Yesterday the rain settled in and all night I listened to its song outside my bedroom window as I drifted in and out of dreaming. Though it's still warm, fall is definitely here.  It's been a slow shift and still somehow hit with a bang. It feels like everything embodies that narrative lately. I watch a slow turn and then suddenly I'm looking at the other side of the thing.

The sky is white and I've had strange little hints of reminders the past few days of places I've been, places that feel so far and distant it's hard to imagine they once felt close to the marrow of me, places I feel fondness for and places I feel grateful to have left behind, bullets I managed to narrowly dodge, trainwrecks I watched unfold in the rearview mirror... in the same breath there have been breezes blowing through with the intoxicating scent of future possibility, directions that—like this impending season—feel fresh and grounding, full of earthy wonder.

This year, like every other, I went to visit the swifts for my birthday. I watched them gather in the sky, flutter and swirl, dart and soar, and was reminded once again of the way they work together, the way they so perfectly embody the singularity and togetherness that I feel in the world. They coalesce and converge, then break form—a mass of seeming chaos—then just as quickly, drop a wing and are one again. There was a time I would have called this the closest thing to religion I know how to understand, the way we are all—imperfectly—a part of something bigger.

Once, I wanted to trace the flight patterns of birds on paper, macro and micro—30 seconds, a lifetime. I made them up in short bursts of thread, of ink, tracing their way across paper. Do their movements across the sky, the continents follow those same patterns of tributaries, bark, the veins of a leaf, the veins beneath my own skin?

Somehow now though, the abstraction feels a little deeper, a little more distant. This year, my body is my body. That little bird body is his own. 2 beating hearts, a million. Meaning is less born of the sameness, the layering of pattern. Tangible proof isn't what I'm after, not exactly. The weight is no longer in making visual the gaps and convergences. The call I feel is something like wanting to learn to be them. This year my fantasy is to trace their goings more specifically, fly alongside them—if only in short jaunts in the metal body of a jet. This year my fantasy is to spend a year with them, see what they show me in the moments without the grandstanding of their yearly show, break free of the metaphors that have grown up around them in my own yearly rituals. I want to see their quiet moments. It is in those moments, I think, that I might find the simple beauty of the easing between community and singularity, the way a life is built in the accumulation of those moments.

I have always wanted to be that last bird in the sky, the one diving and darting alone as night falls, with the safety of the rest just below, waiting. This year I want to learn the ease of transition, slipping easily back and forth between that solitary delight and the pleasure of the whole, making something beautiful together.

I am both very happy and very sad. This is either a character trait or an extended state of being. This is both a character trait and an extended state of being.

Last week I camped at a lake, floated weightless in bracing cool clear water. Blue above me, blue below me, that special submerged silence, the small muffled splash of a toe breaching the surface.

......

For a time I prided myself on the shortening, the simplifying of my long languid sentences. See how I am breaking form? See how I am laying bare what I used to shroud in epiphanic gesture? See how I am revealing what simply is? See how I don't need to pretend there is beauty?

I need to pretend there is beauty.

I need for there to be beauty. I need to believe in it. It is the believing that makes it.

......

On the second night by the lake—the blue hour, the gloaming—the swifts dove and darted low and sweeping around me. It felt like something. It was that familiar something feeling, the precipice of something. 'I know I should be too old to believe in that feeling anymore,' I heard myself say, 'but I think I'm a better person when I believe in magic.'

I love that swelling feeling inside of me, that buoyed feeling of hope, that intangible slippery something. It is what I feel on warm summer nights on my bike, at sunset on the beach, with my face buried in the crook of the neck of someone I love, the feeling when artmaking and living are imbued with the same breath, when they are indivisible, that feeling that makes me want to press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, unfurl my fists and fingers, breathe deep. It is something like delight, something akin to peace.

......

In 3 days I turn 35. Three fat decades, plus half of another, a baker's dozen—almost twice: My mother's age at me 5, a few years shy of when my grandmother first got cancer, the age they start calling a pregnancy high risk... Because I don't have children, a friend of mine says, of herself. She speaks of it as a foregone conclusion.  Another woman, 10 years my junior, talks confidently of her future children. It is such a part of how we know ourselves as women, locate ourselves in society, in time, in culture, in lineage. I once spoke of my future children—a younger, sharper, more fierce and naive me—now I hear the story shift in the telling: If I have children... If I had children... The maybe crept in. And it isn't really sad in the way the younger version of me would have thought it—the 28 year old me who saw babies everywhere she went, who felt that ache in the pit of her at the sight of them, the smell. Now it is an abstraction more than a feeling. And now I know that lakeside champagne breakfasts and dance-parties, and collapsing on the couch at the end of a long work day, and spur of the moment beach trips or spur of the moment pretty-much-anythings are a product of this childless life I am living. My twenty year old cousin told me last week that being an adult seems alright the way I do it, that my adult life is blackberry picking and drinking beer. And from a certain angle she is right; it feels good to see this vision of myself, this particular freedom, the way the sound—the feeling—of the wind stops me in my tracks, spreads a grin wide and slow across my face. This is a good life, a full life, a thrillingly happy life.

It is a life in which I am learning to embrace being both very happy and very sad.

I went to the opera a couple of weeks ago and was so blown away by the scene of Lucia's hand dragging across a fogged-up window while her brother and lover fought below her, so blown away that I didn't know how to talk about it, the visual viscerality. I could dissect it for its symbology, its metaphor, how it became a fulcrum, the pivot point for the rest of the opera. I could write a whole dissertation on the movement, the tracks, each moment memorialized as the next unfolded on top of it... But no. It was glowing red, and I felt in my spine. I felt it. That is enough. That is everything.

And in that moment I remembered what I meant when I first laid claim to being an artist, what it felt like—the unnamed thing coursing through me. Before I cared about theory or the postmodern secret nods of artists to each other behind the closed curtains of their public faces, before I knew the pasted on smiles of openings, the things we were supposed to be talking about. The language and slight of hand that proved the point of the dissection that made what I had to say worth hearing, the worlds of prestige and tangled meaning.

I have been dog-paddling, forgotten entirely that I am a swimmer, grasping and scrambling to stay afloat, getting nowhere. It takes a willingness to stretch out long, point forward while looking down, have a little faith in muscle and breath and buoyancy. If—instead of all of this furious trying—I can let my muscle memory take over, I think I just might remember the cool meditative rhythm of my stroke: reach, pull, kick, breathe. Maybe after a little while inertia will take hold again, and movement will come more easily than the swirl of my own thoughts.

The snow is melting and has become a sea of slush. I tiptoe and slosh and try to maintain balance. What had frozen rigid has melted in a flash and flooded everything. We weren't prepared, aren't prepared.

It is like that. When the ice melts I don't know what to do with everything that is suddenly liquid and flowing. It is moving and bigger than anything I can corral, anything I can even pretend to try to control. It makes its own rivers, forges its own paths, carves ravines into anything between it and where its headed.

My feet slop through the muck on the streets. Everything is slick and soft and yielding.

Last week in yoga, my instructor had us spend the whole class on backbends, spoke of the metaphorical implications of the pose: baring your belly, committing with effort and intention to vulnerability. She told us how, in her personal life, vulnerability was the most anxiety-producing place—bare yourself and then freeze and hold your breath. It is like that. I step forward into open air; I do it every time. I am not unafraid; I am terrified, but I do it every time. I take risks; it is the only thing that feels worth it, but I bare myself and then I freeze and hold my breath. I cling and I gasp and I hope, and I lose my suppleness, my ability to move and breathe with ease. So we spent the hour bending back, baring our bellies, pushing evermore skyward, opening, opening... and breathing, moving in the place of vulnerability.

It is a muscle that needs work, a practice we could all tend to with more diligence, more grace, with more give and forgive. Even writing the words here is me stepping forward into the wind, and I feel my breath catch in my throat, the beginnings of steeling myself, the rigidity creeping in and up. So, deep breath, return to the slick soft slush of the fiercely wildly melting snow and ice. It knows not where it's going, but it's going, and no fear or self-consciousness can slow its pace or block its path.

I have had so many lives while trying to get to the one I imagined for myself. My life has been made up of vignettes—suspended and disparate vignettes. I remember a dinner I had years and years ago with my first love, and a family member and her then-boyfriend; afterwards, my boyfriend told me how every time we did something, every experience always led him to think this is how it's going to be now. From here forward, we would be having these dinners with these two. But they broke up not long after, and after a time, so did we. It was the only dinner of its kind. Still, I think about that idea, the way a pattern develops, or even just an occurrence, and it feels like the way things will be.

I've made a sort of tenuous peace with my life unmoored.

I was once a girl waking before dawn to trudge through the snow to lifeguard at a swimming pool in a college town in new england. (Remember the night sledding down the Brown Green on cafeteria trays?) I was the child in rowboats, and the woman painting inky blue skylines, the preschool teacher, the nanny, the woman in a business suit presenting at museum conferences, and the apron covered in printing ink, and artist talks, and high heels and hiking shoes, and watching the sun rise from the roof, and the woman who's loved so hard and so deep and so many times over that counting doesn't suffice.

I was once the girl who built gallery walls, and tore them down, and wrote poems about what life would be like in ten years. It isn't anything like what she imagined.

In this life, phosphorescence is my season. But I haven't seen it since that week in August, at grad school. The one where possibility felt palpable, where ideas and artmaking felt wide endless and expansive, and I snuck away from the beachfire late at night to kiss a man I shouldn't have, and I watched the stars fade and the sky grow pink, and love and life and future felt like the sun rising in me.

I haven't swam in phosphorescence in years, but it feels like swimming among the stars. It was just this summer that I rediscovered swimming in lakes—the silence, the wide open blue sky, the way a toe breaching the surface makes a sound deep and echoing underwater and the sound of my breath and heartbeat amplified. The first night of that camping trip we all stumbled down to the lake's edge and dove in and under. Stars thick in the night sky. This was a life that felt so alive, every part of me was happy. Free.

And what about that brief vignette of red lipstick and Lana Del Rey, boozy fancy cocktails, and dancing all night?

And there is the night I spent out in the gorge last month, the spur of the moment trip we took after hearing bad news, the company and the drive into the golden hour lifting my heavy heart, reminding me of hope and pleasure and open air. He held my hand and touched my face, and things felt actually better. We drank hot chocolate from stainless steel travel mugs after watching the light drain from the sky, slept in the folded out backseat bed under the skylight in the car, made coffee at dawn and hiked up to where we could see the gorge and the river spread out in front of us. To the west, greens and blues, and to the east the trees gave way to rich yellows and golds. We were on the precipice, sitting at the very edge of where the landscape changed, the newest place that felt like this is how it's going to be now.

But the quiet white sky, the golden hue of the worn-down wooden floorboards in my empty apartment, the sound of cartires on wet streets, the poet in me finding meaning in sounds and colors and the words written on passing trucks, the familiar tinny voice calling out the line number on the bus, the mixture of sadness and hope settling in my chest, sleepless nights in the company of sitcoms or my thoughts under the yellow halo of my bedroom lamp, laughter with friends, walks around the lagoon, my studio... this is the life in-between, the thing that always returns between the hypersaturation of each vignette. The baseline is the sound of my own breath in the space between the notes.

Antilamentation
by Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

I don't know how to talk about the things that are really happening, the things that are bigger and deeper, the things rooted to deep lines of blood and family, and the ways we've loved each other all our lives.

I found words—What if we do nothing and then she's just gone?—tumbling from my mouth, into the phone receiver, falling through the ether and backhanding my mother's soft open face. The words as I type them bring instantly to mind that terrible time I slammed the door to my bedroom in a dramatic teenage fight with her, how she was in the doorway, how the door hit her head, how her glasses hit her nose, her wince and gasp of pain. Nothing is worse than injuring my mother; nothing is worse than my mother injured. But this is what is true. My mother is injured, and I cannot fix it. She is in pain, and I cannot fix it. Her little sister is sick. My aunt is sick. Saying it, even here, sours something deep in my gut. a little stone turns over, disrupts some peace. It feels like I am betraying a secret. Why is illness a darkness, a hidden secret thing? Cancer. The word is ugly. We don't like it. My mouth has said it too many times. And I am not yet old. My mouth is not done saying it while formed into shapes of shock and sadness. There will be more. Cancer. Words like metastasize fall easily from my tongue now. It is in her stomach, her spine. It has metastasized. This is what we know. Metastasize is a bad word; it is a worse word than recurrence; I know that now too. 5 years ago she had aggressive breast cancer. After a litany of surgery and poisons and radiation, she came through still on this side. And now it is back. She told us she thought of it as a bird, a bird she had to get out of the house. I liked that. I liked it because I always hated the war and battle metaphors. This is a body, a person. Soothe and tend always seeming more appealing to me than wage, attack and fight.

But now I understand the urgency to fight. I want to fight to make my mother ask the questions none of us want answers to. I want to fight to protect her from those answers. I want to fight to make everything ok for everybody.

I want to fight for my aunt, fight to always be able to hear that belly laugh coming from the woman brushing my hair with her hairbrush—the one that was SO much better than the one my mom had at home—on the couch at the beachhouse. I always took pride in the way family thought that I looked like her, was like her. You have your aunt's hair, and I puffed up just a little. 6-year-old me just wanted to be her. I remember visiting her once, in Seattle, before she was married. I think she married the summer I turned three, so I must have been very young. She was a single woman, living in an apartment (in a city!)—so exotic. There was a mystery and some secretiveness surrounding it, something I can't quite place now.

Cancer. It is such an ugly and plain word. It doesn't suit the woman I looked up at wide-eyed as a child, the woman of cities and world travels, the woman of opinions and convictions as brash and unabashed as my own.

She was tough. She was tough, and she was like me.

And I don't want to soothe and tend. I want to be—and I want her to be—the woman that 6-year-old me saw in both of us; I want us to be tough, and I want us to fight.