You Are Here: Another Scott Foley/Laura Horton Collaboration.

Video work by Scott Foley. Words by me!

You’re not lost. You’ve simply forgotten it doesn’t matter what you’re looking for. All that matters is you’re here. Here because there, wherever you were that held whatever you’re getting away from, wasn’t enough for you or was too much for you. It let you down, or it tied you down, so you had to leave.

You’re not lost. You left aching to get away from something tired. Not thinking through the part about getting into something new. But you found something new. You found this. You found the ground you’re standing on. So you’re not lost. You are not misguided or mislead, not astray or wayward. You are here. With everything or nothing in front of you.

What do you choose?

Carved Boxes and Open Palms

I'm dealing with an absence of things to say, things to think, as though my life has stored its meaning in a carved wooden lockbox because the beauty of it seemed to rest on some complementary frequency but thoughtlessly misplaced the key, leaving the two of us, my life and me, to sit and stare at this work of art wordlessly, afraid to speak lest it be something inane and offensive.  We'd like to actively hope for a means to access the meaning it holds within itself, but more frequently the delicate woodwork and the stained iron of the lock leaves us in a state of hypnosis.  (Keys do not walk themselves to open palms, yet here we sit with our wrists askew, waiting for a weight to fall into our fingers).

We tell a story  – or I do anyway, as my life nods along – of someone who knows where and who to be, of someone who might have lost a key but broke the hinges or manipulated a paper clip because meaning was all too important to be left stagnant in cedar.  This someone is as oblivious to what the future holds as we are, as afraid, as happy to sit and wait for something to come to her, but she is also certain that there is more, some undiscovered fulfillment in the pursuit of dreams and the wild pull of ambition. She sweats when only breath is demanded and bleeds when they call for sweat.

In moments of disenchantment, she grabs onto shards of broken hope and turns them into prisms, which then turn her the temporary relief of her moments of optimism into a mesmerizing splendor – dreams of dancing with green and purple to watch them envelop her in yellow, blue and red instead.

The words of her flow out of me and into the air to settle in the intricate carvings of the box, which now balances atop a bench beneath the readied swing of hammer, the beauty ready to be traded for meaning though not without intent to find beauty in the aftermath.

Doc Brown Could

I watched the feelings unfold like a flower in stop motion.  She walked into the room with a slump in her shoulder and a crease in her forehead, and it broke my heart.  She looked tired.  Not just didn't-get-enough-sleep-last-night, or had-a-long-day tired.  She looked worn.  Slowly threadbare. Then she looked up and there was this moment of honest relief, and when I felt her arms around me it was as though I was anchoring her to the moment, keeping her from remembering whatever it was she had been going through.

As we sat, her head on my lap, my fingers in her hair like always, I watched her face slip in and out of that same fatigue.  I asked because I had to ask, but never too deeply because that kind of tired only comes when talking about it on anyone else's terms has stopped doing any good, so mostly I sat and waited because silence stopped being an absence of communication between us a long time ago, and I couldn't say or do anything to make it better.  Make it fixed.  Doc Brown could.  I could only say the things like, "Give it time." But what good would that do? She can't very well actively make time pass.  "Things will get better." They might.  They might get better.  They don't get better for everyone.  Sometimes they get worse.  Sometimes people don't recover.  Probably, for her, they would get better, but who am I to tell her what things would happen? I didn't predict this.

So instead of empty words I gave full attention, and we sat –my fingers in her hair, her head on my lap – staring at the ceiling, waiting for the silence to become oppressive.

Finding a Moment Among Conversation Gaps

I sit across from a familiar face at a familiar table and have a familiar conversation – a commentary on shoes and late night television programming and a strategy discussion on awkward social encounters (exchanging tactics and horror stories).  The conversation is buoyed by jokes and words that are more fun to pronounce than useful to the discussion, and I watch the gaps in conversation fill and wonder when my moment should be, wonder if there's a not-awkward way to steer the conversation, because her not asking isn't necessarily a product of her not caring.

I'd like to tell her everything even though she probably doesn't want to hear it because telling everything is the only way this will all make sense.  I have previously given bits and pieces and walked away feeling misunderstood, and this is too important for her to misunderstand.

I want to tell her it rained on a Friday night in October. I want to tell her that I begrudgingly left a blanket-nest in my apartment to find a substitute comfort in cheap beer and conversations with near strangers, and that my watch refused to lie and let me believe I could leave without questions, so I paced and rotated through the people I knew until a conversation became a little bit interesting, but before the conversations grew distracting enough, my reason to leave walked through the door: a reminder of everything I hadn't figured out, everything I wasn't doing right.

I want to tell her how I didn't leave.  How I froze.  How I sought sanctuary in the fading crown molding and how I buried my head in the shoulder of the only person in attendance who understood, but that beer had made that person distract-able, and the story was stale and not keeping her focus, so she passed me off onto the next person. I want to tell her how I let a stranger be my sounding board.

I want her to know that it took me a few minutes to make eye contact, that I don't actually remember what it was he said that made me turn my head toward him except that it was a challenge in some way, it was something I wouldn't expect a stranger on a couch to say, and it wasn't the familiar empty house-party banter that leads to more drinking and less talking. I want her to know that at some point in what had evolved from my rant to our conversation, the stranger and I made the kind of eye contact you have to recover from and that after a few twists and turns of the evening, we found ourselves on the front porch with uncertain smiles and sideways glances.  She already knows that the empty street once had meaning to me, standing as I was across from a house filled with a bumbling series of mistakes, but I want her to understand that as the stranger disappeared into that same street, I lost my thoughts and my balance.

She knows he's not a stranger anymore, but I want her to know that his kisses separate me from reality and his arms keep me from losing my mind, and that even when phone calls get tripped up by awkward pauses or we unintentionally hurt each other, it feels like we've figured it out, like we're doing it right. I want her to know that it's not the familiar story to tell at the familiar table amongst familiar jokes and familiar conversations, but I'm in a world with a whole new concept of familiar, and I'd kind of like her to be part of it.

Ignored Expiration Dates Amongst Souvenirs and Holiday Cheer

We sat down at the tiny cafe table, angling our hips away from each other but still managing the occasional knee bump or foot graze.  My fingers were inconsolable, tapping against the paper cup, worming underneath the cardboard sleeve, and picking at any anomaly with each fingernail.  You smiled at me, and I winced.  I tried to cover it up with closed eyes and a half-smile, but the half-smile was hard to keep in tact with my eyes closed because the ball of fear and tears and memories welling in my throat fed on the darkness.

I shook my head and opened my eyes in time to see yours staring back at them.  You were grinning in the same way as the time when we buried our legs in the sand so the bugs would stop biting them, or when the rainstorm had us soaked and piled on top of each other for warmth in the back of your friend's SUV.  I couldn't stand to see you so happy to be there, so I averted my eyes to the cup in my hands and watched the whipped cream disappear into my hot chocolate.  Shit, this was an awful idea.

Then came the portion of our evening for mean-spirited questions, for answers formed from words carefully chosen and quietly released, for dialog.  Because with you and me it had always been late night talks about 1996 Nickelodean programming or lists of animals that have defied evolutionary norms to stay around, but talking about "us" had been carefully avoided, and we had missed our chance because there was no longer an "us" of which to speak, only a "you" and a very separate "me," and that day a "me and him" that I wasn't prepared to discuss and you weren't anxious to leave alone – a screaming example of everything that we had never been neatly packaged into the word I never let you be, graced with the time I never gave you and the patience we never had.

You had long since become an image from my past that I tucked into my suitcase for emergency self-esteem, a souvenir from days I left behind for a reason but had the odd experience of falling back into every now and again by virtue of geography and school calendars, so you and I persisted past our expiration date and on that day were left with stale conversation and a bitter aftertaste.

By the third round of interrogation, in which I hesitantly revealed a few details you begged for but didn't actually want to hear, my fingers were desperate to avoid your skin but kept landing too close because the tiny cafe table seemed tinier. The hot chocolate had lost its heat, the flavor of the whipped cream now an assault on my tongue, which paired with the assault on my ears was finally altogether too much.  The bells on the door sounded with a cruel holiday spirit that reminded us both how lonely the afternoon had been.

Thirteen Percent Chance of Sunshine

I stared down at the bubbles floating around in my cup, wondering if they were, in fact, carbonation, or if something had dropped from the ceiling and caused a commotion. (Then I thought perhaps I'd be better off not knowing.) My shoes were sticking to the basement floor, and my brain was not yet so clouded that the sound didn't make my stomach turn. We stood in the corner, beneath the pipes making disconcerting noises, contorting every so often to ensure successful evasion of the walls.

Not that any of this was particularly unusual. Trying to avoid letting my elbow touch yours... that was less usual. Being afraid to speak to you as we stood alone in the corner of a dark basement... that had only started making headlines a few weeks earlier (when we realized that whatever fault-line we had been sliding across had finally left us disconnected).

I peeled my feet off the floor, left then right, then left again and right again because there was nothing better to do except perhaps be entertained for a moment by the couple prematurely inebriated on the empty dance floor.

You had disappeared. Your eyes were disconnected from the scene, your elbows pulled in tightly to your sides as though you expected a guy with an ether-soaked cloth and a scalpel to drag you into a closet and leave you without a kidney.

Your facial features twitched along with the movement of your thumbs on the touch screen that had given you more cause for attention than any person in the room, and we were both losing patience. I broke and spoke. You broke and screamed.

My grip on my cup tightened, the ridges leaving marks on the pads of my fingers, the beer inside forced toward the rim. I felt my tendons melt and turn my body into a stack of useless bone and tissue, my shoulders frozen in tension, my eyes retreating into my head like a trapped homecoming princess in a horror movie. I watched from within as my mouth made noise, as my feet pivoted and carried me up the stairs, as I sunk wordlessly into a stranger's couch.

Registers above the Buzzing in Your Ear

It sounds like theatrics. Like a man in a tweed hat and a tweed suit in the center of a dark stage telling us how to suspend our disbelief as he puffs away on a corncob pipe. It sounds like something that becomes an eighth grader’s away message, something that I would have clung to in my 15-year-old heartbreak when I doodled the lyrics of songs that I didn’t understand on my shoes. It sounds like a temper tantrum, like Tom Cruise on Oprah, like the girl whose Facebook status updates tell her life story.

But I’m sitting here, staring at the wall with a smirk on my face, and I want to bang cymbals. I want to learn how to play the trumpet so I can announce things off balconies to unsuspecting passersby. I want to stand two inches away from a stranger and tell them my life is changing. I want the side of a building as a canvas and three shopping carts of spray paint.

The words sitting stagnant on my tongue, the ones I am always careful not to let get mixed in with the clutter, deserve some theatrics. They deserve a quiet moment to explode, echoing back at me in new and interesting tones as someone else’s taste buds discovers their flavor. But I may have kept them inside just a little too long, and now I'm carbonated and not yet settled from a bumpy ride, ready to provide theatrics even if the moment's entirely inappropriate.

Obscured Lines in the Sand

The wind carried the sparks off into the dark sky, teaming up with the smoke to take a moment of brilliance away from the stars.  The six of us lay on the ground, he with his head on the sand, I with my mine on his chest, and for the moment we weren't worried about the grains of sand seeping into our socks and waistbands. We stared reverently as the silhouette of the bonfire shivered against the night, glowing like a spotlight on a dark stage.  I changed the grip on my beer and shifted my weight to my elbow, eager to see everything the evening had to offer: the way the waves took turns giving us a new look at the moon, the glow of the horizon inviting our thoughts to dream with a little more risk.

"We need a soundtrack."

Cue headlights, someone's fingers fumbling over the dashboard, and an Atmosphere song making its way around the windshield of the Jeep. Our feet jumped across and dug into the cooling sand, our arms swinging without direction. I could feel his eyes follow me as the shadows from the bonfire made shapes on my face.  It wasn't the first night of obscured lines of friendship, and it wouldn't be the last, but it was always contained in day-lengths, encased in memories not spoken of, just replayed like the best verse of a forgotten song, almost as good as we remember it to be.

Further and Further Away

The water was cold, tearing across my feet like the ocean was trying to suck out my soul through the beds of my toenails.   It was September.  The sun was high in the sky, but it was starting to feel like fall, and the water was cold.  We stood in a close circle, and you handed me your piece of paper because your sentences kept collapsing with the weight of your tears, so I took the wrinkled pages from the fading strength of your fingers  and started to read.  Calmly.  Steadily.  Rhythmically.

I heard my voice empty out into the air, and it felt as though it were just lying in a stagnant puddle, pooling and festering, suspended level with our chests in order to soak us in its stench.   I sounded like a sociopath. I tried to conjure the images that made me human, tried to remind my brain to care, but it took every muscle in my chest to send my heart back to a place where it could break because... my heart had been broken.  And broken.  And I wanted to feel, but every time he choked, and every time he fell, and every time he couldn't prove that there was life behind his eyes, that he still existed behind the frozen façade, I gave up just a little more feeling because it hurt to feel. You could see him, you could see him trying fight, but the disease was crushing him. He was being wrapped in cellophane, and we couldn't help.  We couldn't reach him, we couldn't save him. We just stood there, and watched as he disappeared, as he suffocated.

I wanted to remember his stories.  His sense of humor.  I wanted to remember the way he teased us when we hadn't brushed our hair, or the look in his eye over cocktails as made those elegantly crude innuendos.  I wanted to hear him laugh us off as we ridiculed him for donating his leather couch to his pampered dog.  But I was just an observer back then, waiting for my turn to take the stage and garner more valid attention than cooing or polite laughter.  I never let him engage me because I didn't feel like I could prove anything to him. And by the time I was ready to stand my ground and be the contender he always had seen in me, he stopped seeing.  He stopped absorbing.  All he could do was struggle to hold the ground the disease hadn't taken from him yet.

So, as though my wrists were cuffed to a damp cellar wall, I watched him fight until there was no fight left, and every time his breath got heavier, I felt my heart harden just a little more: this might be it.  This might be the round that kills him.  And he'd make it to another round but he'd fade just a little more and I was further away from him.  And further.  And he had been so far away for so long that it just didn't matter any more if he was there.  Because he was already past saving. He was already untouchable.  He was already gone.

So I watched my voice stumble and land with a tickle upon unwelcoming ears.  And I ushered in the water as it ate away at the sensation in my toes.

How Tos and What Ifs

I find my thoughts these days are confined to self-improvement. It may not be that I am in such a desperate shape that I need to be so much better, but most days, most hours, most minutes, I don't feel I'm quite enough.  I see myself as someone with potential, but the possibility of being is not the same as being.

But my self-improvement kick lacks focus, oscillating between figuring out how to change the world and how to love, how to stay in touch and how to stay alive.  None seem so impossible on their own: changing the world with words, rants and research; loving with a full heart and a generous hand; staying in touch with coffee dates, lunches, drinks and phone calls, maybe a Facebook post or a text message for good measure; staying alive one night's sleep followed by one morning's coffee on one month's paycheck.

Then there's a moment once in a while when they all seem to be happening at once, and they feel as though they need to be happening faster because God forbid I don't become successful, become something that fits into a pretty paragraph-long biography below my name on a glossy page.

Time, an arbitrary measure of life sloppily understood as meaningful, feels as though it's running out.  But there is no clock.  There are no universal seconds ticking away, and I'm not losing anything as each moment fades into the next except maybe a bit of sleep. There should no rush because there is no imminent pendulum ready to strike if we don't decide quickly enough (except maybe a glaringly low bank account balance, but let's put numbers away for a moment).  I have only imaginative constructs of what I see, what I remember, and what I hope comes to pass.  (When all's done and said, it's all in my head.)

End in Sight

Breathe for the first time…

toes buried deep in the warm sand,

letting the light soak so deeply it shines back out through your eyes.

Shiver as a cloud blocks the sun,

rays stuck in the grey mass,

leaving only the heat of the sand

to put the hairs on the back of your neck at ease.

Fall deeper into the clutches of the warm grains,

eyes closed to the darkening sky,

keeping the light inside

for as long as it will last.

Betrayed By His Right Sock

That’s what I’d tell him. That’s what I’d tell him if I could bring myself to look him in the eye and tell him I’m leaving. Tell him the weather here, the absence of the crash of waves outside my window, the packed subway cars where people barely make eye contact, it’s driving me crazy. I’d tell him that I envied the comfort he took in seeing the yellow cabs whip past his toes, but if I skirted death by taxi one more time I’m not sure my heart would recover from the beat that it skipped. I’d tell him I’d miss him. I’d tell him I love him.

I watched him, with my back pressed into the wall behind me. The elastic on his right sock had weakened and refused to stay in place around his ankle, choosing instead to bunch up around the middle of his foot. He twirled his foot probably hoping he could work with gravity to get it back into place, ultimately knowing it was useless but not yet driven to the point of taking his shoe off to fix it properly.

I watched him lean his elbow into the not-comfortable-enough armrest of the chair and cradle his head in between the thumb and index finger of his open hand. The door opened, and for probably the 15th time in 20 minutes he raised his head to meet eyes with … not me. Then he left.

The air outside was finally just cold, not bitter or painful, and the only trace of snow was the odd mound of dirty ice pressed into the curb. The sky seemed to mute every sound except that of the grit underneath the soles of my shoes as I moved my toe back and forth across the stone of the doorway to crush my cigarette. I didn’t smoke until I came here.

I watched him throw his hood over his head and shrink into the distance. Then I walked in the other direction.