Monday, December 20, 2010

still

Sarah came over last week and we drank too much wine and sang along with songs we looped on repeat back when we were young. Somehow I still remembered most of the words that I used to scrawl across the pages of my notebooks when I still believed in forever. Sarah said I used to listen to these songs in residence and gesture love over a webcam to that boy twenty minutes away. She told me this and at first I didn’t believe her but then I did but I still couldn’t remember that girl but then I could and I could even still remember all the words.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

i want to go everywhere

*This was written in a tiny notebook on a train from LA to San Diego the other day but I'm only now finding the time to enter it here.

It's been forever because there is too much to say and feel but never the right words to say and feel them in. Or maybe I'll just never have the right words for the present. Maybe I'm only ever capable of writing beautiful about the past. Maybe the past is always beautiful because it's not the present. And so maybe I can write now because I'm on a train and the sound of metal against metal reminds me of a past I can see as beautiful because it became the past will over two (!) years ago. I remember riding a different train back and forth between my temporary and soon-to-be homes constantly that year that has now become long ago. It's too dark to see anything outside this window and it was always too late back then, too. And I was a different person then as well. But this feeling of journey, of travel, of departures and arrivals is suddenly so familiar I find myself listening to that album I listened to on repeat for all those trips of return and goodbye. And this feeling is all so strangely f
amiliar I can remember how it felt to first glimpse the purple and white lights of the city in the distance, to put away my book and button up my coat, to will the train to race into the station, to know how Jim Guthrie felt as he sang "I want to go everywhere with you" and bounce through the cold of the station unphased. And it's probably the free wine swimming around inside, but I can't help but listen to Jim on repeat again and shed a tear or two.