pitcher

The words have been stuck in my fingers for months and I don't know how to get them out. I feel like my explanations are long-winded and whiny, so I abandon them after hearing jeering voices in my ears (somehow, even though he was once my most ardent supporter of my writing, he has the king's chair in my mental court; his voice is loudest above the rest).

So instead of trying to explain and present it all perfectly I am just going to tip the pitcher over. It is full of words and every drop forced more of it to seep out of the edges and go to waste. So let's waste it all.

There is a tug between what is good and bad in my life and strangely enough it exists in each object or person.

The pitcher is trying to hold the words in...I've erased my last three attempts at sentences, but I have to push it out, I need to say it...

This year has been a shitty mess and a lovely diaster.

There is no one reason for it, I am the only commonality and I feel like I change every day, pulled by the tides, set adrift at sea. I want so much but I toss my desires away like petals; they are white and float on the black surface of the deepened ocean like snowflakes, and I realize that letting go of everything I've ever had is the only way to get somewhere new.

She left me before the winter settled into the city and that was the beginning of the algidity, of the bone chilling cold that I could not shake off. She gave me so much warmth and fuel, I felt like I had never been more alive and more aware and more turned up than that. And it was so easy. The ease we shared was joyful and I was tickled by pleasure and thrilled by being known, fully known and appreciated by another human being. I ache for her presence, for her words, for her meandering verbal forests. Not a day goes by that some detail of her does not jar my whole life into a screeching halt, and then there is a sadness in remembering that she is gone.

The winter furthered my rigidness. Gone were my walks, my explorations of the park, the ambling outside just to be outside.

And then there was them, the vast array of failures and disappointments that should no longer bother me, but I still attempt to delineate the threads of what made those loves so painful, usually coming to the conclusion that it is a puzzle I can never solve.

I tried to lose myself in someone else, but naturally that only provides so fleeting an antidote. He tolerated me; in many ways he gave me things that will take a long time to unravel. His presence in my life is an enigma, one that I try hard not to destroy with words or thoughts or questions. He makes me feel not like a girl, a figure, an object, but like a woman. Strangely, I have never felt this way with any of them. I often wonder how cruel it was of the universe to deliver me a very beautiful person trapped under a mountain of insecurity and self-doubt, much as I used to be, and not have him be enough for me and not be able to be the one to save him.

And now, the Spring has finally arrived, and I am startled, absolutely startled by how enamored I am by every breath of life I encounter, each unfurling bunch of leaves on a branch, the growth of those leaves day by day, the vast array of colors they present as the air oxidizes their newness.

I don't know if it is the end of Winter or my new neighborhood, a rather quiet set of streets with the park outside my window, a vast array of landscaping that pleases my eye the way it never has before.

our park

The leaves from the willow trees have covered the dying grass like a blanket. They've been cemented there by snow and ice. They are long and taper at both ends, yellowing, brownish, finger-like. Occasionally there is a slender branch tossed by the wind, stripped of leaves, but lying on top of them because it doesn't know how not to hold the leaves.

The ground crunches under my feet, and the park, my park, our park has undergone a drastic change from when I first encountered it with her, lying in the chaotic grass of summer and looking up into the sky at the stars. The prairie we watched change and grow is flattened, with signs posted detailing it's imminent burning. To imagine that it might someday be a razed, singed, blackened scab on the ground and in six months be full and lush and tower over me is incredible. The trees we watched change are barren now, and all the cement those leaves obscured make the park seem smaller now, less of an oasis.

What catches my eyes the most are the baseball diamonds, like an ice-skating rink, the street lamps cast long gold garland across its mirrored surface and at night, they look like silver circles. I remember how we used to race across them to chase the fog, finding that it could only be seen from far away, and discovering that the sandy surface was soft, like walking on sponges and now it is covered with a disc of ice that I skate on in my sneakers.

To say that I miss her is far too simple. Every single day I think of her, every single day I am disappointed by someone and I know in that instant, had she been there, her appreciation of my observations, my thoughts, my words would have been paramount and the person I am with cannot ever compare to her. In a way, it's worse that I knew her, because it hurts that much more that I don't know her anymore. It makes everything unbearable again. To be known, to be appreciated, to be loved, she gave me that so freely that I felt as happy as I have ever been in my life. I only hope I was able to return that gift to her.

Today was the first day since she has been gone that I traipsed through our park and it was the most I have missed her since her departure, the most angry I have been that she left (even though I do sincerely wish her well and hope she finds what she is looking for, but still angry in a selfish way) and the most sadness that my friend is gone.

home run

I felt the shyness bubble up inside me and then let it burst and asked her some questions and we started talking and it was like we've known each other for a long time already and it confirmed what I have discovered and begun to realize that there's just a certain kind of person who is my type, the genuine, kind, lively, warm and fuzzy person (even though I wouldn't necessarily count myself among their ranks) and she was for me.

There are lots of people who are not for me. But her, with her wild mane of curly hair, which I demanded a detailed description of her regimen from start to finish, she is for me. We had such a quick and easy connection that I was already inviting myself into her world and she was tickled by the invitation. We exchanged promises of Barbeques, margaritas, and art gallery visits.

She had a big deep throaty laugh. She is a smart person. And she likes to read. And she was worried about my wandering off during the movie. I assured her that I was just uncomfortable, as I put it, "I'm a giant person with big limbs and I can't be contained in one small tiny area...!" It's been rare that I meet someone I feel an instant connection with, but lately it makes me happy that it is maybe not as rare as it used to be.

I seem to be going through a new cycle of friendships, where a lot of the friends I've had for the last three years I've outgrown. They were all very good friends and I love them still, but it's obvious and apparent to me that I just need something different in my life than what we had. I've noticed that a lot of the newer friends in my life are people who want to do something, be active, walk around, go somewhere, and that is the opposite of the crowd I've been in for the last three years, good great people who are perfectly happy to pass hours upon hours at a table in a bar talking about nothing (not that there's anything wrong with that).

I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that it's summertime and I just feel this inexplicable urge to go outside, to feel the sun on my skin, to partake in the glories of summer in ways I've never wanted to or cared to before. For instance, on Sunday night I went to Ravinia for the first time with a good friend from school who I don't see often. I received a Ravinia gift certificate as a birthday present three years ago that I never used until Sunday. I wanted to use it, I asked my friends (in my close circle) and they seemed open to it, but we just never got away from that table and that talk about nothing long enough to actually go.

With the park next door to my new apartment being so accessible, I went out yesterday and sat on a bench and read a book and rolled up my sleeves and pant legs so that the sun could hit the pale parts of my skin and I used to laugh at those people and now I am one of them.

And tonight, in a big crowd of people so big it made me hate that I live in a city, I was moody, achy, disinterested and she wiped that all away and made the night worthwhile because she's for me.

see you at jonquil

Today, while trying to acclimate the kid to the out of doors (look it's not so bad, okay there's a few bugs, but for the most part it's not so bad, yeah, just ignore those drunk people...) we wandered near the park where I spent the formative years of my adolescence, Jonquil Park on Sheffield and Wrightwood near Lincoln ave.

As young kids, we ran wild through the streets and the park was our tree house, our back yard, our place. In the summers we spent every day there, playing tennis, volleyball, baseball or just playing on the playground. During the school year, we spent the afternoons there, weather permitting or not, until it got too cold. Even when it was cold, we just dragged ourselves to the park to meet up before walking around the neighborhood with shovels to make money shoveling sidewalks.

I get nostalgic every time I wander through that corner, every time I see those bronze birds on its corner (where my brother skate boarded and did stunts on roller blades) and every time I realize that piece by piece, the park and playground are being altered.

I suppose it's all a change for the better, but they got rid of the volleyball court and put in some dumb cement planters. They tore down the putty colored cement tables and chairs (we used to call them Flinstone furniture) that had chess boards carved or painted into them and replaced those with beige plastic tables and square seats with a metal plate of a chess board (the squares were green and blue for some unknown reason) bolted to the table on the corners (it will likely not last long under attack of bored teenagers, unlike the cement furniture which could not be destroyed by idle hands).

The worst offense was the playground, where a sprinkler had been set up (a sprinkler, really?) and it was too near the tire swing so the "safety first" flooring of the playground was slippery underfoot because of water from the sprinkler. And the swings were all wrong, in the wrong place. They used to be set parallel to sheffield and the park was an expanse in front of your feet, green grass, baseball diamond, the big wide open sky. Now they sit perpendicular so the view is big fancy redone homes and old shadowy trees.

Among the obvious delegated areas based on age, there is the playground set of the future! that looked like some science project of k'nex gone bad, with long sticks connected by bulbous rubber circles and weird shapes that required savvy studiousness expected of kids who no longer enjoy the playground because it's full of a bunch of babies. The colors are dark, the structure itself looks like some deconstructed space station, and I would love to see how little kids interact with this thing. Do they ignore it or dig the hell out of it? I bet they try in vain to figure out what the hell those shapes are meant for and fall every time from those weird triangles.

In the end, even though the park has changed, I found I could still enjoy it, I could still see it in my mind as it was, and in my mind it was this huge expanse, even though now it is small and simple and different.

and there I was

Lying in the grass, under the willow tree in the park across the street, with my friend and new roommate, but not with her, just lying there, looking up at the branches and leaves and sky and they way they intersected and how the wind moved them, and how birds cut across them and there was a butterfly too. The ground underneath me was at first a slab that felt hard and angry, but I softened into it, or it softened for me and as the time passed, I felt the nuances, my head was cradled by a dip in the earth that was so slight, but it fit the back of my cranium perfectly, as if it was made for me. My hips relaxed, I put my arms at my side and let my ankles roll out. Corpse pose in yoga, they call it. I laid there and just felt it all.

The sounds came in bursts, shouts from the kickball games nearby, people walking the paths, birds chirping, sirens wailing, mixed with the distant hum of constant traffic and the snore of airplanes. Eventually I let them wash over me until all I heard were the birds.

When I got up, my back felt moist, as if the ground and my body had been sweating against each other, and it felt good. I peeled leaves off of my legs and looked back at the grass I had trampled, seeing my figure like a pencil drawing you do as a kid, a traced outline of my body in the ground. Tomorrow it will be gone, the grass recovered, the earth hard again.

As if that wasn't enough, we decided to wander through two patches of prairie grasses and "natural" parts of the park, which have narrow paths worn into them. We pointed out flowers, felt the leaves of plants (one plant felt like velvet on the underside only), and watched bees float around. We guessed at plants and compared growth charts (some sunflowers already had heavy heads hung low, while others had giant leafy stalks with tiny concentric rows of the sunflower's hair huddled in the middle).

I would maybe not do these things on my own, but it is nice to know that I can be easily compelled into such behavior.

summer; so far

Strawberries and cherries that taste like they should. Lightening bugs that smolder in the darkness. The sun's heat on my skin forming new freckles. Mandatory uniform of sunglasses, capri pants or skirts, t-shirts. Wanting to eat watermelon. Deviled eggs and friends. Fireworks of the big fat caliber. The lake, bright and teal. Sitting outside just because. Daylight lasting well into the night. A ride on a Ferris wheel. The wind in my face. Chasing bunnies through grass at the conservatory. Scratching mosquito bites.

Maybe it's just that this winter in particular seemed interminably long and that's why summer seems so intoxicating...