Long Beach

It's so easy to see that, in hindsight. How much easier it was to just follow her lead like the last drunken swing dance at Thekla and you feel like Ginger Rogers and know in some tacit corner of your mind that really you are a mess. She has always been my hero. It has taken so long to find it, in myself. The lead step.

I have all of these brief, beautiful snapshots in my mind when it comes to Olympia. I think that's why I'm terrified to go back, to take him. Because I know it's unfair, I know he'll never see those same moments encased in amber, and I will die like sugar melting into water on the stovetop, turning into something else, that self gone forever. And I will grieve for the passing and he will sense it and not understand and how do you possibly explain something like that? He was so nervous when he gave me the ring. And I knew. I knew. I was so scared, for him! Even though I knew what I would say. And so how can I explain capital theater and the heron on the 4th ave bridge when we were broke and nearly broken and the night almost dusk when I was riding back to the westside after dinner at Beth's with them and knowing that it was a Uhaul truck in my near future and breaking, again. In life you learn to not trust permanence, the lessons come with an antiseptic certainty, finality. And we are so bifurcated from our root nature that as soon as we can we forget this lesson and seek again to kitty our emotions up to something outside of ourselves. I guess that is the hardest thing about being human. And also the most sacred.