So it’s home. Yes. I’ve known that San Francisco is your home. Your sense of beauty is well aligned with what your streets offer you. You see beauty in stagnant rusting things, and people filing beside you without any contact. It is one of your great gifts that you understand what makes a human being. San Francisco is a beautiful place for someone with faith such as yours.
Do you know that I have found it to be my home as well? I’ve told you this. But it is here, in a world that seems strange and foreign now, though rich with beauty, heavy fragrant air, lush roadsides and hillsides marked out and separated by handmade rock walls, that I have found the most compelling evidence . . . the small stones stuck in the holes between the larger ones (not smooth and bright like the agate with which you filled your knit hat for me to sift, but rough and faded from the salt air and the hard sun) have shown me that Block Island has been like a cocoon for me. It has served its purpose, and I have loved it and rested well here. In the many years of coming here, coming back always as a different person, at a different stage in the transformation, I have become someone new. And it is clear to me, from here, as it was from there, that the Bay is my home.
From here, there are no places that I can pick out and say Here, here is the wall where we sat and talked about God; I have only my body and my soul. Here is the place where you put your hand the first time you kissed me. Here is the path, across my hip to my belly, that your hand would trace when we laid together; Here is where I am more brave from loving you; Here is the pile of words and emotions I didn’t know how to communicate before knowing you; Here is the lip you would hold between yours; Here is the knot in my chest which has been building since I turned my head away from yours.
I so want to write you a love letter; I wonder how you would take it. I don’t want to make you more sad. I don’t want to make me more sad.
Thick grass, green landscapes, not marked with the vast patches of sourgrass or lavender, nasturtiums don’t wind along the stone walls. Stone walls separate property, because it is too vast to be regulated by driveways, or the walls of the next house; there is mud by the side of the road, with niobium swirls from oil-dripping cars and trucks that show in the waning sunlight; stones mark the end of roads, or driveways, many of them are painted, the paint chipping, with little fishes, or birds, or a simple single-sailed boat in a placid sea ; the dunes that line the beaches are made of Cape American beachgrass and arc and dip like a compacted south Dakotan landscape; the winds move through the beachgrass and the other longer grasses that grow farther back from the beach and make ripples just as they are made on the surface of the ocean; the last line of defense between the dunes and the road are the thick and thorny beach roses; this time of year they are in full bloom; rich fragrant, they open and their petals sag in the sun like poppy leaves, the same kind of tongue lapping the sun; the petals are pinkish of all kinds and sometimes white and they leave behind beach plums when they have dropped; the air is thick and heavy, breathing is wetter. Any slight fragrance is augmented enormously as it diffuses through the dense air; dark clouds here mean rain; it might thunder in the middle of the day; there are ponds in abundance, some of them are salty some of them are fresh, many of them are clothed in lily pads and water lotuses, which close into round yellow balls, and open widely like the heart of Venus, or Buddha’s third eye.
I will always need to do this. I will always need to go away for a time, but it won’t have to be for months all of the time. Now I am here, and I am often weighted with sadness, not just in missing you but in the not knowing, the nail-biting, will we still want to be together? Will we be friends if not lovers? They key, I know, is to trust that the universe will unfold as it should.
Do what you love and the rest will follow” she keeps telling me. I have deciphered that I love doing these four things, though I haven’t figured out the order: loving, writing, learning and feeling. Perhaps in this order: loving, learning, feeling, writing. These are the things I should continue to do.
I miss you. I miss you madly. I cry myself to sleep most nights, curled on my side under my unzipped sleeping bag and my brown blanket. I cry while I hear the others out in the hallways smoking cigarettes and talking in varying degrees of intensity and volume about whether or not it’s rude to offer someone a warm beer.
“Kid. Yuh can’t offah someone a beeyah then give’m whom piss, kid.”
“It’s Labatt’s man, I ain’t got a coolah, whadda yuh want?”
I sleep in my white nightgown with a sweater, since its been right cold every night since I’ve come. June is usually like that here. Sometimes July and August as well. But often it gets too hot to breathe or think or move at all, and if you do any of those things, or if you do none of them, you end up sweating six gallons. I’m changing the subject though. I woke heavily this morning. I came to work in a heavy haze, a paralyzing stupor of sadness. I forgot every task I began, I left water running. I left a scone in the microwave for minutes after it had finished cooking and didn’t even remember until the customer said “uhm, excuse me, is that scone ready?” My friend Justin came in. He works at the coffee shop too, but today he was working at the boat basin, so he had his radio with him. He’s a short boy, with blondish red hair that covers his cheeks and chin as thickly as his head. He was wearing a shirt, dirty and faded, though probably only a few months old, with an unbordered California flag on it. Underneath the bear was a bar of red, and below that three words in black that brought tears to my eyes: Take Me Home. He once drove by Dolores Park on New Years day and saw me sitting with a boy (you) eating and talking about God. He didn’t observe this last fact; its just one that I remember.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been writing madly, and reading, and keeping well to myself. I have been watching the rain and listening to the clouds. I’ve been going to bed early, just as I want to. But there is so much that I miss. My body aches to be touched. My mouth, grown accustomed to your sweet lips, throbs as if weeping. I’m afraid to speak sometimes, because I keep asking people the questions that I wish they would ask me. I ask them about their home. I ask them about their lover. I ask them if they are as sad their eyes seem to say. If someone reaches out to hug me, I turn my body and hug them sideways, afraid that a full hug would pierce me, would hurt me too much to move, or to stay. I’m afraid of people touching me, so nobody touches me really. I don’t let them. I don’t feel alive like you say I am. I see life all around me, in the wind, and the laughing people, I feel it against my cheek when I ride my bike, I feel it on my fingers when I run my fingers through. But something inside of me feels shut down, incapable of life. I feel cold here nearly all the time.
I miss you. Take me home.
Home, I am realizing is something we make for ourselves. Maybe home is our true self, our authentic self. I am wandering along by-roads out here. I am playing out some old catholic teaching that I don’t deserve to be happy and must put myself in the way of suffering if I am truly to be humble and pure in the eyes of god. Maybe the suffering does help me cultivate my soul, but I fear that it will freeze a part of me irreparably.
I am so sad. I am as sad as I ever have been. I know that I will work through it, but it is completely different process out here, away from the blessings I have come to acknowledge and cherish. Like listening ears. Like people who know me. Like being held, if nothing more.
I don’t want you to be sad, but I don’t want to take away your sadness either ____. _____. I love your name. I love the way it looks on the page. I don’t know how to ask you questions about your soul. You probably wouldn’t answer them anyway. You’re probably smoking too many cigarettes.
