BART musings...

This song, and this computer, and the way you smelled when you picked me up last night from the BART station, remind me of the summer I stayed in California and all the time I spent alone, and all the writing I did avoiding all the writing I should have been doing. You weren't with me yet, but you are with me now in those memories, seeing as how you are here now, pouring out of each line I'm afraid of writing, seeping from the inches of fear and magic and anxiety. I remember that summer being full of so much I wanted to forget, which is funny because now all I can really remember are solitary moments and the song I played over and over again curled up on my what some people might call a bed in Germany, windows wide open but hiding under sheets that weren't mine. Nobody told me it would be cold. That's what I remember most of all... how cold it was and how nobody warned me. That's the funniest part about the San Francisco bay area... nobody tells you how cold it can get here... especially in the summertime. Just like Germany, there was so much alone time here in the beginning, and especially that summer... so much time being worried about being too much and so spending all my days alonely. Somewhere between then and now, I've only changed a little, added some lines to my face and toughness to the heels of my feet. There are new Yous now... but less music. There's a dog and probably more happiness. My dream told me last night that there were things I was forgetting I could feel, and when I woke up, I was scared. But the truth is, I'm better off without it and I know that we'll have our time to set sail and go somewhere new. For now, this is still new for you. That's okay.

Anyway, this is what I wrote on BART yesterday in the back pages of my copy of Infinite Jest...

We left one another in deep silence often. I'm learning to forgive boredom, forgive everyone around me for letting me believe I were what they call somethin' else. It's her in the quiet noise next to you, but I don't mind, making jokes about girls I don't actually care one way or the other about. I make comments but I know how I feel is mostly apathetic, mostly concerned with my lack of presence, mostly unconcerned in general about anything. Who am I kidding? You don't read this anyway. Before I had my heart broken, my favorite color was blue, but I never told anyone. But it was blue, like joni mitchell, like how I was often, like how it feels when someone kisses you when you know they have a secret, like how you know they haven't deleted their memory yet. Blue like broken bones and like they say about blood before it meets air, like eyes tired from crying and apologies and solitude and how blue is the word "sorry." Blue like salt, like worry, like music you play on repeat, like the places you'll never go. Like when noone asks you what's wrong even though you don't want to talk about it anyway. Like the missing button, like what Robert Frost really meant, like poetry nobody wants to talk about, like pouring out, like melting. Blue like a bad joke when it's on you, like water tastes, like sadness (of course). Like you when you were honest, like real heat, like how it's hard to wake up some mornings, like sleeping alone, like psychological tragedies, like Alice, like you after me, peaceful and ready for better things. Like how change can be blue. Like how water isn't really, like how we feel better thinking it is, like the last time you talked to God without a meal first. Like anything else, quiet and tired and ready to find land.