beginning at 33.

she jumps up toward the christmas lights strung from tree branches to apartment eaves.
there are reasons to like winter. the branches, the lights, the night air like it is spring where we are.

we read our fortunes in a self-help book. we are predators. we have to focus. we should only pick our favorites.
we could recreate the moors. we are in party dresses. band photos. we could do those dance moves. we could only leave places by dancing out the door.

walking in the morning my mind rushes and floods. i want to write. i want to write until i understand or until something feels properly kept. i stop at windows. boots and furs and layers of necklaces and the plastic shoulders of the mannequin. a giant bed in the window. flowers woven through the chain link.

beautiful things and the things i need.

we walk home in the middle of the road. in the morning he wraps his arms around me. we laugh so hard. there isn't that much to clean up. there are cupcakes leftover. my dress is on the gold chair. i sit on the floor and he sits on the couch behind me and teases me. i open the window. i understand our record player, our speakers. i bake and listen to garage rock. he remembers the stories i tell him that i forget. about the man who told me he was jesus, our lord and savior. about the woman on the bus with the corn in the cob in her purse.

at one point i just looked in the mirror, at its frame, and the glass as long as my body.

'you're lucky, laura,' he says. 'you have a good life.'

how she sings and sighs her exclamations, how he says impetuous and brave. the matte mirrors on the road, the tired hipster boys sitting on benches with their skinny legs and coconut water. a photo of her great-grandfather with his name on the wall, and hers. a photo of the white walls of greece. a photo of my grandmother, her trench coat and black high heels.

we sit on the couches in the dark. we crowd. we get close. we play games we disagree over. we talk and talk and talk.

chances to be zen are scattered all over these shining hills. my bike flat. my spider bite. ingredients. walking all the way back. waking up to read the book that is his fictionalized real life sea voyage. fiction and our memories are the same, he says. it's ok. he looks sexy wearing the tiny silver gun below his throat. not fighting the man who sits beside me at the table. sitting on the steps to eat food. kale soaked in vinegar and oil. cabbage. tofu. lemonade with ginger floating in it.

magnetic magnetic magnetic.

a sheet pulled up to project the movie, the purple sky beyond. the storm, how it might look from underneath, from storm-height, and even from above.

evoke and evocative.
sensual is sort of a silly word. but, oh, the senses. wet footprints. and kneecaps on tile. and walking at dusk. and hands on tablecloths. and how our ages feel. our height. gray stockings, or black. knuckles. whatever we feel is permanent. ink and our initials and even our pulses buzzing. the california mornings of our birth. the two little girls that just started living today. their beautiful names, the vowels, the sounds, the a, the y.

there is no way to write until i have properly explained it. that things do grow better and better. seven years ago i was twenty-six. seven years from now i will be forty. when she is my age i will be 66. darkness will descend, the book tells us. everyone flings their heads back and laughs so hard. our ice cubes melt. it is 7pm on a sunday. it isn't that we don't believe it. it's loud, it's early, it's too good and all true.

red jacket with pockets and day planner full of birds and bags of empty champagne bottles.
i have to cry at the kitchen table at midnight because i'm grateful. and i have to cry in the morning because people are actually born. can you imagine? one day they don't exist, and the next day they do. there is a lot in the world: like politics and doom and all of us melting. but there is that too. and my dress zips silver along my ribcage. some nights glow red for reasons we can't explain. and we twist. we make it.

someone you hold when they are three days into this world. that sends you zooming down white hallways. remembering, too, where they can go. we are only incandescent.

'it only brings me joy,' she says.
'me too,' i say.
she jumps with her hand outstretched toward the string of lights.
the gray chiffon of my skirt hits my leg.
our jackets.
the sidewalks where we right ourselves.

it's early and impromptu. we meet. the sentences of her lower arms. our stories. the arrests of our neighborhood. the mason jars glued to the ceiling. the tin lanterns hung in the trees. someone climbed there. blueberries and powdered sugar and slices of avocado and turkish delight wrapped in plastic and salsa described as fire and bulbs of garlic.

there is an anticipation always. what about being thirty-four? what about waiting long enough to ask. what will i get. when will she write me back and say YES. when will i act. what will i remember from this time. what stories will he remind me of. what decisions are being made right this second. polaroid film in silver and flashes of color. everyone else but us is asleep. like the nights we slid through the dark, windows down, shouting off the bridge. we are still that way. and older somehow.

a cake is smashed on the sidewalk. even that seems perfect.

'that is the point at which some other part of my life began,' he says.

the truth is in the center of you.

and it is always getting late.