The acoustics in this room are unforgiving, still carrying our footsteps like offcenter drums–my heel/toe to
your loping stride taking two of me to catch up. And the art and the walls, how I found myself being
pried away since I couldn’t stop staring with the back of my hand to my mouth in some horrified joy with
tears streaming down my face. In other words, why I’d rather venture to the galleries and certain shows
alone–yet to find someone to cry with, who doesn’t glance around my head awkwardly searching for a
culprit. Sometimes I want being moved to be my secret. It’s really none of your business.

Unless, unless. To these back rooms you are invited. Sometimes. I leave it ajar–have to keep something just
for my palms to warm around. Or is it something I can call mine, is it just passing through–am I just a
system for it to circuit? These the type of questions that bob to the top when I’m sitting on the edge of
my seat at the ballet with a wet face. I let my nose run, I get messy. This, after all, is movement. I am
not a keeper of clean lines.

I treat the well-timed phone calls or playlist the same, a thing or two so slight yet shocking. It is how you can
smell a season. It is what you tape to the walls. It is walking away, just like it is staying, or what our
limbs do as we sleep. Thickets of spines all flowing toward the same source. My arrows will always find
some fat to sink in.

I want to call them split ends. The little fractures wrinkling through along the surface here or there–not really widening old
fissures, not really starting new ones. Just tiny things, crackling across like the limbs of bare trees during the
appropriate season.

The good and the bad start them. Like a couple getting on the bus and splitting up their seats so they can each befriend a new
stranger. It happened, I witnessed it. Like the new things I find out about mom that aren’t new at all–things from when I
was a kid that I can do nothing about except get angry, an anger I have to throw in a general, anonymous direction
because the hurt is so buried, so commonplace, and kind of forgotten. Like meeting my new nephew and letting him
sleep in my arms for as long as he wants. Like being sober.

I’ll stay in earth tones with a fingerprint of oil in each elbow bend. I try to remember being small, and it seems so recent and
so untouchable. What am I archiving for? At some point the memories became stories. At some point I stood in a
kitchen and made myself dinner, ate in the quiet of a rebellious sun beam. Part of me feels the need to make note of
everything. The harm is gone. I’m just taking it in.

The Aging Paradox - scene from Waking Life
(Two women are having lunch - English professor Lisa Moore and author Carole Dawson)

Time just dissolves into quick-moving particles that are swirling away. Either I’m moving fast or time is.
Never both simultaneously.

It’s such a strange paradox. I mean, while, technically, I’m closer to the end of my life than I’ve ever been, I
actually feel more than ever that I have all the time in the world. When I was younger, there was a
desperation, a desire for certainty, like there was an end to the path, and I had to get there.

I know what you mean, because I can remember thinking, “Oh, someday, like in my mid-thirties maybe,
everything’s going to just somehow gel and settle, just end.” It was like there was this plateau, and it
was waiting for me, and I was climbing up it, and when I got to the top, all growth and change would
stop. Even exhilaration. But that hasn’t happened like that, thank goodness. I think that what we don’t
take into account when we’re young is our endless curiosity. That’s what’s so great about being human.

Yeah, yeah. Well do you know that thing Benedict Anderson says about identity?

No.

Well, he’s talking about like, say, a baby picture. So you pick up this picture, this two-dimensional image,
and you say, “That’s me.” Well, to connect this baby in this weird little image with yourself living and
breathing in the present, you have to make up a story like, “This was me when I was a year old, and
then later I had long hair, and then we moved to Riverdale, and now here I am.” So it takes a story
that’s actually a fiction to make you and the baby in the picture identical to create your identity.

And the funny thing is, our cells are completely regenerating every seven years. We’ve already become
completely different people several times over, and yet we always remain quintessentially
ourselves.

Because almost three decades.
Because the first sweetheart has a wife and a kid.
Because my father’s hair is now gray.
Because now both knees crack when I bend them a certain way, and ache when I work them too hard.
Because the poetry turned, folded over like a wave, dissipated and created a new one.
Because I no longer romanticize bars.
Because I’ve learned to describe things with more care.
Because the old favorites are weathered, yellow, or deliver less of an impact. From bowling ball in the gut to
featherbed shove.
Because everything is different. The stack of still frames in my head. Because I am full of things like water,
blood, history.
Because I’m on a new seven. And my hands are mine but still commencing introduction. Because everything
held is touching now. Because gone because here because between.
Because “that is what’s so great about being human.”

I know, I know–I’m not winning the prized ham for updating my website(in a consistent manner) any time soon. That’s
fine. I don’t eat ham anyway.

In summary, real quicklike, these things happened:

My nephew, Cohen, was born 5 weeks early. He had to stay in the hospital for a few weeks so his lungs could grow
stronger. I was a bit of a mess until he was born–a ball of worry and stress 5 hours away from where I felt I should
be. And then the wait for him to finally go home. Now the fun begins for my sister–a new life with two little ones.
I’m going home next weekend to meet little Cohen for the first time, and I fully expect to ball my eyes out. He’s a
miracle. I’m thrilled to meet a brand new relative, to have another young person in my life to show me how to look
at the world again with a less cynical and more imaginative eye. It’s so fascinating to watch them grow and become
who they are, and to have some tiny part on that. Sidenote: I’ve started writing letters for both my niece Maddie and
for Cohen, and I’m going to save them so that down the road they have them. I don’t want to just be the aunt; I feel
compelled to show them a bit about who I am as a person. I also have grand plans for writing some children’s books
for their shelves.

I’ve been wrestling with a serious block with my writing, and the fight is like trying to take a shadow to the ground. The
shadow that happens to be attached to my feet. I need to focus on patience and living. It’s all there beneath the
surface–I haven’t lost a single thing.

My heart quit dipping and started boom-booming again. I’ve got a good thing going, one that I don’t have to bend over
backwards to describe. I’ve laughed more since April than I have in a very very long time. It’s good. It’s better than
good. It’s damn past wonderful.

Went to the dentist and had my cracked tooth fixed. A tiny thing corrected, but it’s funny what a difference the little things
can make. I’m also putting the miles in on the bike, riding until my legs are jellyish, giggly things. It’s the good kind
of tired, the kind of tired I need in order to feel better mentally and physically.

Renee and I finished the press release for our fundraiser show on July 7th. I’ll be posting the details soon. We squared
away a feature in Cleveland, and more are on the way in Chicago, Indianapolis, Dayton, maybe(hopefully) other
cities. It is officially summer. I’m in it, sweating like a champ and staying out for as long as I can. Hiking in the
woods and tiptoeing into lakes. Every experience feels tremendous, even standing in the Strip District staring at the
local grown flowers or trying on viking hats in Feinbergs. If you love your life then make it yours.

More soon.

I turn twenty-nine in eleven days and I think I can say I’m ready, whatever ready means. I guess you do get to a point of
self-tolerance–where after a while fighting the self is a battle beyond boring, and it starts playing out like
choreography. You can call every move and motive, every self-inflicted injury. You start telling yourself not to turn
around–soon enough going forward becomes a habit.

A couple things. Like tonight in the back seat of a car, in awe of a sunset as if I haven’t seen one of those suckers before.
The slow motion drift of flags on the hill, hands in my lap stilled, heavy with words and no pen because it’s just the
moment, all I’ve got and everything I need. I went to the neurologist and after an appointment that lasted past 2 hours
it was pretty much concluded–main culprit being genetics, a brain that craves chemical correcting, so I have another
pill to fight the inevitable. Injections to try for the attacks themselves. In other news my heart rate remains chill at 52
bpm and aside from some stubborn neurons in the reflexes and the predisposition, I’m okay. I’ll keep fighting to live
more than half my life, my makeshift midafternoon nights–I’ll keep rationing my coffee and leaving when I need to. I’ll
keep remaining humble to my good days. I’ll keep enjoying the hell out of them.

It seems like too much at once but I’m trying to maintain the view outside of my mind–outside of where things get tangled
and messy and a bit too fast. School is making me nervous but I’m plugging along, muttering “this is your last math
class ever” under my breath when I need to. The poetry readings have been steady and supportive–the new book is
officially taking form. I’m somewhere in the hips and next I’ll form the lungs. I believe in my work. Another exquisite
evolution with this age and experience thing; the solid force behind it just grows and grows.

So. Twenty-nine? Bring it. I wait patient with a handshake.

muhammad ali & joe frazier, 2003

“It was easier to get Ali to pose than Frazier. Joe still resented all the torment Ali had caused him
over the years. Ali had made all the money, too. Joe finally agreed to pose when we offered to go to his
gym in Philadelphia.I knew it would be a difficult shoot because Ali had Parkinson’s and, I learned that day,
Frazier had diabetes. Ali walked in, and I set a stool in the ring for him to sit on. Joe said, “What about me?
Man, I can barely walk. My legs are killing me.” But they were happy, joking around and hamming it up in
every shot.Near the end I switched from color to sepia film. I said, “Look, guys, just stare at the camera. No
smiles, no gags.” I did one frame, then a second, and there it was, the picture I was looking for: two
battered warriors who’d left their lives in the ring.” - Walter Iooss Jr./SI

I went down for a nap at 8pm last night, and didn’t wake up until 1:52 in the morning. A storm approaching. Once the
lightning started, I put on my robe and went to the living room, lit one candle and sat on the couch listening to
the wind bend trees into choruses. Like the thunder starts up and the limbs & leaves attempt to shush it.
Fifteen minutes later I went back to bed and slept for six more hours.

Now it’s today and I’m on the other end of some of the best dreams I’ve ever had. Handfuls of closure, little scenes so
wonderful that I know they couldn’t be anything but real. The script my heart is busying writing acted out.

There are moments in your life that you can’t forget, because they’re everything you wake up for. You start another
day for them, you connect for them, you create for them. They cover your heart like a layer of fat.

So what of these things: being anxious and nervous as you walk to the first day of your first college class in 9 years.
Worried about what turning 29 will bring. Standing on an overcrowded bus barely hanging on. The days and
activities you have to pardon yourself from because the head pain is too much and rules the world(changes the
world). A messy house, a skinny bank account.

Nothing of those things. They are nothing. There’s no room in the picture for them. The things that matter sit at a
table with other amazing women. It’s talking about the words as much as you write the words, as much as you
say the words and live the words. Poems for miles for days for seasons, for centuries.

Give me that photo booth from years ago and the gigs I can’t remember. Give me paper and pen and leave me alone,
go away. Give me a world that does not make sense so I can talk about it.

Let’s have more of the moments that define us, that work our lungs. Breath deserves us.

Driving through my home town at dusk, knowing my way better than I know anything. Stopping in the middle of the street
to stare. Kissing two fingers and holding them out the window when I leave. Of course I’m sentimental for it, of course
I come back and mourn what isn’t there anymore(the fact it’s gone reminds me I left, that there was a departure, that
time has passed, that I’m not the same). All of these things could crush or lift you. That’s the decision you make.

The simultaneous remembering and forgetting–that this is just a body and my limbs are constantly flailed out living on
their own trust–that my hands owe my feet nothing. That if I’m constantly too careful then I miss out.

Addicted and petrified by the pen, still shaking behind microphones. That I’m still carrying around a wrinkled post card
of Janis that Jim gave me years ago. Nine, to be exact. And I’m not the person he handed it to but I am a thousand
times over more than I can claim it.

Explaining to my therapist that it isn’t a means of seeking pleasure for me, it never has been. I get that–I can point it out if
asked, but it isn’t just pleasure. I tell her it’s movement, something like inspiration, something like witnessing and
being there. Things can barely ever be untwisted. I’ll take my moments like seaweed when forward motion means
walking out from the pull of waves.

I have memories backlit by a shadow of a water tower. A group of us on our backs, touching heads beneath it, dreams of
climbing in and swimming away. The rusted one next to the new. Leaning into a neck on the side of the gas station,
losing an artifact in my youth–the parents going back to the grounds to find it, coming back empty-handed. The crest
of hill where you can see the entire town.

I never so badly wanted to live my life, never felt so certain that I’m doing just that.