i'm not sure what is making me feel like this.

maybe it's to do with the walls i have been breaking down inside myself, maybe that is allowing me to see so cal for what it is, rather than what i had always feared it would be.

for so long i tied all my bad dreams and sadnesses to that geography, i gave it so much hold over me.

but it's just a place, it's filled with people who slide in and out of its boundaries, none of whom really make it any scarier than any other place.

so i have been remembering all its beauty:

thinking about its perfect sunsets, the times i saw the clouds that faced the setting sun blush pink in the presence of it's fiery lustful red. like the first time i remember ever hearing the innocence mission, in james' car, driving up to the top of the ronald reagan library, laughing that we were even there, but then silenced by the view across santa rosa, the sun dipping madly behind the hills, red and orange and pink and fire everywhere in the sky.

the thin trees that lined the drive back down to madera road, james talking quickly, speedily. i didn't even realize that he was spinning tops the whole night through.

being small, so small, the first day we moved in, 4 yrs old, sitting on my knees in the kitchen and my dad lifting me up to show me my room, walking around boxes and weaving himself through the hallway. the room i shared with my sister at the end of the hall.

laying on my back in the front yard on the grass, closing one eye and then the other, listening to the chatter of the talking leaves, santa ana winds giving each of them voices, whipping them around in circles, singing songs.

thinking about the quiet of my neighborhood, the call and crying of the coyotes, my boys, the crazy ones howling at the moon. the soft coolness of the front steps under my feet, how loud my front door creeks at 4am.

the scent of the ocean, different there than any other water i have ever been around. like salt and seaweed and sweat and how, to me, sometimes it even smells like me, heat and sex, ocean inside me, me inside the ocean.

i can't believe i left the ocean, landlocked. i can't believe how my body knew.

also tonight i was thinking about the internal life i have, and how i cherish it, and how it was borne out of the hundreds of soliatry nights spent thinking and smoking cigarettes on those front steps, or in the driver's seat of that volvo station wagon driving up and down the pch.

before the internet and before a computer, when i wrote letters everynight, never believing that they were read because of the silence for days in between.

the smell of the post office at night, wanting to slip notes into post boxes, sometimes slipping open letters into the mail slots.

always by myself, thinking to myself, private private.

i used to worry that this rich internal life would somehow keep me from being able to connect with another person, that it would serve as a barrier between myself and someone to whom i could give my heart. a chasm too big for me to explain, far too large for them to cross.

i don't worry about that anymore, i really don't. i have to believe that if someone does love me, one day, part of what they love will be the considered silence that i have no problem sitting in when i am with someone i trust.

i am a calm lake, crisp uncreased rice paper, a cool drink of water. a center and a solace.

unwrinkled forehead, slow lazy smile, coming back to a conversation from the back of a cupboard that contains thrift store tea cups and every valentine i have ever gotten.

not spacey or distracted, just concentrating on something else.

it's amazing to me that i ignored or discounted this part of myself for so long.

it's the chatter of the the leaves and their santa anas, spinning in circles and singing songs. it's not my fault that their indian summer songs are often more interesting than whatever else is going on, or what anyone else has to say, that the details sometimes blur away at the edges and i leave momentarily to catch up on a question i had asked myself earlier that day.

it's the windchimes that i left outside my bedroom window, all broken glass and faded colored ribbons swinging softly above the roses at 3am, calling to me.

i don't know what happened.

something unplugged inside me.

i don't feel like apologizing anymore.