Bicycle Boats

The sunflowers are finally gone.

The first frost was something that I noticed because of the ice falling away between my fingers as I pulled flowers from the gardens of the rich. The frost determined, changed, our working schedule. But I didn’t think about the sunflowers.

Today, something happened again. Maybe it was a conversation, or just the understanding of what’s going on with my puppy. But it seemed important, and out of habit– because at every significant turn, they have been there– I looked for the sunflowers. The happy, ominous, yellow faces staring at me from highway-sides and the gates of churches; from houses and sidewalks and alleyways. Through this strange summer they have watched me, and now it is November and they are gone.

Like a good friend who has to leave.

I’ll be back next summer, she says. But I doubt it. This was Sunflower Summer and it is over. Autumn is the butler at the threshold, announcing only Next. Here she is folks, the mistress we have waited for in cruel anticipation. She is deep and complicated and very bitchy, and she enters with the coldest of grins. She is as predictable as she is killing. My puppy– because I have finally acquired a puppy in this unfolding adventure– my puppy, Coby James, has never met her. He may love her or hate her, but most likely he will just endure her and accept her. Puppies live in the moment. What is, is. Past and future are mostly insignificant. Whatever will be will be.

What is now is Winter.

The Winter of 8/9.

Welcome, you abysmal, snuffing killer. Encompassing, threatening. Here.

The sunflowers are gone and it is winter.

A frozen cold beauty, because now the stars appear.

As I was driving home (a new home, lit on one side by the skyline and the other by god as a church), a streetlight went out. It snuffed and faded, and I indulged in a fantasy, a scenario, where all the lights, one by one, faded out and we were left with dark, dark except our headlights and the candles and incense heightening the passion of those lovers whose trysts have survived the impending night. And then, in awe and almost without thinking it, we all in our slowing, stopping vehicles, turn out the headlights. Click off our ignitions so even the blinking seatbelt signs can’t mar the darkness. The lovers do not snuff their candles or the burning ends of their cigarettes, so we are left with these small splotches of color here on the ground, on the slowly freezing earth. Above us, the stars reach out, stretching their light to us for the first time in years. The blinking, growing brightness yawns and widens like the limbs of a cat who has been tucked away napping in a corner for an entire afternoon. An entire lifetime. A summer. The sun and our manufactured luminescence. Mutual masturbation of light, until now. Now the stars breathe to us, to our darkness. For this moment, in the cold quiet stillness of my fantasy, we are like Alaska again.

I have to go back. I am crying to go back.

There is so much I wanted to say here, that my chest is aching to spill. But I can’t find the right way to say it.

How do I process a summer? A life: which is stopped here. What am I doing? What is my purpose. I am stuffed full of information and possibility, and simply– set afloat. I must power and steer my little life-raft by self-motivation for the first time… well, ever. And I don’t. Know. I don’t know.

What do I want?

It’s come now to the point where I can’t put that off. Or I can and choose, by lack of choice, to stagnate.

I can’t stagnate. I can’t stand to do that. But god it takes an act of will! I don’t have it, I don’t have the determination. I am overwhelmed by fear. Dammit, a truth that pops out without me wanting it to be true or real.

But what do I want. What is my purpose. So fucking cliché.

To achieve whatever I want, I must have discipline. And I’ve lost that. I’ve fucking lost it. This circle of logic is perpetual! I always come back to it.

Yes I want to film. I must make some kind of art or my chest will freeze and my soul will explode, I will violently react, I will fall apart. I must. I must feel. My avenue to feel. And how selfish is that? What does it matter. Personal masturbation, irrelevant to the scheme of the world.

Desire. Can it be grown, cultivated? Killed daily and nightly by apathy and acceptance. Conformity. Ignorance. Me.

I am overwhelmed. I am exhausted. I am afraid, and I am alone. I am so very, very tired of being alone. I am tired of my arms and hands and feet. I am tired.

This is more existential than I hoped. Less observing, of the world. So much has happened. And I am so tired.

What do I want.

What do you want. How do you know.

Ask yourself.

When it’s done, we better know. What a waste. What a waste of this hour, this minute, this second. What am I doing. Questions so blatant I can’t even mark them the way they should be.

I remember, when I was little, studying in the summer with someone, I don’t know why they had me do this– I couldn’t remember the letter that made the sound of wind, and woof, and where. And the teacher who taught me alone, did not tell me. Did not hint to me. She just left me to my own devices. She went and did something else in her house, where I learned. And I sat and thought. I thought deep and hard and sometimes distractedly. A lot of sitting. It felt like forever. Until I remembered it suddenly, and said “Oh!” very loudly. Hoping to make her laugh. Always hoping to make someone laugh. I remembered “W”, and I wrote it down.

It was the same time I thought ! was an upside down i, and that it added a strange sound to the end of words. Or I thought it might be something to do with Spanish. I think I was in between kindergarten and first grade. I remember the smell of the house. And I remember her dog.