Flight 4481

It’s morning: the east growing orange over the burnt hills, over miles and miles of endless desert. The earth slowly turns her face towards that yellow light, and the darkness shrinks into shadows, taking refuge behind the lonely plans that still cling to this barren land. They’re picking up speed, taxing. The wheels spin faster and faster, and she holds her breath before takeoff. She feels the immensity of the earth, the weight of every breath in her body. There are the memories that have sunk to her stomach, like so many stones. This plane could not be airborne, could not possibly rise with the strengthening wind over this brown, brown earth. She is too heavy, too full of things she can’t name of explain.
But they defy gravity, the wings bend slightly just so and they’re up. She watches as the ground shrinks below her, the miles spreading out as they speed heavenward. There are no birds that can ascend this way, but she wants to let that heaviness she feels fall back towards the earth. She wishes to shed these sorrows and joys that hold her to this earth, she wants to feel them peel away and alight on the breeze, like white feathers. Instead, the rocks she feels in her stomach shift as plane shifts on its axis, pointing north.


In hours, days, she sees the ocean. It feels like a miracle after the miles of dust. But really, they’re not so different. The sky turns orange, then deepest pink, as the sun sinks away to the horizon. She is reminded of an impossible sunset that feels farther away than all the miles she’s traveled. These colors are the same, through now she sees them far above this land and sea, the same sea she once set all of her hopes upon. The plane, not the same but equal, dips through clouds and they see is white, two moments of oblivion. They’re out, inches closer to the sea that now turns an inky color, then falls away completely into infinite darkness. The fading light, now deep purple, outlines the distant mountains that bravely rise from the sea. The mountains are black, black now like soft darkness in lover’s arms, she thinks. She feels sentimental for these places she imagines so often, she feels the weight of her memory but something deeper. In this little plane, she feels impossibly small in the world. The rocks in her stomach grumble and moan, but she’s ready. She’s ready to cast those stones away into the sea, and emerge from the waves light and white like feathers.

(Sadly, the poor-boy Blog has been neglected, so I figure these pockets of time should be put to good use.)

Sometimes it seems like these words don't belong to me, that they come from somewhere else and I grasp at them with my fingertips, like soap bubbles turned golden in the afternoon of memory. These words that flow right through me, though they're paired together in the narrow tunnels of the mind, twisting and turning until they exit my mouth, parading in twos and threes, sentences dressed up for a party. I try to write with these words, but they're like air or water or sunshine, never really mine to keep.
And these words escape me, flutter away on little translucent wings. In those salty-sweet memories: the grit of sand in your teeth, the laughter, the endless expanse of ocean straining to outdo the sky in her opulence. How things were easy and our speech loosened, words that were young and slightly tipsy lingering in the water, stained the bluest blue. But when the water turned red and suddenly everything mattered, those words fled into the sky to be replace with sounds more primal that cut and burned. I didn't know I kept a private store of words, tucked in my breast, but it seemed like even those weren't enough. My words were exhausted. They had fled for more temperate zones, escaping that red afternoon. When words fail, the best we have is the grasp of our hands, the warmth and touch that are meant to convey the same feelings as those mercurial words.
It was only later, as water (this time lukewarm and devoid of smell or taste) streamed down my face, that I realized that these words had left me. Perhaps the stinging in my eyes, which joined the rivulets down my back and legs, was because I was overwhelmed, left unbearably alone without any words to tell you how it felt. All I could do was cry and cry and cry, mourning the loss of my beloved words, the silence that accompanies the reverberations of shock. How could I tell anyone just how much it meant; how could I begin to explain that in those shards of bone and torn flesh we saw something unspeakable, something that made us afraid to even begin talking about the idea of loss?
These are not my best words. They are not the prettiest, nor do they have the sort of eloquence that should accompany these events. But I'm reaching, I'm grasping for something I can thread together, just to remember how to speak.
The tides will change, and these words will return to their natural ebb and flow behind my mouth. For now we're still practicing, remembering how they feel between the lips and teeth. They'll never be mine, but like birds and bubbles and sunshine and things that can't be owned, I'll always wish for them to come back, to visit again. So that maybe I'll never be alone, never be left without their company.

like glass:

Here among old issues of the New Yorker and fashion magazines, literature and bottles of water and lost keys, the forgotton kingdom of Nuestra Senora de las Cosas Olvidadas. And yet all woven together, our molecules becoming acquainted with one another. Down to the fragments of atoms that compose this orchestral creation, the white of these walls and the soft yellow light in the corner. There are birds and memories and Cheerios and oil and electrodes and dried flowers, fingertips and nailpolish, sticky peanut butter. Songs like Mom used to sing, the same as the dreams I'll have tonight. Everything part of something bigger, like the strings of violins that sigh in harmony among bassoons, piccolos and crashing percussion, everything in its place, everything always, everything.
I had a dream last night about an ocean turned yellow and buildings that collapsed on themselves. When I woke up, there was no tragedy, only the familiar: someone in the kitchen, the sunlight through the curtains, the traffic rumbling somewhere beyond, the texture of the pillow under my cheek. And I drew that first breath awake, unravelling the images of yellowed seas and rubble: banished away into the subconcious. I lay there, for those first few minutes, strung between sleep and awake, trying to feel a part of everything, some sort of immensity.
I have a hard time inventing new things, so I often creep back into the refuge of memories, which I can reinvent and retell to my liking. I live off their color and smell, the cloudy taste of remembered flavors and the silkiness of their textures. They become metaphors, lessons, they become old friends and strangers that seem vaguely familiar. They're my own menagerie, my own kingdom of things half-forgotten. One day, I will make a garden of these memories, that I've nurtured back from the dead so they might bloom like orchids. When my bones creak and complain, I'll return to my garden and revel in the colors: lilac, mango, persimmon, chartreuse, soft brown like soil, the inside of guavas. But beyond their chatter, the songs collected that sound like a family of canaries, will be the interminable solitude of silence, the absolute quiet beyond Memory.

We talked about realismo magico in Literature class, rehashing Garcia Marquez and Carpentier, the primitive and the neo-creative. But a thought: reality is simply another construction, another cardboard box we play-pretend is our house. And magic is as real or as make-believe as we want it to be, as we ponder the difference between realms of the impossible and realms of the improbable (not my terminology, but very eloquently put).
It still seems like I'm inhabiting different worlds, each bound by its own senses and rules. Magic of the conventional sort seems farther away here, though I remember it dusting my childhood, flakes of gold that drifted through the trees and into everything I made up. There was a wild sort of Magic in South America, tall like mountains and older than the landscape of a people now forgotten. It was intangible, yet inevitable, woven into the mythology of the places we saw. Here, perhaps it's forgotten in the ordinary, left behind like dried leaves swept up in a sweltering day, lost lost lost.
They teach us in writing that things happen in threes, it's a magic formula that somehow feels appropriate, satisfying. So perhaps it's only natural that I find myself caught between three world, always in triangles that draw their lines across continents, across languages, across time and space and heart. But I can't help feeling like I'm not listening enough, like if I could understand these whispers and shouts it would make more sense, it would conjugate and connect and the magic would make itself known. Can a person every really exist in threes, always feeling like a piece of themselves was lost in another world entirely? Which do I believe, which is a dream?

Things have been noticeably different since the Spanish language abruptly exited to the left of my life. Now, whenever I hear that a sonorous accent, the lilt of Spanish speech that melts syllables together, my ears stand in attention like someone stranded and starving for food almost forgotten. It's a treat, a soft caramel melting in the heat, it's sweetness the same color of afternoon memories.

My apartment, all white and tiled, is noticeable absent of Spanish language, except for the rare foreign film forgotten in the VCR. The chatter of the stream outside, which is the incessant background song for our every interaction in #605, makes a sound like rushing footsteps, like the swell of applause, like a stiff breeze between leaves. It's different, and I find it lacks that sweetness that I loved so much in Spanish, the language like music that rose from the street and was caught in my curtains, the smell of melting caramel sticking to my sheets. Whispered and shouted and between giggles, the language that composed the sweetness of those days, now replaced with the sound of the stream forever running away, like boots marching.

Un recuerdo (because I have many, many, many now): On that stretch of sand that ran from your doorstep to the dunes in the distance, made the brightest white in the noontime sun. Summer was just ripening, and as ocean gew warmer she drew crowds to her shores, from all over the Continent. And how we would just lie there, pretending to be asleep, and be surrounded by the sound of a thousand people softly talking. It sounded like the waves, the organic ebb and flow of human dialogue mingling with the crash of saltwater. The Argentine, remember him?, with his full-mouthed Spanish spoken like music, lush and accented. The Chileans, and your accent that I always loved, echoing the place we both loved to the North. And Spanish! Warm like the blooming summer sunshine, that same sticky sweet caramel that stuck to the back of my teeth sometimes making my own vowels sound different.

I miss this language, that was never my own but always something I held close like a little girl. Sing me a song, won't you, sweet like sticky candy, something colored white-bright as that Chilean sunshine.

I guess it's a new year, though not a new me, though I do find myself on the other side of the world, aaaaagain.

These memories are collected like loose change, like scraps and threads of cloth, buttons and odd ends. Each jangles around in limbo between past and present, their collective cacophony the low hum behind each story told, each personal fable whispered and later exaggerated. I remember, I remember, I remember.

I remember, for the hundredth time, that particular sunset. Though I have seen hundreds before, this one was new because it wasn’t my eyes that saw it for the first time. And as yellow faded to orange to that too-loud pink strung with gold, the froth of angry Pacific waves reflecting the fade into deepest mauve and eventual dark…as the sky rioted above, knees inched closer and fingertips crept across the sand to find each other. Sand got into my ears and my pockets, in between my toes, the web of skin between thumb and index. And these colors, I remember those colors, that lasted forever but what was really only half an hour, and all we could find to talk about was the cielito lindo.

I remember, I’ll try never to forget, how we played like children in the street, laughter overflowing into the too-quiet neighborhood, through pools of streetlights. And how at my gate, neither of us really wanted to say goodbye and have that very first sunset end, so I worked up my courage and asked through a smile…
……remember what I said?.....
…and how you said yes, and things were never quite the same after that. Perhaps later you thought that you should have turned your head away, should have walked back down the street and kept that night just for the memory of color.
But what I didn’t tell you, but I remember like it was yesterday, how after you left and I went upstairs, through-the-gate-up-the-stairs-in-the-door, how little grains of sand found their way deep inside something I couldn’t quite describe, how it turned orange and too-loud pink strung with gold just like that sunset.

Remember, don’t you, how many other afternoons there were, but how that one was almost, casi casi perfect. How I cried too much, sometimes not enough, and we danced like no one was there, ate what we found to be best from our own hands, going to sleep embraced by the sound of the ocean. And so many times after that, always laughing like children or just perhaps fingertips touching, that was enough, right?

I still collect these memories, I string them along quietly because I think only you really understand, you who hold the other half of all those afternoons. You remember, oh yes, tell me that you remember, too.

It's almost all over. Time to go crazy.