you know, the kind where everything is lovely but you recognize the nostalgia to come?


mmmm, the mum, the mother figure, the strangeness, the one you can cuddle with and run to in the morning and jump on, the kind you never have to grow up for, other than grow up as in "into yourself," but can always smile and tease and lift arms into light and be teased and remember and talk two-second serious with. because life forwards flashlike and there it is, with all its summerstress, the things that Must Be... as in, accomplished, finished, done, striven towards, cared about, nurtured, ventured, dared, tried out, and failed but accepted.


the truth is, i wouldn't be en este momento without her, and some goes without saying, but the part where i really wouldn't be here, as in the part where i was desperately sad and beyond sad and in my head and lost, and the mum said, "hey, you should go to the Art Institute," and the part where the mum says, "I'll help you go to the Art Institute," because nobody else really knew how really sad and dark-room locked I was but her, and so, here I am, and here she came to visit me, and have the h-blues because I miss all the things that could have been that i wanted that couldn't be that i gave up on that were too much, and found this place i am that truly is right now and content but not rooted, although it passes transient through the thoughts, in what was.


i felt just a bit lost this morning when i got up and she and chuck were gone because it's so much more fun to be for other people, and so much harder to be for otherwise.

it was muggy and hot and i wore shorts again, and felt the green washington well up in front of me, all the times i dream of its ocean, all the moments when i dream of the ex-girlfriendishsorta and her lover bumping up against me and the shores of the post two-years in my dreams... the first night my mom was here, the sand rode in between her toes, caught the drift of our wind and our thunderstorms, roamed around this creaking ancient home that was long before me, and felt between the creases of life remembered. i dreamt of what might be, but who cares? we say no to some paths and try to find hope for others, although hope is a haha kind of Object.


"you are so beautiful," she tells me ardently convincing, and it's not the convincing i need. i'm past knowing i'm beautiful and at the point where i know that life only has thirty-two point four percent to do with effort, and everything after that is the open maybe perhaps and could be. people in iraq are beautiful. people who find holes in their non-existent socks are beautiful. people around on the buses muttering in the night are beautiful. deserve is a word for the midlearn, and everything that happens afterwards is chance and hypertext. how to express to someone who loves you, who wants the best for you, who wants you to yearn, that you've learned that everything one yearns for is fiction, and everything else turns out to be fiction anyways.

we went to: Hyde Park, Field Museum (I growled at the dinosaurs like an egg learning verbs), Pilsen, Evanston, beaches, Art Institute (and after I made a fuss and bitched at the line we shouldn't have waited in, we wandered the surrealist, the Picasso's, the Dali's, the sculptures, the trans-Siberian modernisms, the Bressons, the stained glass, the armored suits from Germany, the children's books, the Americas). we went to: Mexico in Pilsen, Deep-dish in Exchequer, and Japan with c2 and she-who in HamaMastsu. I got drunk at a party in between, saw someone's ass and asked for its context, and then walked home through the mug-fust, talking about the influences of body image and the division between hunter-gatherer and mirror.


today i planted flowers while happy and sad and notingstalgic and foundforgetful and urban and rural and artist and working-class and privileged and abused and lucky and starchallenged and a member of a family too far away and a member of a community of artists in transverse. and when the day comes, the gate opens, the sky chomps down with its clouds, i will mention how well i loved, how i wrote it on walls and on paper and not enough in my stories but felt it when i crawled through the blankets, over the dunes, under memory in order to kiss my mum on all her faces and find these embodied knowledges we know but forget and learn to feel again.