spill

watch a child hooking fingers through the cracks in its egg
watch the wind take a dried husk


my heart's memory is strong.

i can still recall the first hand that touched my waist
five fingers
then five more
and suddenly my cheek is resting warm above a plaid pocket,
and four feet are squeaking on linoleum
under paper banners

the music lasted longer than I could
so I broke early,
sitting on the curb outside the school
trying to identify love and not-love by the shape it took against my crowded organs.

even now
ravaged by love
spilling love from so many seams sewn in haste
my edges made ragged and soft by love
my center scooped savagely empty and refilled to bubbling bursting by love
i do not quite recognize its face.

is it
the boat that floats shallowly over a teeming sea?
the juggernaut of bare-toothed determination that growls and thrashes through years of poverty; of isolation; of a death in your arms?
the breathless promise of forever between two children?

part of me is still sitting hunched on that curb,
fingers worrying the wilting flowers strapped to my wrist,
wondering what this is.

this delectable violence;
this mouth of a thousand tickling teeth.

a love letter to salty, written far far away

I. 

“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.” ― John Green


II.

the cerulean patchwork of salt pools stitched into the bone-white shoreline of the great salt lake, as seen from the open door of a King Air slipping up to altitude


the sweet hour of rocking, trainbound peace between my doorstep and the Ogden wind tunnel

tucking myself into a wood-paneled corner of the Brighton lodge to write after a long day on skis, snow-softened sunlight pouring across my hands on the keyboard as I wiggle my toes in the fireplace warmth


the moment when my motorbike curls around that uphill corner halfway into Little Cottonwood Canyon, where the stinging, slightly mineral smell of forest pours in to fill my helmet


standing on tiptoes at my window, fingers balanced against old brick, to watch the Wasatch blush with alpenglow

lying on the teddybear softness of the climbing-gym floor, the muscles of my forearms ratcheted tight to the bone, burning and smiling


the sussurus of a needle on my father's records


climbing up to bed on the hangboard, just because

the beautiful barista in my next-door living room, peeking her blue-eyed hellos through a thick fringe of bangs as she draws my third espresso of the day

the green canvas of a summertime Liberty Park, Pollocked with dogs and ducks and hulahoops and slacklines and tattooed flesh and dervish children and balloons and so much dancing

a city chosen mine, keeper of my only root.

alone

I.

I should have known that, after the initial struggle with the biological imperative to stop at the edge, BASE jumping would be relatively easy.

After all, "risking it all for nothing" is all I've ever done.


II.

Doing one's first solo BASE jump is the conclusion of a long internal conversation. Mine started months ago, as I saw myself constantly wiggling out from big-group commitments in an orgiastic summer Valley. I knew this isn't why I'm here -- to joke and flirt and gossip and goad and sticker myself forcibly to the collective memory of the sport. I'm not here to geek the camera.

I've always chafed at the group dynamics of a busy exit; always disliked the banter of a group hiking out. I stopper up my ears with headphones. I hike far ahead or far behind, never in the cluttered middle. I hide.

I thought I'd need babysitting much longer than I did. As it turns out, I found my solitude quickly and easily.


III.

I ran the boys out late that afternoon, flashing just enough tooth to move them along without being concerned by my sharpness. I waited long after they left, dawdling, until the sun started visibly fading in the sky. I wanted to be sure I'd follow through; wanted to be sure the press of darkness would send me over even if I stood there whinging.

I started my hike in a spirit of collected certainty. The calm surprised me.

When I rounded the first forested corner, a little orange fox stopped in the path in front of me, white tailtip painting wide strokes across the green as he wagged it. He dashed away almost as soon as I registered his presence. It felt like there was luck in that, as in the bighorn bullgoat I caught grazing in a little meadow a few moments later, and in the family of deer I spooked from the trail farther along. I felt the Valley encouraging me, somehow; urging me along as night began to close in.

I stepped up my pace. I started singing to myself.


IV.

I thought it would be harder at the exit. The terror I had planned for doesn't live there anymore.

As I methodically applied my gear, I thought about how little I actually wanted to stop. I thought about how delicious this was: the simplicity of this solitude, the feeling of fabric and metal in my hands, the snap of the pilot chute in the undisturbed hush of forest twilight, the warmed-butter quality of the last sunlight, dropping through the fringe of trees. I let myself down the rope to the gravel at the exit and heard, for the first time, the sound of the nearby waterfall suspended in the air.

I heard the smile in my own voice as I counted down, then my outbreath replaced by building air as the evening Valley enfolded itself, it seemed, within the wrap of my solitary, hurtling embrace.

Clarity. Exactly.

I miss the way you occupy a chair.

I miss the way you occupy a chair.
I miss the way you fill a pair of jeans;
the movement of your breathing in my hair;
the cradle of your fingers’ inbetweens.

I miss the architecture of your stance;
The sleeping weight your arm rests on my waist;
The perspicacious thrumming of your glance;
The ocean way your lingering fingers taste.

I miss the shape you carve beneath a sheet;
the tickle of your curls against my palm;
your laugh’s arrival and its swift retreat;
the ripples of your thoughts against your calm.

I miss the sentences that you arrange;
the warming way your breath remembers tea;
your somber and your silly and your strange.
I miss the quiet way you you fit to me.

a short story about god

Once, there was a girl born with a heart so full of joy that her feet could never touch the ground. 

She spent her early childhood skimming over the world, bouncing easily on a thick cushion of jubilation, laughing heartily at everything she would see: a flower, bending in the breeze; the roll of a kicked pebble; the butcher, trimming the afternoon steaks.

When she went off to school, however, the other children began to poke cruel fun at their floating classmate. Her father, the town blacksmith, fashioned her a pair of iron shoes to help her to better fit in amongst her landlocked peers. 

Unfortunately, when the girl began to walk instead of float, pounding waves of joy surged up through her lungs. The girl began to sing -- all day and night, humming when she couldn't think of the words to fit. She sang about breakfast; her teacher's dress; the funeral director's horse; the well-bucket; the way the boys would kick each other on the schoolyard. The children at school covered their ears and wailed.

Finally, the teacher put a giant cork in the little girl's mouth, fastened on her head with a pink silk ribbon. Her parents, exasperated, did not remove it.

Plugged up and grounded, the girl began to draw. She drew, fervently, all the joyful things that she saw in the world around her. First, the girl used every sheet of paper in the house and emptied all the inkwells. After that, she commandeered her mother’s lipstick and painted all of the windows with ferris-wheels and tigers and tall men in kilts. When the teacher turned her back at recess, the little girl covered the back wall of the schoolhouse with exuberant sketches of penny-candy, riding crops, golf shoes, and birds, all lovingly rendered in rich, red mud. Infuriated, the teacher tied the little girl's hands behind her back.

So then, unreleased joy screaming though her bloodstream at thousands of miles an hour, the little girl exploded.

Two days later, the town forgot all about her.

God has hated the world ever since.

whoop

Every single time I jump is a triumph. It's my heart and mind, working together against a primordial memory of pain and loss that has been coded deep into the tissues of my body. Before I jump, I feel the muscles of my lungs wrap around that memory like an oyster works a pearl; when I land, I feel the memory pushed out in a burst of joyful noise.

escher's ballroom

I.

When I first started paragliding, I fantasized constantly about what it would be like to be able to see the wind -- to see thermals and heat signatures and ridge lift and venturis and rotors clearly defined, etched out against the landscape like a living ice sculpture, flirtatiously obvious and beckoning.

The wind tunnel has invited that same fantasy to set up residence in my musings. As I watch others fly, I imagine a ghostly watercolor of wind twisting around them.

II.

Scooting out into the middle of the tunnel for rookie head-down coaching feels a bit like offering oneself up for execution: you shuffle to the center of the glassed-in space, hands clasped to the sternum, and drop to your knees at the feet of your coach. Once there, kneeling before a crowd of eyes, you slide your hands to grasp the wires beneath you and fold into a reverent-seeming bow. The trick is to slide your head down with the quick smoothness of a practiced penitent, lest you let the wind find your chest and throw you wildly akimbo. The first few times I did it, it seemed pageantish and ridiculous. Now, it's utterly normal.

My head anchored firmly beneath me, I let the wind capture my legs and invert my body. I feel my hair licking my neck with the undulating insistence of a flame; feel my coach's hand between the very end of my gloved fingers, as though he's pulling me to the dance floor of a baroque ballroom.

I used to stay there for a while, letting myself overthink it. I would stare into my coach's chest in a wonky-legged, hovering savasana, feeling the small bones of his fingers as the wind capered kittenishly around my legs. Lately, I've been spending less and less time locked secure in that embrace, poised like one of two figures on a playing card. Instead, I let my coach's fingers slip from mine; let the wind lock me into its rippling tractor beam; let myself be forced to fly.

Most of the time, especially at the start, it was very, very hard to let those fingers go.

I'd be distracted by the engulfing sensation of the wind, its multitude of invisible ribbons wrapping my body in an ever-shifting garment, pressing teasingly into the backs of my thighs, spanking fabric against the tender skin at my waist and the insides of my arms with brutal little slaps. Every adjustment seemed to send me careening at the faces watching me from behind the windowed walls and I'd sink to the wires at the bottom of the tunnel, on my back, rolled fetal and stunned, feeling bruises bloom under my clothes.

Now, even though I struggle, there are moments of illuminating delight.

I've flown head-down by myself before, but it always seemed as though I were muscling myself bodily against a bullying foe, doomed to be quickly crumpled in the fist of my own grunting determination and thrown against the wall. Yesterday, it was not so. As I broke that tenuous connection of fingers, I felt the wind like a strong current in deep water, somber and unfightable, the subtle shifts in its pressure suddenly sweet. My spine somehow discovered where to be; my hands drifted out, quiet and questing, and I felt the wind cut in to the accustomed topsy-turvy waltz with my coach, slipping between my fingers as it danced me away. For a few long moments I stayed there, my toes feeling the edges of my little movements forwards and back, an ebullient smile pressing the apples of my cheeks into the pads of my helmet.

Even when I tumbled out, the smile stayed.

GTFO

I hate coming back to LA.

I always start strong; start tough. Start motivated.

Doesn't last.

LA dumps buckets over my fiery. LA plays a symphony of petty disappointments over the furtive footfall rhythm of the days. LA sallows my skin and empties my eyes of sparkle.

After a couple of weeks have passed here, the air starts to settle in my chest in rimy layers. I stop wanting to get up in the morning. I stop tasting food. An insidious grayness starts to wend its way up through the fist-clenched get-up-and-go I summoned when I first passed the city limits. It squeezes liquid from my eyes; it slithers out my lips in nonsense vitriol; it infects what I see when I look in the mirror; what I see in others' eyes when I'm standing in front of them. I start to feel ugly. Stupid. Slow.

It used to take weeks for the transformation to click into place. Now, it's days.

Tomorrow, I run.

Thank god.