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Location: Home.
Listening: "Iowa" ~ Dar Williams (again).

2:09 AM and this entry will be clean--blunt and simple--as that's the mood I'm in. It will also be non-linear, disjointed, an amalgamation of images and sensations and desires to mirror the montage rolling through my mind like a series of waves breaking.

Every once in a while, I find a song that contains a chord or a line that touches something hidden away in one of my boxes--untouched for years for some reason or another, some good, some distinctly cobbled-together--and releases that sensation, moving me to shivering and tears, pulling something from just behind my heart up through my skin. This, along with "Latter Days" by Over The Rhine and "Notebook" by Innocence Mission, is one of those songs. It makes me think about packing a hurried bag, starting my car and driving until I can find waist-high fields like the ones I grew up with--then running into those fields and letting myself fall backward, feeling the coolness of the soil against my skin. These songs make something inside of me cry out for a home I never had--that I only got glimpses of during the summers at my grandparents' in rural Mississippi. Red clay and heavy bracken, slow-moving streams and nights filled with cicadas and heat lightning in the distance. I want to be a little girl again--to be able to look up at the stars and really believe--to lay my cheek against the flank of a sweating horse and drift off to sleep as the rain hits the roof of a barn--to drink iced tea on the porch as the neighborhood boys shoot off bottle-rockets just because. Peter told me tonight that he had an offer from Vicksburg and wanted to know how close it was to Memphis. I told him that I would never ask him to move to the Southeast--that even as a Southern girl, I can't go back and face the ignorance and the prejudice and the bitterness. I meant it--more than three days back home leaves me sick and yearning for the West Coast. But there's something in that god-forsaken earth that sings in my blood on nights like this.

Beulah Land, you beautiful whore
Tell me when I won't need you anymore.

I want to be a boy kissing another boy for the first time. I want to feel what it's like to throw away the convention and the conditioning and just hand myself over to desire. It's not the same for women--these days, it's almost expected--and I'm keenly aware that I'll never understand that difference.

Peter was in the field tonight, lying in the grass--I could hear the crickets chirping in the background and could swear I could hear the stars and there was that pull again, that knowledge of what the ground felt like under his back coming back to me like the knowledge I have of the way his skin feels under my fingertips. I remember that land like a lover, but I wouldn't know what to say if we were face-to-face.

I remember the first time I kissed a girl full on the mouth, how I lingered longer than with any boy I'd had before and hovered over her like a moth over the proverbial flame. I remember the knots of her hair caught in my fingers and the way she pressed her body to mine. I remember realizing that this was wrong because I had never felt anything so shattering; that, like all of the drugs I had been told not to do, this was wrong because it was too good--and I could lose myself in it. I felt the same way the first time I kissed him.

I don't know when or where I started equating my lovers with home--allowing the images to overlap in my mind. I am an eternal foreigner here, although I've been in Los Angeles for eight years, give or take six months. I don't understand a land without rain. I don't know when I started equating my lovers with the thunderstorms I stood in when I was fourteen, when I starting allowing both of them to soak me all the way through. I don't when or where, but I did, and the days and nights here without rain and without him are starting to take their toll.

So I touch him the only way I can--with my voice, words that spill from me like sweat and somehow move him, thousands of miles away, lying naked under the moon. I sit in stifling heat wearing one of his shirts and describe what I would do were I there, in the backyard of his childhood home that wasn't professionally landscaped, trimmed back weekly by my mother in gloves. While she was paying attention to the azaleas, her daughter managed to go wild, extending beyond her boundaries and eventually reaching to the Pacific, where she put down the best roots she could in sand and glittering asphalt.

There are parallels in that we both played soccer, wrote poetry in the margins of our class notes, kept meticulous journals and tumbled into any dark corner we could find. There are parallels in that we both went to Governor's School and carried reputations we barely deserved and wrote and directed plays when our classmates were trying out for the football and cheer teams. There are parallels in everything, it seems, and on some nights I wonder if my "other life" wasn't actually lived somewhere in Pennsylvania.

I remember clouds bursting over the lake at Cameron Brown park, flattening my palm against the back window of a white '65 Mustang and arching my back. I remember being chased through the woods behind a friend's house by private security and the chill of my father's drafting board againt my bare back when he left us alone in the office. I remember a tire swing, a ring, honeysuckle and humidity, the smell of barbecue smoke walking down a famous street near the river. I remember diving into the pool, coming up for air and his best friend watching us from the second-story window, with a smirk I recognized years later in that best friend's bed. I remember not knowing any better and I wish I didn't know better now.

43 is the answer to this equation.