To June 30
Morning in San Francisco. Each day I awaken there is the attendant heaviness, that obscuring garb I step into as I rise, even here, surrounded by family, the sky shock-blue & unclouded. The space that uncertainty occupies inside a body so much more pronounced somehow than the weight of any particular regret, any particular decision. There is an insidiousness in that which remains obdurately unclear, a creeping evasiveness to it that spreads like a black smoke until you find it in the oddest of places. & what word would usher it out? Ferry it past the heart, past the confounded head, & issue it clear & capable into the world? Is there such a word?
***
Unpacked in Denali, Roy grunting along in the kitchen after we caught up for a half an hour or so. The cabin almost disgustingly filthy with dirty dishes & crumpled paper towels on every counter, onion skins along the floor, a streak of coffee grounds along the front door. & every window closed & curtained, the malodorous funk of whatever it is he does in the kitchen malingering like a fog. Slept in a Walmart parking lot last night just south of Wasilla for a few hours before heading up the rest of the way today. Finally in a position to establish a routine of some sort, which has its appeal right now, tossed about & exhausted as I am after a healthy ten days in California. Wonderful to see my family, to wed Jason & Dawn, to find such generosity everywhere around me & such love & warmth. & while in California made another decision to prolong an absence of contact with Stef, which, however excruciatingly painful right now, I think is the right call. We never know. & still I look for her everywhere. & my little Wils.
Returning to Alaska presents an odd sensation—one entirely mixed & amplified doubtless by what I left in California & what I returned to here. It was no small chore keeping a semblance of calm every day, & grace that my pleasures could trump however momentarily some of my griefs these last weeks. Here I wear no façade, need no artifice save that which permits my cohabitation. What would I do presently, I ask myself, if I lived alone? Sleep, & likely cry a bit, & let settle these days passed. Find again that kernel in me, that moored part, that keel eager to split the water. I feel now more lost, more afloat, more wildly isolated than perhaps ever before, & even still, I hear myself asking the world what it is I am doing here, thousands of miles away, tucked in this paper-thin cabin, whittling time into this quiet, quiet life. How I pulled over to sob along the route. I am tired, I know, but still I wonder after my small dreams, little shadow-bright things in a dark that swallows their forms. Which is to say thrill is in me forestalled just now, sleeping bird. What passions I presume I presume dormant; hoping, anyway, that they still endure in me. It is tiredness, I know. But I can wonder at it all the same, this absence of overlap, this little space I inhabit here with no little love to tender, no little dog to walk, no idea of anchor or compass. & I am in it, somewhere—somewhere, I am. But honest, I know not where.
***
Strange, rending oneself from that wealth of a heart’s warmth so utterly & entirely. These long miles. This yawning, protracted quiet. I see lately the struggle of it, the battle in me, over me, the heart rustling thoughts branded in quick defense, or vice versa. I am wondering more often today what part of me balks at Alaska—recalling that in Homer, too, there were a few days in which I was entirely convinced I’d made a foolish & unguarded mistake in heading north. & now, further afield, it isn’t a sense of error or regret I feel—I know, this time, the germ compressed beneath this heft—but a kind of preternatural awareness of process. I know no result, & can expect nonesuch. I know only the going, this odd march to some distant, muffled cadence. & ridiculous as it sounds I appear before myself costumed so variously: a soldier now wild-eyed at war, a hermit straining to hear the hummingbird lighting upon the bough, a child looking for firm foothold, a pining lover. I blush to write it, absurd as it is. But there it is, all the same. This vague notion that I am at once discerning the very core of my own being & simultaneously as far from myself as I can ever recall feeling. Those Russian dolls, only every face a stranger’s, every robe a different color, & no pithy center. These are, I am well aware, frighteningly specious things to divulge; I almost think I might find my journals as a teenager more efficacious. But one is thrown, & one panics for footing for only so long before realizing he will not, he can not, seem to land. & so. He swims, he seems to float, unmoored, some paper scraping sharp against the asphalt, some pine needle spindling in a gale. Some flaming eye. & the world, waiting to be seen.
***
Unpacked in Denali, Roy grunting along in the kitchen after we caught up for a half an hour or so. The cabin almost disgustingly filthy with dirty dishes & crumpled paper towels on every counter, onion skins along the floor, a streak of coffee grounds along the front door. & every window closed & curtained, the malodorous funk of whatever it is he does in the kitchen malingering like a fog. Slept in a Walmart parking lot last night just south of Wasilla for a few hours before heading up the rest of the way today. Finally in a position to establish a routine of some sort, which has its appeal right now, tossed about & exhausted as I am after a healthy ten days in California. Wonderful to see my family, to wed Jason & Dawn, to find such generosity everywhere around me & such love & warmth. & while in California made another decision to prolong an absence of contact with Stef, which, however excruciatingly painful right now, I think is the right call. We never know. & still I look for her everywhere. & my little Wils.
Returning to Alaska presents an odd sensation—one entirely mixed & amplified doubtless by what I left in California & what I returned to here. It was no small chore keeping a semblance of calm every day, & grace that my pleasures could trump however momentarily some of my griefs these last weeks. Here I wear no façade, need no artifice save that which permits my cohabitation. What would I do presently, I ask myself, if I lived alone? Sleep, & likely cry a bit, & let settle these days passed. Find again that kernel in me, that moored part, that keel eager to split the water. I feel now more lost, more afloat, more wildly isolated than perhaps ever before, & even still, I hear myself asking the world what it is I am doing here, thousands of miles away, tucked in this paper-thin cabin, whittling time into this quiet, quiet life. How I pulled over to sob along the route. I am tired, I know, but still I wonder after my small dreams, little shadow-bright things in a dark that swallows their forms. Which is to say thrill is in me forestalled just now, sleeping bird. What passions I presume I presume dormant; hoping, anyway, that they still endure in me. It is tiredness, I know. But I can wonder at it all the same, this absence of overlap, this little space I inhabit here with no little love to tender, no little dog to walk, no idea of anchor or compass. & I am in it, somewhere—somewhere, I am. But honest, I know not where.
***
Strange, rending oneself from that wealth of a heart’s warmth so utterly & entirely. These long miles. This yawning, protracted quiet. I see lately the struggle of it, the battle in me, over me, the heart rustling thoughts branded in quick defense, or vice versa. I am wondering more often today what part of me balks at Alaska—recalling that in Homer, too, there were a few days in which I was entirely convinced I’d made a foolish & unguarded mistake in heading north. & now, further afield, it isn’t a sense of error or regret I feel—I know, this time, the germ compressed beneath this heft—but a kind of preternatural awareness of process. I know no result, & can expect nonesuch. I know only the going, this odd march to some distant, muffled cadence. & ridiculous as it sounds I appear before myself costumed so variously: a soldier now wild-eyed at war, a hermit straining to hear the hummingbird lighting upon the bough, a child looking for firm foothold, a pining lover. I blush to write it, absurd as it is. But there it is, all the same. This vague notion that I am at once discerning the very core of my own being & simultaneously as far from myself as I can ever recall feeling. Those Russian dolls, only every face a stranger’s, every robe a different color, & no pithy center. These are, I am well aware, frighteningly specious things to divulge; I almost think I might find my journals as a teenager more efficacious. But one is thrown, & one panics for footing for only so long before realizing he will not, he can not, seem to land. & so. He swims, he seems to float, unmoored, some paper scraping sharp against the asphalt, some pine needle spindling in a gale. Some flaming eye. & the world, waiting to be seen.
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