ELSEWHERE

“Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

.

I.
There are no Santa Anas in Northern California.
There is rain, too much rain, plugging gutters with newspaper wads of leaves,
And north winds coming in at saw-toothed angles under jackets and scarves,
And summers where the asphalt melts
Into eyelash-glue black pulling at my shoes like chewed gum,
And occasionally there is frost,
But there are never those oven-air, haired, heels-over-head winds
That chap lips and parch hands,
And carry wool-socks-on-carpet electricity out of the dry canyons
To jump between us in snapping white arcs.
That breakneck-fall from the foothills
Over our houses, and cars, and swimming pools, and bent oak trees.
Over colleges there,
Which are nothing like the places
Where I have studied.

II.
I have missed the Santa Anas for five years.
The changes of seasons here surprised me--
Summer into fall, fall into winter.
Biting at each others heels, fighting over days like dogs,
Teeth and tails.
There was nothing that told my body,
The deep mammal part of my brain,
That the earth had moved.
No lines except flat, black calendar boxes,
Printed black dates.
Letters spelling “equinox.”
I found myself waiting, even when the winter rains came,
For something to tell me they were going to come.
I ached and bent west, aerotaxic,
Finding just the damp,
The pervasive cold,
And the saw-toothed wind
That was not my wind.
Not the wind that my body knew
To brush one season
Away from another.

III.
I wasn’t home when my mother fell off the wagon.
But I imagine it happened
In fire season.
She is like me.
She loves the winds, though they make her crazy.
Though they infect us with desires for food, for change, for sex,
For huge spaces with empty skies.
Our love of the winds is a guilty one.
Winds there bring fires,
Sending the eucalyptus up like candles.
Coaxed from casual sparks,
Cigarettes flicked from cars as they pant through the foothills
Windows down.
Fires that threaten the houses,
The ones that creep so far into the mountains,
Their careful lawns side by side with the manzanita and hedge mustard.
Often, the fire fighters, trying to restrain them, lay breaks.
Till under cultivated and native alike
Leaving thick brown stripes of bare dirt,
Or set backfires,
Considering some small damage a fair price.
But the fire, wind-borne, jumps them sometimes.
Or else the heat alone is enough.
Ignoring the breaks, causing the chaparral to burst and burn with that yellow-white flame
I have never seen anywhere else.
You cannot love the fires here.
But my mother and I try, I think,
Because they come with the wind,
And the wind belongs to us.

It is super cool to have a panic response from having a discord alert or seeing the Twitter interface.

This whole situation is such shit.

Note to self: tomorrow sort out the locked lists here and ramble incoherently about our feelings behind a filter.

I've had an anxiety backache for two days now.

I did NOT miss this.

I don't know how I lived with this all the time for years.

I'm actually trying pretty hard /not/ to bright-side what's been happening. It isn't that I don't think there is one, it's that I don't /want/ to try to sugar coat stuff to myself. I want to not be terminally trying to find the good in everything.

I mean, it's good to find the best in things. It is. And I'm glad that it is, in general, my impulse to do that. And before, I needed to focus /hard/ on the good because there was so much bad and I had so much to get past. It was healthy and necessary and really, really kept me fro falling in all the very bad shit that was going on.

But thing is, now I'm doing a /lot/ better. Life is, overall, pretty damn good. And I want to allow myself to see and feel the actual bad as it's bad.

I feel like a lot of people would say this is... I don't know, getting caught up in the negative. It's not, though. It's being /honest/ about the negative, rather than trying to see through it. And I want to be able to just say "this thing sucks" without trying to make it all ok anyway.

So.

This thing sucks.

But that said! There are some actually, legitimately good sides!

First, as was mentioned, a /lot/ of really sucky people are now out of my sphere of influence and interaction. I lost some people I thought were good and cool, too, which sucked, but turns out they /weren't/ in fact. And I also lost people that made me feel absurdly uncomfortable. I'm incredibly upset that people I thought knew better apparently don't. But. It is so nice to be able to largely breathe free with people out of my space.

Second, I've really confirmed what I /don't/ like to do. I don't like to try to follower grab. I don't like to sell myself or my projects. I like to make them, and be excited about them, and talk excitedly to other people about them. I don't want to network for the sole purpose of making connections. I want to hang out with people for projects I like, and not that I /should/ engage with because it will get me ahead. To this end, I've left a /lot/ of Discord servers for stuff I was /trying/ to like, but didn't actually. Which is fucking fantastic. I feel very slightly guilty, but also hugely relieved.

Anyway. Looks like the body count of thought-were-friends-but-weren't is going to keep rising for a while, but hell. Says more about them than me.

Sucks. I hate it. I am sad and hurt.

But fuck 'em.

It is rough in my head tonight.

Come on, melatonin. Please let me sleep tonight. And maybe actually eat a proper amount tomorrow.