I'm lucky to have lived such an intimate life. I have tossed over a cliff a tiny leather pouch I picked up in Greece, and its contents, the used-up molar of a former lover. I don't know how closely it landed to where HeyZues, the rooster's corpse had been a meal for some eagle or coyote. The tooth was heavy, so I think it flew out beyond the threadbare teddybear with black button eyes, and red plaid cotton baby blanket I'd used till I moved out of the house when I was seventeen. My mother had sewn the quilt, and red yard ties every few inches apart. The ties were little red nubs now, like a pox, the last time I saw that quilt as it soared out across the salt-blue sky over the cliff above The Columbia River somewhere before my 48th birthday. I imagine birds picking threads from it, and stuffing from the teddy bear, to make a nest the way I saw birds do with Ramona, my cat's hair, the last time she was combed in the yard before she died.
Thinking of these nests move me even deeper internally. I am a recluse inside a hermit's heart. I am raving that my stories are so intimate I could tell them only to a trusted friend, or write them as a fiction. The external stories are there, I too had a first fish I caught; it made me sad, and there was a red collar on my shirt the same as the blanket. (My mom chose red plaid for me. My choice was the color of freshwater pearl. I would have painted my room freshwater pearl pink if allowed. When I could, I bought angora with pink flecks, just to feel softness.) I had a first kiss too, but being only five years old, and me having compelled a four-year-old to come with me behind a mattress leaning up against the wall in our dark garage, to face each other, cross-legged, and kiss, made it feel to intimate to tell. I couldn't have imagined, being so young, the context of a mattress, then, but darkness, I knew, was where this secret kiss should happen.
I turned the light onto life's intimacies a million times, whenever it tried to turn inside-side-out, I reversed it to to turn outside-in-again, and I adjusted my eyes to the dark. Alone in a crowd on a yacht in Newport Bay, alone, because I was the only person sober on a boat my parents made the rare error in what they thought was good judgement to let me, at 16, go with a friend and his family, not knowing they and their young teenage kids would be sauced and diving off naked into the bay. I saw fun, I witnessed it, and tried to find the steering wheel and figure out if I would be able to drive the boat back, in the event the adults forgot how. The other teenagers were drinking too. I wanted to join them in their revelry, but I hadn't been drunk before, and I had never seen adults drunk (maybe not even drinking alcohol, up close) before that day. I didn't know that drinking adults could still drive a boat, and get us all back safely to shore.
My memory is of the intimacy of fear (afraid they would all being caught by my teetotaling parents!) and a misplaced sense of responsibility that we wouldn't drown. I must have been such a wet rag, but the gold on the water painted its way to the quiet in my heart.
I grew there, among the bronzed and oily laughter, and waves smacking the boat, I grew a fine coat of other new sensitivities, a refining knack for intimacy as a way of life, for internality, at first as a way from feeling so outside ever again, and then as a lens to see the brightest colors, and the fine lines, life's fingerprints. I grew into someone who could pluck gold flecks of water and see the horizon among the drunken worlds. I could be the drunkest in spirit of all, where intimacy meets the Divine, where confession is like an old map with frayed edges, beautiful, preserved for its keys to buried treasures/ I find my stories don't have a beginning, a middle, or end. Their arc is always soaring deeper and deeper, they are tones, they are shades, they are grasshoppers whispering at dusk, and they move me closer to the center, where there are no boundaries, and no need for them. What to do when you dropped your stories before they even got made, when all your stories flowed past you like a river, while you were watching the light mirror in the eyes of this beloved, or that? You get to celebrate that.
I'm delighted by the feathery toy dangling before my paws in the form of this external world, with its contrasts, the holograph I can validate like a parking ticket at Intimacy's great hall, and I can drive out, free.
