Nothing can be taken from me because nothing belongs to me

When I was nineteen, I promised myself that I’d never pass by a beach without diving in headfirst. My years in Southern California at times seemed like a long trip through undulating fog from which I myself became undifferentiated, floating. A psychic once told me that she gets uneasy in Los Angeles because she can feel the rootlessness of the place in time, knowing also that the place would one day be eclipsed by things beyond time like gravity, like weather. No wave ever strikes the same place twice but in California the water is always cold, which is something to count on. So even though we had a show in San Diego last night, I put my head under anyway, if only to keep a promise to a teenager.

And of course my hair was ruined. Pulling up to the venue with sand spilling out of my everywhere, my still wet string bikini still strung on a hook in the van. Hauling shit with my guitar-guy strength (all in the back, none in the core). I tried to strangle my hair into some legible shape and it defied me, so I put it wherever it wanted to go, which was everywhere. What was I going to do? A low bun? When you coil an instrument cable, you have to pay attention to where it wants to go (unless you want to be a hasty teenager playing basements and ruining cables you will have to replace in your twenties — also fine but more expensive!). It’s like that with everything, though. Tap into the energy and rise to the occasion. Sometimes rising means falling to your knees.

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In an effort to connect with people in every way that I can, everywhere I am, I ask the person at the vegan restaurant what they recommend I order, forgetting that doing such a thing essentially compels you to follow their suggestion. This is how I ended up with a fried mushroom burger that I wanted less than anything.

But I was finding it hard to eat, hard to decide. I needed help. This was weeks ago, after I emerged from the airport to catch the New Jersey rail train and I found the air so temperate and the sky so uniform that I at first believed myself to have entered another building with a high ceiling. It was difficult to convince the mind that I was outside, that the ceiling was actually the eternal sky. Normally such a mistake in perception would have hardly occurred to me, but that day the thoughts keep coming and I found it nearly impossible to shake the idea that my believing the sky to be the ceiling applied all the way down. I sat down at the end of the platform and cried helplessly for a half hour, listening to Silver Jews “Pretty Eyes” and trying not to think about the train or the tracks.

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Like I said, it was a while ago. There is more to say but I’m scared of saying it, or I’m scared of scaring people. It’s all fine now, at least in the logistical sense. All I really mean is that I’ve had experiences of surrender so complete that I earnestly attended Easter mass in jean shorts on the East side of Los Angeles last Sunday. I am quick to cry now, and I don’t even say “this usually doesn’t happen to me” anymore because I have a new usual and it happens all the time.

I forget that repression is a non-directional force until I’m looking into my boyfriend’s eyes on Laguna Beach, all of a sudden remembering exactly how it felt to be twenty-one and falling completely in love with him. My sky-ceiling came down and crushed everything, and I realize now that sweeping darkness took with it not only the memories of pain and loneliness but those of love and belonging.

It’s not that I remember everything now, only that my present has ceased existing in isolation — each moment pinging other embodied experience, creating a thread that I can feel running across my whole body. This means that pain now feels like being electrocuted. And that, on Laguna Beach yesterday, loving Max felt like existing outside of time, felt like floating in pure sensation, felt like putting my head under, felt like making promises to a teenager, felt like stickysandysaltwater that I didn’t mind knotting up my hair.

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I have decided that nothing can be taken from me because nothing belongs to me. Everything I have has been given.