how to be

touch an innocuous door handle and it ignites a flash of memory to another place. I've been in and out and finding so much of it pleasant as hell. A burnt piece of palo santo in a room that's burning down. A Catalonian red wine spilling it's plum mineral blood down a throat.

Climbing steps up to a white adobe house on New Years Eve filled with Arizona people and music made from the neon green hides of broken aliens. Then that hidden fairy land in the corner of Highland Park with a kid telling me to feed the fire with Santa Maria wood while he spun obscure wonders and we danced like muppets.

To wonder what I'm doing here over a bowl of oatmeal in my kitchen and feeling like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, the clouds the way they were outlined out our window with perimeters of yellow bounced orange light yelling at me how I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

She says she hates waking up cuz it reminds her that one day she won't. I know. I know. Fuck, all our deaths but this is living. Fuck all the lost opportunities we're dying anyway.

I run errands, run mental circles, drive on slick pavement and thunderous potholes and traverse my city cascading with memories through fifteen mostly underpaid years that I wouldn't trade for anything.

A girl in brown high waisted Dickies and tattooed arms hugs her arms around the slight slender 20 something boy she loves before they track past me to go have unprotected sex in a youthful haze.

kemosabe

There was never no oath with the person you didn't want to be with, the person you didn't want to be. There was never no oath to take care of one another if you weren't taking care of one another as you turned into the person you wanted to be. There was never no oath with the person you never wanted to be, that's why you went on to become the person you were trying to be.

A month or so ago

h2o