Good morning. Happy Sunday.

Here is my mind as of late June.

ON MY MIND

There is an orange rotting on the counter of this coffeeshop.

No one has seemed to notice it. It has been there for days and it will be there for days more. Sitting there, dying, as June crawls into July. 

June is crawling into July and I saw fireflies for the first time last night. I thought sparks were flying through the air and looked, in typical California fashion, for smoke. I gasped when I realized what they really were. Bioluminescent beings, fluttering through the night. The air so warm and wet that I heard someone describe it as soup. 

Soup. An open mouth and you are wading right through it, wishing for September. The leaves are so vividly green it is stupid and the air is so hot it feels like a big hug from global warming. I listened to a podcast when I was sixteen about all the ways the world will end, back when AI was for science fiction novels, not national news, and temperature spikes were just these incremental things.

Incremental things. Time. Age. Loss. Gain. I read a quote the other day that read “there was a time you played outside as a kid and had no idea it would be the last time you ever did”. And we know this, of course we do. Nostalgia and growing up and all the major motifs that we choke on as writers, English students, human beings. It was the mundane factuality of the concept that got me. It was realizing that somewhere between the feigned sweetness of childhood and the beautiful atrocity of whatever came next, there was surely, and you can know this for certain, one random day where you played outside as a kid for the last time. Played with dolls for the last time. Made mud pies with lavender sprigs for the last time. And never once were you aware of each moment’s finality. Never once did you stop cartwheeling, stand up straight, brush your hands on your jeans and and say, enough. Rather, it was simply decided for you by factors so elusive and inevitable that you never stood a chance. The passage of time was so seductive back then. I found it so alluring. I still do, but not like that. 

Not like that. Those are the words I spit onto the sidewalk that we were on when I said it was over. Over because I don’t love you, not like that. There is a special kind of cruelty that accompanies perpetually finding yourself lodged on either side of love’s extremes, only to look out and see the other person waving at you from across an aching chasm. One person in love, one person far from it. I have been in both places enough times to be sick with a longing for some kind of mutual equilibrium. It was fun to be nineteen, watching his finger trace each tattoo as he told me its story. It was fun to be so recklessly dumb and in love. I didn’t realize that until it was me, watching someone else fall in love and wondering why I couldn’t just join them. It doesn’t work that way. I grew tired of motion sickness and then tired of stillness, aching to either kiss the land or sway with the sea, one for the other, one for another. I am not nineteen anymore. 

Not nineteen anymore. As June crawls into July, I will slip into 22. Silently, reverently, I will watch as another year stacks up inside of me. I dreamed for a long time of being 22. I love the evenness of the number, the numerical alliteration of it. When I was a teenager, it was the age I attached New York to. “I will live in New York when I am 22”, I used to say. It seemed quite old, quite unreachable. Now it seems both impossibly old and deafeningly young. A blistering dichotomy, like most things. 

Most things. I knew someone once who told me he loved binaries. That he experienced the world through them. That they made up most things. He saw life as an endless string of extremes to which we flock to either one side of, or the other. Taken to definition, a binary is a pair of terms that give meaning to one another purely through their opposition. Light and dark, love and grief. We would not know the brilliance of light if there was no darkness, etc, etc. I believe the world to exist more on a continuous spectrum, but he had a point. Most things are one thing, simply because they are not the other.

Not the other. The other what? The other life? Or, as Cheryl Strayed calls it, the ghost ship that did not carry us?

Maybe.

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