Carry Ziplock Bags for Specimens

I told this to my friend as she got out of my car last week, dropped off curbside at Sky Harbor. She would be escaping the Phoenix 110 weather for seven days in Washington.

I said, "Whenever you feel overwhelmed by the beauty of the moment, take out a ziplock bag and pack something away for me. I'll fashion an alter below my graduate school board and maybe the presence of the elements will work their mojo and get me to Portland."

She returned with three ziplock bags and cellophane filled with sand from Edmunds Beach.

Contents:

2 Bluejay feathers - found at random, picked up by a childhood friend she re-connected with.
One mullusk, still smelling like raw ocean.
Oyster on the half-shell, minus the oyster, missing the second half of its shell.
Sea glass - frosted white.
A seashell, four rocks, and agate picked up from the beach.
1 dried chamomile bloom, stalk still in-tact.
likus (which may be spelled wrong) tree moss.
Pinky-finger sized piece of kiwi tree bark, not ripped off, but found.
A spiral shell that would be a perfect megaphone, if I were a tiny fairy.
1 rose-hibisucus bulb that I wanted to eat instead of plant.

The morning smells like coffee with cinnamon and the heat has returned. I text an old friend, too embarassed to call - how long can it be sometimes before people forget you? What have I missed? Have I been so in my life, that I have forgotten I am a part of the worlds of others? I realize I have been looking for myself in the wrong manner. I dove down the rabbit hole, expecting another world, and didn't have the upper body strength to climb back toward sunlight. I have not been Alice, returned with a parallel universe in my pocket which will be deemed only as fantasy, or dream. As though neither possess credibility. I want to tell her, "I'm sorry, I have been living inside of my head again. You know how it is, don't you?"

I want to list all of the things I have been through to justify how far away I've been - not from her - but from myself, as if these things that have transpired have taken me away. Leaving my lover might as well have been a five-year trip to a country where I showed up with empty coat pockets, without a passport, and held without amnesty. No I.D.'s, no sense of myself. Trying to figure out how I got there was like trying to remember the beginning of a dream. I was in the middle of something and had no idea where I came from, my instincts were subdued - I couldn't wake up, but I knew I didn't belong there. I have been there, I want to say, but have no geographical explanation for the cities of the interior.

I want to tell her that when my grandmother died, the day of the Dappled Fawn, says the calender - I climbed into the oven with her. I was scattered into amulets. I'm worn around the neck of her descendents now - but there is no history between us. Only empty pages with a fragment here or there - poems rubbed into each other by an eraser on a cheap pencil, turning lines into pink-grey smears. I've been looking under those, I have been gone a long time, and still have no answers.

I want to tell her about the photograph that I printed at work. How Lilith was leaning against one of Eden's trees and the serpant covered her heavenly parts. I left it on the printer at work and someone turned in an 18th century photo of a painting to management and called it pornography. "That's what started all of this," I want to say. I want to tell her that I know it's because the woman who handed it in shook her head every time there was mention of same-sex relationships. She thought they were beastly, perverted, deviant. She had read the Bible out of context, forgetting the difference between translating and reading.

And...that it has been a troubling thing, being home this much with myself. There is no rabbit hole. Distractions have dissolved into silence. I've been looking into books hoping the pages are mirrors. I can feel the presence of the poet, but my ears have been ringing constantly and can only guess at what is being written.

"People walk by the garden," I'll tell her, "And they think I am someone who I am not. I can't tell if I'm lying to them, or if they're lying to me about who I am. I don't have green thumbs, chard alive in August is a freak accident. The mulberry won't stop shedding. It unintentionally mulches the garden. I only deep water because I'm constantly forgetting what I did five minutes ago. Sometimes the hose is on for two hours. I don't know where I am."

I do the only thing I can.
I clip mint from the largest cinderblock. I take the last fuscia petunia and a handful of earth. I rub creosote in my palms until it is fluffy and my hands smell like rain. I say everything I know about love and forgiveness, by taking from the place I am most peaceful and sending it to her. This is everything I look at. This is what makes me grateful when I don't know how the bills will be paid. This bank statement poem was a moment of clarity that I have lost again. Please don't forget that I love metaphors, look for me in every flaking petal and crushed leaf. Remember I have never been much of a phone person, and love sending letters. Don't ask when the last one was sent, because you have never written back and I have always kept sending. There are pieces of ourselves that we offer to each other - some are silent, some are whole vacancies, it seems, along the ridges of the heart or deep canyon bellies within the organs. When the world is most beautiful, take out a ziplock baggie and send me a sample of what reminds you to be speechless so we learn to judge not the silence, but to know who we are within it.