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.