delayed closure

I am hanging on a thin rope, clinging to a leaky lifeline, grabbing at faulty plastic to stay afloat. Something has changed in me, I cannot say what or when or why, but I am tired of this city. Tired of the trash and the noise and always always always-ness of everything around me. And I am so blessed, so lucky, so fortunate and cheeky, because where I live is quiet, and the streets are safe, and I know my neighbors and the trees are big. And in the summertime, there are fireflies. And I can walk the short blocks to the streets that are even nicer than my own, and I can bask in it by proxy, and I should be grateful. Because my apartment is lovely. The streets have gardens. In the spring everything is pink blossoms and muted brownstone. And there are quaint cafes and cozy restaurants and haughty boutiques that sell clothing that bewilders me at prices that astonish. All of this means something, quiet a lot actually. It means I don't live near the projects. It means I don't live in a musty multi-floor, mega-building in an apartment the size of a Brazilian bikini bottomIt means I don't live across the street from a hospital, or a major intersection, or above and below and on all sides of crammed in with people, living on top of one another, colonized. It means a lot of things and each of them is ostensibly good and I should be grateful and be quiet and suck it up and appreciate.

But somehow, lately, I can't. It's too much. Too much much. Too much trash, too much honking, too much too little too often. It's too hard and too fast and there is no softness anywhere. Not under my feet, no where I can sit or stand that is not made of concrete. No where I can sit or stand that wasn't made by someone for something. Fabricated. 

Andy is getting ready to leave Santa Cruz in the next two months. We are both a little soggy, a bit watery at this unavoidable truth. He tells me that it's beautiful right now: perfect, brilliant. Gorgeous. It is the Santa Cruz I remember: the surf double over head and glassy, the sun reluctant to set, the redwoods and cypress thick and green and golden. 

Sometimes, when a wound is too messy, too old, too infected or too fragile, the only choice you have is letting it heal by delayed closure. You just leave it be, not touch it. You bandage the area, keep it clean, dry, irrigate as necessary, remove the infection. Sometimes you can go back to it, close it up with stitches, neatly. And sometimes you just let it heal from the inside out, scarring its way closed, leaving behind the mark, a testament to the process. Sometimes I wonder if this is for me my own delayed closure, leaving behind one of my greatest loves of all time, a place kind of magic and immortal and perfect to me, packing the wound only now, long after the fact.

And there is much there that was hard and heart breaking and complicated for me. The bones of my own, old sorrows, the remains of all those necessary losses. And every place I can go there is no place I have not travelled. I have been everywhere at some point, at all points, of my life there. And all of it is filled up of me and my life, the happy ache and the anguish; every bit the architecture and landscape of nine years of life and everything that filled it. And sometimes I just want to return, to remember, to recall, to revisit. Sometimes I just want to go down to New Brighton at sunset and sit in the setting glare of light on water and remember. Remember coming to tend to every broken heart, remember the clear bright day when I met my soulmate, my husband, my mate. Sometimes I just want something more of a place that is my own, that isn't made up of grey concrete or red bricks or stone. 

Sometimes I just want what I don't have, because I am made up of faulty wiring and dysfunction and because it's always easier to see what's behind than what lays ahead. And because I am tired of looking at what lies all around me after a while.