The Milky Way

1. The first (and only) time I've seen the Milky Way--that great stretch of universe that our little blue planet happens to be nestled--was in Orlando, Florida when I was seven. We were standing outside of Disneyworld waiting to take the shuttle back to our car. We had spent the whole day at the park. It was now midnight and the sky was jet black, only punctuated by the twinkles of the sky.

My dad had picked me up. I'm certain I started to become more and more of a slumped child as we walked the last bit out of the park, so he picked me up to speed up the process.

He touched my shoulder and pointed up at a smear of stars in the sky. It look like someone had smudged the sky, a permanent error that no amount of erasing could remove. A dropped nail polish bottle spilling it mercury-like paint onto the antique dresser never to be in its original state. "That's the Milky Way." Images of candy bars flashed through my mind. "There could be anything out there. Stars, and planets and suns and maybe other Earths." I gazed back at the smudge, at the infinity that was expressed in a seemingly tangible way. I felt small. I felt huge. I felt unlike a seven year old nestled in her father's arms. How could it be so big and we be so small? How could we exist with everything out there? How could I stand on a dot that is smaller than the smallest dot up in that inky sky and look up and understand and haven't dissapeared and dispersed into the vastness of it? I couldn't stop looking at it as we walked to the bus. It was a chasm of everything my life to that point had not been: vast, uncertain, indistinguishable.

We boarded the bus. I feel asleep on Daddy's arm and awoke being tucked into my bed in our motorhome.


2. Last night as Shelby and I were streaming down the highway with the top down in her convertible. We went North because we didn't know where it went, and we zoomed north, slicing the air, having it toss our hair up in the air and fling it back down to our face, stinging our skin. The stars were out. The sun had tucked away hours upon hours ago. I looked up at the sky, at the grand spectacular sky that stays still as you hurl forward into the unknown. And for a moment, the whisps of clouds that had survived into this late nighttime became smudges of the galaxy across the sky.

Zoe Keating's music (an avant cello player) leaked from the speakers and I was seven again, and the universe was before me. And there was no forward or backward, no worries of being another year older, another year behind, there was the stars and the make-believe Milky Way and the night and the music.

Shelby turned to me, "Don't you just love convertibles?"

I grin.

"Yes. Oh, yes."

One Year Out

Last year at this date I left Brooklyn. I retreated back to Dallas. Last year at this date I would have never imagined to be living the way I am, which is? Well, not horribly. Actually pretty good.

Dallas was painted so morosely in my mind. Black tints to everything. It was the Past--capital P. It was the dim and the slow and the backsteps. It was awful things that made me feel caged and small and nervous.

And this year has had those moments. It's much easier to be caged in places of your past. The bars are already up. The barriers are already up. They are just waiting for you to walk into the open doors. But with the experience of being away, you can see the traps sooner.

I viewed returning to Dallas as returning to the person I was in Dallas when I was young but she is (thankfully) gone. Dallas was not as terrifying when I am me and not her. She lurks around setting those traps of above but her weakness is my strength.



Last year at this date, I wouldn't imagine that I returned to Nw York because of a play I wrote. I wouldn't have been able to imagine that in hindsight, New York was not good to me. The people? Maybe. The place? No. We were never destined to be friends.

The Baz Luhrman/Mary Schmich production "Always Wear Sunscreen" tell us to "Live in New York once but leave before it makes you hard." I am proud of my time in New York, but I am perhaps even more proud of the months since and the haze of emotions that I've waded through and the clarity found in distance.

For New York was foreign to me, and it no longer is. That is an accomplishment. And Dallas was familiar yet foreign to me, and it no longer is. That is an accomplishment.

I left as a child and returned as an adult. I have been rediscovering Dallas with the grace of a baby, tripping and falling and making messes of things other people cannot fathom. I've been covered in paint, and grass clippings and left alone, so very alone and so very surrounded. I had to learn again how to make polite small talk with strangers who will talk to you. Ever presence kindness has infiltrated my life again, and it makes me smile. I have to hold my tongue a bit more and be more clever when I disagree with someone's ideas. I'm being accosted with mindsets I was quick to forget, and when I leave again perhaps I won't shuttle them away so quickly. I have found the joy in lawn care. I awake in a house so brightly colored that it gets compared to Monet's Giverny home. And I love it. I still have some belongings in boxes. And I'm still "trying" to unpack them. I don't mind that they are in boxes. They amuse me. My unpacked boxes sitting in my home. A pause in my nomadic life.



And as I still (and perhaps constantly) look to the horizon, to the next great adventure, and next great city and next great part of my life, I am content where I am sitting now. Sitting on a front porch with a beer and a breeze reminiscing of all that has come before and all that is in the future. Dallas may just be a way station, but for the time being, its the nicest one I've stayed at in a long time.


To another good year.