Attraversiamo / Missing MPS

Attraversiamo.

Fresh from watching a film about a woman who learns to embrace her own life and live it, I can't help but smile at some of the events I've experienced over the past few months. Knowing what you want is not something that comes easily...especially when you avoid what you really want for so long. It takes an immense amount of time for people to do this thing. They like to call it "finding themselves" but mostly, they are just getting more and more lost in the lives of others. I say "they" with absolutely no particular faces in my mind, and maybe I mean "we" or "I" but whatever I mean is not what matters.

People travel, they take planes and hikes and trains and journeys to places so remote they feel like they want to jump off the edge of the earth. And that's fine. Traveling is good. Experiences in various locations, with various cultures, a rainbow of emotions, full bucket lists, and years and years of living. People get married and divorced, have babies and take care of them, and eventually, those babies grow up and do the same. It's a cycle. During the cycle there are so many possiblilties that people are simply blown away by the beauty of it all.

Thinking about the past year I literally get a headache. I have been back in the town I grew up in for almost five months, and in that time I've realized a ton of things that I think I may have already known and not wanted to see. I've learned a lot of new things that I know will help me to grow and be this stronger woman I have become. I have forgotten over the years that there are certain things that prompted me to leave this place, and have met them all again as well. Thinking about how very much I have learned, and how much memory has enveloped me since I've come back, there is a vivid rainbow of raw emotion and a world of feeling that I can't even begin to put into words. But...and there's always a but, there is also a blankness. I mean this in a positive way for now...I think; even though it may not always have a positive impact, or it may not always feel positive in the everday sense of things.

My life has become a blank canvas that I can't wait to paint.

I went shopping for art supplies with a friend yesterday. I walked through aisles of brushes and colors and pastels and spraycans and markers and pencils. It was beauty. It was creativity waiting on platforms to be lifted in hands that tell stories in ink and paint and strokes and loops and curvy spirals that caress the corneas of onlookers. At the end of each aisle were stacks and stacks of blank canvas: pure white with gesso waiting to just be loved with color and inspiration. I recalled being fifteen, staring at my first big canvas, thinking about where to begin. Would it be a landscape? End up a portrait? Abstract squiggles? My boyfriend's graffiti name and that little smiley with the tongue sticking out that he painted on my bookbag...

*****
MPS  

Flash to one of a thousand fall  days in 1992, 93 or 94: I remembered smoking on the steps of the art room watching my Swatch between fourteen hole Docs untill it was time to run down the hill and get a flannel coated hug and kiss when he skated up to the gate. I remembered crossing Victory Boulevard to Silver Lake where we would write and laugh and kiss and smoke and be teenagers in the grass; watching ducks waddle and honk, squirrels frolic joggers run, water lapping, rocks skipping, sky darken...dreading getting on separate busses but knowing we would always have tomorrow...

I remember being mesmerized by the ability he had to stay inside the lines, spraying  with such precision and the skill with which he kick flipped and how his maroon Converses matched my thrift store dress and his polka dot tie when we got persuaded to go to a semi-formal even though we didn't fit with the rich kids. I remember at my 16th birthday debacle he gave me a card with a hefty 500 bux in monopoly dough and it was the sweetest gift I ever got.

I recall pain on his face as I tearfully told a story of my own remorse and our connection wavered for a few moments but never died. We both lost so much, gave so much, learned from each other in a way I never knew again...and hope I never will because to lose that again...unrepairable.

The fall of the year he was supposed to come back, we sat in a cemetary and carved our names in a tree, smoked a blunt and swore that when summer came we would try to be adults and try to repair the damage everyone else had inflicted on our two broken hearts. We would keep writing filling black and whites, look at the same stars every night, fill our hearts with hope for what's next despite all the messy interference we both ran for years of self destruction. We would get on planes when he got off the road and see things we dreamed about and surf and cliff dive and explore caves there was so much. So much we wanted to do.

But he never made it back. So I ran away again and again and again.

As I sit scrawling daily in fitful bursts of electric memories, I feel like there are so many important things we learn from the people we love, the people we lose, and they learn from us too. But I guess what's most valuable, most precious, most dear, is that we always remember if it's at all possible not to lose them in the first place, we should never let them go. Because when we think someone is gone, they aren't really gone until you can never see them again...

goodnight dear heart i know you still hear me.