time, more like bomb.

It's been three months, and all of you inappropriately unacquainted readers must have wondered, where! when! huh? why? when did flannel stop being cool? MOMMMMM (hi D, u r the only one still reading this)

I came back to America and it was America like I had imagined, but it was more than America: it was a place. And "a" unusually holds a strong grip of centrality in that statement. It was a- equivalent to 'one' in meanings- place. For childhood at least, I've been doggypaddling in this enormous vat of goopy solvent, heaving in and out of the surface, dialed away from country, town, state, home, home, sandwich place, wrap place; unaware of being part of one conglomerate, a hollowed out quarry, being of place. And that is important.
I felt part of a place when I was 8, and my Mother, Aunt, step sister, brother, cousin and I went to the Palisades Mall. I was blindly excited about the Rainforest Cafe, a cafe that pretended to be a rainforest, but with Mexicans making the food that the angry white women brought to you. It made no difference to me. And then there was a carousel that day. I maybe slept through the ride home, rumbled into a lullaby over the weightlessness of the passage through tall space.
And when I was 9, at the camping trip, I felt like a poor boy. I didn't feel like a thoroughbred, or anyone who could jetski without wondering which side of my body to break on the fall. I wondered if there were actually savages waiting in the brush to kill me and my brother and if in the morning, after the lightning storm, my brother, my Dad and I would still know the way back to the summit.
When I was 10 I wondered about my Dog, and her dreams, and why she ran. I wondered if I did that when I slept, or if I just peed. I wondered if that could be waking life. A dream of running.
When I was 11, I fainted in the hall of my classroom because I don't think I drank enough water but I think I wanted to be saved. I auditioned to play the Nazi in the school play because it was a pretty song and noone else had tried it. I loved to watch all of the kids audition for the Artful Dodger. I loved it when they were all cast as him, even the Colombian girl who smelled like tuna fish on the bus to the Space Simulation Center. I sat in the nurse's office, and she gave me cupcakes: some were Freihoefer's, like the one with matted red frosting, and they had a hot tamale on top. She had doe eyes, the nurse. She had wild, tempestuous blonde hair that rested on her doll scalp like a triumphant poet. I shared secrets with Adam in his room and he wouldn't turn off his screen saver or music during the sleeping part of sleepovers. We rode by Fountain Square, and saw Taylor Mondshein, on a razor scooter, and Alex Bodor on a bike, and we felt hushed in our stomachs but didn't say anything. At the graduation dance, Alex Bodor stole my hat, but because I was mad at Brad Jacobson for accidentally colliding with me during a game of Ghost in the Graveyard.
When I was 12, 13, 14, I knew places. And 15, 16, 17, 18, rooms, sensations of lightness, heaviness, qualifications of different types of tinglings, their force lines, what to expect next. The sound of footsteps, the difference between a dark room and a light room, the turgidity of the frame of a good bottle of seltzer in comparison to the flaccidity of a deposed container of raisin bran. The oncoming flow of vomit, its prevalence and incongruous tendency to make you feel abandoned and terrified at a later stake in life. You remember baths for lice, your sister's chicken pox on christmas, and a trembling box at the door in the snow that isn't your's.
All of this brings Me here.

I left France on November 25th. I surprised my sister for her birthday, and she was upset about not getting attention. I tried to keep it a secret, because I wanted the truck to pull away to delineate my critical post-adventure mass, in an ensemble of clothes that I had owned for years, but now somehow fit. It would be like the end of "Dude Where's My Car?" I left because it was time to come home, and I was in love with Paris by the end, but in a way that only I think of as love. And I am a different person than when I arrived in Paris, clouded by fear of my sense of place escaping me, and I am different than when I came home, hoping for everything to converge into euphonia. It's because at the end of the day, this is my only skin. I have to do me, and any emotion that grazes in my passing, or any flowering emotion that molds on my sockets is natural, and constructive. I love people because I believe in them. I look forward to live in the present, I dream, I have to shake off the self-doubt, and some nasty instincts that sometimes make me feel lost and awful. But sitting in a cockpit, at the end of the day, reading the New York Times to try to just look at the world, feeling linens and sweating in whatever depths have those capabilities like some hero, I'm doing the best I can. I've begun to learn lessons, feel, and normalize in ways that terrify me. But I have to conserve the parts of me that keep me. I accept myself. I don't have to approve of myself but I accept myself, and any kind of wrangling that results from that has to be good. Charlie told me that I'm the same person that I am today that I was tomorrow, and I still have all of these people. Whoever you are, thank you. Thank you for showing me the things you all have, and thank you for teaching me how to live effortlessly even in the most awful times that require the most effort. I think that being Me is what I need, and thank you all for knowing that that exists.

I'll see you on the other side!