:Vocalo.org

I wonder about us wandering types.  Us wandering types who used to be a small part of the population, and are now nearly the whole.  We move from Iowa, Pennsylvania, Florida, to California.  We find people unlike anyone we’ve ever known, like the people we dreamt about in our high school homerooms and math classes, and on weekends when we weren’t at the football game.  We find them here, by the bay, by the ocean, and begin to love.  But what of the rhythm of life?  Everyone I know has moved at least once in the last two years.  Everyone I know has come and gone into my life in the abrupt fashion of a transplant.  This does not seem abrupt anymore.  People, here by the ocean, are like waves that come up, around, and down.  Then out, and maybe back again, but maybe not.  Maybe all you’ll find of them is the detritus they leave when the tide goes out.  I left a box of things my ex-lover gave me when I moved last month.  It’s still sitting in my old apartment, in the back of a closet off the living room where I wouldn’t ever find it again.  I put all these things together in a box because that’s what someone told me to do.  Banish them, banish him from your sight.  He has moved out to sea, reject what he has left behind.  After six months I rejected all this stuff so well and so thoroughly that I forgot to bring it with me when I moved.  Forgot to throw it away, even.  It simply wasn’t.  He simply wasn’t.  Now I am sure I won’t ever see him again, and I can’t remember what it’s like to feel his skin next to mine.  All I remember of him is that he used to rub my shoulders hypnotically with both hands.The city will sink, they say.  Sometime in the next thirty years the big one will hit and shake the foundations made of landfill.  The foundations will simply cease to exist, causing a great collapse.  It won’t matter then where I left that box, or if he rubbed my shoulders.  All will be is gone.  I just got a message from the new her.  The new her that will surely also be gone.  Surely also disappear like that beautiful wave on the blue-black bay that only looks silent.  Where is the rhythm to life?  Where is that familiar joy of a song heard and sung since gestation?  A life known since conception, and known in the bone way.  It’s not something your ration puts together, the perfect life constructed with Lincoln logs.  All are there, the perfects friends, the beautiful apartment, and the lovers.On Thanksgivings at my parents house someone makes succotash.  I have never seen more than a spoonful taken from the serving buffet, but I know somehow that my great grandfather liked to eat succotash on Thanksgiving.  The year it wasn’t offered produced raised eyebrows and even fewer compliments on the turkey.  An offering should always be given, and my family knew this without saying it.  This burdened me in my youth.  How frivolous this thinking, how confining and morose.I do not know how I feel about succotash now.  I know it is made of corn and beans, and I know I’ve never tried it, and also that my great grandfather liked to eat it on Thanksgiving.  

I want a rhythm, a way of knowing that what will be will be.  Maybe I will move to Minneapolis, that place of compromise for rural Midwesterners to live in a city that is also colloquial.  Maybe I will live there in a one bedroom apartment and huddle under the blankets in the winter, enjoying my holidays and the predictable seasons.  There is snow and there is heat, and they come in equal parts.  I could live here forever.  I will live here forever, my sister told me from that place once.  She is now married and wants children with her Swedish-Norwegian husband.

My family accused me of levitating in my youth.  They thought I would go up to my room, put on music, lay on my bed, and then rise above it, full body in the air.