Saturday, Friday, Saturday Again, and Finally Sunday
My friend Joe visited me on a whim this weekend and I told him I have not cried in months which feels like an indication something is wrong, but there lies some irony because usually crying is an indicator, but what about a lack thereof? We ate big salads at Blue Barn while Joe told me about his friend who has stayed at Chateau Marmont. She [Joe’s friend] wrote a break up letter on the Chateau Marmont stationery, left it in her car, and the car was broken into, only for every valuable to be left except for the letter. I had him remind me that he met her at the Parker Palm Springs and I remembered how I do love saying words that mean expensive things. After hearing about a divorce, a breakup, and an engagement regarding the Chateau Marmont/Parker Palm Springs bee relocator person, Joe and I began to speak in cockney accents as if we were pitching a log line of a film based on Rodin’s idea behind The Thinker. We kept saying in too many iterations,
“Okay so, it is Dante, but he is thinking about hell.”
The day before salads and catch ups, I went to prom and borrowed a dress from Chloe. It was very fun in the way that putting on a dress and blow drying your hair so you stay up late is fun. It was fun to have smoking patio conversations that get interrupted by shoves or empty glasses that cannot stand to be empty. It was funny to have adult mimicry for a teenage festivity–there was no punch bowl by the way. It was also the kind of night that is simply fun. The kind where you feel so at home in the current state of affairs that is your life. You laugh and stay up late and find that the night was so young (just like you).
On Saturday evening, Chloe and I made potato leek soup and watched a movie that seemed to bring a swirl of emotions. The kind of emotions that seem to define youth by its inevitability. I think what it means to be young is to be balancing on that precipice of what is going to happen and forgetting what already did. A lot of the time being young is filled with moments of trying to find yourself in the mirror on the wall wondering, just wondering. I got three mosquito bites while we talked about love, the big life altering kind. We talked about the land of possibilities where a version of you went with that guy or the other guy or maybe you live on a Sausalito houseboat or maybe you live in Los Angeles, but it does not matter because all the zip codes or imagined relationships exist in the transparent realm that is the land of possibilities. We talked about patience and decisions. There are decisions that never seemed like anything in the first place, but really were the first domino to fall before a bunch of other things followed suit.
On Sunday I got to ride a bike to Ocean Beach and look at waves and hear the Blue Angels. I was wearing my Grandmother’s old bermuda shorts and walked to the old cliff house and tried to imagine the San Francisco where people were riding horses and you could actually go inside this building. My legs were tired from pedaling home. I read in Alamo Square in a certain spot where I have had lots of good ideas. It is on the edge towards Hayes and what it lacks in shade, it makes up for in sunshine. I had an idea I liked enough that I figured out a loose structure for my thesis–It is taking a page out of California as if I was not going to do that already. I wrote it in my tiny white notebook I bought this time last year which is full of previous scribbles. The first page has excited words I wrote when I was flying from San Francisco to Santa Barbara with a blonde bob wig in my carry-on bag under the seat in front of me. I do not know how a year went by and another one will too. This notebook has one liners like “Sometimes I wonder about the future constantly” or “The light in my room has needed to be replaced for 2 weeks & now it really does.” Change may be constant, but wondering is ceaseless (maybe that is because I am young incase you have not noticed).
