My Pretty Little Sky

I love you.

And it won't make any sense, you know. Like. Six months from now. Or even four weeks. Why I spent this evening or rather this morning laying on the Tangerine Dream feeling all languid, watching Three's Company (the Terri years) and wishing I was somewhere else but instead deciding to write to you.

It won't make any sense at all. I've found lately that it is a task: stringing each day together in a way that makes sense. Sliding these bones along this twine one by one and trying to make it into a graceful pattern of some kind. Trying to make it feel at least a little like it matters.

The Terri Years don't help much. She's all fake stern and intelligent. Nothing like that bouncy little Chrissy Snow. And nowhere near as cool as that classically trained actress, the lovely and dark Janet.

Terri is.

Filler. J Crew catalogs in your mailbox addressed to your neighbor.

I can say this only because at one point in my life I was filler, too. And I wonder often day by day if I'm filler even still.

Nights like tonight I notice only the absence of one or three key figures. People who always make it a point to give me a proper greeting.

At the same time I'm swept away by the presence of one or three key figures. These are the ones who see me just as well. I might say that tonight there were probably five of them. Tonight was saturated in so many ways. And in only one way that really mattered.

I love the way I do anything else. Very stubbornly. Very precisely. Very much as though it's the only thing in the world that actually really needs to be done, at the time.

That single-mindedness kept me solo. I drove across town for my first meal of the day. I spent Saturday in bed and had some peanut butter on Ak Mak and finally got up and out and into my Jordans for work and by that time I was actually running late, if you can believe that. And still no real food. So tonight I drove past my house into the avenues and back past my house into what's left of the Fillmore and finally made it home with food.

So much to say and no one to whom I could say it.

Lately when I dream I'm almost always in a room with two walls of windows each facing the ocean as the tide rises higher and higher and then much higher. It rises and rises far past the point that it is meant to rise until I'm surrounded by foaming swirls of it. With sea stars and sea weed and flotsam and jetsam all around.

But I'm perfectly safe. Not a bit of it touches me. Or even threatens to.

I dream almost every night that I'm in a reverse aquarium.

I fear that maybe I live every day in that very same fashion.

I know that it matters not, as I'm only striving toward a state of grace, and who could blame me for that?

Not you. I know that, at least.

Cielito lindo, yo te amo.