it's like cranes in the sky

have i been waiting my whole life for this?

it’s 8:30 p.m. and the hyper-virginal pieces of my new kitchen island (on wheels!) are scattered haphazardly about the living room like dismembered limbs, if you could order a box of dismembered limbs on amazon (free with purchase: bag of indistinguishable screws sure to clog up your junk drawer for the next decade). this is why i do my furniture shopping almost exclusively on facebook marketplace: i’m not cursed with the tedium of having to put anything together myself, and i don’t have to ask anyone to help me unless whatever i’m buying doesn’t fit in my car.

in this case, however, i needed a kitchen island (on wheels!) of a very specific size, because i can’t put my new coffee maker in its rightful place on the counter next to the sink until the microwave gets the hell out of the way. enter: the amazon purchase. okay, glad we cleared that up.

for a while i avoided telling people when i ordered something on amazon because for a while i felt really guilty about ordering things on amazon. amazon, i believe, is a moral gray area, because it’s really not my fault or yours that jeff bezos is an evil billionare. i’m not going to sit around all day attempting to prove to you what a righteous anti-capitalist i am. i needed a kitchen island (on wheels!), and i needed it to be exactly 26” wide. in a bezos-less utopia, i would call up the community carpenter to commission such a project, but unfortunately he was busy this week and my displaced coffee maker was starting to get impatient.

it’s 8:30 a.m. and i’m eating breakfast on my balcony: fried eggs on buttered sourdough with avocado and hot sauce. i wonder when the bus goes by if the people look up and see me at my tiny wooden table and say i wonder if she’s been waiting her whole life for this? because i do wonder if they wonder and if it’s obvious how grateful and ungrateful i feel. that i finally have what i want (my own apartment, a balcony), and still all i can think about is how annoying it is that i have to drive to the post office to pick up my mail, since whatever mechanism exists to keep the all the mail in the mailbox is currently, inexplicably broken.

a week after i got back from spain, i drove up the canyon hoping to catch a whiff of autumn, and quickly discovered that autumn had mostly vacated the premises. i felt almost too tired to care. this was partly because i was still coming down like a roll from the magnificent dopamine explosion that was my trip, and it seemed logical that all my fun points would have already been cashed, like when you trade your full punch card for a free coffee and then you’re back to square one. i had my fair share of goodness. i ate and i licked the plate. it was only right for god to give my fall to someone who needed it more.

i pulled off at the same picnic area i do every year and on my way to sniff the creek caught my eye like a loose thread on a cluster of asters near the parking lot, a sight so precious and unmistakably autumn that i felt my heart swell a centimeter or two. bent down to their height and sharing a holy silence, all i could think was where have you been?, as if it were they who had been gone from this place for weeks and not i.

in hindsight i have to wonder if this transmission was, alternatively, directed at me from the asters, but even considering the possibility makes me feel impossibly vain, as if the asters would ever give two shits about my presence or lack thereof.

vague disappointment quelled by the aster sighting, i took a moment by the creek to feel the opposite of breathless, which is breath-full, even though that sounds stupid.

it’s 6:30 p.m. and from my chair on the balcony, the same one in which i ate my vanilla ice cream with raspberries just seconds (three months) ago, i watch planes circle in the western sky, making shapes in the sunset that seem abstract to me but i know, logically, are not. the aesthetic performance feels more important than analyzing flight paths, which is fine because i’m not a pilot, i’m a lady on her porch.

i consider the metaphors implicated by this half-performed ignorance. does recognizing a pattern automatically imply significance? i guess it’s comforting now to live so close to the airport, knowing somewhere and someone else are never far away.

when there are no planes or i get bored of watching planes, i watch the cranes. the cranes have now been stationed above the temple for so long that my brain is adopting the version of the city skyline with them in it as a somewhat permanent representation. the sight of them both disturbs and frightens me. it amazes me. the scale of it – what we have built to build in the name of god, in the name of our pain and our sins, which are endless. the simple, physical way they shuttle steel through the air like sticks. the feat of it and the uselessness. sometimes i don’t wanna feel those metal clouds.

i tried to drink it away
i tried to put one in the air
i tried to dance it away
i tried to change it with my hair

i ran my credit card bill up
thought a new dress would make it better
i tried to work it away
but that just made me even sadder

i tried to keep myself busy
i ran around in circles
think i made myself dizzy
i slept it away, i sexed it away
i read it away
away

it’s 3:30 p.m. and E calls me while i’m digging through a box in the closet for some obscure cord i wouldn’t know how to google. it’s like a portal opens between our phones and for a while we exist solely in some sort of satellite space, an alternate dimension like a tunnel or a tube. they say “it really is funny, how we get high on our own depression,” and i have to laugh out loud because it is funny and we do.

we talk about language and how we need to care more about understanding than words. we talk about how we need to care about words, too.

E has a knack for pulling you into their container like a fish into its bowl, to make you feel and experience their world rather than just imagine it. no one else speaks to me in this way, and when we hang up, i look up to find a cable in my hand, the one i’d been looking for all day, dangling inscrutably in my palm like the sorcerer’s stone.

the physics of these lapses in bodily presence are a mystery to me, those phantasmal seconds between streams of consciousness during which i must appear a ghost of myself.

one moment it was saturday night and i was smoking a spirit on the bar patio with three of the people i love most in this world, plus two more i also love but had only just met, drinking a draft pacifico which could be the best beer experience there is, laughing about something a professional hypnotist couldn’t bring me to recall. and then the next it was sunday morning, the wee hours, and i was hunched over behind a bush at the lesbian rave (ironic), dizzy as a middle schooler at the county fair. the rapidity of this descent into messiness felt scarier than the episode itself, my consciousness turning for the worse on a dime as though i was ella of frell and someone had ordered me to suffer.

i find oftentimes i drink mindlessly when i am unable to make eye contact with my own anxiety. it’s a sort of passive aggression – my heart asks me what’s wrong and i say “nothing, i’m fine,” and she says, “you’re not fine; look at you,” and i say, “no really, i’m okay,” and then of course i am forced to yield, because i have fallen head first into the bush. i have no leg to stand on when i can’t stand on my own two legs.

in the morning i woke up naked on the couch and found i had knocked a vase of flowers off the coffee table, but i was home and i was alive and i had not driven. i had my keys. i had my wallet. i found my phone in my pants. i felt sure i could retrace my steps and find my dignity discarded somewhere between the bar and the party.

it’s 9:30 p.m. and the cranes are still and beautiful, all lit up like christmas trees: one red, one blue. looking at them now i feel an empathy for their plight – oblivious, as the means, to the end they’re doomed to orchestrate.

what would it take to pick my life up like these pieces on the floor? could i become the red crane? could i get out from under myself?

i tried to run it away
thought then my head’d be feeling clearer
i traveled seventy states
thought moving 'round’d make me feel better

i tried to let go my lover
thought if i was alone then maybe i could recover
to write it away or cry it away
away¹

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obsession of the week

my fall ambience videos du jour…

day:

night:

spotify “on repeat” song of the week

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1. italicized stanzas are lyrics to “cranes in the sky” by solange