Paint Samples
Color is – and has always evoked – a fundamental thirst. It is the problem and the solution, the luxury and the loss and the love. As a child I told my mom I would rather die than go blind. Color floods my dreams, thickly blots my pleasure and my pain, creates me, disintegrates me. Last week I told my mom that as long as there are flowers, I could be happy anywhere. Life exists in small pieces the color of some faraway desire, pieces like paint samples.
Nostalgia fractures and memory is undone because language can’t hold color. Nonetheless I will try to show you the desperately spiritual. Days defined by obsession. Pressure and yearning. I chose to spend my 20th birthday alone, sipping wine in a famous flower garden. The immersion in those velvety petals in the endless gentleness of California’s April was almost too much softness to bear.
Color-nostalgia, too, is hard to bear. Hot evenings when the smog has settled, the sky is a dusty blue that looks for all the world like a postcard of Los Angeles, perhaps a film photo, taken before I was alive. I cannot do it justice. Italo Calvino writes, “Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased… Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, by speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
She was not, as I had first thought, a true romantic love. She was purely a muse. We mixed paint on each other’s skin, we spent a whole July taking Polaroid photos on the train to San Francisco. She taught me how to make daisy chains and crowned me as her peroxide princess. Her mom taught me to tuck pennies into the root systems of hydrangeas to turn their blossoms a striking shade of indigo.
Late afternoon light filters through the windows at an angle, throws its geometric gold across the cheap loft rug. This August has been a headache, a whole throbbing pulsing month that won’t feel clear until much later. I find myself wishing I could swim in the sunbeams, wrap myself in something so tangibly good.
One October, off the coast of Baja California, I dive under a wave and for a moment get lost in a bad way, immersed in its loud rushing dark. When eventually I resurface, the world is the most beautiful it has ever been. Your freckled face, full of concern, looking like love itself, and around you the endless foam catches all the brilliance of the dipping sun. A phrase crystallizes in my brain: everything is made out of white velvet, just as it always has been.
If there is a god, god is color. I clumsily broke open a pomegranate under the sun in Joshua Tree and its tart blood coated my hands, hundreds of wounded rubies scattered across ancient sand. The previous day we had picked enough to fill our bags from the tree by the side of the road. I can’t believe these are free, Kristina said. I can’t believe we are free.
“My childhood home” is no longer the same physical house in which I grew up. Rather, the quality of the light in California is my childhood home. Wrapped up tightly in it, memories are illuminated. The roses and rosemary in that garden made me who I am.
someone who is a home
your eyes feel heavy already, it’s as though
you’re a child on a road trip in an old heated car
when your journey ends your parents will bundle you up
still asleep in your blanket
and if you drift awake while you’re carried up the stairs
you’ll keep your eyes closed anyway.
when you wake up in your rumpled clothes
as the honey-gold sun pours over your yawning self
you’ll remember how safe you feel
in the arms of someone who loves you
in your world of care and light
in your soft and gentle life
flight to San Francisco now boarding
as always, there’s a burning tenderness in flying west.
a brimming feeling of gratitude for all the selves i have been
and am becoming,
and the people who held
and will hold them.
the pale early sunset over boston while on a train
passing by the last of the fall colors –
it’s something from another time
but it’s right now.
it carries with it all the brilliance of what came before,
the chrysalis and the raw and beautiful
emergence.
i carry in my ribcage the sweet lightness of adoring and being adored,
which spills over into each moment:
the mundane spectacular, the festive turnover of the weeks
the winning and the falling and the feeling
and the last summer peaches and the first fall leaves.
it’s pure gold as my world turns white-silver
as winter’s cold body takes residence for a spell.
and again i return to the winters in which i loved like a hearth,
the summers in which i basked in the great possibility.
of love
I meet you
on islands of sleep. an
archipelago
if you will
on these shores
waves roll in, soft
as blankets
rhythmic as breath
sunrise comes easy
and the day ahead is
a glittering endless ocean
until we wash ashore again
everything is the best version of what it is
luxury seeks the best version of everything,
the best house and the best beach and the best sheets.
but everything is the best version of the very thing that it is,
even if it isn’t the highest form of that concept,
simply because it’s what is
and there’s sacredness in that.
this experience is peak in its own way.
notice the sourness.
notice the sun slipping
behind clouds.
this is all part of what it is.
these details make it itself, and given that it all exists,
even without you,
it’s bigger than any perfect concept
even with the sand in the snow
and the dry skin on my hands
and the realness of our pores,
this makes it what it is, the best version
of the animals that we are
on this big lake
on this january day.