Eighth

When I was fourteen I ran away from home,

because my mom and I had an argument in the living room,

in front of the rest of my family.

When I ran out the front door and slammed it behind me,

Hurrying from the porch I used to sweep in first grade,

Running down the driveway where I learned to ride a bike,

Traipsing on the street I wandered day and night,

Taking distorted pictures of street lamps on school nights,

I turned the corners I sometimes rode my bike around on the way to the library,

Stopping to stand in the grass on the corner, next to the stop sign,

Crying, shouting, barefoot and mad,

Dragging my heels through the leaves and grass,

My fingers grazing the ivy of the wall.

I turned the corner again onto the highway,

and coming down the road on the sidewalk,

a police car pulled over, red lights blaring,

and I pretended not to notice,

but the policeman talked to me,

asked me where I was going and where I lived,

and I answered, terrified, until he stopped.

I continued on the sidewalk, cut grass, deciduous trees, 

bougainvillea running along the high wall

of the oldest country club in the Coachella Valley.

When it happens I am surrounded by trees, and the ground is dark.

I see the sidewalk in my memory, pockmarked and pale,

and lying there is the four of diamonds,

one scale from some lost deck of cards.

I look down at the card,

its sharp parallelograms and mirrored 4s dark in the night,

and having recently come home from China,

remember that the number means death there.

It's silly, but at fourteen, that was why I turned around.

At home, Dad had said, "Should we go after her?"

And my only little brother, a lump in his throat, wailed,

"Well, do you want her?"

By the time I turned around,

they were cruising slowly through our neighborhood,

our huge white Suburban moving like a mythical whale in the dark.

After some college boys harassed me about the police harassing me,

After I was walking back, playing card in hand,

My dad rolled the window down and said something funny,

something about coming home.

Six years later, I went for a walk here in London,

maybe just to feel the comfort of being warm when it's cold,

of wearing a coat and breathing out clouds.

I intended to walk down just one street, and at the end of it, to turn around.

I intended to stop when the line of trees stopped, and then to follow them home again.

But I continued into Kensington, and past Hyde Park, and through Hyde Park, and on,

And you're not going to believe me,

But after I passed a bus stop I looked down at the pavement,

Lit by yellow street lamps and crowded by trees and high buildings,

and I saw one card, an eight of clubs, lying alone on the sidewalk,

and again, I don't care what that card means to technical numerology or to the occult, 

but eight is my favorite number, 

and 8 is an infinity symbol turned on its side,

and eight is the number of steps to Nirvana,

and eight is a perfect cube,

and eight is a perfect octave.

I didn't stop and gape at the card on the ground; I picked it up and kept walking,

Carrying the omen with me,

Realizing that my life was, and had been, metaphors and foreshadowing,

building off of each other,

And that I need to start believing the whispers I hear in my mind,

things like "This will be finite, so end it,"

and "you'll be friends with this person,"

and the worst, after days of a strange fever:

"if you get close to him,

he has the power to remove you from what you love."

And because this needs a denouement, my dad is coming to England,

to carry me home, on a silver plane, like a bright fish in the sky,

And home isn't an escape, but a destination.

Home is a refuge and a celebration,

home is a place to hug three sisters and two brothers,

parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins.

Home is a place to make fresh orange juice on Christmas,

a place to play ping-pong with my sister

in the backyard in rolled jeans and sunglasses.

Home isn't a living room or a dark street.

Home isn't someone's sternum and clavicle,

or the touch of his hair on my forehead.

Home is my mom trying to say "I love you," more,

Home is my dad driving me back from the airport in our white suburban,

through the thousand windmills at the base of the San Jacinto mountains.

Home is arriving to the fourteen arms

of the seven people who love me most,

and it is knowing that my brother will always want me back

to be the fifteenth and the sixteenth, 

and the eighth.

Maren, Holding On

I watched my sister take one step over Skype the other day.

I've been talking to my mother obsessively,

and she sits in front of the screen,

glowing in the bright Californian sun and holding the baby.

I'm somewhere in London, where it's dark at four and cloudy all day,

And I'm in my pajamas until something pulls me out of the house.

So I call her and sit alone in the hall, wearing boxers and a T-shirt,

and she asks me whether I've eaten yet that day.

My sister is ten months old, a smiling miracle.

No, really.

She sits in my mom's lap, mostly wriggling around,

and if I say her name in a high pitch and smile,

She remembers me, (maybe only as the girl in the computer)

And she hits the keys with that one arm she's always waving around,

And she smiles as big as I'm smiling,

Our Scandinavian eyes winking with joy.

She can't smile big enough, so she opens her mouth and laughs.

My mom sometimes walks around the room as she talks to me.

She's warming oatmeal and mixing in applesauce,

coaxing my sister into every biteful of solid food.

She was sitting in a chair a few meters away when my sister took a step.

I think my dad was talking with me at the time,

and he cranked the camera toward my sister.

"She took a step!" said my mom, and I looked at her again.

She was holding my sister under her tiny arms,

where she had just fallen into my mothers' hands and knees.

Maren is afraid of falling.

When my mom walks her around,

(her fists wrapped around my mother's index fingers)

she's started carrying herself on her own,

but when my mom lets go of her, she stops, afraid of falling.

She doesn't know she can do it alone.

She doesn't realize that walking is an act of continuous falling,

That each step is a forward fall being caught by the next foot, and the next,

alternating fall after fall, catch after catch.

What she doesn't realize is that life is a great fall,

a great fall, and a catch,

And every moment after she learns to walk will be about falling and hitting the ground,

hopefully always on her feet.

And this poem wasn't actually going to be about me specifically,

but I fell on my face the other day,

After this boy I was in love with proved he wasn't what I thought he was,

and broke me,

Me who was finally, really in love, for the first time,

Finally there, my face pressed to the concrete, dry heaving on the ground,

Finally realizing why it is that some people are so wary of falling in love,

because falling in love,

is, 

most certainly,

falling.

And having hit, 

like Maren topples on the kitchen tile sometimes,

I'm terrified and shocked.

I don't want to get up again.

Wouldn't I rather reach, wailing and tearful,

For my mother's arms, safe from everything and anyone?

Wouldn't I rather stay here in bed, down, asleep,

Rocked slowly by the temporal turning of the world?

But what Maren doesn't realize is that life is a fall and a catch,

and what I hadn't realized is that much of what I catch, I eventually get over.

And what my mother knew is that the trick is to let us fall first,

until we learn to stop before head-over-heels hitting ground,

until we learn to catch ourselves with our feet.

On the Beach at Night.

Most nights there we would walk down to the dock together,
Dipping our feet in the dark water, strewn with light
We would squint across the bay, pairs of red and green lights swimming down in the water,
Rows of gold lights dripping toward our toes

On the peninsula we saw the ferris wheel, like a dream
Turning and glittering, the boats drifting before us, one or two at a time
And the dance hall, brightest of all
The roof covered in electric bulbs,
Boats crowded around it while the moon spilled white and close
And always I asked you for the same stories,
There was the one about the lilac water,
About the dances in the hall across from us,
About the things you used to do and the people you used to know.
Huddled in a slick green jacket and cross-legged on the dock floor,
I looked up at you and then out at the water until we walked back.
Later it was gardens and shops,
Later it was restaurants and museums,
Later it was streets, hotels, French windows and New York leaves,
Later it was souvenirs and postcards,
Later it was letters,
Later I was only coming home, instead of leaving
(for a little while)
And I would hold you longest of anyone,
And love you more than all the rest,
And last summer at the dock I swear-
I swear I saw something bright and blue and wondering,
Swimming in tiny circles,
And the next night and all the nights after, it was gone.

Wet magenta jewels sticking to our fingers

We sat salty on the back of the golf cart

Barefoot and sandy, a shared pomegranate cupped in our hands

Spitting the brown juiceless seeds on the disappearing road

Moving to the Desert.

I moved to Rancho Mirage and went to kindergarten (and the rest of elementary school) at Washington Charter School, complete with an obnoxious theme song that was written while I was there. I don't remember many specifics about who were my best friends, but the girl hugging my shoulder in this picture is Cassie, who I became better friends with during high school.

On another note, because this post is short, it's interesting how quickly little kids can make friends with each other. When I was a kid I felt like age was the only thing I had to have in common with a person for us to  have fun together. Add some arbitrary toys or a make believe game like "Lost Kids," (which my cousin Connor and I made up) and you've got hours of enjoyment.

Pasadena

Now that we've gotten past the fact that my family are my friends (and my closest, at that) I have a story for you.

When I was 16 months old (fact supplied by my mom as I sit on a kitchen stool while everyone else makes lemonade) we moved to Pasadena, California. Home of the Rose Parade and a two-story house on South Los Robles where my mom would eventually grow a spectacular garden and win an award for city beautification. My favorite part of our yard, after the flowers, was the three plum trees in the front.

It was like this:

I had three good friends in Pasadena before we moved to Palm Springs in December of '97, when I was five and a half. Their names were Amber, Allison, and Marilyn. The parents in our ward organized a day at the park every Thursday, when we would all play together. We always got super excited to watch the dump truck pick the trash up outside the park:

I'm the pink and purple one on the far left.

Here is a picture of me and those friends at my fifth birthday party, about six months before I moved away. (Note: my name was scrawled in pink marker on the back of this picture.)

Order, left to right: baby Spencer, Amber, Me, Allison, Marilyn (who was a year younger than us)

Life in Pasadena was fun. I was sad to move.

I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

March 1997

Mesa, Arizona

"Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after."

-Annie Dillard's An American Childhood

(Best book ever.)

  

Sometimes I forget that little kids never feel like little kids. I was talking to this one earlier this week (Melissa- she's eleven now) about that. She's the youngest in my family and sometimes I think I treat her more like a little kid than I should. All my life, I've felt like a full-blown person. Never once, when I was five or eight or thirteen did I feel like I knew less than the rest of people did, or that I was capable of less.

Also, I recently realized that I periodically write like J.D. Salinger when I'm feeling pensive. I re-read Catcher in the Rye this summer. Maybe it's part of my dialect right now.

Big Sarah's Little Boots

When I was little, I loved this book:

It's about a girl named Sarah who loves her rain boots. When she grows out of them, she fills them with rocks, stretches them (with the aid of her dog), and even waters them, trying to get them to grow up with her.

(Photos: Kids Can Press)

But Sarah's efforts are to no avail. At the end of the story, she passes her adorable yellow boots on to her little brother in favor of new yellow boots, with a "fire-engine red" stripe around the top.

Eventually, Sarah's mom bought her larger and larger pairs of yellow boots, and eventually, some ended up at a Goodwill in Orange County. Because guess what Madelyn and I ran into in our thrift store perusal of Newport Beach?

Yes. Big Sarah's Little (ish) Boots.

10/6/09

Then when there were sunflowers in the garden
Green beans running up poles and a red plum tree in front of the house
When my hair was dark in the shade
And gleaming in the sun
When I had a swing in a blooming tree 

And when I had a brother, close, to push me on it

My own face used to smile at strangers and
My voice used to sing in supermarkets
But she folded in on herself and sank to the bottoms of my feet
Buried, like seeds, she is starting to grow
Up
To the sun of knowledge

I portend eloquence
I have hurriedly constructed the facade of confidence

But walking down a crowded alley

She turns

my lips

up

And runs a bow over my vocal cords

As I walk by the plums and green beans.

Urgh.

So... I've pretty much royally screwed up the whole NaBloPoMo thing this month. It's not really a HUGE deal, since I did it pretty successfully this May and can therefore keep my participant sticker up. Better luck in 2010, I guess?

Anyway, Christmas was lovely, as I expected, and break has been going fairly well so far! :) I've gotten to see lots of old friends who I missed tremendously, and this next week I'll get to see more of them. Hopefully today I will start doing some recording with a friend of mine, but I'm mainly excited because I get to see him again!

In some weirder news, today I walked around our old house, which I lived in from age 5 until I left for school this past August. My family moved to a different neighborhood while I was away, so it's been kind of odd. Our new house already feels like home, however, and the old one just felt really... surreal. Everything looks smaller without our furniture, and it was also kind of like when you go back to your first grade classrooms and realize that everything was really, really little. Only I haven't gotten taller. The house just felt weirdly small anyway, and my whole life there kind of felt like an odd dream, even if that sounds super cliché. It also brought back the memory of moving in when I was about five years old, and I remembered picking my old room for Madelyn and I, because I thought it looked "pinker." Both rooms were white. :)

Another thing- my mom is making me these two really pretty skirts that I found a cool pattern for. I'm super psyched to wear them once they're done. I love clothes...

That's all for right now, I guess.