Sunset bath

It’s been one year since I’ve lived in Los Angeles.

I am buzzed on the last 12 months –
all the ways the city has enveloped me.
The growing familiarity of Koreatown, the purple line
and all the others I sit beside, whom I will never know,
their full lives interwoven, perfect next to mine.

The way the pizza burned when I heard the news she died.

The ways I drove across the country in search of something
I had to go the other direction in to find.

The ways I can’t recall my neighbor’s names,
but sing to their dogs through their open windows.

The ways I learned to lean into him,
and all the ways he let me.
The ways he skated, tasted, talked
He, a real and tangible blue bird day –
who transformed into a foggy fantasy.
The ways this weird, cold Angeleno rain
poured harder as my heart sank just out of reach,
when he told me he didn’t feel the same.

The ways I’ve said goodbye
over and over and over and over again.
I hope I start to see all those goodbyes as points in time
that all began with electric, opportune hellos –
and in-betweens that are too grand to comprehend.

I wish I could replay
every moment I step outside
my apartment on each new day –

I’d like to see myself when I become witness
to the ever-changing flora & fauna,
the grilled chicken smoke from the
fast food restaurant on the corner.
and whatever’s on the menu –
wafting from my neighbors open windows.

I think I like me most when I’m moving through the air.

Can I pour the sunsets, all the glorious sunsets into my tub? I’d like to bathe in every hue of pink and purple. Maybe wrapping up in all that color would make me different. Maybe I’d be different then.

I walk forward through it all.

This, this sensation of unknowing.
I’d like to lay down in the middle of it,
but I fear I’ll miss out on
what’s waiting for me on the other side.

I keep walking through it all,
but I don’t know where the rain starts and my tears stop.
I don’t know what’s coming next.

What if the sun never returns?

What if all the what if’s

that circle inside my head,

what if they are true?

I have tried not to dissect every inch of this year,
but the harder I try the more I cut each moment into non-existent,
confusing fragments - bits of bitter sand that I find in my shoes,
in bags, in the cracks between the floor and trim that I can’t wash away.

It seems the sand will always be where it is.

I can feel an unwavering perseverance
deep, deep, deep, deep inside of me.
I am buckling, yet I am determined to stay tall.
I have stood still as fires erupt and buildings fall,
and smoke fills the streets
as loss constantly seems to punch me
every time that I get up again.

I welcome falling to my knees.

Maybe the closer to the earth I get,
I will witness worth, in all of it’s fickleness –
wading through the grass
and straight into my mouth
so I can breath it in again.