Navigating Woodland

“There's no heaven, just a big blue sky”

– Rhett Miller

 

There's no good reason to feel all alone looking out the window.  The house is to the gills.  It’s a three bedroom, and we’ve got six in here. Looking out the window, back against the wall, I feel all alone anyway.  The morning light is distant, hazy, as if asking “why commit to this?”

The vast eastbound valley tong of this great western city perdurable beneath me.  Downstairs I can hear them breathing.  The roommate stole grumbly off to work shortly before dawn and I’ve been up since, the lights off, off and on examining the smiling pictures of his family on the wall thinking, as a design choice, why do we do this?

The junk he carried

I sleep around, fail abjectly to learn anything, sneak smokes behind the dumpster at the office park.  Here we call this Thursday – Saturday.  My soul is on fire so who needs lights on?  I’m up here on the second floor of our rickety house on top of the hill with morningwood like a fucking lighthouse but I wasn’t masturbating, because my emotions were in that weird soupy non-lubricious primordial phase that sometimes happens when I’m hungover and lonely and feeling self-righteous and hungry and guilty and tired all at the same time.  Instead I pussyfooted for the kitchen, down the creaking steps and through the front room where Lopez (from work) snored vibrantly on the futon.  He’s been in residence for over a week now.

Eggos and the last of the non-wrinked blueberries.  Phone pulses in my pocket and I hear the girls coming up the steps, we have a century-old pine out front that hides the quiet ones, so, not Bascombe and Clover. Bascombe is a townie, and along with her girlfriend Clover newly homeless (two months now).  Clover is a good person who came to me asking for the spare room which we didn’t have, so I gave them mine.   That was last week. 

Outside they laugh like wild animals. 

“I was already halfway in his car before I realized he wasn’t my uber driver,” Clover laughs, streaming in the door with grocery bags lavished on both arms. Bascombe behind her, laughing, with two arm loads of her own.

“Whaddaya wan from me?” Lopez asketh from under his pillow.

Clover apologizes for waking him.

“I want you to be reincarnated as a smartwatch.” I say.

“Siri, find me a new roommate."

Bascombe laughs again, “Siri, find me a brilliant comeback.”

Innately iffy, as I am about people my age who don’t seem to be experiencing the same level of existential anxiety as me, I initially had a hard time with her.  Her green streaked hair in braids that hung down on either side of her head, just cresting the shoulders of her portrait of Baudelaire teeshirt.  She has terrible skin, occasional reefer stank, no qualms at all discussing her aversion to shaving any body hair, and one of if not the worst tattoo I have ever seen on her forearm of the bear from Ted drinking a bottle of Bud. I think I get it though.  There’s simply nothing I have that’s of any interest to her. At all.  Unless I am having a good time.  We get along pretty well despite her taking the piss out of me more than once already with some pretty surefire owns. It’s all about letting go, not being so serious.

Her cheeks flush as she unloads groceries and I ask what's this all about. 

“We went out and bought groceries for you guys.”

“And now we’re going to make you breakfast.”

On cue, Joel shuffles in from his room.  “Summa say sombout breakfast?”  He’s been here the longest so the master bedroom is his and his alone.  Pretty soon he’ll pull me aside about having “the talk” with some of our freeloaders so in the meantime breakfast was, I had to admit, a fantastic idea to keep the mechanisms of shared accommodation smoothly oiled, and so we males settle in around the table while the females cook— and yes I am aware of the non-21^st century optics of what I just said — fight me — it is how it is.

After eating one feels less mad, more awake.  Truism blecht. Throughout the meal everyone is curiuosly chipper, the way consisting on sleep deprivation makes everyone slightly electrically giddy.  Remembering that my phone had pulsed earlier, I look at it briefly and find the answer.  “We’re going to Woodland," I announce, surprising even myself, "who’s coming?”

It’s all about letting go, not being so serious.  I saw a snap that she was there and decided to go.

So we pack up the dog and headed out, Lopez and I.  His brother lives close by there so he offered to split gas and I didn’t even have to ask.  The road spills beneath us remarkably swiftly, which I do not remark upon until we stop to switch seats and fill up at a station in Fairfield, propping my forehead on the window and watching a eagle or some such big bird-of-prey make his loping eternal symbols on high, keeping keen heed of his impossible-to-fathom dominion. How do birds see so well?  Almost two hours in and the radio starts to the repeat the same love songs with lotsa synth, leaving a milky residue in my mouth so we flip it off and Lopez discourtheth about California Fescue (festuca californica) “the reason it’s the most heat and drought tolerant is because it develops a deep root system to get water from way down,”  a lot of uninspiring dribble, but I decide right then that Lopez isn’t so bad while I check my messages.

Lopez seems to be a good person, just going through some serious shit right now. He’s very keen on local history, spending more time than anyone I know at the library, collecting books, making notes, crying over non-existent emails. So when he dropped me off in front of the Cinemark I wished him sincere good luck and shook his hand then he and the dog proceeded on to crash at his brother's place with their dog and his sister-in-law, and I wiped his sweat from my palm onto my jeans and walked around Woodland for the half the day remaining.

Tired male author tropes I already know I am going to be unable to avoid: essay describing thoughts while walking in nature. nostalgia trip bit about girls in college guess the third shitty trope I reuse over and over and win $300!

A good alley

Good to see my breath coming out.  Thick conical cloud bursts, the hints of a winter wind probably paring the temperature down below freezing, but in the sun where I relish the tinge of warmth on my earlobes it's a tolerably pleasant 40 degrees. Turn the corner and things get real quiet real fast.  The developers maze of houses is all well and good until you get overwhelmed by the scale of them when you’re on foot, with nothing but lint to knit deep within your pockets to keep you feeling grounded. Down an alley there's a feeling of secrecy that I appreciate, hedged in as it is on both sides and running discreetly as it does between the backyards that nobody seemed to be out and about in.  A dog barks, sparking a hitherto hidden web of barkers.  A guy in a bronco pulls into his drive beneath a plump red maple, just getting off work?  He waves.  On the bigger road I am overcome by the lingering sentimental touches on otherwise neglected commercial real estate.  The paint scraps of a sunset, or sunrise.  A six digit number to call with inquiries, the seventh long faded away.  Tufts of weeds in the cracks, inaccessible to the Samaritan weedpicker like me behind a warped chain link. I fight back waking dreams of sleeping in a dry ditches turned muddy in past lives. It's good to walk, to see the world at a pace apace with my thoughts. Thinking for instance how the colors all seem off today.  Even the grass in the school park seems hues of brownish gray.  Metal carvings on the guardposts of Boy, Girl, Basketball, Bike Rack, maybe not that last one.  I have been through this town about a handful of times and combing through it as I do I never fail to discover new nooks to spend a few contented hours in, restaurants, street corners. It's part of why I wanted to walk.

A young man approaches me and asks "where are you aiming at?" And really, where am I aiming at?  Yes, good point sonny!  I cannot say anything so I go past him and see the eternal flocks of pigeons, their tiny pointillist spots making  huge shapes on the sky! A padded blue/white facemask lying crumpled on the ground.  “I’m in trouble."  He is following me, saying in a formal voice "can you help me get back home?”

"Sorry man," I pat my pockets for extra emphasis.  The look on his face is non-committal but I feel a huge cavity puncture in the bridge my breath-in breath-out consciousness was spanning over the chasm of unhappiness.  As a student who finds psychology, what is the word, recondite, I chose not to look too deep inside.  But I am actively aware of the love I feel for this city, previously only experienced as infatuation, and so I was glad to come up here, walk around, make a spirited entrance in a few hours, maybe — some food first — when the kid is gone I sit down beneath a slim tree in a parking lot, rearranging some bark mulch as a means to legitimize my presence in this wholly unholy place, steal a smoke to jar my soul a bit.

 

I guess you should know that I am here because, well my sugar-sweet temptation is to say she's my girlfriend of moment but that’s not fair.  She’s my girlfriend, has been for a while now, and to place a time constraint on the title, even an open-ended one like that just isn’t honest.  I hope it’ll work.  I drop little hints about the future and togetherness, including at dinner late last month. 

           “I thought we were just having a good time,” she said.  I agreed that we were. Ruminating to myself that it’s been a 'good time' that’s gone on for almost seventeen balmy, mostly frictionless months now, and I start to dissolve from the inside out, a kind of paralysis provoked from want of a stable definition, however she surprise invited me to her cousins’ wedding this past weekend, and he and his fiancé, now wife, dated for ten years before they made anything official, I guess, so I started to ease off.  Maybe it's a family thing, or a generational one.

St_rb_cks

Into the coffee shop that shall not be named for a chair. Inexplicably He Stopped Loving Her Today playing on the stereo.  A midsized young woman with a wondrously sparkling coif of shoulder-length curls took my order and my name.  "Just chai? Howsabouta muffin?’ she asks.

"I’ll just have something quick. I should be on my way."

"No rush. Stay awhile."

Ashamed to look straight at her I keep my fixed eyes burrowed on the hole in my left shoe instead.  She reminds me of Rachel, a girl who long ago never got a text back before decamping to Pittsburgh.  When I looked her up online it seemed that she'd taken up with an abuser and it aged her.  She'd also shaved her head, which didn't help.

Anyway the similarities are there, sparking multiple what-ifs, what if the conclusion is, I dread, we are all just bones and dust and crushing hard or falling in love is pure double fantasy, a vainglorious pursuit of obsolescence, like that quarter spiral at the children's museum. But we have to do it don't we?  If you don’t follow the forbidden fruit the forbidden fruit follows you.

I watch her take orders, filling vessels, swirling steaming hot liquids together, weighing the abstract emotional calculus that compels we, strange human animals, to stay with some of our own and leave others, remember that time on the lakeshore in Chicago, the insouciant bravado of teenages by blurry fireside.

Each moment has a way of yielding to the next. She is popping plastic lids on cardboard cups and the next thing I know she is standing over me, wet rag in hand asking “is everything okay? Can I get you anything else?”  She has California Fry like an old tin record recording of the surfer fairy.  No thanks, I say, I hate being sold things, I didn't say.


Spun around for good

I escape into the evening light, dissolving into the tendril avenues of this fair city for what reason I am not entirely sure.  I've been casting about through these neighborhoods all afternoon that all look alike until they don't.  Here we are. Someday all this will be gone, burned or decayed or, who knows, soon I will too.  I stand up straight as I stroll up to the door.

After a day thrilling adventure, it’s best to relax with cats, but I have a dog, and he's not here (he's with Lopez) but I also have a girlfriend — don't start —  life is about making do.  We made do.  She gave me a warm kiss on the lips, smelling clean, sultry, and brushing a stray coppery eyelash from my cheek with the kind of tenderness I would have reserved for… I’m not sure…I guess I have a real lacking of tenderness in me these days.  Her hands feel good.

"What a pleasant surprise," she says. Her clothes, still suitcase creased, hang from the folding chair by the card table.  Her cellphone blinks on the tchotchke cabinet.

"I hate being sold things," I say.

"I'm not selling."

"So that means yr buying?"

"How much?"

"How much you got?"

"How much you want?"

Outside the sun is setting and there's no way to hide it.  Tomorrow it will be back again, or more accurately we'll spin around, orbit, from darkness to light, to darkness to light.  I am glad I am inside, glad I made my way here, to this house, which feels for the moment anyway like home.