There's a lotus flower seated between my blue eyes today. Today is my day and I wish I could call Sotce on the phone. It is good to have guides and gurus, and it is also necessary to know that the answer waits patiently for you. Asking around can be helpful and yet only you can save yourself. I am imagining being in Greece today. That does not mean that I do not want to be here. In fact, here is such a good place to be that it hurts my bones. Last night we made spring rolls. My hands, road-mapped palms from millennia to millennia, rolling the ancient recipe. In my dingy 70s kitchen. Years go by and we do the same things. This makes me feel that I am exactly like everyone else. A comforting feeling. One of belonging.
California never seems to change. Does it shift, taking on alternate shapes and beliefs, just in time to revert upon my annual arrival? I get the selfish sense that the land wants me to melt into childhood. To recall everything. When the plane dipped under thick cloud formations to expose those deep, green rolling hills I know so well, my heart exhaled. My shoulders released. My eyes closed in humble recognition of the Cajon Pass. Looking to the mountains and valleys that I asked my questions to for twenty years; I was brought to a conclusion that I could never be spiritually separate from this place.
It was a special visit home. On the flight there, my love and I weren't seated together. It felt silly that this made us miss each other so much. He finished Kerouac's On the Road, mid-flight and made his way to where I was sitting. He held my hands with tears in his eyes and told me that he couldn't quite explain how he felt just then. I understood exactly. Words can be such roadblocks. So bulky and finite. A look tells me everything I need to know. It would be pivotal. He, going back to his seat. I, remaining and left to sit with that feeling. Mid-air. A brewing taste of future joy.
My cousin got married and she was the most beautiful bride I have ever seen. Like making spring rolls, we meet, we cook together, we promise to tie our futures together until we die. Cycles completing. Filling buckets up, pouring them out, passing it down. Under the wild and primitive desert night sky, Jake and I discussed what we foresaw. Fortune-telling and guessing. I felt far away from all my routines and usual mind-paths. The next day he bought me a book from an older hippie woman. She looked as though she breathed dirt her entire life. I mean this in an awe-inspiring way. I'm seeing this for myself, with a hopeful heart.
Getting to visit my faerie Bee was an overflow. Suddenly she was much older. My dear friend Caleb, too. A mother and father to a baby kitten and stewards to the first home of their own. The sun beat down on me and I could have died of happiness. We got to watch Bee and Caleb try Mediterranean food for the first time and we laughed about the perfect mix of carelessness and divine protection. I was full of Baklava and melting with an overarching feeling of good karma present in all of our lives. Jake, Bee, Caleb, and myself. Bee and I used to sleep in the same bed every night, bong-kissed, with reality tv fog around us. We would sit on her carpet before winding down and talk about our dreams, all the weird boys I've dated (Bee has a much better track record), and laugh about things I cannot now remember. In those days, she was my big sister, my little sister, and my star twin. Now she seems to me just Bee. No better way to describe her. The name itself encapsulates everything. She is everything and will become everything.
Before heading home, we pulled the blue rental car over (blue cars being good luck as told by the rental car service guy Manuel) and took some pictures of us with some Joshua trees. In my Portuguese sandals and a flowing light blue shirt that Steve Nicks would envy, he took a picture of me next to my favorite tree of the bunch. I've always wanted to end up with somebody who is fond of detours. Once you find yourself open to detours, everything seems to equalize.
Maybe one day we can buy a small house out there in Joshua Tree.
I will never meet the view of my city from the plane with an even-paced heart. It strikes me with thunderbolts of love each and every time I return. The rivers, the towering trees, the millions of people just tinkering. Todo es un milagro. I finished Patti Smith's Just Kids that night in my familiar bed, mourning it instantaneously. Something in my heartbeat today, the one that is already longing to travel again, anhelando ser un extraño en un lugar extraño, is telling me that although I am like everyone else...some of this has got to be extremely unique. At least some of it.
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