I went out of Chicago today for the first time in sixth months and it was so perfect, so warm and humid and full of splatters, full of green I didn't know existed here, and I was perfectly near happy, not perfectly happy, but perfectly near for the first time since last summer down on the beach back home, and I'm so homesick I think I can't take it; no matter what people say about Chicago and all the events and music pouring out the doors and the festivals and energy and people coming in and out and moving by, it cannot ever find me that dirt of home. No matter how nostalgic or angry or lonely I get out there, the west coast is built like a lung or an arm, and my arm is missing, my arm fell off, my arm and hands, my lungs are inhaling.


Strange how it took a trip of heat and flicker cottonwood, of cherrypit spittings and walking on the sand with my feet falling through into heat and lifting one step at a time slowly to keep my back and body intact, and a quickswim in the shallow shoals of a lake that left my hair greasy and wirey like maybe a bit of salt made its way out here, and flipping through the blue which wasn't too cold, just right, and emerging to dry over hours with my wet breasts blurring through in splotches on my shirt, and then feeling my stomach, feeling it finally move around, want something, what the hell is it that I want?, and knowing I haven't been finding words for anything, no words no new no language can touch anything because I don't even know what one could think about anymore... funny how the green of one place, its perfect place, could remind me of a free I didn't even know had left me.


We - a friend of mine, ls, and her roommate - went to Saugatuk, near a place I applied for a fellowship this summer but didn't get--right along a "river" and "lake" that feeds into lake Michigan. We found ducklings in town which ls says are too old to still really be ducklings, and also a yacht club which reminded me of a how my old man got kicked out of a yacht club for attacking a woman on a club picnic, how it was just him, my sister, and me, out on an island and he got drunk and she got drunk and she started yelling at him, and he picked her up and spun her around on his shoulders, and even at seven I knew what he was doing was a shift, or strange, bizarre, a grown man spinning a shrieking woman around on his shoulders. And how they took her off him and then banned him to the dock, later to be kicked out of the club, and how he walked down there and took out his knife and threw it into the wood of the dock so that it quivered and how he said if she came down there, he'd kill her, he'd slit her throat, and I took my sister back up to the picnic and got us food and felt bad about abandoning our dad, and so went back down and sat with him with our legs over the sides, kicking in the water.

And we found t-shirt shops, and kayak rentals, and the sound of the wind through leaves, lots of leaves, and now that I've heard it there, I can hear it here, right now as I write, thousands of particles rushing through the air and making motion for no sake, no sake at all, but for the dispersal of elements, and how it's the most silent sound, the most music, around.


I think I will give my back one more week and if I don't feel like I'm getting better, you know, more like I can actually move without worry or consideration, then I am going to quit and go home. I'm going to quit on Chicago, I think. Although I'll come back and finish up school, I might finally recognize that I wasn't meant to be here.


I felt a little silly today, and less sad, and more. I felt annoyed with work, and how the deal there pushes all these small considerations into extreme focus until life can't be about the very moving and enjoying or being solitary happy or feeling what is to be felt, rasta. I mean, this doesn't have to do with the cutie, who texted me a couple times today with sorries, etc, but more about how I myself unrelated to whatever latch myself to anything that feels like living.

I'm listening to ec's "angles and corners" mix right now, and strange how her music makes me miss her, like a vision never shared elsewhere, that's solitude for you.

I'm giving a reading this Thursday at Powells, and I haven't written anything I like for an eternity.

I'm going to work tomorrow.

I'm thinking about home.

Today was really good.

Why has it taken me six months to venture out of this city? Do I think I will see it clearly only if I am completely submerged and wrapped plastic within? What an absurd thought.