i do now

the sun is a red wine float peering over the edge of the earth and a song with a yearning delicate guitar riff sidles up to me on the airtrain so i immediately listen to it three times in a row. it’s happened before. i am always the most tender in the hours leaving the airport, grieving what i left when i came home. i want to stay forever with hana in the uber to la cuevita, drunk on the way the night unfurls. i’m in love with everywhere, so everything breaks my heart.

i missed the snow because i went to la to beat in tune with the friends who chose forever spring, sometimes summer over the kind of cold i’ll tell my children about when they thaw and i can’t blame them. my words freeze the second they leave my lips. i never understood why people out west craved mountains but i do now, cradling me as i cry in sonia’s subaru. the air tastes like mezcal and one puff of a cigarette and everything on the east side is yassified tinned fish bullshit but i love five days in a city i can never spend more than five days in. i want to rub red rocks on my hands and absorb the desert but my skin is already so dry. this time is different than all the other times because i don’t feel lost.

one of my airpods dies on the walk home from the superbowl and i dare myself to figure out a metaphor for it. what is it about hearing the chorus again, the one you’ve listened to a million times, and that moment when it hits you from the other side.

i do things that are bad for me in the abstract and great for me in the present and as always, i’m not sorry unless i see blood. i pull tarot cards and they fit in with the future i want for myself and i wonder if this time i’ll get to stop thinking about canyons, and the way nature carved them into mountain ranges to remind us that it’s okay to be empty. the chorus sounds like waking up at nine after going to bed at five to go hiking and eat thai food, like throwing a fifth birthday party for my eggs. a scout’s smile. falling into the arms of my people, near and far. i think i just might, finally, have a warm enough coat to wait out the cold.