Travel

She specifically liked places she'd never been, not just travel itself. Each street, each tree or storefront, came under a certain glow by virtue of its newness, regardless of how similar to places familiar. It wasn't wanderlust so much as a need to escape memory. And not bad memory, just a dusty film that seemed to creep over places as experiences overlapped. Time folded into place, layered over and through. A particular stretch of sidewalk was a walk with this boy, with that one, alone, a dozen car rides, a place to bike past, and each with its own place in a different story, snatches of old dialogue or hopes or disappointments which snagged as she walked through them.

Over years, places burnished. The itch under skin of memory solidified if kept too close together. Memories could make her smile, but more often they humidified. So she sought cleaner air, the wonder of trails untrodden, the magic of not knowing what else had happened there.

Impostering

I buy my legitimacy with social gambles. A major squashed together of two incredibly complex disciplines, neither of which I feel I've quite earned as title. I made the major up, but the diploma is real, somehow.

I'm a programmer of hardware, but really only in the very small space I've defined for myself. The specific thing I get credit for is a device I tell everyone makes it easy to do hardware, to learn programming. I didn't make the device as such, but I did make much of its easiness- and now I'm celebrated using this device I keep telling everyone is simply not hard.

What am I good at? Juggling. Writing. Dancing. All to degrees, and all degrees I don't have. If I did them for a living, I'd probably disavow my legitimacy there too, and I'd again be right. I'm not that good, just better than most. 

But I'm mostly good at continuing. Distance endured slowly, in the physical sense. The swallowing of feelings like this: knowing that I am not the best, taking myself to task for small mistakes. Fighting always to be and do better. Feeling like I'm often working hard but always never enough. Agonizing over wonderful and undeserved choices sometimes, but mostly smiling and meaning it. 

I think I'm good at slipping through cracks. Celebratedly nonthreatening, I can pass, use wit and bravado if the facade is slipping. Amuse my hosts. Take the things I don't think I deserve, because others think I do. 

There is some that I deserve, just not all this. I'm more a bluffer than a full imposter; I expected more of myself, shouldn't everyone else?

We are as many stories as we are days. But some days shine brighter, that sheen of memory made apart, that something other beyond the pale of blending together days. Some days, I mean, stick their heads up.

But it is the blending together days that make the life story, the back and forth of eras.

It is difficult to remain intentionally unconscious of the man standing there watching you on the periphery of your vision, the place where you are exercising much conscious effort not to look. He called out as you pulled in, and you, off-guard, looked up and smiled before you recognized the nature of his "hello, laadiesss", drawn out like that. And now you're pretending with mighty effort that there is a wall in place through which he cannot reach you, that you and he are not both aware of the fact that your window is down and he is standing right there, still trying to get your attention. Because that's your best weapon, to bend your head down and look like you are too absorbed in your book to notice anything else, to assert a reality that isn't true, so confidently that he will be forced to live in it. Even as he forces you to live in a reality where your best defense is to turn your face (as though deferentially) down.

Dream

In a hospital, a pool full of swimmers, all in black suits. Glass walls on either side divide the pool from two long, curving hallways.

The good doctor lifts her, sideways, tucks her waist under his arm; she is strong and holds herself straight to keep her right leg, the prosthetic leg, steady. They level it across the pool through the blasted out window at the doctor's brother, who has begun to lob small grenades into the water.

He wouldn't dance with her on a moonlit lawn as live music played, but in the aisles of a drugstore he'd catch her hand. In the aisle between the frozen pizzas and the racks of beer, he spun her around, mouthing the words to some poppy love song airing over the shop's quiet speakers. They smiled and stole kisses in secret aisles, dimly lit fluorescents shining out love.

Did I only dream it rained? The sticking and then the running of a hard rain after months of none, almost for me, as though called by my missing it so.

Not just a rain but a downpour, a deluge like we needed, the land too like a sun scented desert for me, the woods that, eucalyptus and scrub, are not woods enough for me with the ground all dust and never moss.

But even a downpour would never be enough, not here. The trees were fine, and so too the dust. It was me who needed rain, dripping from the boughs they do not have here onto the soft salal and sponging forest floor this land also does not have. One rain is not enough to create a woods so gentle.

The heady rain scent is rare enough here that it is cloying, the land seeming desperate, puddles splashing up too briefly on pavement, only to disappear in hours. As I once disappeared in forest. The dry here is so great it swallows you up like ferns can if you go deep enough, like hills do here, swallowing up the life it holds so briefly and then sucks so fully out of the green covering grass which held the water. The little rain those green blades caught leaches down in the space of a week when the season hits, tips first empty and dry, turning sharp, the hills suck away and days later the grass is dead and dry and dead it crowns those hills they proudly call golden.

Behind her, a car speeds past. Something yelled just as she is passed sharpens with the colliding Doppler waves. She recoils, folding in over her chest as though shot. It's an electrical jolt, a shock in the true sense, though she never made out what they said. It's like this every time: a fast car, some guy, words that make no sense whether they're heard or not, and that little Taser of surprise and horror. A little reminder that she's not safe alone.

A woman with hot pink hair to match her shirt serves a green juice. Asked a question it is like she doesn't hear. Slowly and pleasantly but with no great care the vegetables are selected and jammed lovingly into a processor. The juice tastes terrible. She drinks like bitter medicine trying not to wrinkle her nose. Eventually she is pretty sure she feels better.

Strawberries

In the gardens at home, it's strawberry season. Threading through the rocks and flowers of the front garden, in clumps and barrels by the vegetables, all behind the grapevine row, the berries must be ripe by now.

My family called strawberries my birthday fruit; end of June, they're growing sweet and everywhere, spreading into the path with thin green runners like weeds.

They're not mine anymore, the strawberries, but they're still the purview of little girls. Low growing in spottable red, familiar, and large enough that you can fill a bucket even while eating every other. The cousins come and it's like a day of magic at the fairyland house where I grew up.

Red ripe berries among sweet flowers, water from the house, and a silent soft cat threading by the blooming tree while three little girls pluck berries into the plastic jam pails tired around their necks.

Marriage

My friends were married a few weeks ago. It's weird because it's such a permanent thing that it seems rash, but your parents are there smiling quietly the whole time. It feels like maybe the parents should be jumping up, reminding you that tattoos look saggy when you age and are you sure you really want to look at that the rest of your life? Thirty, forty, fifty years from now?

Which is a reasonable reaction; at twenty-three, you have no idea what you'll care about when you're seventy. Maybe you'll still think that peace everlasting is important, but no longer think the Hopi symbol of it on your hip was such a great idea. Maybe you'll still love the same man and want to be around him every day, but for God's sake don't ink his name on the back of your hand. That shit doesn't come off.

Er, marriage. That also doesn't really come off, or rather it's like a tongue ring: you can commit to it, and then years later you can throw away the ring and hope the hole closes up, but it will probably leave a scar, and if nothing else the effects on your tooth enamel are permanent. You and that tongue ring committed to each other, and changed each other in permanent ways.

Anyway, it was weird to watch them walk down the aisle, simple, classic, in the woods, and have them make lifelong vows - vows to keep for several times longer than they've been alive, and everyone smile at the romance and love of the happy couple who have just done something so recklessly binding that they can never take it back as long as they live.

And it's amazing what soft music and cultural norms can do. As I sat their watching, I smiled too, and reached next to me for my partner's warm hand. Perhaps the very foolishness of the act is what makes it beautiful, because it means you're so in love you either can't see all the coming years, or that you see them and can't think of anything you'd rather do than cling hopelessly bound together as years hurtle by.

I look over and his eyes are open, his smile sly. He snakes his arm around my ribs, and in a haze of sleepy warmth, pulls me in. My face on his, I fall back to sleep.

The only percussion their voices needed was the tapping of his brown leather shoe on the leg of the microphone stand. The mic was adjusted short to their wooden chairs, so the center of the stand hit the floor as sharply as a snare in 2/4 time.

I wished she would sing more; he wrote, and played, and sang, and even tapped, but it was her blending harmonies that rounded the notes and made them beautiful. But she was happy to sit with her hands in her lap. Her voice would rise with his, creating the soul of the sad song as she watched her husband from beside his center stage, nothing but love in her eyes.

Closing a company is extremely emotional. It's rough, all the sensations of a hysterical jag stretched out across a couple of months. And you know it's coming; it's not like you don't know you're running out of money, but you're trying everything, really putting in your all, doubling down on caring and time. And the worst thing is, every few days or weeks, you end up with hope. Someone might buy a lot, someone might invest, someone else might hire your whole team to keep doing what you're doing. And you hope, because it really might work. It might not be over. Because initial success is at least as implausible as eventual failure. Neither feels quite deserved, and at the end of the day you don't know why anything is really happening.

With the wisdom of reflection, I remember that for months at the beginning, I told people that our success felt like waiting for the other shoe to drop. This was true; how could we be allowed to be celebrated, given money by strangers to work on something we thought was interesting in a space and time all our own? Because that's the other thing: it did feel like success, that whole period of time. Learning, growing, working together in a way we got to choose, and getting paid- that is the dream. That is success, even if it doesn't last.

The strangest part about the other shoe dropping is that if it takes too long, you don't really believe it's going to fall. And then when you realize it will, it seems like the sky is falling with it.

That's probably part of the reason the failure is so emotional, other than the pure and simple fact that it is failure. You've pinned quite a lot up there, on the underside of the sky: who you are as a person, for instance. When people meet you, they know you as that person who is so passionate about her company and the problems it is trying to solve. That thing looks like your one success, and all your friends and family are so proud. You've moved your life for it, poured out your time for it, more than staked your reputation to it. To many, even you, it is the thing that you are.

And so when you think you might have to shut it down, it's a bit emotional. Because it won't work. Because you still have hope. Because your friends and family are asking how it's going, and the real answer is both too heavy and too unstable, so should you distance yourself from the failure, or from your friends and again double down?

There are two things that must be in reach when I wake up: a water bottle and a timepiece. My cat thwarts both.

I wake thirsty in a way that brooks no metaphors, and reach left. But I have to reach with my right arm, because the cat is lying on my left. I can't quite reach; I'd have to roll over.

Of course, I can't; if I rolled I'd be laying my cat, and despite all logic I like her enough that I don't want to kill her. This despite the fact that she likes to wake me at night by walking onto my chest, lying down to purr and press her front paws endearingly against my windpipe. (I assume she thinks this is endearing.)

So I'm tired when I wake to a cat on my arm, and because I always neglect to set an alarm- I assume I'll wake up naturally, one way or another- I need to know the time. Because I'm not sure if I'm allowed to go back to sleep and thus avoid the water bottle/cat situation.

As I write this, my cat is snuggled against my chest; she spoons. It's the pleasant part of her routine, which is another reason not to let her know I'm awake if I'm not yet ready to get up.

Her routine: if I stir, she gets up from wherever she's sleeping-usually the foot of the bed, though right now she's going through a phase where she likes my pillow. Anyhow, she stands, walks up to my face area, and starts cuddling aggressively.

This is sort of nice; soft cat cuddling is a lovely way to wake up, assuming you meant to be awake. She rubs the top of her head over my cheeks, purring in good faith as the little hairs she sheds continuously settle around my nose.

I draw her out by offering my hand, somewhere away from the medial line of my body. Every time, she goes for the hand, five fingers much better at scratching her cheeks than my mediocre chin can provide.

I pet her a bit, and then if I'm lucky, she'll settle down on my left arm, purring, nestling close so she's all encircled but for those front paws, which rest on my shoulder, massaging with claws. I have a thousand tiny scars from a thousand tiny wounds of affection on my left shoulder, but sometimes I can fall asleep as this goes on.

This, of course, yields the left arm predicament we started with: I'm thirsty, and it's light out, but I can't see the clock. Do I check the time, and risk restarting the cycle if I'm too early, and should sleep?

Bosses

There's something very off-putting about having a boss. Especially if you haven't had one before. Particularly if you already knew the person.

Anywhere else, you'd meet as colleagues. "What do you do?" "I manage a team of developers." "I design user workflows." "I'm a dancer." "I freelance." "I write." It barely matters what it is you do; you're equals. You converse under the assumption that each other's time is valuable and their insights interesting.

That's not to say bosses don't respect their ..what do you call them? Underlings? Peons? There's probably a better word, but that's what springs to mind.

It's unnatural, is my point, to put one person *over* the other. Where does that lead? Why does that person get to decide, to lead you?

My woods are dark and deep as night
Small sunlight ventures through the sagging boughs
The sounds are sussurus, but not of leaves;
Of tiny creatures over needled ground
The smell of water rich upon the air
And mossy carpet rises all around

You are rest to me.
With you, the world goes right and still.
Like following a dance, I can give up my thoughts to you.
Full trust, in love you sing me peace.