and you can bet that for every well-intentioned mermaid separating her paper from plastic, there are at least a hundred eighteen-year-olds wondering how many cans of PBR they can bury behind their tent. It’s inevitable. However, the idea of tracelessness begs more than the question of whether we can leave the land the way we found it. Besides pillars of bamboo, the countless vendors, mason jars, LED lights, and camp stoves, what happens when thousands of people pack an entire coming-of-age into the course of a weekend? Regardless of whether our tire tracks can be seen in the dust, can that much energy simply dissipate from whence it came? Would we even want it to?

            That’s the thing about transformational festivals: they are miniature lifetimes, disguised as weekends. One can’t show up without expecting to encounter a little puberty. Now, I’m no Lorax; I can’t begin to speak for the trees, nor the countless glow-sticked Lucidibeings who spent the entire festival on a wave of compassion and bliss. Perhaps theirs was paradise, pure and simple. However, to claim that my experience was entirely positive would deny a fundamental aspect of what I value most about these things: that within each festival, as within a life, there are peaks and valleys. Reuben put it best when he said that for some, the transformation occurs when you park a mile away from the site and schlep your bag up a hill. For others, it’s lying in a cold tent, feeling the weight of Alone. If you’re lucky, you come face-to-face with the things you like least about yourself: because oh, how the mighty fall when the Porta Potties stop getting serviced! When their friends ditch them, when they can’t find their toothbrush! In the end, though, it’s not the difficult moments that outweigh the whole; the people you’d rather not see, the snippy remarks that emerge from camping with friends. One needn’t watch MTV to know that when you throw a bunch of people in a teepee, shit happens. No: the difficult moments simply lend credence to the victorious ones, reminding us of their beauty, providing contrast. Like the negative space within a painting, it’s the cave that reminds us of the light.

            So you’re spat into the Universe, discover face paint for the first time, hit an awkward growth spurt around Saturday night when your sleeplessness kicks in, and circle around to the glow of wisdom by Sunday afternoon; hopefully in tea with close friends, catnapping in the shadow of a cycle well-spent. But what happens on the other side, when you’re forced to reintegrate into life as you left it? For me, after an hour-long struggle with a dead car battery and spastic descent down the 154, I went straight to my job as a cocktail waitress. I probably don’t need to explain what a challenge this was for you to imagine me there, sun-drenched and sad—with a nose full of dust—seeking a flicker of recognition in my customers’ eyes. There’s a reason for decompression parties. After a week spent engulfed in the festival blaze, the default world seems vanilla; you see an accordion, and feel bummed when it doesn’t spit bubbles. What do you mean, it’s socially inappropriate for me to kiss someone on the mouth every time they deliver my coffee? What do you mean, you don’t want to hold hands? Like every good teen movie, there’s the moment you look at your festival family—buoyed by the connection that lingers so effortlessly, bringing you home—and ask: What happens when we leave? Like the kids in The Breakfast Club, leaning on archetypes, all hormones and fear: “When we see each other in the halls on Monday, will we say hi?”

            The truth is, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, reintegration is selfish and swift; and before you know it, you’ve forgotten the feel of that one perfect shower, and are worrying about things like loan payments and bras. You’ve forgotten the people who occupied space, who became all you wanted, if just for a night. In that way, festivals are like summer camp: as Isabel put it, a land where you gauge your successes and failures within the microcosm of Friday to Sunday. Alive Stage to tent. On the one hand, when the “real world” returns and what seemed like the Biggest Mistake is now distant and mute, there’s relief. You exist, you move on. On the other, like a postcard dug up from a sea of old summers, we must learn to re-read what we felt. We sink into the evidence, a talisman of feelings past, to remember the weight of what seemed like the whole. After all, isn’t it better to have wandered around the festival, looking but not looking for that person you made eye contact with—who saw you, who you may have decided to love—than not to have loved at all?

            Yes.    

            At their core, that’s what festivals are: the bold-faced desire to create something beautiful out of the extraordinarily temporary. I felt it when we set up our teepee, stringing fabric and lights in the trees, filling our nest with live music and baskets of food. I felt it again when we hung lengths of silk across a chain link fence, bunching and lifting just so, making it lovely for just that: to be. To exist for three days before the same crew of people rolled through with Kubotas and screwdrivers, tearing down everything they just worked a year to create. Maybe it’s weird to decorate a dumpster. But if you don’t at least try to make good what you’ve got—to make light of what’s fleeting, what one day will leave—why bother with living at all?

According to Michael Meade, “Myths heal us by placing us in proximity of a ‘whole story.’ Not that any one myth tells the whole story, but that a genuine myth has everything it needs within its shape of beginning, middle and end.” Lucidity is myth: our collaborative tapestry, a lifetime contained in a campground. The truth is, for every time I sat in the Pyrobar, swearing I’d clock the next person who said the word “manifest,” came a moment of total tranquility: a child in a garland of feathers, or an hour spent flat on my back with the stars, the hum of a deep set of frequencies lodging themselves in my bones. I’m not above a little Kool-Aid. Viewed from the outside, it’s easy to dismiss festival culture as frivolous and false; and yet, like Meade says, “The same can be said of love.

            “Only those who surrender to love know what love means, how it heals and how it teaches. Myth also requires some surrender and, like love, a little sacrifice.”

            I don’t know about you, but in this, I’ve been saved. I made life in Lucidity, and found peace in my growing pains, too. Nowadays, we sacrifice so much to the linear progress of time; “Yet to find again our mythic sense and touch timeless things, time is exactly what must be sacrificed. Only when time becomes broken can the ‘once upon a time’ realm of genuine imagination appear again.”

I remember the first time I heard about fairies, and felt that belief make a nest in the pit of my heart. Lying in the Lucidity starfield at night, a mess of green laser beams, I was that small girl again.

“Then, creation becomes possible again, and love has a place to enter…”

I may not be a festival person, but I know a good thing when I feel it. And like you, I feel it. I feel it in my bones.

“…and healing can follow.”

            Follow it has, follow it will. Down the rabbit hole, into the Universe, across the plain of a dream only just coming true: it no longer matters to me whether sleeping or waking. I know what has changed in my heart, what pressed up from those grounds. Like most things worth experiencing, until you feel it, you can’t know what you’ve been missing; and like most things worth experiencing, it’s better to know it will vanish by morning than not to have loved it at all. The doing of it is what makes your heart sing: the giving of it, of ourselves, is what makes this sweet festival real.

So you know? If it’s packed in a tarp until next year, if it’s gone when a storm finally hits, so be it. Paint the sign, stick the fence full of flowers; you’ll be better for it, by the time that it washes away. We can love it enough to let go. In the end, we can still pray for rain.   

Nearly Departed

You walk off the stage, taking longer than you should; then again, time is something that never quite occurs to you. It’s early May, the time just before end of school sets in, and the crowd ebbs and flows over us like sand being stirred from above. The sun dips behind a cloud as I shove my fists further into my pockets, feeling around past a melted chapstick and crumpled $5 bill. As you pack your guitar into its case, looking to most like you’re tying your shoes, my feet make a beeline toward you—tugged by an invisible thread over some long plain of silence that breaks open in threes: one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three hold. Suddenly, color gets sucked from the sky. I forget how to be. Late afternoon on a lawn full of teenagers, waiting for one of them to call out your name—or mine—one of us, anyone, just so the other will know what sound to mold our mouths around. I’ll stand in the parking lot afterward, hoping to catch a glimpse of your back as it ducks into a car, something to ground the wave—the almost impossible knowingness—of having already held your face in my hands. “Fauxstalgia,” a friend later calls it; or the feeling of fact, of intense reverie, over an experience you haven’t yet had. What he forgets to mention, however, is the way this truth pounds in the chest. The unfurling that occurs, like a flower that turns toward the sun.

       There are stages to every story.
It was broken down for me, once, like a table of elements: Boy meets girl. (Girl frets about hair, boy hugs girl from behind.) Boy loses girl. (Girl cries into hair, boy stares longingly into faraway ocean.) Boy gets girl. (Girl gets grip.)
Life goes on.
I let this wash over me as I sat with my back against the water, skin crisping in the midday sun like a leaf held under a magnifying glass. Two blonde women approached from the opposite trail, and I knew at least one would feel obligated to stop and tell me, like she was delivering some indispensible truth, that I’d need to wear sunscreen. I’d thank her, smiling so my lazy eye doesn’t crinkle, in that way I always do when I’m still in control. Sure enough, they stopped—matching pink Nikes glaring up from the concrete—and the shorter one leaned in so her breath caught the wind. “Careful,” she said. “You’re really burning up.”
     “Thank you,” I blinked at her, marveling at how many people go out of their way to tell me this. Like my fair skin is a revelation, something that only they see; as though by alerting me, they’ve done their good deed. Like I can’t feel the sting on my face. Like I don’t know my own transparency.
      Meet, lose, get, I wrote again and again, circling the middle word like a fish in a gaping whale mouth. It’s the course of every good sitcom, every meaningful romantic comedy. What’s not lost cannot ever be appreciated. Still, the words oozed like a drone onto the page, and I wondered why my dad said that what’s yours never leaves you: because most things of love do, at some point, evaporate. They were never really yours, he’d argue. Right. But the thing is, I never meant to own them. I only wanted something to fill in the blank for each memory made, or made up, or whatever: to be hit in the heart from the right type of drum, because frequencies cure. Just someone to wait for at a stoplight.


I’m walking with hay sticking out of my sandals, hay pushing in from the toe and up under my arches, dirty with campfire ash and silty mud. High noon, and the late winds of summer play games with my hair; the bare field ahead opens up like a yawn, heat streaming out of its mouth. Sweat drips off the end of my nose, and I’m aware of your presence nearby. I don’t know that it’s you, exactly, or that you’re even here; but if asked, I’d say that my skin is on fire. I swim past the row of vehicles that scream back the cloudless sky, feeling the gaze of children who have not yet un-believed what they sense bursting out of my body. I see you emerge from behind a partition, a full head taller than the boy in the Thin Lizzy shirt, and feel like I’ve swallowed an apple. I can read the hours you’ve spent in the sun from the shape of your skin, like rings in a tree. Your head’s to the left, laughing at something Thin Lizzy has said, and I somehow forget to forget: suddenly, I’m left only with you, with the moment before you turn your head, and the sensation of skin beneath fabric. Thin, like a sheet. A blue dress in early August. I wonder if your smile matches your steps, and it could have been hours. Then again, we both know how heat plays games with the body.

       I put down my pen, coming back to the park and the river; my back against the water, earthy smell pouring out from the trees. Each time someone ran by, my hand snapped to my hip, to the place where my phone wasn’t buzzing—no more than it was five minutes before, and five minutes before that—halfheartedly searching each jogger’s vibration for some sort of message, or truth. I pulled the phone out from my pocket and stared at it, scowling. It stared on, feeling nothing. You pathetic fuck, it said. How did you come to be owned by my face?
Earlier that morning, in front of an online yoga class, I pulled socks over my hands to keep them from slipping. A pupil-less woman in tight pants and ponytail laughed as her leg bent back over her head. “Don’t worry if you fall out,” she told me. “I fall out all the time.” Lies! My calves began their violent shake, and I plopped to my knees. This bitch wasn’t fooling me. “Whew! I know I’m certainly feeling it.” You don’t feel anything, you stupid robot! I pulled myself onto my belly, forehead flat against the tile floor. “Find the place where you’re about to fall over,” she twittered, “and hold it there.”
“Hold.
Hold.
Hold.”

With my head on the floor like that, I thought that I felt my phone buzz.

It hadn’t.


The third time we meet, it is from behind. Your shirt smells like cigarettes, and I know that my window is closing. Before you turn around, I place my hands up to my wooly hat, then move them down over my eyes. This is my face. This is my collarbone, my shoulders, my chest. My stomach, my pelvis, my knees. This is my hand. I am see-through. From your back, I can feel you surrender. My lips on your ear. I lose track of my life and would drive the car, drunkenly, and a dozen more things that refuse to make sense; but somehow, you hear me and smile. Cards drop out of my wallet, and I force myself to notice: to remember that I’ve already eaten dinner, that I don’t really like beer. But certain things wobble and fade when your hand lifts my hair from my neck.


       The breeze came up over the water, exhaling across my notebook with a definitive huff. I traced my fingers along the coarse pages, outlining words, starved for the feeling beneath them. A butterfly drifted by, lazily matching the wind with its attitude, and I wondered if bugs can feel loss. What if it missed its chrysalis? Did anyone ask if it wanted to change?
Clearly dehydrated, still stalking my phone, I pulled myself up from the rock. On my way to the drinking fountain, I remembered a friend who believed she was being followed by butterflies. “My girlfriend died in a traumatic way,” she told me, bopping the pedestrian signal with her thumb as we waited to walk. “And the energy felt clogged. I could feel her around, like she hadn’t crossed over.
“But when I started seeing butterflies, I knew it had happened. She had left. It changed.”
With my head dipped down to the fountain, I thought of my own little ghosts. When somebody’s home is a shrine to a breakup, photos of the recently evanesced looking down from each surface that sticks to her face, eyes following me as I wade through the space left behind. The nights that I drive home from work and a song hits the radio, packed with the outline of someone I’ve tried to forget. My house isn’t haunted, I’m sure…but those stop signs? They’re brutal. I cry for our unfinished business each time that I brake.


This time, our meeting is the sum of three parts: One, a bus with a low overhang. I smack my head as I duck into my seat, and sitting with my knees curled into my chest, spin soft words of comfort inside. Two, a porch and a man eating a turkey sandwich. He offers one bite for a dollar, my eyes drooling over the bread, but I decline. Three, a swarm of people with paper cups in their hands; recognizing a girl from the bus, smiling, then remembering how I’d hit my head. Disappearing, embarrassed.

Body, blood, spirit.

I finally see you from across the room, white hat hovering above a mountain of sweaty curls, and dip my head down to find lipstick. Reemerging, I fold through the crowd, moving forward and to you like an electric current, like a pulse. That familiar draw. You tumble back from me, clutching your heart with your hand; and I know, suddenly, that I’ll fall. I’ll fall even though I designed this room, imagined it with all my heart, picked the wallpaper and dotted the carpet with flowers and placed myself in it, all of me, with a jeweled star in my hair and shoes that stay soft when I walk. When I dance.  

In the alley behind the bar, we look at and through one another, gingerly tossing each word in to see if it sinks. You ask for a lighter, I think you say ladder. You walk away, and a man pushes past. You here alone? He asks. Yes, I reply. Oh, he says, raking his hands through his hair. You don’t look like the kind of girl who comes here alone.

But I did. I come here alone every time, rifling through circumstances, searching. And I remember, when I see you: your cycles, your glue. This is what it feels like to have missed someone for a long, long time.

You return, but your eyes stay focused on the person just behind my left ear. I know that my window is closing again, that glorious in-between granting a moment of touch, and I pull my chin up to your shoulder. A sloppy kiss, then I float away: feet moving aimlessly, knowing only that it’s time to go. I’m sure that you’ll speak, so I stare straight ahead—but suddenly, sense your retreat. It’s strange how the spine recognizes Alone: to contract then relax, sure only that you’ve somehow stopped watching me leave. 2 a.m. on a Sunday, 65 degrees, and I’m not too small to feel pain. What’s terrifying is to think that maybe, at some point, I’ll feel nothing.


I wiped my chin on my sleeve, finally coming up for air, watching the last of the water bubble its way down the drain. Behind me, small notes caught the air as someone noodled their way through a clarinet waltz. I began walking away, but paused when the music halted.
“You writing a book?” a voice asked.
“No,” I replied, turning around. A boy with long, stringy hair stared back at me, clarinet perched on his knee, squinting his eyes in the sun. I cleared my throat. “I’m writing a letter.”
“To someone in prison?”
“No.”
“Oh,” he sniffed, placing the instrument back in its case. “I didn’t realize people did that anymore. Write letters, that is. Other than to people in prison.”
I waited to be released, but stayed mysteriously rooted as this stranger loped toward me. Before long, we sat: tracing patterns in the dirt with our fingers as I spoke to him, and he listened, about the past lives in which I’ve met you before. I don’t know anymore, I squeaked, words jamming in my throat as I tried not to cry. I can’t tell if what I’m remembering is real or made up.
He paused, thumb making a crescent moon shape in the soil, then spoke softly. “Do you know what ‘idiosyncrasies’ are?"
Kind of, I told him. I think so.
“Well, I’m not sure, but I think they’re this thing where you meet someone, and you have the feeling that you’ve met them before; but not only that, you’re remembering how you felt the last time you saw them. Only you’ve never met. But the feeling lingers, like muscle memory…and it’s like you know you’ll love them, because you always have. Because you’ve done it before.”

I remembered you, then, and the blue dress that streamed out behind me. I’ve held you in my muscles for so long, you know; I can’t help that you’ve haunted my bones. Breathe through them like air; let me float in the knowingness, knowing your bones. Sifting through all our lifetimes like sand.

“Anyhow, I’m pretty sure that’s what it means. People were just wrong.”
We sat for a long time, neither one speaking, watching the sun fall behind the water. “What is it?” he asked finally, drawing his hands up into his sleeves.
I want, I told him. And it played like a tape in my heart.

I want, I want, I want, I want, I want. 

      He leapt up, suddenly, wrapping me in his thin arms like a bird. I breathed in his smell as we hugged, but nothing stuck. “I see you,” he said, smiling crookedly as I pulled back. He furrowed his brow. “Are you going to write a book?”
“Yes,” I decided. “Maybe.”
“Well,” he said, brushing off his knees as he stood. “It’s going to be good. Maybe.”

~

I made my way down the hill, past the ducks treading circles in water, past the women in sneakers and babies with soft heads and gums. What happens to all the wishes I’ve hurled toward you? Are they stored until next time, preserved under snow? I think of it, still, when I pick up a dandelion. My mouth makes a wish before I try to explain; and sometimes, it even comes true. Other times, I wash away the small superstitions that tether me to your shape, and I live. Maybe this time around, you will see your own shadow. This time around, maybe one will stop drifting away.

     In the end, though, I’m not worried. We’ve done this before. And if asked, I would do it again.

This in No Way Revolves Around Miley Cyrus

Dear Indy,

I wish to speak to you on a subject of the utmost importance. It is topical. It involves our sweet, aching planet—our less sweet, but equally pained, government—the community of Santa Barbara, and (eek!) even Lucidity Festival; it is at once creative, political, philosophical, and personal. It involves each of us, equally, interchangeably, together.

Flash mobs.

And before you throw this paper down, assuming yet another theatre kid’s half-baked plea for attention (“Give me a location! Seriously, just give me a location, watch what I can do with the first ten lines of Macbeth!”), allow me to explain: this is not your average theatre. This phenomenon resists definition, slipping through the cracks of propriety, threatening to disrupt everything you think you know about performance. The flash mobs are coming, Santa Barbara, and they just might save us all.

I know what you’re thinking: “Flash mob! That thing where everyone shows up in identical costumes, perfectly coiffed, to perform polished choreography while a crowd of onlookers gawk in simultaneous jealousy and awe! Right?”

Wrong. I know that world; that world was my world, the family of dancers and directors who shellacked me into believing that my life’s ambition could be whittled down to whether my name made the top of the Nutcracker cast list. Don’t get me wrong: I am grateful for the discipline this instilled. However, when it came down to it, my question to the girl in the mirror—perfectly poised, one speck in a sea of bunheads—was never, How am I pushing my artistic boundaries? But rather, Am I wearing the right leotard?

Flash mob, on the other hand, occurs when a group of all shapes, sizes, abilities, and backgrounds comes together for the sole purpose of creating a strange scene in a public space. It raises questions: for example, What happens when the boundary between performer and audience member is blurred? What happens when there is no ideal body type, no expected aesthetic? What happens when the performance space can’t be controlled? Just last week, at Lucidity Festival’s “Rising Vibes for the Universe” event at the Arlington, I participated in two flash mobs: one Bollywood, one Michael Jackson. For the former, we rehearsed for a few weeks, carefully orchestrating the spontaneity that accompanies flash mob. I’m well aware that “orchestrated spontaneity” is an oxymoron, and that we were, in fact, wearing identical costumes; however, not even our hip jingles could save us when the music failed to play at an audible volume. Only our attitudes could do that. As we plowed forward with smiles on our faces, the audience filled in the gaps—clapping hands and stomping feet to create the necessary rhythm, allowing us the opportunity to roll with the punches. That’s the gift of flash mob, after all: unpredictability, and the chance to make the best of what we’re given. Improvisation, connection. Far from alienating others, it calls upon us to carry their weight: all the while trusting that they will do the same when the time comes.

Flash mob, like love, requires a suspension of disbelief. It demands that we trust our instincts to save us when we’re handed something unexpected. For example, if a flash mob is announced mere hours before the performance—giving nothing but the instruction to show up and wear green—guess what? You show up and wear green. If you know the choreography, the skit, or the intention beforehand, excellent: but if not, you’re still wearing green. If an elbow gets thrown in your face, you use it as a prop. You laugh. And best of all, you’re granted permission to apply these lessons to other areas of life: for instance, one can’t help but believe that the current political situation would lighten if a crowd of mismatched dancers entered the White House, singing and dancing to a chorus of “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” Using silly art to make people uncomfortable doesn’t always disrupt unhealthy stalemates. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.

When we’re invited to question the boundary between performer and audience member—unsure of who is “in on the secret”—we unlock a whole host of other possibilities. Forget questions of wearing the right leotard; performance is demystified, and separateness itself is revealed as a construct. Suddenly we’re all players, and are handed a truth that we—that’s right, Santa Barbara, us especially—are in desperate need of learning: how to stop taking ourselves so damn seriously. It’s happening already, and I know you can smell it. Art projects are oozing outward, the Funk Zone gets cooler by the minute, and on a nationwide level—hell, on a worldwide level—people are beginning to question everything. We’re less and less content with the idea of a heavy velvet curtain obscuring us from what takes place in the wings. We want to see the stage sweepers. We want in on the mess.

Here in Santa Barbara, we don’t usually like messes. We like our days seventy degrees and sunny, our commutes fifteen minutes or less, and our performances clean. However, “clean” doesn’t cut it anymore; and flash mobs, in all their nitty gritty, are inclusive and egalitarian in a world that tends to be neither. Without trying, they simply are: revolutionary.

I recently approached a group of high school students about performing in a flash mob; and by default, they flipped their hair and averted eye contact, behaving as though I’d just asked them to wear a coat of tarantulas. But the seed was planted. Fast forward two short months, and those same students will be joining us for our “Thriller” flash mob at the Sunken Gardens: on October 26, we will all participate in a worldwide effort called “Thrill the World,” pretending to be zombies in order to raise funds for charity. And you know what? These students, along with hundreds of others from all walks of life, are setting the tone for the type of person they will be: one who expects art to exist everywhere, who lives in the moment, accepts all bodies, and has fun.

As Howard Thurman says, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that.” Even if what makes you come alive is, ironically, dressing like a zombie and pretending to be undead, go out and do it: “What the world needs is people who have come alive,” and people who have come alive need more flash mobs. So. The next time you see one, I hereby invite you to partake in the madness: clap your hands and go there. Love the improvisational art in your community. Join in. Let go. Believe. And who knows… the spirit you save just may be your own.

Sincerely,

Jenna Tico