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All the things I need are sitting next to me, unused. Another package arrives for us at the post office, full of more. My nose aches as it is carried for twenty minutes through the cold air outside, covered with a mask for 7 minutes, then carried back home for twenty more. Just above, my brain wonders if last-years’ boots still blend in with the Berlin scene. They could use a polish – and of course we have some at home, sitting on the shelf, waiting.

At home, flowers are pink and yellow and purple, soaking sweetly in slightly yellowed water. They don’t know about the recent snowstorm. They don’t know I’m waiting to hear from you. They are just flowers, pink and yellow and purple.

The laundry machine swirls. Does it smell like vinegar in the kitchen, to you? I used the rest of the bottle this morning to clean the black mold out of the place where you put the soap in. If your clothes smell faintly of fish n chips from the seaside, this is why.

My head aches like a hollowness. There was so much and is so much still coming. Packages and life and dentist appointments we need to make next month and airplanes and phone calls and feelings. She’s so little but she’s starting to see it, too: the depth of all of this. The distance. The places you have to walk in your big girl shoes. The height of an airplane up in the sky. The memories of snow-people you made last week, last year, before it all melted away into something more. The ways you keep changing, the ways people keep changing – good and bad. The sunshine and the darkness and the way trees look covered in too much snow.

Sleeve Season: I’m learning how to sew sleeves. Making things from other things is special. Historical. Important. Useful. Hopefully doesn’t end tragically. Come over and watch, we’ll make something together, end it all with a big group hug, surrounded by sleeves, screaming, stuffing more things into this life, stuffing more arms into sleeves, more arms around our loved ones, keeping them safe from this life that’s ever-changing – good and bad.

He screams, roars, yells in the other room. He is a beast – we are all animals but we have lost our first voices. We cook with wooden spoons, move with metal cars, walk with rubber soles – we made nothing of it. I make nothing, sitting here in different countries on the Earth. It is not special, we will all end up back where we came from. This room is a breath of air. This day is 24 hours of trillions. We are nothing and I have yet to be anything at all.

His beer bottles rattle in a bag like bones picked apart and broken for marrow. He sips everything down – he’ll get you, too. Beer bones, protein teeth – her wilted hair needs watering.

Magic boy’s in town. There is a gold glowing path where they have walked. The sea parted and he and his friends went in. Not you, crazy man in the back of the dark apartment. Stay still. Be still and not seen. Fill your beer bottles later with the leftover water from their party in the river. Drink it down, get wasted on wastage, age faster and with a growing loneliness that no bottle can fill.

The journey was for nothing. They haven’t learned anything, Mr. Churchill. They will all kill each other again, clean it up, grow peace gardens, pick the fruit, eat it down to the roots, forget why they were hungry, get mad, find the old war. We shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be here with his beer, drinking the same bottle down again, filling it up, losing hair and teeth and collagen, wrinkling down to the bone, fading away, filling up the Earth with broken bottles and coffins.

1.They can come back. It won’t be the same, but it will be better than emptiness

2. I know you love your new human and all, but everyone else really doesn’t need to see each picture you take of it. Thanks.

3. Look further out.

4.Floss your teeth, god dammit!

5. We are all family.

6. Are we getting better and worse at being nice to each other at the same time? Do we need to police each other’s niceness? Do we need to rate all of the social interactions that ever occur?

7. Dropping your cell phone is the same as dropping your baby, change my mind.

8. It doesn’t matter. We’re all going to die. It does matter. This is your life.

9. We are all still here. You’re still here. Hello. Thank you.

10. Do kids still build tree houses?

Hey Infinity is 6 years old now – being just have had a birthday this month. And no, no one sent it or me birthday cake. Yes, we are offended.

This means I created this little space on the internet when I was 20. Back when I wasn’t legally allowed to drink – one year before I bought my first (and only yet) bottle of adorably pink, strawberry Boone’s Farm wine, and tiny rainbow-sprinkled cupcakes for the crazy 21st celebration I had with my friend and her cat. One year after I voted in my first Presidential election, smiling as I colored in the tiny bubble with a pencil to support Barack Obama, thinking to myself that much-younger me would have been shocked to know that my Republican parents’ opinions hadn’t stuck with me to adulthood.

When it was a new infinity and not a 6-year infinity veteran, I ordered some tiny business cards that have the website on one side and “I think you’re beautiful” on the other.The idea was, I am pretty sure, to give those away to people so they knew this place existed, or forcefully leave them on cars, or stick them in random places wherever I found myself – all of which I never did. When they arrived in the mail, I opened my package to find someone else’s cards, listing actual helpful information like a contact email. I emailed the lady, told her I had gotten her cards by mistake, and suggested the following: She would probably get my cards in the mail soon, and when she did, we would swap, and also report the error to the printer, thereby getting another order for free from them. And she agreed! It worked out well in the end. And so, yes, I have two tiny boxes of tiny business cards that I still am planning on someday giving away. Probably. Maybe in 6 more years.

I’ve been thinking about that statement a lot recently. “I think you’re beautiful.” Six years ago, I was infatuated with newness. With people. With places and all that they held. The world was magical to me. I wanted to see all of it. I wanted to tell everyone that they were a beautiful story. I wanted to write them all poems about the sky.

Right now, it is so hard to feel that way. Is it not? There seems to be so much more hatred and violence and sadness and fear and global warming. Our planet is dying, and we are dying, and our teeth are falling out.

I know it is all still there, everything I used to see. I am searching for it, still. I want to feel all of those things again, and just as deeply. It was a wonderful way to be.

There is goodness and beauty. There will be safety and logic. We will keep going, together. Please send cake next year.

“The trees are too tall, they block the moon,” says my bosses’ son from the backseat as I drive him home from school. It is a short and poignant thing to say.  “They are pretty though, aren’t they?” I ask, and he agrees. It was a simple observation, one that led to a conversation about the moon and space and sunlight and how trees wouldn’t be very good to eat. It was a short and quiet moment in the busy, loud life of a three year old.

In some writing class in college, my professor told us about how his brother had been a forester in the pacific northwest, and how he had fallen from a tree and shattered all of the bones in his legs. I wonder if that guy thought trees were too tall or if they were beautiful or if he only did it for the money.

It is raining here in Los Angeles. It must be good for the trees. There are puddles on my balcony. The streets shine. I sit and listen to the rain and wonder if it all comes from the ocean, and how long it will take to get back there.

My job is terrible and dull and it makes the people who stay there for years terrible and dull. Sometimes we sit around a table and talk about other people’s money. Last time this happened I remembered sitting at a table in Seoul, staring at a tiny Korean girl refusing to eat her lunch. Those two situations were very different but very much the same. It is all some kind of strange humanity.

Someday there might be someone who loves me more than someone else’s money. Someday there might be someone who loves the trees because they are beautiful and not because they can be cut down and sold for lumber. We will grow tall and strong together in the rain.

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He walks into his life with a nasty grimace on his face. He is tired of everyone already. It is all repetition with only a few beautiful moments. It is all time being traded for other things not as priceless.

He got a tattoo on his right arm near his elbow when he was about 23. It says family, even though he hates his family. He stole his mother’s jewelry and gave his sister a black eye for Thanksgiving. There’s more, but that’s all repetition and no beautiful moments.

In the Summer, in some places, there is light for 24 hours. It is hard to sleep. People get used to it. Then it changes. This is important but you can figure out for yourself why.

The man with the grimace loves me. He’s not very good at showing it. So instead we fight and give each other figurative black eyes that last for months and stop us from speaking.

My brain hates repetition. The same office chair, the same people, the same city, the same stop lights, the same food, the same love, the same words, the same good mornings, the same country, the same world. Everything gets better and then worse and never really changes. And we get used to it. The sun rises and sets. Bruises heal and we mostly forget them until the next one.

My memory is bad. Worse, I think, than most peoples. I don’t know why. It’s never been very good. Maybe my brain is bad. Too simple. It thinks simply. Uses small words. Is incapable of remembering. Doesn’t care about trying to sound impressive when the story can be told easily and simply and slowly.

I love him, I think. But we will always keep hurting each other. We don’t get used to it. We don’t have the words to get along. Most things are not tattooed and permanent. Love isn’t. People aren’t. Repetition might be.

 

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I am a fucking child of snow.

I flew into Detroit the day before Christmas eve and saw the blanket of white covering our bit of Earth. Veins of streets that had already been plowed and salted and driven over fearlessly. Strong winter people.

I had a window seat and as we landed I watched the world tilt and wrote poems in my head about the lines and the white and the snowy trees; “Thin but sturdy mother fuckers who hold their weight in frost every year.”

No wonder we are better at living our lives than those sunny Californians. Not living through seasons seems like the equivalent of being an only child.

I would like to tell him to stop listening to the songs I sent him. I would like to tell him to forget me. I would like to pretend none of it ever happened. Cover it with snow and let it melt away in the sun a few weeks from now.

I am a strong person. And weak. I am a snow-covered tree.

Seasons are reliable. Unreliable weather is reliable. My memory is bad. My sight is getting worse. I am old and still have no idea where I’m going and it’s getting harder to see.

I love you but it is cold and California is far away.

Can you hear yourself talking? Sometimes all I hear is the loud noise that comes from your lips. The whining empty words that don’t mean anything, the drift-less thoughts, the sentences just filling up time and space.

I wish I could sing like him. I wish I would take the time to learn how to make music, how to make more beautiful things. I can’t hear myself; I only listen closely to other people. I can hear when you’re not hearing me.

His hair is shorter now and his face is long. I remember the sounds in the room, the stillness of standing alone. My stomach grumbles and she asks me how to make soup. I will dream of it all tonight, music and carving potatoes and sharpening knives in the tiny, dirty kitchen.

When I wake up she is still here. A lot of people have disappeared, somehow. I am grinning and my jaw hurts. He tells me stories about the bay and people who ride bicycles. I imagine all of the roads I will have to drive on between here and there. Where will all of my books go, all of my stories?

I have so much to say, but he is not the one to say it to; I know, I’ve read the list of approved questions and answers. I have met him before over the years, I can see him and hear him well. My guitar is leaning against the wall; it’s ready to go, it’s waiting, too. Beautiful and terrible things and people just want more of everything even if you don’t have any to share.

The conversation goes on without me. He is singing in the background of my head and I’m not paying attention. Are you always this quiet? They ask, they are the same people, I have met them all before, I will meet them all again, I will love them until they don’t say enough.

She is eating a cheese sandwich somewhere on the other side of the world. She finally found a girl who will laugh at her jokes. She speaks softly and wants more for you than what you have. I want to be strong like her someday, I want my strumming hand to be strong, I want him to smile in photographs.

He is a straight boy with dyed black hair and thin lips. He looks like a mass murderer, really, but he’s wonderful. She swears to me she won’t talk to him today, but she does, she does, she does. I send her pictures of flowers and we talk about things that are important and I don’t feel guilty afterward like I’ve done something bad.

It seems like everyone good will end up there with me. You know how to tell the difference by now, don’t you? What good is growing older if we can’t shake their hand and see the outcome? But that is why you and I are not the same, that is why I love the people that I do, that is why you’re staying there and we’re leaving here.

She sits a little too close to me on the couch because she is drunk and happy and she shows me all of the pictures on her phone. Her fake nails are too long and she swipes hard at the screen. “Here’s where I grew up,” she says, “back here along the coast.” She is from Hawaii and she tells me the names of the islands and I have never even heard of them before but I nod along as she points them out in the picture she took from her airplane window seat. It’s raining outside, it’s that sort of drizzle that hangs in the air while at the same time falling and making unavoidable puddles on the ground. Everything is wet and everyone’s hair is turning into frizz and the man with the large beer belly passes out beers and pours strong drinks into tiny plastic cups. I cut lime slices for him and stand behind the rickety table that was never meant to hold so many bottles of alcohol. Everyone adds ice to their cups and the ice melts and their cups stay full and strong and no one ever needs to leave the couch for a refill. People sit closer and closer together and talk louder and louder over each other. “More ice!” Says the beer belly man’s father, bringing a fresh bucketful and sliding it onto the table in front of all the bottles. The table is littered with half-squeezed lime slices and half-moon rings of water and empty cups and full cups and beer bottles and pieces of ice slowly melting. Outside the workers from Jamaica pass back and forth with their maid carts and luggage carts and garbage cans and wagons full of grass clippings and hedge clippings and gardening tools. Everyone is interested in the people who are so clearly from somewhere else but are so friendly and hardworking and kind. I think about the boy I knew in college who was from Jamaica, and knowing someone from there makes me all-knowing. “I knew a boy from Jamaica,” I say to the people on the couch. “He was happy, too.” I watch the people as they pull their wagons and carts and cans and I wonder if they are happy or if they hate all of us for being loud and fleeting and cheap, for not tipping when they bring our bags to our hotel rooms, if they want to go home, if they are excited for this adventure, if this is just an easy way to make money, if they hate this island like I do sometimes, if they love it like I do most of the time. It is raining and my bike is outside rusting even more. The man with the beer belly is loud and he thinks he is very important. He is happy pouring drinks and talking to everyone about sports and hurricanes and the one time he was in a tornado and his father’s lack of hair and the city he is currently living in. He tells us all about the earthquake last week and the flooding in Texas and the tornadoes in Missouri. My drink is finally gone, the one tiny drink that became an endless, watery drink. I walk outside into the other watery drink, my hair curls more, people ride by on bikes and others pull wagons and carts and cans. I walk and I wonder if the man I pass hates me, if he cares at all, probably not, he’s fine, he’s happy, I’m sure, I’m not sure. They go on walking and I go on walking and the drizzle hangs in the air and the woman pushes hard on the screen of her cell phone and shows everyone who will listen and the beer belly man scoops more ice cubes into cups and tells everyone about floods and earthquakes and Ann Arbor and how he shaves his head because he’s bald now just like his dad.