Today I went on a hike with someone I have known since seventh grade, when I was on the Strikers travel soccer team and ran up and down the midfield with my unbounded lung capacity. Sucking on oranges, downing gatorade drink boxes. As I was walking along the dirt path in Chabot, I was thinking of dirt paths at Devil's Den in Connecticut where I kicked rocks and got dust in my socks while avoiding small gartner snakes that seemed wild and scary. I felt like I was in a timespace somewhere between Fairfield, Connecticut and Oakland, California and that I was 32 and 17 all at once. This happens really frequently lately. Here and there and nowhere at once.
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Walking by the park later, what a beautiful day, I saw so many people. Some were playing frisbee in red t-shirts and beige shorts and others were eating Trader Joe's pretzels and sipping $7 red wine on their blankets in the sun. Kids were cavorting around with dirt underneath their nails and inch worms in their sandals, and furry dogs with drippy mouths were trotting in circles, bumping into each other, giving high fives. I have a longing inside, I thought, to be one of those people in the park that seemed to be living as if they had sprouted from the very grass below their feet. As I walk, I keep banging up against this glass box that they are contained in. I feel like a 17 year-old at the Boston Aquarium on a high school field trip. Look at the axolotl. Look at the shark. Look at the people living a Saturday. The museum of daily life.
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I am in a fold of life. It is a strange fold, between time zones and spaces, between bodies and minds. It's a fold in which I am lying down. Sometimes, while lying, I try to meditate. And sometimes I perch my little birdie head out from the fold, and peek out for a second. Down in my fold, I don't know quite what I want or quite what I look like. I don't know who I desire, or what desire even feels like. Did I desire once and what was that feeling? If once is as good as never, Walter Benjamin, when will never ever happen once, again?
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I'm outside walking through the arcade of life. Looking through the glass windows, seeing images that paralyze me for a second, never thinking I could have possibly dreamed them up days earlier. I see outlines of figures and former selves dancing on tables and sleeping in hammocks. I'm in an alley way, a tunnel, a passage between. And I am not sure how long I will be here.
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