As the days filter down, I can't say I've felt more alive, as if looking through a keyhole for the portrait beyond. It's blurry, but something moves there, if only the refracting of tiny lights, and what sends me over the moon is the unknowness to come. The year carved out such whopping beauty, namely in the soft-smoking tinder of renewed creative fires. I somehow stretched beyond what I ever knew possible, and to begin to explain it -- the things I was witness to, babes born into rooms and waters and beds -- Sometimes, to think of it in the night, I feel almost unworthy, for how can my heart hold such beauty, what do I do with it??
It is strange, in this moment, to feel unafraid. Making provisions for journeys past used to swell my sense of nostalgia, rubbed me raw with uncertain longing, a panicked vanishing, some strange and thrilling dread. How different this feels. I can't remember a time I more freely let go -- of objects, of what I thought I wanted, of people, and familiarity. I cannot wait to set sail - to become again gloriously anonymous. The only worry now set slightly beneath the skin is that of the Italian dance party: will I find myself standing, pidgeon-toed and sheepish, on a half-hearted dance floor to the hiss of a german techno anthem, longing in vain for the funk parties of home, and a certain Waid's Haitian Lounge??
Years ago I had a lover who berated me sweetly, for being naïve, for trusting strangers too much. (I had somehow ended up in a blood bank in Brooklyn with a freshly released 15-year convict, because he was reading A Hundred Years of Solitude on the bus, and I thought he was interesting.) I hear this echo still, though I only want to laugh: "How wrong you were!" I would say to him now. "The world is good, and righteous, people can be trusted, wait and see!" (My mother, I know, wincing.) But part of me is eternally 17 years old, the forever optimist, a believer despite all odds. I've been alive long enough in my crude and fleeting youth to know it's what you welcome in that arrives suddenly at the door. So I'm heading down the road with all the gutsy, bright-eyed sureness of a slick, spring chicken. And I don't feel afraid. I just hope that it serves me.
When I was a girl, right up until my grandmother could barely walk, our ma would pile us into the Volvo on the way back off Camano, and we'd roll down the windows as the car cinched beyond the drive, swinging our little arms in circles, and watching our grandmother do the same. "See you 'round!" we'd shout, "See you 'round, Nano!" She'd call down the lane, cigarette between the lips, "See you 'round! See you 'round! I luvva, luvva you!" It now seems the only fitting end to this most perfect departure. "See you 'round, my friends. See you 'round, see you 'round!"
