LP / SMB FTW

LP and I walked the Highline on Monday; it now extends to 30th Street. She came out for a surprise visit because she has landed an amazing job and is moving to San Francisco this Sunday, less than a week (but several months of anguish) after being 'let go' from the college she's worked at in Modesto for the past 15+ years. It is a cosmic move, all of it, no? Her new employers flew her out; I stayed at her hotel enjoying bright white sheets and AC, embarrassed to say the TV was ENJOYABLE, too. This winter I shut down. It was not a good time to not be able to listen, but I couldn't do it anymore. Whatever I go through, however people see us, whatever people envy or despise in our relationship, does not undermine the thing we have, which is natural like breathing and just as accepted, needed, IS, etc... What LP does is love. What I do is take. It seems simple, and easy to combat: each should do both. It isn't. For whatever reasons, sister-sister and mother-daughter relationships are usually complicated, from close to mean to cold back to hot and loving, etc., and we fall there, too, between comfort and rage. On Tuesday night we sat on Elizabeth street and she spoke with my friends who are now 29 and 30 - what? She asked about every fucking building (!?!) from 14th to 30th Street and I say !?! because a) that is my reaction to my mother on some days and b) I have no answers, other than the Gehry building next to Chelsea Piers. On Wednesday I met her close friend Judy from 7th grade. We ate Afgan food while the downpour began outside on 8th Avenue, the same one that caught Chloe for twenty minutes further south in Brooklyn. Good one, we say (and it is). They call her Laurie in New York; another piece of past that stays in that foreign country. We're Californians, now. Some of our family deserts, Mom's a dessert, I'm both. I walked her to the hotel on 28th Street through the mist and said 'goodbye for now' like we've done countless times and I presume she walked upstairs and got settled in her nightie, and rubbed peach-scented cream into her tan elbows, and then probably called Adrian to say sweet things before drifting off to sleep. I made it home not soaked, for once, but took a shower to fix that. The following day I met a lanky creature who gave me a slow dance; the one I always speak about. He emerged as if from 1646 with a face from somewhere else and with beautiful, indio hair that fell to the small of his back like a heavy black waterfall. Pause. I mentioned I'd like to braid it because I don't know the things that should come out of my mouth...I just know what had come out of me throughout college was the inverse of what should have been coming in, you know? In every form, and I mean like from food to love letters - don't be lewd. He was smoother than the past had been and warm like sun-baked marble. He was young like womb and soft like: "excuse me, whom?" When Sarita and I went to Mamaroneck last Friday we saw three evidences of magic: a beautiful solitary deer twitching its tail in a garden (perfectly calm, perfectly alert, perfect in hue and shape), a huge turtle making its way along the side of the highway against traffic in broad daylight (alone, determined, protected), and a clinically insane mouse chasing her own tail in circles-around-and-around-and-around-and-around while we sat there and stuck both our heads out of the passenger side window watching it spin on the rough asphalt below. The day after that Suzy and I took color photos in a booth on Bedford wherein my face emerged blue, like some side of the moon, and hers orange, like the sun. All of it means something: from Laurie hasta La Luna, from Turtle to Trenza, from Womb to Whom - but make of it what you will, I read into far too much already.