Everything you say has water under it
It's the first day of summer. I went running, it felt awful, and I wanted to walk the last mile. I hadn't eaten since early Sunday, so maybe I should have eaten. Maybe that would have made me feel better. You know how people say that they just forgot to eat and you don't believe them? I feel like that happened to me the last few days. Now, I don't know if it's because I'm older & now pay attention, or if I'm just deteriorating as quickly as I suspect, but I can feel my mind slipping in ways I didn't notice even two years ago.
Two years ago I was slipping out of the things that comforted me in, and about, Arizona. I was running a lot, not really eating, except for these light, cool, desert-y meals I made with my then-girlfriend. I drank tequila all the time. It feels so green & alive in your mouth when it's prohibitively hot out. Most things in my life were destroyed right about then and I didn't really see the value in trying to reassemble them when I was about to move away. I remember pulling my foot up from the asphalt in Arizona as I got in the car to drive to Portland. There was this really stupid moment where I remembered a book I read once on the Potato Famine in Ireland where these boys would sail to the United States because their home couldn't support them any more. Their families would wake for them because they knew it was good bye for good once they stepped on that boat. Pulling my foot into the car, I felt this--a little bit. I felt like I was going into exile. I feel like I'm in exile. I haven't been back--and tho it's only been two years, the pulling up of that foot already feels prophetic in certain ways. I want to go back, but when I think about what I want to do there, it's just hanging around with ghosts that I know live there, seeping out of the walls and bottles and dried ravines where I'd target practice with self-portrait polaroids.
Here, in Portland, it's just as empty. It's almost eerie. I'm in love--frighteningly, uncontrollably--and that is just about the only good thing I've got going. If I didn't know better, I'd ask the gods if life ever stops being an echo of one's failures that keeps getting amplified thru all the feedback. Sometimes it feels less shoegazey: sometimes it's just deja-vu of all the failures I was scared of repeating, and then seeing them repeated.
My first recollection of deja-vu was when I was a sophomore in high school. I was at a swim meet at some pool in Phoenix. I was sitting at the side of the pool by a ladder out of the water. Looking down into the water, seeing the lane lines blurring and shaking from the races reminded me of a time--maybe when I was six, eight--I was sitting in the same place, the same pool, the same blurry ripples. I asked my mom about it later, and it turns out I fell in that same pool and almost drowned when I was six during one of my older sibling's swim meets. She was surprised I remembered (as only my mom could be). But what makes me recall this instance of deja-vu so often now, fifteen years later, is this rippling looming familiar since of the inevitable in my world. Now it doesn't seem as tho it matters whether it was a pool I fell into, or love, or my dreams--or even my body. It's all at the edge of this pool. I've been there before.
Two years ago I was slipping out of the things that comforted me in, and about, Arizona. I was running a lot, not really eating, except for these light, cool, desert-y meals I made with my then-girlfriend. I drank tequila all the time. It feels so green & alive in your mouth when it's prohibitively hot out. Most things in my life were destroyed right about then and I didn't really see the value in trying to reassemble them when I was about to move away. I remember pulling my foot up from the asphalt in Arizona as I got in the car to drive to Portland. There was this really stupid moment where I remembered a book I read once on the Potato Famine in Ireland where these boys would sail to the United States because their home couldn't support them any more. Their families would wake for them because they knew it was good bye for good once they stepped on that boat. Pulling my foot into the car, I felt this--a little bit. I felt like I was going into exile. I feel like I'm in exile. I haven't been back--and tho it's only been two years, the pulling up of that foot already feels prophetic in certain ways. I want to go back, but when I think about what I want to do there, it's just hanging around with ghosts that I know live there, seeping out of the walls and bottles and dried ravines where I'd target practice with self-portrait polaroids.
Here, in Portland, it's just as empty. It's almost eerie. I'm in love--frighteningly, uncontrollably--and that is just about the only good thing I've got going. If I didn't know better, I'd ask the gods if life ever stops being an echo of one's failures that keeps getting amplified thru all the feedback. Sometimes it feels less shoegazey: sometimes it's just deja-vu of all the failures I was scared of repeating, and then seeing them repeated.
My first recollection of deja-vu was when I was a sophomore in high school. I was at a swim meet at some pool in Phoenix. I was sitting at the side of the pool by a ladder out of the water. Looking down into the water, seeing the lane lines blurring and shaking from the races reminded me of a time--maybe when I was six, eight--I was sitting in the same place, the same pool, the same blurry ripples. I asked my mom about it later, and it turns out I fell in that same pool and almost drowned when I was six during one of my older sibling's swim meets. She was surprised I remembered (as only my mom could be). But what makes me recall this instance of deja-vu so often now, fifteen years later, is this rippling looming familiar since of the inevitable in my world. Now it doesn't seem as tho it matters whether it was a pool I fell into, or love, or my dreams--or even my body. It's all at the edge of this pool. I've been there before.
posted by Joseph Mains at
11:23 PM
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