carmen f*cking rios

Sometimes I feel very sad Sometimes I feel very sad Ain't found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into Sometimes I feel very sad Ain't found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into I guess I just wasn't made for these times

cause the smell of her perfume echoes in my head still cause I see my people trying to drown the sun in weekends of whiskey sours cause how many times can you wake up in this comic book and plant flowers?

for a split second i thought maybe this is how the spiritual journey ends, and then i saw a photograph in the gallery of a palm tree reaching toward the very edge of the sky in a sea of blue, with just one cloud, and i remembered why i came here. i sat at home in despair and then i realized the sun had come out. i woke up wondering how much longer and then i rolled the windows down and took as deep a breath as my chest could hold. i made up a reason to drive back up that mountain road, the curves just like i remember them, every instant of it so familiar that i already forget what it looks like, just how it feels, all that wind carrying my music across the canyon. i took the dog on a walk and stood in warm light. i drove the same route i used to take when i worked in that gorgeous building every day and i didn't know why but i started crying. i thought what if what if what if and i vowed to write again. i sat in front of the fireplace and tried not to think about my to-do list. i ripped pages out of a magazine and promised myself i'd make something beautiful out of them. for a minute there i wondered where i'd gone, and then the traffic cleared and i found a new way home.

i had to tear them out of the ground, i had to dig the soil out of the wood and fill the bag, and for a minute last summer i was sure everything i had ever deigned to do well would wilt. i had to water the plants with hydrogen peroxide and scrub the ceramic with rubbing alcohol and the stain peeled off the chairs after the rain. i tossed what was brown over the fence and cut down my one source of shade. every time i see the flowers, white and pink and green rising out from the rocks, something soft on something brutal, something living in a valley of death, i think about the grand canyon. i think about all the places where green grew over grey and brown and red, all the routes where mirages became real, all that water under the bridge. i had to grab low at the root with my fingertips and pull, i shut the door and covered the yard in peppermint oil, and then when i surrendered something beautiful appeared.

when i was barely twenty i slept in jfk, three seats next to the front door because they wouldn’t even let me into the terminal. it felt like a poem. i landed over and over again on the way to san diego, each time with my song synced to the drop in my stomach. it felt like a movie. on an airplane i decided i was big enough to get myself here, to cross route forty away from anything i had ever known and toward something else. when i land this time i hope i remember her, all those versions of myself staring out of the window waiting for something like catharsis in the middle of chaos, and exactly how she found her way home to herself.