I am doing a series of posts based on a question I asked my friends, “what object represents you?” I hope they will still want to be my friends after I have shared the results with you, Internet! The first one goes live March 10.
I thought I had lost everything when the market crashed, but I have not nearly lost enough. I spent a year afraid of the news. Every day turned another one of my investments into dust. So here I am; I would have to live for two hundred years to earn it all back. The impossibility of it is liberating.
I found my flute and started playing, worse than when I was seventeen. I have never been more pleased. A year ago I spoke with old friends only on the phone, only while I was in a cab. Now I spend hours with them for no reason at all. I used to eat at pricey restaurants I hated. It cost just three dollars to feed myself today and I used my spare time to learn to juggle.
The world is ninety percent poor if we judge it that way, but other things are equal.
I want to know what you would love to lose if everyone else would, too. I want to stay up all night with you and throw that stuff away. And when all this mess is over, I want to dance with you. I want to dance like light on the rubble of our ruined city.
I don’t have a plan in the world. I have the wide open sky and a bag of dried mangoes. My last girlfriend called them slices of sunshine.
I have kept the phrases my closest friends gave me. A teenager is “a case of ginger ale”, empty praise from the human resources director is “a licorice reward”, and the rocks that reach out into the bay of the small town where I grew up are “where the dragon fell asleep a thousand years ago”. I can barely describe how painful it was to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. These phrases are the best things I am keeping.
Is it crazy to take a bus this far? I cannot see myself doing it by air—too clean, too impersonal. When I arrive I will step straight down onto the broken asphalt of the parking lot. Austin, I will move my lips. I will be in the thick of its air and its smells, its dust. Change comes up at you from the ground, it doesn’t feel right any other way. This ride is centering, a stench coming from the lavatory, a rhythm maintaining the brink of nausea, a boredom that makes all my music and all my books seem boring. I only wish it could take longer. I wanted this so badly.
I want to find who you can be now that I have washed my context clean. I want to feel a rush of nerves, to laugh with you without knowing where such laughter leads, to kiss you and have no idea that a kiss can be so thrilling. I want you to give me a phrase I have never heard before.
