The night of the day we summited Harvey, I stood at the chain link fence again, peering at the sea below. I was nearly drunk. Though I’d not had much, three glasses of wine some time ago, the alcohol had coursed through my body, slammed into my veins, and taken me swiftly to a place of high emotionalism. Here in the city I have obscure desires the least of which I understand, there in the mountains I am a more simple woman, and a better person. I stood at the fence missing everything all at once, the mountains, what I seem to leave there -- my childhood, and the innocence I once carried in my body and thoughts. Would it be pathetic to say I want them back?
I walked around the poorer parts of downtown, allowing the men and women of the street to wash my wounds that I had aggravated all over again, having picked at what I hate most in myself. Or maybe not what I hate, but what I do not know, what I cannot seem to understand about the girl living in my body. They are the people who see me, nod at me, tell me without words that I am here. I wandered around remembering the descent from the trees, how often I fell on my ass even once face first right into the snow beside a pine that held back from laughing right out loud at my clumsy awkward limbs and heart. Memories of trees and wandering, being reminded of their sunken eyes, missing teeth, how they seem to say we all have a very similar longing, though they went searching in all the wrong places. Trees full of grace up there, protecting the land and its inhabitants, but not too much of that here in the city. Not too much of that here.
I’ve been having dreams of everyone I know, as if something in me needs to reach out and touch everything for the first real time. I thought that would make sense because I have longed to have red shoes my whole life, which I bought only a few weeks ago, and because my mother has been dreaming of my death. She’ll flail into my room some mornings to make sure I am breathing, and I’ll sit up startled from the dreams where I’m seeing everyone and being a part of everything and not holding on to anything but my own ability to dream.
Everyone is back now. I was the last to leave and the first to come back. We ran to Farnia in the airport, down the hall where we weren’t allowed to go, but there she was so we ran to her and embraced, us three girls, us three friends, laughing and embracing for everyone to see just like a happy movie. And today Auntie Inver Lea is back from India, hanging on my neck a Nepalese amulet. And Shane, I imagine, is back too. Yet nothing is the same, and there are things you can know all along but might never know how to face. I’ve had phone calls that I’ve taken for granted, encounters with beautiful mountain men, and dear, magical homeless vagrants asking me for mints or telling me my heart, and peaceful wanderers sharing lemons and carrots with me. Long drives, rivers, and weeping. It’s all gone, and I have to wonder about that, wonder where time goes when it reaches the shore, and play, and the outfits I wore when I hadn’t a care because I was a child swinging on monkey bars and rolling down hills.
I go up to the mountains from the city knowing that nothing lasts, then look around at the splendor of nature in this world and have to believe it exists because there is still hope I can go back down remembering, believing that I can exemplify old rock, and strong wood, the soft persistent water, the quiet snow, that I might descend among trees and live with the same grace and goodness in the world below.
This is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard:
