a bond so instantaneous

Billy Jonas has a song called "The Bus” (lyrics) (listen) in which he shares a few anecdotes of fellow passengers he met while riding the bus across America. A father goes to bail his young daughter out of trouble, a young man heads off to boot camp to avoid gang violence, and a Native American woman teaches Billy how to kill rabbits with a stick (before cooking them with instant onion soup mix.)

The point of the song is the bond, the trust that arises amongst travelers in a single vessel, the breakdown of suspicion in favor of camaraderie and straight-up love. It’s a subversion of our natural fear of strangers, and an assurance that it isn’t so odd to let your guard down, to get close and be vulnerable because we’re all in this thing together

I wept over this in the sun on a beautiful day at sea, so happy to be on the boat with strangers, getting to know them, hoarding the small intimacies they shared with me.

We have so much to learn from each other. Each of our lives represents a perfect example of what it means to be a human being. I can only live from this one seat, from these feet and this brain and this set of predetermined and acquired circumstances. Whenever I talk to someone new, it feels like a bonus round of life, a tiny taste of what it’s like to be that person, to think their way and experience what they have. It gives me the most expansive thrill, that spontaneous moment of closeness when we break through our conceptualizations of each other as “other” or “foreign” and find common ground.

Of course this is Marina, too. Her words shake in me everyday. I reread and think about her and it feels something like studying scripture; enigmatic enough for multiple layers of analysis but prescriptive and instructive. Important. It feels good, painful like a workout or an overzealous massage, but good.

Good today at least. Mourning can be like the weather, capricious and unpredictable.

To hit the ground running...

As usual, everything starts with worry and concern. Too much stuff, don’t like my blog, conflicted about how much to focus on photography, not sure what I’m doing out here. Writer’s block outside my notebook. I have to shed it, this icky sensation that I’m somehow getting it all wrong.

It doesn't LOOK like that much stuff.... the only thing missing is my camera bag and my other shoes. Whatever, soon the useless shit will become clear and I'll mail a box home. 

I’m never going to be anything but myself. I may never be a real writer, but I have to write. From now on, I’m going to try to throw something up here every day or every other day. It’s going to be meandering, unstructured, and exactly like my brain. I can’t pressure myself to craft perfect pieces, and quite frankly the sun is shining and I want to get my ass out there in the adventure.

So here’s to new habits and hitting the ground running.

But what is the ground made of? Where am I running to? What do all these cords connect to and why do I feel like the anxious shepherd of a flock of very poorly behaved digital sheep?

To catch us up:

I was on a cruise around the Mediterranean with Mom and Amanda for the first two weeks of this adventure. It was outrageous, amazing, wonderful. Exhausting. Invigorating, hilarious. Mostly wholesome (but for the Bingo storage room rendezvous...)

Everywhere we went (France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey) I could have passed for a native. This is a shift in what it’s meant to be a foreigner to me in the past - no visual marker of difference means people are more open to talk (at least until they realize we have to switch to English and/ or charades.)

I want to learn every language. I ended up with Korean because that was the first place I went and had an experience like this, but the impulse doesn’t change. I always want to get at locals, to try to communicate even when the only shared denominator is a body with arms and legs. I spent last night with some Barcelona boys who spoke almost NO English and somehow with my totally limited Spanish we got by in hysterical laughter and acrobatics.

I know I’m drunk when I’m talk to myself out loud in the bathroom. I took a picture to commemorate during my bathroom break from the charade-a-thon that was last night.

Yep, that’s my face reflected upside down in the toilet paper holder. “Bitch I’m in Barcelona! Bartheloooonnnaaa Barcelona! Si si si, yo hablo espanol, si si siiii en Barceloooona.” Over and over.

Anyway, back to the point:

Now I’m back in Barcelona by myself for a few days. I sort of have to figure out what I’m doing next, but mostly not. Mostly I’m just so grateful to be alive and excited about my adventures that I don’t even care what I see or what happens.

A lot of this is coming out of losing Marina. Marina Keegan passed away in a one car accident a few days after her graduation from Yale. She was probably the most talented writer I’ve ever known personally, my little WORD dongsaeng all set to be the shiningest of shining literary stars.

I don’t want to say that I’m devastated; I’m running around. I’m smiling and laughing, I’m writing again. But I am devastated, I think of her and I cry at least a little bit everyday, not only for her and her family but for the rest of us, for literature and the course of America and the world for not having her with us anymore to inspire and delight and provoke us. Her death has changed me, or reminded me of something I’ve always known but haven’t actively engaged with consistancy. I can’t let this go without being affected, she was too important. Too good. Too brilliant.

The last thing she wrote was about the opposite of loneliness, about the shared sensation that we’re all in “this” together. I want to live that way, making it clear to everyone I meet that I’m in this thing with them and that we can count on each other, we can love on each other and be vulnerable and laugh too loudly because I’m not going to judge, I’m not going to knock anyone down or be too cool for school. 

I’m pushing deeper and I’m not letting go. I’m going to do it with love and trust and honesty, and whatever it is - it is. I’m going to write about it, too, even if the writing isn’t very good, because we can’t get anywhere without sharing and communicating with each other.

#10/30 "Now, Everyone Knows Your Name"

Unsure of what it was,

we scratched it with our finger nails.

Tasted it. It melted at the edges

and multiplied under a microscope:

a fractal sponge scooped

out of strawberry ice cream.

Emptier and emptier it expanded,

wide caverns of paper milk

spun into suggestion’s opposites.

We shrank to slide inside,

to slick our skins on sugar membranes

and dig toes into the ebb tide

of melted cream, falling away.

We shivered to the pulse that marked

each hollow exponent’s explosion.

I ate my heart and wondered

if you’d wish on us enormity,

to fill the grottos

with opposition for entertainment.

I’d never been so happy

as when I was small and sugar

-slicked beside you

in all that waxing emptiness.

I ached to stay,

our toes sole landmarks

in a wide, delicious country.

But you were a lush, indelicate girl.

You dairy-stank and swelled, fast,

merciless as a guillotine; you

leaked from fractal windows.

I clung to you; first a child,

then a tick or trace of pollen.

I was a single cell before

your skin opened

permeable and I

slipped into you.

Imagine my surprise

to find your cell walls

scrumptious, studded with

frozen fruit, expanding

ever lonelier in runny

fractal sponges

of strawberry ice cream.

#9/30 "The Canary and The Snake"

A bird flaps between us

hotpulse-frantic against our knuckles,

warbling of urgent intimacy.

Coiled around the bird is a snake

ruby-striped and gently draped

about its lover’s wings.

You know the snake.

It lived in your boot, once,

menacing your ankle’s pulse.

It left you for the bird: a canary

in the coal mine of our embrace

singing the honest blues.

From my grasping hand to yours

the canary ricochets like a needle

weaving through two slips of gauze.

We’re drawn clumsily along its path,

until two sloppy rosettes

converge in a sad bouquet.

It is absurd to ask how other

more auspicious signs

might have been procured.

The snake recalls your leather-sweat

and socks; it tells the bird

not to bother with such fakers:

no violence is greater

than to make a lie the truth.

The canary is unconvinced.

It believes a flash of ruby-striped

success could wake us up

to the impotence of numbers.

Its song flosses the gaps between

filmy petals, pours mortar down

throats and holds

a hairdryer to gaping mouths.

We know this, yet still we stand

lips parted in awe and waiting

like penitents for the host.

Show us, canary,

how to get back to ourselves.

#5/30 "Muscle Memory"

I have a vague memory

of water on glass: a fingertip

gently kissing surface tension, dragging

drops to a reservoir until rivulets

broke free and flowed

down a darkened window to the sill.

Your pale chest is that dark window

when I prod drops left clinging from the shower

across your constellated skin.

My hand is young, your chest

a curious partition

protecting irrigation from a storm.

#3/30 "Sunday"

Handsome anchor,

I am happy to be planted

in your shallow nail beds.

Let’s read and write the news

while under our windows

Chinese women sing in argument,

a scaffold rattles

apart, and spring

breaks like a wave.