This my kid...

Learning to unlove can take so long. 

I may have smoked my last cigarette tonight.

I may have not.

Unparalleled in a time of great change, I didn't know this would be my first habit to lose. 

Not as if I were a chainsmoker - that was only the dream, 

                                    Once.

They say nicotine is addictive. I'm not so sure. 

But I also might just be smoking rancid cigarettes.

Yet again, aren't they made that way. 

To love you and to not wish you were here. 

To love and to lose. 

To give to god. 

I do not smoke anymore because it reminds me of murky things:

• Spitting down the drain. 
• Tobacco and lotion.
• Too - full stomach. 
• Wishing a new metabolism to replace this old one. 
• Grey, stale sweatshirt.
• Water on an empty stomach.
• Singed bangs.
• And you.

Cigarettes remind me of you - not that it’s a bad thing.

I feel new. My cells, I mean.

Allergic reaction to Gaspers and Kools and American Spirit and Marlboro - and every other cure, too.

I cried about losing people. Yeah, I’m still at this stage.

This is why I can’t be trusted with love:

And my tears were fresh, rolling down my cheeks, and my bones were shaking -  like a child.

As if I’m made of weaker stuff, as if I am ultimately new to loss.

I am not.

Loss is an old man. He has eyes that are the color of whoever I miss most today:

• My mom.
• Emily, at age 5 or 6.
• People I’ve never met.
• Harry Potter.

I cry and tell my best friend, "I am scared to lose you."

She replies, "I will stay with you forever if you let me."

As if it could be my choice.

As if she were the one to reach for me across all these stars.

As if I  could ever let her go if I needed to.

As if it were any choice at all.

As if I would leave, even if she asked.

As if I would listen if she planted a gun on my head - like a garden in bloom - and told me, "You are not enough to keep."

There is no world where I am leaving.

How do you make love stay?

You can’t.

Love is not a person - it’s a plant.

A field of flowers. A green on a perfectly manicured golf course. 

It grows in weeds, in tumbles, 

In between concrete - and when its leaves crumble, its roots deepen.

Give me water.

Give me sunshine.

Give me your hands, 

                             Your eyes,

                       Your soft, round heart.

Sing to me.

Loving her is having Real Love.

Loving her is

                  - Easy. It has always been.

                    Real.

You cannot scare me with words. I know them all.

My whole world is green.

Look inside my head, under my eyes - like my body under a blanket.

Look through my ears - like looking through a telescope into the night.

It is written across my frontal lobe - 

                 I LOVE HER.

Driving back to San Diego - what a radical moment to experience some radical connection with God.

And all week at Original Home, feeling some kind of strange and out of place.

San Diego’s pollution has become a breath of fresh air.

My visit to Oceanside - a moment of real life.

The sun breaks down after an intense day, and the colors it creates on the waves as I dive through them is a new kind of magic.

Love stirs something inside of me.

Energy and relief and fun shock my exterior behavior. 

If this is ADHD, then give me a million thoughts in my head. Make me a mess of tattoos - but also, 

I am raw,

And so awake.

Make this new thing last. 

Let me sink into melancholy during a slow song in the car.

Let me be so excited just to watch the surf on the pier.

Because all beautiful things remind me of you, and I am having such a good time - and originally, weren’t all my planned words about love?

What if I don’t see Mom for the rest of Dads life.

I get it together.

I get more educated.

I start my career.

In the process I push out a song. I publish a book.

I watch my sister's graduate college.

I travel.

I own money.

Me and Dad visit Amsterdam, Copenhagen, the Swiss.

I don’t have kids.

I don’t be a mother.

And later, when the dust has really settled, the unthinkable happens.

And losing one parent prompts me to reach out to the other.

In this reality, the universe has finally forced my hand (for I am sure, in this lifetime, I cannot wait that long to see you again),

 I walk into a coffee shop. Mom waits at a table. 

(Do I decide to be the first one there or am I reasonably late?)

She is older, obviously. 

She is grateful to have lived so long - somehow outliving dad. 

Greyed hair. Lined face. Rounded body. 

Beauty giving way to age, as mine will. 

I order a hot chocolate or a decaf cappuccino. 

I am not sure who talks first - and I’m not sure it matters. Hopefully, after all these years, I no longer care to hear an apology. It would only be more wasted time.

Anyway, in our conversations, maybe I find warmth. 

Maybe the untouched room is opened - the glass of the window shatters - the sun shines through glazed curtains, new oxygen, a small breeze hurries to unsettle the inches of dust. 

Maybe we are back to where we started. 

Strange. 

It’s spring fortitude, and spring mix kept in my salad.

Green springs up from my feet and springs up  around me.

Green grass and green flowers and a bed, messy of healthy roots and sheets, healthy of night sweat.

As the strange wind comes through the window at night, it mixes the air from lukewarm into soft, cool peaks. 

My eggs scramble into soufflés the next morning, as I scramble out of bed and into clothes.

As the bird scrambles the bees, and as the bees scramble the green flowers. 

Tomatoes leak from my salad, just like my healthy leaks in the morning.

Aren’t we all just lettuce? 

Can’t we bee healthy, even with a healthy amount of Caesar dressing to coat our skin? 

Aren’t we all the same human, coated in Caesar dressing?