i send my SOS to the world- this is my message in a bottle. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Accumulation of Time and Space I was browsing through things I have written the last couple months, and this one encapsulates the moment. I want to tell you that being here changed me, that I am a different woman than I was before I moved here. But that wouldn't be true, because those twenty-two years prior I had to living in San Francisco had equal bearing on me. I want to tell you that I found myself, that there was a there, before there was a here. But that implies two destinations, and if I can only file one piece of information into me from this moment, it would be that I've realized that my whole life is so much wider than stop overs between flights. If anything, I can say that these moments all equal pieces on a journey. It's something tangible within me here like the smallest increment of growth, tick marks that I can put on an imaginary post. I can't tell you about a definitive moment because there wasn't one. It might have been on the day that I sat on a bench underneath a willow at the Conservatory of Flowers and listened to a man play the saxaphone for hours. It might have been the time I stood at the top of Mt. Diablo and felt the gentle curve of the limitless blue press in against my outstretched arms. It might have been the moments every single time I come out of Yerba Buena on the Bay Bridge to feel my heart swell. It might have been the first time I saw beauty in etched, graffitied glass in a mom and pop Chinese store outside Stockton Tunnel. It could have been with each inhalation and exhalation from an impromptu game of tag in Union Square on a random Wenesday. It might have been the time I rode the M-Train and made up stories in my head about a woman in a burgundy knit cap and unusually large suitcase. It could have been with every single tear that miraculously appeared in the dark of a pew at a church in Berkeley. Maybe it was in every single spontaneous, random drive to destinations unknown. Or the time I wrote for hours and hours on end in my big black book and realized that I was meeting me again. Perhaps that moment is now, now that I'm leaving, now that I'm realizing how much I gained. I tried to bring the things from home with my sparingly, but I've accumulated so much here that I don't know what to take. Love. Honesty. Joy. Fear. Courage. Belief. Friendship. Knowledge. I know I can parallel park ten times better than I ever could before. I know I can walk down dark roads with every childhood fear I've ever had crowding at my shoulders. I know I can be a girl, but I also know how important it is to be a woman. I know how it feels to understand finally, how far I've come and how little I really know. 3:12 p.m. - Thursday, Jun. 09, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||