cutting great neck

again in one of those moods, longing for israel, reminiscing, engulfed by music, wanting to know what type of person i would have been had we stayed.

would i have listened to this music? stayed up hours trying to listen to it? to remember it? to remember the roughly pouring words that fit into one another like wooden blocks. to remember: the night, blacker than black, the white plastic chairs on the balcony, the balcony, the 90s, crumbling apartment structures immersed in age spots.

i know where i’m doinga my semester abroad.

i’ve realized that i need more human connection.

perhaps it’s the frank sinatra single that has just rolled, or the fact that i’ve been hosting second cousins whom i’ve never met and yet truly enjoy spending time with. perhaps it’s thinking about this new world, attempting to take into mind every single kind thing that anyone has ever said to me (only genuine ones) and knowing that nothing could be genuine if it’s not part of a connection.

and missing that.




i need someone to swallow up the expanse of feelings inside me, to cause it and understand it. i need many people like this. i need to live in a community of people like this.

i wish i could go to the army, without the war. because—that’s what i think can make me feel belonged.




and it’s night. my favorite time.

great neck night.



i’ve never experienced anything like it. maybe it’s the black vastness of vibrating leaves, how each loose dark speck hangs over us and webs with all the others into a curtain of night. or it’s the wall of silence that separates the island from the city. or the peninsula, draped in the long island sound that keeps it so hushed.

fade into you mazzy star.



i remember driving around in the mountains in the desert somewhere, east of san diego, perhaps driving back from death valley or utah or big bear. a long black valley expands forward as you drive on the edges of its bulky red mountain borders, the road like some kind of ribbon that seems to slide into the mountain valley and the car just an infinitesimal speck riding on it.

it was sunset and the wavering maroon shadows of the sky pooled across the valley. we were alone on the road, the solitary witnesses of the purple dying fizzle of the sun. sometimes a car curved out into the road ahead of us from beyond a mountain; white orbs danced from behind us once in a while.

i love the desert, the mountains, the valleys for that reason. the pine trees glowed like embers. streaks of orange light corralled along the cliffs and died down into a blue obscurity.



and fade into you comes up on my zune.

--how can i say it? listen to the song for a moment: torched strings that peel away in the rural night, when only the cowboys hear 'em--the way they seem to fade infinitely away into the melody, into the clattering bells and into the hounding voice, the one that seems so, so resolved, so resigned, and yet it persists, it sings, it--it reverberates and echoes.

it's beautiful.

and the combination of me in the car, from this polarized window, all alone with the music looking out into the dying rays of the sun in this lonesome, empty green valley, with the haunting solitariness of this song...



---

i remember this because my zune broke apart very recently and i was just reminded of it after the song came up on itunes. and this memory has remained with me for no reason at all, one of those insignificant details of life that accidentally leaves a mark.

when old songs revisit me, so do old feelings, feelings that rise up in me and crash inside like a great big blue wave.



i am writing this at 12 am on saturday, june 13, 2010; classical gas by vannessa-mae is on itunes; i’m about to read the nytimes mag and atlas shrugged; on a word document because my internet’s down, i have no plans to revive it till i wake up.

i wait incessantly for the right darkness to settle into this room.

i already miss the winter. my first real snowy winter. i miss waking up in the night and letting the raw cold fill up the room, filtered by this window and kept away at arm's length by these walls. i miss the piano songs that ring in the ice. the way the blackness seemed to swallow one small yellow streetlight that blinked in the distance from my window like a star and made me miss summer.

i am isolated and insulated all at once. maybe this is why the words sound so similar?

these green trees greenest than green pour around my house like an insulating blanket. they're one solid dark green color that packs into this window like a thick liquid grime.




---



an old french song comes up on my itunes.

i miss a world i forget. i miss being five, traveling through europe with my family, those auburn stone-laden alleys, the blue july noons, so clear and distinctly airy, light.



i miss what i would never be able to do and be and have again. i miss those moments that seemed to wash away from me like water. i miss old friends, old houses, old lives; and the new ones that never came to be.

i'm lost in the wood.

this black world fills up like an empty jar in the rain.

i'm sitting here all alone in the darkness

and the emptiness--borne out of the black hole of this night--just squeezes the life out.



my eyes lock like chains.

drooping head, fingers dead.

i'm tired.




crumpling into this chair.

hotel california by gypsy kings, such a beautiful song.

now the night plies in strings across my room and forms a vast black web with thin, supple cords that swallow me.




i am so tired.

i did the ncte impromptu today. i feel like i did well--i wrote something about israel, something intimate and weird and yet strangely something i had never contemplated before.



good night. off to the warm bed.

we're so lucky to be here.

the sun on this side of the ocean is red and it sizzles on every green leafy tree that it binds to. the way the city is black and the smoke as thick and old and suffocating as the ocean and yet it is forevermore beautiful.



sometimes

i wonder how life came to be.

i don't believe in the idea of soul. how each one of us has a "wavering flame" that burns inside that pulsating, copper-crusted organ that tries to rip through our chest's pulmonary muscle like moses through the red sea. the existence of death contradicts the "soul."

soul:

scientific ember of life, residue from the eruption of god.

our soul is nothing but cells multiplying inside. neurons transmitting an action potential that jolts us into being--breathes "life" into us--and blows up, spews little green spinach sparks all over the place and with this electricity gives us the ability to

be

alive.

when flecks of the universe collided in the black nowhere where nothing was and nobody existed, something ruptured like a split vein and somewhere life spilled out.



burnt marshmallows that spray their pale pulp into the world like a mother giving birth. in spanish: dar a luz--bring, give to the light.

i'm scared. i'm frightened. there's nothing in me that burns and life is like a balloon that never stops swelling.

maybe i'll just burst one day.




it's like the universe that never stops expanding.
our universe.

have you ever thought where it could go?

where would all that empty space come from?

maybe,
we're just getting smaller

and smaller
and

freeing up some black space for the universe to edge into.

once i wanted to be the greatest.

i woke up one morning and set out into a new life. this is the moment when the main character: springs out into the world like a freed fetus brought to life, with the inky blue sky pulsating like a great big heart that fills out the world and the sun streaming like rain down it.

i was trembling with the fearlessness of wanting to be the greatest. it wasn’t courage but rather a naive un-knowing, a greenness that opens up like a flower in your veins, squirting out venom.



there i was: not knowing who i wanted to become, but knowing much, much more.

i had no vision of the future, only a vision of the present. i was the greatest, and still am to some degree; the only person whom i truly feel comfortable being, the only person whom i confide in incessantly, the only person whom i can totally, unapologetically relate to and rely on.

and the new life i set out into? it slowly weaved into the other lives i’ve led, and they had all become great.

great in the sense: complexity, so complex that they become simple.

and that’s life. that’s all life, yours and mine.



greatest i did not become, i am not. there are many more great people out there—so many more that i have let my innermost pompous dreams corrode like a rock against an ocean of superiority.




but now i am here, the rain pumping furiously against the black outside, through it, a rough fusty coat pouring around me and with hair matted by cool shower water, the yellow light like a playful insect leaping around corners in my room, and i feel... great.