Breakdown

            You avert your eyes when the waitress walks by, seeking, quietly anxious in her search for the right place to drop her plate of food. You do it without even thinking; a subconscious slide from the place where she might recognize you, thinking it’s you who ordered this rapidly cooling grilled cheese. Or mistake you for who she’s been looking for.

3 days before

            It’s simple, really. We’ve been on the road for ten minutes: the truck is gassed up and the highway is empty, I’m picking the chocolaty bits from our trail mix, and one of his hands is still free. I grab it. We’ve come to that place in our knowing each other where it’s okay for me to do things like this without asking—but not so far that I’ve adjusted to the ripple of pleasure each time that I do. I find myself stopping more often with him, accidentally finding constellations as I close the small gate to his backyard—as if pulling myself from the moment suspends it somehow, and will allow me to access it later when beauty feels lost. They’re unassuming, these moments: so modest in their perfection. Like folding his hand back and forth as the ocean whips past, depositing sugary almonds inside of his lips as he smiles.

            It’s my turn to pick a song. “I’ll go alphabetically,” I say, ticking through a laundry list of A and B names, not wanting to pick the wrong song. What is the wrong song? I settle on Ace of Base and immediately regret it, but his palm is right there, and he hasn’t pulled it away. I answer the phone with my free hand, use my voice to ask questions about mileage and rotors to a man who is selling his car; and the man to my left flickers slightly, but stays with his eyes on the road. The song ends, and we lurch in spontaneous bursts of gridlock, the road as effortlessly congested as it was clear only moments before. He dips his head down to the steering wheel, winces, and brakes. “Fucking traffic,” he growls, slipping his hand from my grip. “Did you find a new song?”

            “Working on it,” I say, encouraging each toe to unclench as I hoist my boots onto the dashboard. We can do things like this, him and I; because I know the way he drinks coffee, and he lets me leave shirts at his house. The periphery ebbs as we flow. “What do you want to hear?” I ask, lingering over Nirvana.

            He laughs. “Pick a song,” he says, and finally moves to fourth gear.

2 days before

            “I just can’t accept that kind of favor from you,” I tell him, jabbing at my plate of fish tacos. In my hurry to eat, I’d forgotten to ask for no dairy, and a mound of fried snapper stares up as I pick out each tendril of cheese.

            “Why not?” He asks, swiveling on his stool.

            “Because,” I whisper, aware that—even in my hesitation to answer his question, and the eerie warmth of California winter nights, and the overly-sterile smell of the diner countertop—that a small part of me is elated to be important, important enough to offer money to. “I’ve heard you talk about how you’ve helped people out…but always at the expense of yourself. And I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want you to grow to resent me.”

            “This is nothing like that,” he answers, voice gentle, but body bending away as he shakes his head down at his plate. “This is taking advantage of something in the moment. You need a car, right? And a man in this city wants to sell you a car. You can pay me as soon as the loan goes through… so whether you take me up on it or not, this is nothing like that.

            “I could never resent you.”

            I squeeze his hand and imagine what we look like to others, painlessly losing all track of the time. We clear our tray and walk to the drug store, halfheartedly browsing through candy. I realize I’m still nervous, that a part of me must sense the water between us, and still wants to want what he wants: even though he has told me his secrets, even though we eat off the same plate. “Gummies or chocolate?” he asks, looking at me from across the Good & Plenty’s. I narrow it down by category and price, spinning off on ingredients, waiting to hear him say yes. But he doesn’t.

1 day before

            We walk on the beach with our backs against the sun, watching shirtless men and spandex-ed women in various states of exercise, exhaling each time that they pass. I loop under his arm and chatter about something or other, feeling the air crisp my skin. “I had no idea people still rollerblade,” he says lightly, crinkling his nose; and right then, if I’d never kissed him, I would have. I did.

            “I’m not good at this,” he tells me later, spitting a thin stream of smoke at the sky. I’m sitting on the porch, robe falling off my right arm like a film that’s come loose. “This is new for me.

            “When I say I don’t care, it’s not that I don’t care about you. I just don’t care about arguments, picking apart the relationship. You’re… you’re beautiful.”

            With that, he sits down at my side.

            “But you’re a lot of car.”

            I wiggle my nose at his shoulder, feeling for humor, for ease. I string words together; rearranging sentences like furniture, watching the pillows take shape. I wait for him to notice, sit down; to put his boots up, take my hand back to where we’d begun. But the weight of our bodies knows better. “The car I’m buying is pretty,” I say finally. “I like the color. But the aesthetic is only a bonus.”

            “Like YOU!” he laughs, mushing my face with his thumb.

            “That’s the same way I feel about you.”

Before

            “I’ll meet you there,” I mutter. “You’ve done so much already. I don’t want you to get back on the freeway and sit in traffic. I’ll pick up our stuff and just meet you there.”

            The key is in my hand, the key to a car that’s been sold by a man with red spots on his face, from a house that makes fungus seem ritzy. I’m staring across at the other man, the one I love, whose face betrays nothing but space. I watch our words trail out in front of our mouths, tangling in the air and then reordering into a handful of movement and sounds. His eyebrows knot, and I get in my car; watching us watch one another in mirrors, waiting for something to crack.

            I pick up our bags from the house on the corner, lopsidedly shuffling down stairs. I wonder if cities have baggage, like people—if our romance was dropped in a vat of bad karma, essentially fried from the start. The car starts by coughing, so I sit for a moment; praying that I heard it wrong, perhaps misunderstood it. If I keep moving forward, give motion, just breathe, this will all be some sort of mistake.

             Last night, when I lay down beside him, he flipped himself over and snored.

            I ease onto the freeway, pleading to the radio buttons—to the steering wheel, the chipped vent, anything—to keep me safe, just this once. Please, just this once, let it stop.

            And it does. It stops. At the place where the freeways combine, on a bridge overlooking the city—that damned vat of oil, the place where we burned—my car becomes quiet and dies. “No,” I say aloud. “No, no, no.” I search for the hazards as cars swarm around me, droning their horns as the sun trickles down. Trembling fingers press every button, then open the door—I watch headlights slam, bug-eyed, toward me. Halfway out, the car starts to roll, and I clamber back in for the brake. Then, without thinking, I run for the side—never stopping to panic, or think. That’s the thing about living: you don’t question it until you turn back and look. With my hands on the rail, as the road rushed behind me, I didn’t have time to “survive.” I just did. But as soon as I stared into traffic—the thick stream of trucks, careening out of the way of my dark, lonely car—my legs said it’s over, and failed. 

            I remember waking up with his head on my cheek, the tangle of hair at my neck. His eyes opened slowly and we burrowed together, not committed to consciousness yet. An inhale of breath as he hovered to see me, corners of his mouth still crusted with sleep as he touched his lips to my nose. “You’re something special,” he whispered, cupping my jaw in his hand. The spaces between us were small.

            By the time the ambulance arrives, my phone is dead, and the mirror has been clipped off my car. They drive me to a church parking lot, are you okay, are you okay, and tell my boyfriend—is there someone we can call? —where to find me. He pulls up and walks over, all handshakes and smiles, but his legs give away what’s inside. They shake as he tugs me, one-handed, toward him: defying the length of his arms as they wrap and keep wrapping around.

“Do you have any idea?” He whispers, crumpling into my spine. Any idea of what? Of how frightened he felt when he thought he might lose me? Of how glad he was to see me whole? Of the simple perfection of brushing our teeth, making toothpasty grins at each other? Or the fact that I never know what he is thinking, or how to make words he can hear?   

“Do you have any idea?”

“Do you have any idea?”

I do, but he’s already gone.

After

            We sit across the table from one another, a small expanse of linoleum and about a thousand miles between us. A woman behind the counter shuffles cups back and forth, expertly snapping small pastries into plastic cases with a press of her thumb.

“God, is this even coffee?”

I look up and notice the lines on his face, running like rivers—some deeper, some new—inward, seeking a source or the pool of his eyes, or the thumbprint of tiredness beneath them.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, turning my attention to the deck of cards on the bookshelf beside us. They’re tarot cards, worn at the edges, with pastel flowers spiraling over each surface. I remember the woman who gave me a tarot reading, and the milky sound that her words seemed to make as she spoke.

There’s a tower, she said. And a gift. The tower needs to fall away, though, before the opening can occur. For true change to take place, the illusions you’re holding must die. It’s only once the foundation crumbles, breaks down, that you’ll find your true power. It’s there that the healing occurs.

 I drop the deck onto the table, waving my hands and rolling my face to the sky, pulling three cards with an exaggerated flick of my wrist. “Your future,” I tell him, lowering my voice to a hiss. “Is in the cards.”

He flips them over: Forgiveness. Guidance. Growth.

He asks me which one we should read about, and I look in his eyes. His words, barely audible, flash like a small match of life in his eyes; but just as I reach them, they’re gone. “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Which one do you want?”

“Just make a decision,” he answers, cold. “For once.”

A pause. “Are we done here?”

I remember the way that I felt in the car, looking out at the freeway, my life as delicate as a coil of truth. I want to stand up and scream at his forehead, boil the muscle memory of fear—our shared horror—to the surface. “I almost DIED!” I want to tell him. “If you can’t look at me now, then when? WHEN?” But I don’t, because speech is too wobbly. And sometimes, one word is enough. “Yes,” I tell him. We’re done here.

We stand up.

We move.

Now

            When the waitress passes, depositing her plate, you lower your eyes to your hands. They’ve clenched fists, they’ve lived, and they’ll probably melt as you’re aging. They’ve skimmed the soft craters atop babies’ heads. They’ve closed doors and scabbed up and latched onto branches; they’ve opened and clapped loud and traced every groove in a face. They’ve listened, they’ve lingered, they’ve given you something to hold.

And when the time comes to leave, they’ll let go. 

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.