Buddhism is the search for enlightenment. Where, and how, and why, and all the things that’ve been lost along the way. But childhood—”growing up”—is a circular path to nowhere. Half-alive, here we are now, years grown out like trees, like split ends; some of us die, and some of us learn to cope, and some of us spend a few too many Decembers lying on cold wood floors in secret, quietly listening to Jon Foreman sing about trying to find a cure for pain, pulling secret meanings out of a chord like it’ll somehow save us, a divinity that can’t be captured within a single lifetime. It’s freezing, and we can’t afford blankets anymore. We use candles sparingly. We’re familiar to each other only in darkness. Your breath looks like smoke from the chill in this apartment, but your hands still feel like bonfires, warm and red, secret and wild———-and this isn’t perfect, you and I, we know it’s not perfect. This is solemn and desperate and never-ever-ending; this is a moment in the in-between that makes up for all the destination points, this is the train in the second before it slows and pulls into a station, this is the look on a father’s face when he peers at the windows waiting finally for a glimpse of his family, this is that whoosh of the engine as it starts to skitter, this is the beautiful time-suspended instant of a child as she presses her hands up, frosted glass, smiles, this is the heavens that split apart for moments like this, shivering. Dauntless. Unafraid.

निब्बान: nirvāṇa—nir-van-a—(n.)— the lack of suffering, the lack of want, the lack of desire or sense of self, the ultimate goal, the state of unflawed idyll.

We’re far too jaded to use the word h-a-p-p-i-n-e-s-s anymore

but this is so much better than that, anyway

Habit makes us crazy. Routine is terribly unsettling. For sixty-seven years I washed my hands twice daily at a sink that was just the right height; paper and pen and piano keys always feel the same underneath fingers, no matter the weather outside; the roar of a car engine coming to life sounds exactly the same each time, despite the different moments, different roads that we’re speeding off on, the twists and turns and lightning-wide cracks. You wake up and you press your face to a pillow, morning-by-morning, taking it “one step at a time” as the self-help television hosts like to say, when really it’s just a phrase meant to soothe you, to lull you into something that you can trust again, if you are even able to trust again. There is no one step—there’s only this wide wide canyon, and you can jump it, maybe, if you close your eyes for long enough. And here, mid-leap, lost in the blind dark, you’re burning to ask: is this the best that the universe can do? Look at us. We can’t take this. We’re not meant for this. We throw rocks at the skinny breaks in the glass, the weak points, praying for something to shatter, even if the pieces cut us when they fall. Restlessness is a permanent state of mind. “I used to sleep at night” is one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever heard yourself say.

PETRICHOR (n., /ˈpɛtrɨkər/): Scent of rain on dry earth, stone and the fluid in the veins of gods, oil secreted from plants, drops of dew on the flowers in your mother’s backyard, before the hurricane blew it down, walls and dirt and all. Secrets. The trail of breath over a fresh-bloom ear, where-are-you and I’m-right-here, let’s hide, keep it between us, safe, quick now, into darkness, the most important game is the one that no one can ever know, the last man on earth won’t be able to find us for all the gold in the world—but on the other hand, why hide? Why simmer into the quiet crevices of the ground like cowards, when we could be gods, angels, kings and queens and sword-wielding heroes, we could conquer the world, we could conquer the world! We will conquer the world. One day, my darling, I promise. // Petrichor (n.) Etymology: you and me, stabbing through the core of the planet just to reach each other; the wildfires, the burning homes, the twisted fault lines—collateral damage. I never said I was a good person, did I? But you did, and somehow that makes all the difference. // Petrichor (n.): Olfaction is the strongest of the senses. Every time it rains here at night, I wish you were home again.

“I’ve got my things, I’m good to go,” Andrew McMahon sings into a microphone somewhere, and the crowd goes hush-quiet, the world becomes a silent symphony, the air is crooning to the melody, breath-vs.-breath, moment by moment, an invisible war. A shutter clicks and an echo bursts. “There’s so much sun where I’m from—I had to give it away, give you away,” and this is where I start to cry.

It’s not a tragedy that some things end too fast; the problem is in the moment you try to look back and touch, and the picture disappears, a hologram that leaves you crazy. (Saudade.) In two weeks, Phoenix in the summertime will turn from wind to vapor, sunset to burning noon, a gutter of memory that would rather stay hidden from sight, but for the unstoppable floods. And here, on this song from fifteen-year-old memory lane, the record skitters and skips, the microphone makes every rattle of lungs into a drumbeat, the static fills for just a second too long, the space unbearable —

The hours pass but she still counts the minutes
that I am not there

don’t fly fast, oh, pilot, can you help me? can you make this last

this plane is all I got
keep it steady now

Every inch you see is bruised.

Carl Sagan says we’re all living on a tiny blue dot. “That’s here—That’s us—That’s home,” he says, and he points at the famous grainy photograph to the feeble speck of blueish-white, the only thing that can be seen of Earth from six billion kilometers away.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe him. I’m lying in the sand of a quiet summer night in the desert, or I’m running my hands through icy-bright water at the California coastline in a shroud of fog, and I have to think, privately, that this planet is anywhere but home.

This world is rocks and air. It’s bones, it’s history, it’s human, but it’s alien to me. Far off, there are suns that burn so fast that they shatter others, darkness that’s deep enough to swallow souls in half a breath, colors ricocheting around planets like they’re balls of paint, thrown by a child’s hand. Diamond-shining oceans under miles of ice. Maybe I belong on a Venus, a Jupiter; inside the comfort of a planet-wide crater, the plasma tail of a comet, the spinning, spewing core of an undiscovered star. Space is my religion, stars my chapel’s ceiling. Give me the universe; is that too much to ask?

“The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings. Every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

Skies, come to me; stars, fall into the bowl of waiting fingers—I’ll catch you one-by-one, precious as the deepest jewels; I’m bursting with energy, I need to expand—I’ll keep you secret, keep you glittering, keep you mine.

UNIVERSE DON’T WORRY, I have ended loneliness. Behold, a scientific wonder: I have made a magical being that dances, that loves on command—a body, warm and bright, to make tea for days of illness, to press kisses on shoulders for last-minute early-morning good luck, to smile and laugh and forgive unconditionally, to soothe, to fix the steady leak in the kitchen sink pipes, to talk without the need to argue, to predict bad days and counteract them in advance, to crack eggs precisely, to sleep calmly, to pick the whitest flowers, to love every insecurity, to hand-hold across boardwalks, to dive into freezing-cold November oceans, to train-ride across the continent, to pour champagne on starry rooftops above a city of putrid smoke, to pick strawberries, to write the best books, to take every step surely and steadily, to guess the winning lottery numbers, to breathe into the shell of an ear and make it a small secret heaven, to understand the strings at the heart of life, to forget to die, to radiate, to welcome strangers, to whisper lines of ancient poetry, to be somebody that can be known as HOME; a beautiful wonderful machine of a boy that knows what to say at every exact turn, programmed to anticipate and appreciate and never, ever stop; a study in p-e-r-f-e-c-t verisimilitude, synthetic joy, life imitating art, but more accurately, art imitating the purest and most impossible form of life.

I’ve given him your name. There’s no need to miss you anymore.

rain falls like the bone-heavy sound of war, outside. it’s been a long long time since the desert, but the heat burns through you all the same; human memory is like a cage, and the thing is, lately, you’ve been tripping all over old spare keys, un-lost after all. rosewood floors and faraway sounds, parking lots and fog-on-windows breath, alone and not alone, each individual note of jeff buckley’s “hallelujah” on repeat. but the promise of petrichor in the morning doesn’t cancel out the storm. maybe some things just shake you and never let you go.

wherever your angels are tonight, they’ll try their hardest to hear you - bruised, waiting, the question that’s been on the tip of your tongue for what seems like forever, a, “when will twelve forty-three a.m. finally, finally not feel like a battlefield?”

this is not a happy ending, but these are the words weaving through the air and this is the sheer stubborn persistence of life and this, this moment, this string of moments, this tangled collection of strings and wires, this is a story. this is a story.

found this in old word documents today, and I completely don’t remember writing it. under a cut for length/incomprehension/blah blah fifteen-year-old existentialism?

—

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Sling-shot a year at me, come on, I’m ready for it; wrap it up with ribbons, nostalgia as a pretty red bow, a bundle of days and days and days: burning cups of tea, freezing fingers on the handle of a door, salt in eyes, sudden blindness, smiles and not-smiles and not-anywhere-close-to-smiles, a collection of two hundred alarm clock rings and dazed afternoon showers, solitude and company, books and voices, faces forgotten and then remembered again in a dizzying snap of fingers. Sand storms and rainstorms and yellow leaves, coats and sandals, work and sleep, driving and flying and running and staying all too still. Thirty-one million, five hundred and thirty-six thousand seconds that must be accounted for—where do they go? Next year, I swear, I’m keeping a file, a whole bookshelf of moments, of minutes, so that all of this time stops catching the both of us off guard. Go on, throw me another one: a snowball-sized handful of memory, a reminder of what we have to come, and what we may have lost along the way. And the next one, the next year, it’s a stone wrapped in a thousand rubber bands, bouncing right back to us for ages, and we’ll never forget this golden summer, that glittering wide-eyed silver fall that still has yet to come. And the next, and the next, and the next—

“Endless, numbered days,” Sam Beam calls them. We stepped into spring four days ago, and when the rain finally clears—and it always does, because if there’s one thing you can count on in the world, it’s the constant replaying of patterns that shape into a history—we’ll open our eyes to a universe that is unchanged but still, still sparkling from so much unbelievable potential.

Here’s to the new season;

here’s to brand-new light.

Nameless light, bullet that razes through your teeth—sure, everything has to come to an end, so can’t I be yours? It’ll be pick-and-choose destruction, a herald of the modern age. I’ll spin myself off a ring, an interstellar disk, a dimension, and come to you through a forest fire or the punctured engine of an airplane or a broken blood cell (danger’s in the details, baby). I am the rope that breaks when you’re mid-air, swinging—the steel singing at the edge of knives. Look at us, from far away, third planet from the sun, third in line, like Earth is waiting for its chance to get close and burn up the sky, a star that never could. Time should go both ways, I think. Here, at the beginning of the universe, I missed you still. The air between us is only a displacement, a mistake, an uncontrollable error, but

it’s just—

I could be your poison

—No, that is not a hypothetical, not a what-would-happen-if, not a four a.m. dream or a late-afternoon wish or a seaside lie, not this time, no, sir, i only say the things that I mean these days, because so many words get lost in the space between the silences, the dark inch between the heater and the wall, the chasm of empty air between your hands and my face and our bones. RUN AWAY WITH ME and this time I’m making a promise, a sermon I have no right to preach but a sermon nonetheless, a call for angels and for you, a phone ringing loudly in the middle of the night and when you pick it up tired and unawake and drowning in a dream, there won’t be a sound, just the static of the sky and the wires and the years, but is it too much to ask for you to know what I want to say anyway? A car, a stereo, a moon that guides us toward the horizon, any horizon. In that quiet next to your ear I am trying to tell you: please, all it would take is a bag with the essentials, toothbrush and clothes and a pile of books, and I’ll be over in a second — I swear, sweetheart, I’ll be there in a split second faster than you can close your eyes and we could live so unspectacularly, isn’t that what you wanted, just to be ordinary in the most perfectly extraordinary way? Tell me you’ll miss this life and I’ll call you out on being a liar. Tell me you don’t want a highway, a chandelier of stars, a front yard that is the entire map of the country. Your mother, my faults, your plans and my letters and the prospect of leaving everything in a puff of air and dust and dark, dark blue, because after all here is the music that we’ve been hearing all our lives but not quite listening to; why have we never listened? Tell me you need a sunrise just as much as I do. Tell me we could live on cheap stale coffee and a wild night of quiet car rides forever, anonymous, unspoken, free. Tell me yes.

dear, dear M: you go through friends like other people go through tissues, sneezes, days of the week, but it’s not anybody’s fault. if anything, it’s from books about the multiverse—all those things you used to read about parallel worlds, about an infinite number of places and possibilities and philosophies all coincidentally existing at the same time, making you frantic. making you sweat. because when it comes down to it, the only thing you want is time, right? time to tell your mother that she should be proud for her own life as well as yours, time to ask that girl on the bench if she has time for coffee despite how busy she pretends to be with her newspaper, time to quit things that lead nowhere and find the words that matter. time for more people, more ideas, more loves—you want it all. you’re trying, but not in the right ways, and it shows; you know there are chances and, understandably, you can’t take them because what about the other ones—what about the endless number of choices you’ve given up just by thinking about it, by worrying, by the simple act of sitting here right now and trying to choose? what if you’ve passed up the stars, the galaxies, the ever-expanding expanse of the sky-scape, the oceans and the nebulas and the cosmic wanderlust that drives the burn of suns, just to be here on earth, buried inside a life for which you might not even have been destined? what is destiny after all but a misalignment of futures, a random concoction of total random consequence. and this is the part where you panic, where you jerk awake in the night in cold sweat, because you realize that you can’t have everything. in fact, you can’t even have most anything. not anything. but F for effort.

hey, M - 

at all times, there is always a sunset in some place of the world, did you realize? close your eyes for a heart-stop pin-drop moment, and let the idea comfort you.