Echo

Missile Silo.

History.

hail!

Everything is just perfect right now. Got the full moon today through tomorrow, I’m in a little apartment overlooking the ocean as it storms every night, and it feels like a portal has opened up around me. This book is exactly what I need at this exact moment. I got to the part yesterday where the main character finds the Orange Girl at the cafe and sits down at her table, and she reaches for his hand, and it’s just this moment. And I started laughing because I had written the night before I started the book about sitting down with strangers, holding their hand and their life unfolds.

I don’t know if these synchronicities actually mean anything outside of being fun and giving me a general feeling that I’m moving in the right direction, on the right track. They’re like a voice telling me I’m getting warmer, as I search to find that hidden key.

Wouldn’t it have been infinitely worse if we’d first been able to see each other every day for six months and then never met again?

This line made me feel sad and guilty.

The beach from where I’m staying. This obstacle course must be climbed every day, rain or shine!

Last night featured an even more violent storm, which attacked the windows, making them cave on their frames. There was zero visibility, and for a while there, it felt like the building might be blown away. I tried not to let it bother me, figuring that this structure had been here for a while and banking on the fact that if it’s stayed intact for this long, it will stay intact yet. I was free writing, and all of a sudden, one line came out of nowhere and landed on the page. It’s appearance was as jarring as stepping in wet, sucking mud (which, incidentally, I did today.). The line was so out of place and strange, that I pulled on it like a loose string, and a whole world opened up. I wrote for 6 hours, just taking down the words, thoughts and lives of these people like a medium at a seance, until I could barely keep my head up. There were times when I was writing and thinking, this may be my most unbelievable writing night to date. Doubt began to creep in, if this was real, if this was any good, if I could carry this out. The story, as usual with me, is out of time, out of place. All I could do was just take down what the characters wanted to say, what they needed said. Even as I crawled into bed, they kept talking to me, showing their lives to me, and even though a part of me was terrified that I would lose this opening by sleeping. I usually write at night, but by morning, in the light of day, I’ll reject what I’ve written. A part of me had to tell myself to trust it. Trust that this is real and what is happening. Trust it long enough for it to fully emerge.

I felt like I was giving birth last night, like it was something that was happening despite whatever my thoughts were on it, and I could either fight it or go with it and help it come out. I remember once, when I read about the 5th house and how it ruled either romance, children or ultimate creative output, how sometimes, you had to choose one of the three to funnel that energy. Maybe for a woman, you can either literally have a child, or you can give birth to something that spiritually, metaphysically, is as deeply a part of you as a child. Maybe in lycan country, like lichen, I have reproduced asexually. Or maybe, I just won’t know who the father is until this thing has fully emerged. It quite possibly could be twins. It doesn’t appear to be black. And yes, what a weird thing to be talking about.

There’s been a lifelong personal debate between me and people who know me. “Are you romantic?”

I never know how to answer that. On one hand, I think the answer is an obvious yes. The fact my life for as long as I’ve been conscious has revolved around the notion of a soulmate, an Other, someone my entrance into this plane of perception separated me from and whom I almost singlemindedly search for. But then I think that could also be symbolism I’ve used in my personal search for god and/or meaning. I don’t believe my Other is the end all be all. I believe he is my partner in a greater search. I see the positive potential in people, I see the positive potential in life. I want us to strive for more, for higher. My relationship with the world around me is one of idealism and romanticism, in the framework of what is realistic (read: possible) for a given plane. I believe I have the power of transformation, if the world would guide me and teach me how to use my abilities. But in spirit, in soul, in mind, I’m the ultimate romantic.

In a conventional sense, what defines being romantic? I’m emotionally secretive and awkward with romantic gestures, even though my well of emotions runs very deep. I hide things even when I can tell in moments when it would serve me to be open, I still feel a need to hide. I rarely have the guts to actually make a full-blown romantic gesture. It’s not from lack of desire, it’s from lack of comfort, a feeling of exposure. But I’m drawn to those who are more easily able to express a romantic nature, who can draw me out. I express my deep feelings through consideration, being helpful, protectiveness, a psychic safeguarding of the hopes and dreams of those I love, their well-being. People I care about matter to me. But despite this, a history of complaints from people about not knowing where they stand. Maybe they just have to ask. Maybe I don’t even know myself. How do you know when you’ve found your Other? I assume you just know. I assume, that maybe you don’t know right away, maybe for the longest time you just know that you DON’T know for sure that they’re not him, until one day, you suddenly know. Until then, I can’t make any promises. I don’t think the question is if I, by nature, am romantic. It’s been the lack of expression. But am I capable? I think if the world is open to the form in which it comes in, my heart and its capacity to love will prove to be undeniable.

All this was in my head last night as my fingers flew along the keyboard and my mind rode the waves. I realized, as I watched the words spill out, I could possibly once and for all answer that question. Often a work reveals more about the writer than anything else. I want this to show what it is I can’t seem to outwardly express through my person. I want it to end the question. I want people to read this story, and know exactly what love means to me, and to what depths and lengths I believe in this world. I’ve made an art out of mirroring for other people to help them appreciate themselves, their potential. Now it’s time. I need these words, these people, this world inside, to be a truthful, powerful mirror of me.

We are people of good timing, aren’t we?
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My mom and I went to the sports store around Christmas. I needed new running shoes, and she was buying clothes. I saw an orange pair of Mizuno’s, a color I normally wouldn’t get because its impossible to match, but I wanted them. I got em and wandered around until my mom found me and we went to check out. When we got there, we realized we had both independently picked out the same pair of shoes. “What are we, orange girls now?” I laughed. I really liked them but didn’t wear them because they weren’t as comfortable as my blue Brooks.

But when I was back home recovering from surgery, those were the only gym shoes I had in Fremont so I started wearing them every day. They kind of drove me crazy because in secret, I loved the color but they weren’t comfortable and they didn’t match anything. But I wore them every day. And then one night. The strangest conversation. It was the kind of conversation you look back on and see that it was the one that opened things. He didn’t see me as a squirrel. He suddenly blurted out that I was a rabbit! And I remember standing there thinking, where the hell did that come from.

Whoa. The Orange Girl. No wonder I was so adamant about waiting until March to read it I even hid it from myself until I got back earlier this month. Just started it last night, with the ocean storming like an inconsolable beast outside, the wind and rain pelting and howling outside my window, making the entire room shudder. It seems to be a book about synchronicity and magic, coming at a time when the world around me has again begun to synchronize and connect in more than coincidental ways. I thought March/April would be a portal. I’m starting to strongly believe.
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I remember once I’d connected with a guy and it was all very platonic but poignant and caring. At the end, I told him we may never see each other again but I wished him well, and he thanked me and said he loved me. A few months later he was threatening that if I wanted to be with soulsuckers, no matter how far I buried myself, how well I hid, he would find me and dig me out.

That conversation made me more careful. Who knows, maybe on some level of interpretation, his intentions are actually really benevolent, but he really scared the hell out of me.

I’m in a second floor room with a balcony facing the moody Pacific. An obstacle course of littered driftwood creates a barrier between the cabins and the water, so you have to climb them to get through. I’ll probably make a training course from it, force myself to work on my concentration and focus. It’s stormy here- angry winds and a battering tide. The building shudders. Outside, large rock formations are as magnificent and mystical as those of Easter Island. Love the sound when the ocean is unsettled. You can do nothing but give in to it, succumb to it. Let yourself consume the fear. Whatever happens, happens. We’re near a tsunami warning area. I want to walk around there tomorrow. That area reminded me of that Murakami story about the artist. I’m very isolated here. It’s hard for me to hide in small towns. But it makes anyone who’s watching me stand out. People usually ask where I came from. What they really want to know is why I’m here alone. Maybe I came here looking for you, I say. And they sit down and I hold their hand and their life unfolds.

Not really. But maybe it could happen that way. I haven’t tried it.

When you’re at the end of the world, so isolated, no way to reach you, and someone gets a message through? Well, that message is going to come in loud and clear.

julia hunts a lone.

I’m in wolf country — La Push, WA. Have a room with a balcony overlooking ocean with beach right outside. Gonna be here to visit with the full moon. As soon as I step foot in mystical county, the guy following me shows up on my trail. Can’t be coincidence.
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Last night I had a conversation with a man from Texas. He warmed up when I told him I’m from Texas as well. We had a great, friendly conversation about travel, life, fate, etc. He asked me if I’d ever traveled through the Far East and I told him I’ve been to Taiwan, Japan, China, etc. He asked me where I liked best and I told him I liked visiting all those places, and they were good experiences, but I didn’t really feel a connection with the people. But I highly recommended hiking the Great Wall. I recommended that he see the temples of Angkor Wat while he still can (tourism is trampling and deteriorating the ruins). I’ve always wanted to go, but I’m afraid to visit Cambodia on my own. It’s easier and safer to travel to some places in this world alone if you’re a man.

He mentioned that China would be a total “mindfuck” and that word sparked. I laughed and said that the word “mindfuck” has come up a lot in conversations lately, and that words tend to synchronize in my life, whereas I’ll be writing or thinking of certain words or themes, and they’ll pop up randomly in conversation with people, except they’ll come out of the other person’s mouth. He asked if I thought the matrix was real and I laughed and said that 2 days ago, I finally decided to rewatch the Matrix because I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I do think it’s real, or something like it. I don’t think that this world as we know it is all there is.

“You’re from Texas, so you’re probably the best person I could talk to you about this,” I said to him, and he leaned in, his eyes widening in attentiveness.

“You know those tiny, dusty little Texas towns, where there’s just one main street drag and there’s nothing to do. You grow up there, you work there, you die there. You’re bored out of your fucking mind because you hang out at the same places with the same people. You marry someone you grew up with, you’re all fucking the same people. Hell, you’re even cheating on each other with the same people.”

He was laughing so hard while I talked about these Texas shitholes; he was well familiar with them. “And the best escape they have is maybe driving a few hours to some shitty little town in Mexico, and that’s as big as their world is,” he said.

“In fact, randomly, I watched this movie about that town. It was some old black and white movie with Tim Bottoms, and Jeff Bridges…The Last Picture Show.”

“I know that one,” he said. “With Cybil Shepherd. That’s exactly the town!”

“Exactly! People in this shitty little Texas town don’t think about New York, or LA, or Paris,” I said. “All they know is that this tiny shithole is the extent of their entire world, their entire universe. That all their choices must come from this tiny place of limited options. They’re born into it, and eventually, it sucks them dry of their hopes and dreams and it kills them from the inside out. But what if that shitty little town is Earth? What if we’re sitting here thinking, this is it. This is the best life has to offer? At best, we dream of maybe moving to Paris, or taking a vacation in Australia. Meet someone, settle down, live out our lives. What if Paris is our little town in Mexico, and Fiji is the bar or pool house on Main St? What if you think you have to pick a partner from this group of people you grew up with, but meanwhile, someone who is a better match for you is out there, beyond the town limits of your tiny hometown, but you’ve never imagined it because your imagination is trapped by the confines of this place? And meanwhile, there’s an entire universe out there, an entire world of options out there, but we don’t realize because we grew up thinking all we know is all there is?”

“This place is too small for me,” I told him. “I love Earth, but this place is too small for me. What if Earth is just one little shitty town in the armpit of Texas, where people live and die smaller lives than they are capable of having, and meanwhile, there’s an entire living, breathing universe out there that we could live and touch if we could just commit to believing there’s more than just this town, this planet, this plane of existence?”

“I would love to go to Saturn,” he said.

“I would love to get out of here,” I said. “Anywhere. Just to know this isn’t all there is.”

Anna: Love bores you.
Dan: No, it disappoints me.

–Closer

Where is this love? I can’t see it, I can’t touch it. I can’t feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can’t do anything with your easy words.

-Alice, Closer

on thursday, went to physical therapy and found out i was working between a pisces and a virgo. i found how interesting it is the way the world replicates itself in different arenas.

ideas were harmonious today. people at odds.

tonight, i was at the loft. the last time i was here, i was looking for a place to watch the warriors game so i could see my parents wave to me on tv. they were nice enough to turn on the sound and i met a bunch of regulars. the bartender and i were talking and she said that she was moving to the philipines to try to find work in film, and friday the 26th would be her last night. since we had been talking about sake bombs earlier and she’d never done one, i told her i would bring her sake on her last day.

i almost forgot! but last minute, as i was stepping out the door, i remembered. the same characters who had been there for the warriors game were there, including this guy whose wife had told me, “men need to feel like they’re in charge, but most of the time, we’re the ones taking care of things. there’s really only one place they should dominate, and that’s the bedroom.”

and dancing, rie had added when i told her the story.

personally, i like a man to take charge when he truly knows what he’s doing. then i don’t care where he asserts himself, as long as he does it well. i don’t need to dominate. don’t like to, in fact. but i do demand dominion.

met several people and got sucked into their group. one of them rubbed my back for much too long, and much too creepily. another guy told me that he finds most good-looking women to have bad personalities. and he knows because he’s been in that situation a lot. he was dumb. but otherwise, had good conversations all around that featured lots of synchronicity.

at one point, i heard daft punk, something about us, come on the speakers. electricity filled my head and i remembered that this song had been inside me in february. it stirred something inside me, and i kept it close for days. the presence of this song tonight sparked me, reminded me of all my arcade fire, wake up moments, and as i went to note the synchronicity that seemed to be present tonight in music, the song changed.

even hearing the distinct opening, i couldn’t believe it. it was silvia, by miike snow, the song i’d been damn near consumed by earlier this month. curtis had posted the song burial by miike snow to his facebook, and i checked it out, having not heard of the band. the song sounded very kcrw-like so i did a search and found they’d done a live performance on kcrw last june. while listening to that a few times, i got really into the song, silvia, to the point i would wake up in the middle of the night to that song echoing in my head sometimes. i’ve never heard it played anywhere in public at random, then as i was writing about the music seeming to be synchronized tonight, it came on. it was a complete visceral experience. it hijacked my senses and threw me right back to those moments with curtis earlier this month, where we would meet and talk, but mostly just stare at each other in thinly-masked disbelief. this song had spent so much time inside me, in privacy, in secrecy, to suddenly hear it in my world outside felt like i’d been flipped inside out. like time and space had run full circle. the last time i felt like this was that day on the cruise to alaska, when i went to see those acrobats only to find their intro song was ludovico einaudi’s primavera. my inner universe had manifested outwardly, and here was what felt like the stirrings of evidence of will over matter.

i texted curtis and told him that silvia was playing and asked if he’d willed that to happen. that song is a million percent tied to him. he said he’d willed for me to be thinking about him, too. i told him how i’d watched the front door of the bar when the song came on, thinking how weird it would be if he walked into the room, wondering what if he did walk through that door. i watched the door, hard, not realizing until much later that i was holding my breath.

yesterday, i had heard the lady antebellum song that i had recently spent an entire day listening to, and pondered the lines, another shot of whiskey can’t stop looking at the door…wishing you’d come sweeping in the way you did before.

how many times in a life does a person think about someone, long so achingly for someone that they stare at a door thinking, what if he or she walked in right this moment? Even if it meant a transcendence of time and space?

but it never happens. you always wonder, “what if?” but there’s always reality to contend with.

he asked me what would i do if he had walked in. i told him i would believe in everything.

i always said that if i dropped my keys into the ocean and found them again years later unexpectedly on some distant land, i would believe in god and universe. if he’d walk through those doors today, somehow managing to surmount time/space and appear, i would have believed the unbelievable. i would have believed our minds are stronger than the world we live in, and we can create our own worlds and make them habitable. it would have gone beyond just proof of magic. i would have found proof of belief. and i would have taken it as the universe giving me permission to unleash.

but it didn’t happen. reality marched on.

he asked me what i would do if he had walked in. i told him i would believe in everything.

i’m not everything, he said.

what are you?, i asked.

something, he said. special to you someday.

something, someday, somewhere.

isn’t it always?

What do you say to someone you meet whom you recognize from a dream? Hey, you don’t know me, and this is going to sound weird and uncanny but…I think you were in my dream last night.

Douchebags of the world have killed everyone’s credibility for sincere and mystical stranger moments, so when it’s actually true, people never take you seriously.

I usually don’t say anything. Just wait. And if they approach me, I pay attention.

1. you may or may not have a power of magnitude building inside you.

2. you have been saving it and plan to devote it to one person.

3. through that devotion you will commit yourself to fly that path as far as it will go.

4. you can give it to anyone.

5. but most likely you will devote it to the one you love.

6. you believed that great love requires a great sacrifice. you were wrong. it required letting go.

7. you talk to ghosts. is the only way for a person of the world to reach you, by crossing over?

8. if you chose that your greatest lesson be to experience great love through letting go, then you chose a very challenging path.

9. i wish you good luck.

nobody is any one thing. i’m not a good person or bad person. i’m just a person.  i was taught very young that the more i recognize how small i am in the grand scheme of things, the bigger i would be. my personal life has been defined by following that vision.

got off the elevator on my floor and i immediately smelled weed.

i knew it wasn’t because of me.

as i got closer to the source, i couldn’t tell if it was air freshener or weed.

either way, good for them.