fist of the pacific

the city I thought I would love opened up on a sky dark with human ashes and I told myself I couldn't go back.

some endless weeks before, we walked through a forest, you and I, our hands clasped, our fingers crisscrossed like firm fabric stitches. the ground was soft and damp and here it seemed that any life could be brought up from the soil, that endless aeons of trees and vines and predatory flytraps could be born again and again in the promise of the good earth. here was a land unremoved from its spirits, and although scattered, the native people would always be able to lean out on the wind and find a familiar whisper, waiting to return. I wanted a whole new level of authenticity. I wished for a bloodline born on the nearest shore a thousand years ago, generations of things still sacred leading up to my life where it stood. my hands got cold from all the places they'd never been, so I squeezed them against yours.

a crime wave was on the news in the city, masked men with guns pointed at denny's patrons, their money new property of desperate living. leaning over a hotel balcony, i could see the low horizon, and the absence of anything on it made the world feel too big, too fast. lonely palms reached towards each other across impossible spaces, and I took a breath of hot dirty air and knew this would define anyone caught in it too long. it was a city of ghosts still living, a vastness too old and steady for me to ever really comprehend.

grassy plains stretched out along the roads that I grew up on, and fog rolled through mountains I'd met at birth. the familiarity was wearing me down, until the landscape shifted just slightly and showed me something I hadn't seen recently, a subtle change of scenery so reassuring that I wondered where I was for a moment. I had trained my eyes not to rest too long on these hometown sights from the fear that I would not be able to turn away; that what you once belonged to owned you always and would one day come to reclaim. But I looked, and the rain and the peaks and the prisms of light told me that while there were a million ways to be unhappy, there were still more secrets to seek. there was new living to be done on distant coasts as young flesh ought to find.

-blh/2006