Sunny Places

I know what I’m supposed to do.  Everybody’s told me. 

“You have to...” it always begins. 

     Have to what? 

A storm rages in my soul –       dark clouds thundering behind consternated brows –            waves pounding relentlessly inside my throbbing chest                crashing against the mute, spongy shores of supposed to. I’m supposed to calm the storm, silence the tempest,            tame my heart, rein in my passions,      step, one foot at a time, into my “supposed-to”s and lace them up                before heading out the door every morning. 

I refuse.  I choose the storm      for I cannot silence it without extinguishing my own flame.

What am I “supposed to” do?      Pretend like I don’t remember           how I wasn’t even in this world when I was around you           how – as I drove home after –                I was in a trance the whole way                     just trying to get back to reality? I’m supposed to act like       your mind didn’t get me higher            than anything I’ve ever smoked      Like your smile isn’t as beautiful to me           as the LA sunshine                 or the San Gabriels on a clear day      Like the depth of your thought           the incisiveness of your perception                the serenity of your presence             your preternatural wisdom                                       and infinite cool                     aren’t permanently impressed onto my soul?       Like the world has been the same since then? 

I

The sea was well used to dozing off next to Paita port hearing the sweet melody of that female voice well versed, no doubt, in shouting commands and impetuously declaring her passions. 

That voice entered the sea with the authority of one accustomed to dominating bodies and souls of men, women, horses, blunderbusses, swords. 

Whole passages of Plutarch recited by that voice fascinated the secrets of the sea and the fish of Paita, familiar with the writings of Tacitus and the letters of Bolívar, came and went across the Southern Ocean, just like the leopards of Kenya come and go all haughty with their beauty. 

The woman with the contralto voice recited poems, repeated ardent stories and declarations of love that she would send to a weak little man who nevertheless resisted extinguishment, a phosphorescent little man whose wife, husband, empress and slave she had been. 

Astonished the sea would hear her say: “As Themistocles was once telling Aristides that a general’s greatest gift is to foresee and preempt the designs of the enemy, Aristides replied: ‘Most truly this is necessary, O Themistocles, but the most essential and laudable for he who commands is to keep his hands pure!’”

And the echoes of the sea strolled through the firmament, and from the wheelchair of the Paita woman the words of Alexander resounded: “The sun, suspended in the middle of the sky, will applaud such pomp. O Sun, O Father!” And at times, the sea fell silent, because Manuela, attired with great splendor in her Ayacucho Lieutenant’s uniform, congregated with sweet authority the Indian and black and mulatto children of Paita, and accompanied by a blind man on the quena flute sang with silver voice a grave hymn that an old friend of hers had written, a man like her, unfortunate, despised and tossed by fate, who nonetheless puffing out his chest rumbled a speech excelling Pindarus, to sing the Arms and the Letters of the halcyon centuries. 

II

One evening, almost dark, the incantations over the sea fell silent. Gently was the door pushed, the door of the solitary emptiness of that soul of a fluttering seagull. Lovely flaming eyes, carbuncles with the look of another, of the feverish Bolívar that enshrouded her, the whirlwind of her fair hair clothed in gold the old woman’s insides, hanging up in the salons of her soul curtains sewn with pearls, tapestries with scenes of love, orchards of eroticism. 

Uttering a verse of Poliziano in his native tongue the Stranger entered: 

My name is Garibaldi, he said. I’ve come to kiss your hand, to beg you to let me behold you naked, to caress what He adored. Dante has taught us to wed the unattainable, all that is forbidden. 

Señora, I’m going to undress, to lie beside you. I want your body to pass to mine that man’s warmth, his boyish love-making fury, his perennial thirst to possess you in body and soul, and bless you with children. 

I’ll lift you up, I’ll tear you away from that wheelchair that is the throne of God’s own widow, I’ll walk you in my arms, I’ll take you to the sea, I’ll rock you to the tune of a rigadoon. 

Her breasts are erect again, like spurs elevating the delirium of desire to the sky. 

I’m going to possess you like no man ever possessed Thaïs or Ninon. I only beg you, Doña Manuela, Doña Manuelita, that you think meanwhile of Bolívar, that you imagine being in his arms, feel him deranged by the fire that burns in you forever. Here I am naked before you, my name’s Giuseppe, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and I only want to be for you that young man who danced like no one else the rigadoon in the fiestas of Quito. 

The young man that only when clasped by your arms was able to discover the taste and aroma of life. 

I’m bounding up an endless flight of stairs. It’s nighttime. All around me loom the dark, expressive silhouettes of flowing bougainvilleas and giant banana fronds.

I’m bounding upwards, filled with hope. Somewhere, you’re there waiting.

I hear your voice. “Tim?”

The shadow of a girl, slight and carefree, stands just ahead on the next landing beneath the drooping banana leaves.

I climb the last few steps – a little bit breathless; a little bit terrified; a little bit in love.

We embrace. “Did you find your way alright?”

No, Crystal, I’m still finding my way.

It’s almost a year later and I’m still bounding up those stairs, looking for you. But with every shadow-dappled new landing I reach, you’re not there.

Is that the silhouette of a girl in a hoodie and jeans? There under the dark, swaying fronds? Is that her long, flowing hair? No – it’s just the bougainvilleas.

What pushes me up these endless stairs? Why this hope still? From where?

I clamber breathlessly up the next flight. I stop. I listen for your voice. There’s only the rustling of leaves in the cool November breeze. Where are you?

I’m on the I-15, speeding through a tiny corner of Arizona where striated red and brown bluffs tower over the winding freeway on all sides. I’ve been on the road for 5 hours, bounding up these stairs towards you for 5 hours. I’m headed to LA, where you are. Maybe this time I’ll hear your voice calling out: “Tim?”

I’m not terrified any more. What is there to be terrified of? I have nothing left to lose.

Silver Lake. I roamed these streets with you last November. Is that your wonderful, perfect shadow, there down the block? No – it’s just an apparition. Perhaps on the next landing, up under the blue shadows of the banana leaves.

It’s morning. I’m pulling my socks on, on the floor by your bed.

“Go the rest of the way up, to the top of the hill, and check out the view before you head down,” you tell me sleepily. “It’s beautiful in the morning.”

I climb the last little bit to the dusty crest of the hill. Down below, our city spreads out before me, bathed in sunlight. It is beautiful.

Slowly, unwillingly, I turn and descend back down the stairs. The gentle banana leaves wave goodbye in the waking light. Orange and pink bougainvilleas cascade down like fiery waterfalls on my left and right. It is beautiful.

I don’t care. I hate to go down these stairs.

I long to turn and bound up towards you once more. What are these resplendent tangles of bougainvillea to your tousled morning hair? What do the lavender blooms of the sun-drenched jacarandas have on your wide, brimming smile? What is the carefree sway of the banana leaves to the warm rhythm of your pulsing heart?

Thanksgiving. It’s been a year now. A year since you told me, with the top down in the moonlit Pasadena outskirts, that we couldn’t be. That you weren’t “the one.”

So why can’t I stop bounding up those stairs?

Koko is back in town from Raleigh. It’s her third annual Friendsgiving, and I’m slumped in a white plastic lawn chair in the driveway, staring into the licking flames of the fire pit.

I met you at the first one of these, two years ago. At the second one, you told me you were too broken to love again, to love me. “I’m trouble,” you told me as we drove through the nighttime fog.

At the third one, I thought, I would see you again. We would talk; we would start fresh. I would listen to your stories, and soak in everything I’ve missed, and tell you that I care and that I didn’t mean to hurt you, that I had just been insecure and stupid but I’ve grown now and I’m not broken the way I was before and even if you’re still broken, I want to be there for you to help you fight your way out.

It would have been poetic. That’s how I would have written it, if I was writing the story. The third Thanksgiving. The pieces come back together, full circle.

But no one writes the story of real life. You didn’t come. I thought I saw your shadow coming up the dark driveway; it was only an apparition.

I’m almost to the next landing. I don’t see you anywhere. I’m a little bit breathless, but something keeps me bounding. I don’t know what it is. If I was writing the story, I would say that it’s hope. I don’t think it is.

The shadows loom around me, embracing me. A November breeze is blowing. My feet pound against the concrete steps. Maybe on the next landing, you’ll be there, calling out my name.

I’m still looking for you.

Sinister black trunks. Naked, angular branches. A soft blue light that fades into hungry shadows. Just ahead, a small clearing among the trees seems to glow with otherworldy verve. 

Vertically, the trees are impressive, but with almost no outwards growth. No leaves festoon their stubby, forked limbs. It is like a forest of telephone poles. 

Around the clearing, the thin black trunks stand in an eerily regular pattern. Their towering height and angled beams and delicate twig fingers give the impression of being in a giant Gothic cathedral. It is a forest of silence, ancience, and dread. 

I had been curious about Crystal’s cover photo for a while now. Why that dark, hopeless forest? Was that how she felt right now? 

“I’m broken,” she had told me. I knew she was in pain. It did not announce itself loudly, but hung around her edges like the kind of invisible blue haze that blurs the mountains on days when the air is thick. Yet her beautiful wide-mouthed smile kept it at bay and sometimes made it hard to remember that pain and doubt had closed in on her. 

What was that forest to Crystal? If I had paid more attention the last time I saw her, would I have seen the shady depths of those hopeless woods in her eyes? When I had held her cold, slender fingers in mine, was it the cold of that desolate place that I felt? If I had held those perfect hands just a little longer, and bit my serpent tongue, might I have warmed the blue clearing of her heart even as just a few weak rays of sun breaking through the clouds? 

How I want to ask her what that forest means. Crystal, won’t you pick up your phone? It rings six times, then goes to voicemail. Same as always. 

I must have practiced in my head 100 times what I wanted to say. So why do my words escape me now? The message I leave is filled with long pauses, stitched together by fragments of stupid and childish sentiments I manage to utter. “...so text me or something,” I end lamely. 

I hang up the phone. I burst into tears. 

That deathful blue mist is closing in on me. I look up: straight black trunks stretch up to a sunless sky all around me. I feel miniscule. There is no sound, but somehow the lack of sound fills my ears – like water pouring in when you dip your head below the surface. Maybe it’s the shadows crawling in. 

The trunks are all too straight. It feels wrong. Does this forest even end, or does it go on forever? There is no escape, I know in my gut. I’m not even sure if I can move anymore. No – I’m riveted at the center point of this clearing, this abominable cathedral, tied like live bait for the lapping shadows. 

I stare upwards to avoid looking into the endless mirk of the forest. The sky, however, is no less bleak. 

My desperate mind conjures a wild card attempt at breaking out. I slip in my earbuds. Perhaps these will keep the shadows from snaking in. 

The volume is all the way up. I haven’t heard this song in years, and in fact I think I only know it from some old 80s movie my parents probably watched when I was a kid. I have no idea why this long-forgotten song has suddenly and forcefully suggested itself to me, yet for some reason right now I can listen to nothing else; I need this song blasting in my eardrums, drowning it all out. 

I LOVE MYSELF I WANT YOU TO LOVE ME WHEN I FEEL DOWN I WANT YOU ABOVE ME

Just yesterday as I was driving home, I had thought to myself – I’ve finally done it. I’ve beaten the cycle of depression that tore at me for years. Six months ago, I was in the depths of despair once again as I waited hopelessly for her response. But now, I had thought with a smile on my face, I can take it, and even hold onto my happiness. I own my own happiness now – win or lose. 

I SEARCH MYSELF I WANT YOU TO FIND ME I FORGET MYSELF I WANT YOU TO REMIIIIND ME

I wonder if Crystal is still caught in the trap, I had thought next as I waited at a red light. Is depression still holding her down, keeping her broken? Did I escape it before her? Or is she doing better now too? I hoped she was. I wished I knew. 

“Anyway, I’ll be in town next week,” I had said with a halting, stupid cadence in the message. Months of confidence that I could find my way back into her life had evaporated when I hung up that call. Where did this crushing doubt come from? 

I DOOON’T WANT AAANYBODY ELSE WHEN I THINK ABOOUT YOU I TOUCH MYSELF

The song was on its sixth repeat already. I sat in the dark; the sun had fully set now, but I did not want to turn the lights on. The dark was comforting. In the dark there was only my thoughts and this song. No puffy red eyes or wet cheeks or wet snot swinging from my nose. 

I DOOON’T WANT AAANYBODY ELSE

I had her cover photo open on my screen. The hazy bluish glow of the woods was the only source of light in the room. I stared into the picture. The straight black trunks towered over my head. 

It wasn’t even my forest. This desolate landscape, this hopeless waste, wasn’t this her brokenness? How did I get here? I stared deeper into the picture. Wasn’t this the forest behind her eyes? 

I remember waking up and seeing her sleeping face across from me. I remember feeling her naked body against mine. The gentle curve of her hip as she lay there on her side was one of the most thrilling things I had ever seen. 

WHEN I THINK ABOOUT YOU I TOUCH MYSELF WHOOAH-OHH-OH

He loved California, so he had to leave it.

There in California was everything he desired: the yellow sunshine that dripped on the pavement, the palm trees that notched the horizon like inch marks on a ruler, the brown, scrub-covered mountains, the wide, curving freeways, the girl who lived on the side of the hill whose beautiful hair fell to one side of her face and whose honest words wiped clean the muddied windows of his soul.

He got in his car and drove out towards the desert. He passed alienoid Joshua trees and continued on across vast flat areas and through chiseled gorges and past where the soil became red. 

Exile called him. The things he desired were not the things he needed, so he went to the desert. 

"You have a lot of growing to do.” She took the thin black straw from between her lips as she said it. The dim red light of the bar cast her face in glowing scarlets and satiny shadows. “I do too.” There was a serenity in her voice and in her eyes that stayed with him even after that kind face returned to the fog of his memory. 

He didn’t go because she wanted him to. He went because her words were full of truth, and they shook him awake. Now his soul was in its morning, eyes still bleary. He felt that this girl, whose smile was like the sunshine, believed in the soul that he could become. So, like the ancient hermits who went to learn peace and to know themselves, he went to the desert. 

He went up into the mountains and found a cave to dwell in. On the first morning, he observed the song of the rising sun: 

In the early blackness before the day, a ringing began in the desert, so faint at first that it was impossible to know whether it came from far away, or it was a trick being played inside one’s own ear. 

The ringing grew steadily, like some ethereal drummer teasing her drumstick along the edge of a celestial cymbal. Softly, light began to creep at the eastern edge of the world, and he wondered if this strange sound itself were tugging the sun up into the sky. 

Soon the ringing filled the landscape; and it became apparent that the sound issued from the very bones of the rocks here. A dawn mist, just materializing, murmured airy, reverberant chords.

Now the cacti and the stunted trees joined in - woody limbs lifted high - warbling a euphonious prelude which at long last roused the sun to show its first blazing edge. 

In an instant, the whole expanse of sand and cracked earth became lit up by these first rays. As the light raced over them, the sands burst into joyous deafening anthems. Peals and clangs rose up towards the pink clouds, carried on the shoulders of exuberant brass lines. The sun climbed quickly now, turning orange and fiery. 

The mist cleared. The plants sighed. The symphony plinked its final notes. 

It became his ritual every morning to rise before dawn, and standing at the mouth of the cave, listen to the desert’s song that made the sun rise. He studied its notes and its chords; he hummed it in his head through the day. It carried his words up when he talked to God. 

In the desert, nourished by this divine song, his soul outgrew his body, and forgot who he had once been. He became filled with God, and felt desire no more. He did not think of the girl whose slender pretty fingers were like the lithe trunks of the palm trees and whose heart had almost found his.

He wrote his own part to the song, and sang it every morning with God’s rocks and God’s trees. 

One day, the girl who lived on the hill noticed that the rising sun shone a single degree less brightly. 

She got in her car and drove out to the desert - eastwards where the sun rises - past alienoid Joshua Trees and across vast flat areas and through chiseled gorges and past where the soil became red. She went up into the mountains and found a cave there. 

On the floor of the cave, by the entrance, was a pile of gray dust. Kneeling down, she stared at it for a long time. Her soul felt like a clock that had just begun to tick once again after being broken for a very long time. 

She took a handful of the dust and gently let it sift back down through her fingers. Some was caught by a light breeze and diffused out into the open. A sunbeam shone and revealed the floating specks; she watched them drift lazily away. 

No.

You’re wrong.

I remember how it felt – sitting there with her in that walled-in eden high on the hillside, well past the time when the rest of the city had fallen to sleep.

She passed the joint across the table to me. I remember the way her voice sounded as we talked about life and God and love.

It was so cold that night.

I remember how it felt when she looked right through me and turned me inside out and in that calm way of hers told me what she saw, and I knew she saw light. I knew she felt something.

“You have to get over her.”

“Are we done after this?” We had spent the last 5 hours together, and now we both said that I had better head home once we finished at this bar. But when we left we decided maybe we’d stop for one more drink someplace else.

I remember how it felt roaming the deserted, Monday-night streets of LA at her side. We walked til we found a pretty little spot on the corner called Home. Only a few others were there.

We took a table on the patio, where no one else was. An electric warmer burned nearby. Potted plants hung all around.

I got a beer; she took a wine. I liked how it felt buying it for her. We didn’t say anything about it. I just did it, and we both knew that it was right.

“You have to get over her.”

“You know, I have a gift for you. It’s nothing. Just something small that I made for you.” We took the long walk up the stairs to that eden outside her bedroom, the place where we had first kissed a month ago. She gingerly unwrapped the tissue paper.

“It’s beautiful. Really. I love it.”

There was so much sincerity in her voice. I suddenly noticed the acne at the left corner of her mouth. It was the prettiest acne in the world.

She played idly with her hands over the ash tray, where the joint sat smoldering. 

“Can I?” 

“Yes.”

I took her hands in mine, and gently caressed her slender fingers.

“You have to get over her. It’s not healthy. You’re treating this like a breakup, but it wasn’t. Not to her. You were the one with feelings, but it wasn’t mutual.”

“She had feelings for me.”

“She told you that?”

“Yes.”

We hugged goodbye. “Who won tonight?” We had played foosball at the second bar, the one before Home. 

“I guess it was a tie, right? 2-2.”

“The last one was for it all, we said. Remember? You won.”

“I guess I did.”

The late-night corner store winked in the darkness of this sleepy corner of the city.

A boy and a girl darted across the street between two crosswalks, her briefly clutching onto his arm as they executed their little dare.

Inside, behind the counter, a woman in a blue vest stood passively at the cash register. Here where the lights shone just as brightly at every hour of the day and night, she stood always, like an erect sentinel guarding the passage of time with a sun-tipped scepter. 

The boy and the girl entered her store. She cast an inexact glance that brushed past the inexact glances they cast towards her, which were both proud and self-conscious. The boy’s left hand brushed against the girl’s right. They hurried into the sterile, shining white aisles of the pharmacy section. 

From where she stood behind the cash register, the woman could only see the tops of their heads over the racks of lotion and medications. Watching, she pretended to gaze over at another part of the store. Under the back of her tongue she pinned the shadow of a smile that had attempted to creep into her taut, tired lips.

The heads bobbed up and down in the aisle. For several minutes giggled whispers bounced over and around the clean-looking packaging to the ears of the woman, who still wore her tight-lipped expression. When four curious eyes pushed the heads up higher to peer at her, she looked more intently towards that other part of the store, as if expecting a cavalry charge to come pouring out of the stationery section. 

The eyes darted back below the precisely labelled packets and bottles; now those whispered giggles fell down to the white tile floor and rolled slickly around the base of the aisle. Four shuffling feet followed. 

One may have been forgiven for thinking that the woman was surprised to notice the boy and the girl approaching her counter. She looked. 

The boy wore the paper-thin seriousness of a poker player concealing a winning hand. The girl came just behind, attempting a bored disinterest she had perhaps practiced while accompanying a friend to buy toothpaste, except in that situation her eyes must not have glanced so shiningly at her companion. 

Now the sentinel woman’s stern eyes directly met these two (whose elbows met as the boy placed a single silver box on the counter). 

Every detail in the faces of this young pair was revealed by the steady white laboratory light of the store. For example, these streaming lights utterly betrayed the joyful smirks erupting behind their chosen masks. If the boy and the girl had been as tall at this moment as the pride welling in their burning hearts, they would have matched this taut-lipped cosmic sentinel in stature. 

     Severely: “Find everything alright?”

     “Mm.”

The moon rose one sixteenth of an inch in the sky outside while a machine read the boy’s card. Ever so briefly, the woman flashed a tiny scowl that ran a single lap around the box, the boy, and the girl. Their hands brushed together again below the counter. 

A fresh receipt marched dutifully from a sputtering mechanical womb. The warm white square passed from old hand to young. The girl took the silver box. 

     “Have a nice evening.” The woman said it more like a warning than a salutation. 

     “You too.” 

The boy and the girl turned and walked out of the store. Crossing the threshold from light into dark, the girl lightly clutched onto the boy’s sleeve again, and their quiet mirth exploded noiselessly like the fires on the sun ninety-three million miles away. 

I’ve always looked at it as, “What different does it make?” But now I’m in a place where it’s more the exercise of doing what I believe in. It’s not even for anybody else, I believe in this. That’s kind of a new thing for me. I’m just doing it because that’s what I believe in. 

Every Tuesday night when I leave the gym I’m driving up El Camino Real and I pass this little roadside ice cream shop. “YUMI YOGURT.” It says it in big neon red letters. It’s dark by then, and that sign, and the ice cream shop, are the only thing you see amidst the shuttered, snoozing auto shops and car washes and tire stores that populate this stretch of El Camino. “YUMI YOGURT.” It hums good-naturedly, like a lamp along the footpath of a nighttime garden. Beneath the big red letters, wraparound windows glow the white electrified light of shimmering tile walls and tile floors and counters, obscured only by the bold pinks and greens and yellows of more neon signs. 

There are always people there – a small, murmuring crowd. They are people who are there with intention. People who chose to venture to this tiny universe tonight, shining so brightly so far away from anything else that is of life. Like joyous congregations of silent moths, they flit around this humming lamp in the dark. As I drive past, they seem to exist only in this saturated miniature world, self-contained and encapsulating. 

I’ve never been before. I want to go there one night with someone that matters. 

I wanted to dance with you.

Not just one more time. I wanted every day to be a dance with you, shared, felt, lived together. I wanted to put my hands on your hips and my hands on your heart, and leave them there until mine moved and beat together with yours and then still not let go.

I wanted to dive into your mind, to swim in your thoughts, to be surprised and challenged and to drown in you, then turn it all upside down so you would pour into me, and flesh and soul blend together and we would never be just ourselves again – because I was in you, and you were in me.

I wanted to travel with you. To see the world with you, learn with you, grow with you, be and breathe and die with you. I wanted to stand in the sun and laugh with you. I wanted to climb to the top of a mountain with you in the middle of the night and yell our names out over the city and then laugh again and embrace and melt into each other, press your body to mine and make you feel, make you happy, make you whole, make me whole. I wanted my face in your hair, your hands on my chest, our legs intertwined all night and never fall asleep because we were too busy looking into each others’ eyes.

I...I...I... The pursuit is selfish. I wanted it. You didn’t. I saw it, right before our grasp. You didn’t. I said goodbye.