A Spoonful of Honey

Cool breeze, cool breeze
Rushing down her spine with both palms squeezed around the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz

High on mushrooms and full moon fumes
Brushing the belly of black waves with her fingertips at midnight

She sprinkles sand like powdered sugar through her hands
As the tide inches closer to the towel

She wants to remember all of this.

The campfire crackling. The strums on the ukulele. The sloshing of lukewarm beer as she lifts the glass bottle and takes another swig. 

These are the sounds of profundity. This is the fleeting feeling of youth. Cast like a fly on a fishing rod on her way to becoming a woman soon.

But the phone rings. 

The clock flashes 7:00 AM. 

It’s hard to sleep when my friends keep calling to go surfing.

It’s hard to tell the difference between dreams and reality lately.

I push my face mask up over my eyes and roll to my side, spooning my pillow. Crows begin their chorus of cranky squawks now that the rats chewing the floorboards in the attic have finally gone to sleep.

Maybe that’s why I work best in winter. When things are cold and dark and melancholy and hot tea and fuzzy socks and overly intimate outpourings feel like the right antidote. Right now the days are long and warm and delicious. They must be gobbled up like ice cream melting off the edges of a waffle cone quick quick quick before they disappear.

Maybe that’s why so few of us tell tales of good times, and the myth that suffering makes the best art falsely perpetuates. It’s hard to write when my friends keep calling to go surfing. It’s hard to write when the sun is shining and the waves are breaking and no one but us will fix them. 

I stretch my sleepy arms over my head and toss the sheets aside. I pull on a loose dress and open my back door to the garden. Outside the sun hits my bronzed skin and the trees sway in a gentle morning breeze. My bare feet sink into the soil and I crouch low to inspect the progress of the salad leaves, the little lemon tree, the apricots above, and the berries bursting on the bush. I say good morning to the dirt and good morning to the earth. I love this place because it’s mine—for now. For the next few months or weeks or goodness, is it just days left in the season? Waking up in the same place with two feet on terra ferma long enough to grow a garden is tangible proof of pause from my transient existence. 

There are certain things you learn in motion, certain things you learn in stillness. Coming or going, moving and bending through beautiful or painful, or painfully beautiful growth spurts is a quintessential backbone in any hero’s journey. It’s a vain attempt to keep up and catch up with the pieces of myself on their own race track of emotional evolution. Stillness is much more subtle. Keeping tabs of who I am and who I am becoming in times like these is like dipping a spoon into a jar of honey and watching it drip off drop by drop. The change is slow and hypnotic. You don’t notice until later when your tea tastes sweet and your fingers feel sticky that anything happened at all.

I’ve been trying to find the words for it—for what I’m doing, that is. I walk back inside and track dirt on the wood pallet floor. I put the kettle to boil and open the blinds. I burn sage and listen to sound bowls and I sit on the hard floor with my eyes closed and think about big things like what will I make for breakfast and where do I see myself in five years? Once filled with ample imagination and ambition, I write down the day’s to-do list on a lime green sticky note:

Tuesday
Meditate (I cross a line through it)
Yoga
Call mom
Emails
Write
Surf
Write
Walk/run
Guitar/skate
Read

Satisfied with the work day agenda and eager for two recesses, I begin hunting those pesky, elusive words.

What do you call it when “working” is riding bare-back up the ridge of the Santa Barbara mountains through places where avocados droop like earrings from tree branches and baby coyotes yelp at you in curiosity? Where my best friend and I disappear for a week down the Pacific peninsula to a farm where the grid has yet to arrive, keeping contentedly busy gorging ourselves in strawberry fields forever, running barefoot down muddy slopes while stray puppies and wild horses gallop alongside us all the way to the water’s edge? Where I’m surfing in the middle of the monarch migration and as I pop up and walk to the nose, butterflies swirl around my ankles and together we travel to the end of the line?

Fingertips stained with indigo ink, I write down the memories burned into the detritus of my history, but can’t find the right words for what it all amounts to. No matter to assemble and reverberate through the atoms bouncing in the air. It’s just a feeling that seeps out of my pores and sinks into my bones. I try to find the words—really, I do. Something to hold on to once this chapter inevitably ends. But I’m not sure they exist. When I look too hard the alarm rings. The dream disappears. I have to go searching again: for the truer truest true, amongst endless shades of greens and blue.

Along the way people pester me with questions: “But really—what are you doing? How are you going to make money? When will you start actually working?”

The truth is sometimes the right answer to the wrong questions is to say nothing.

The truth is you can’t miss what’s meant for you. 

That’s how waves find us, after all. A vibration through liquid traveling thousands of miles, collecting itself under the surface of the sea to release all at once. When your frequencies match, when a pulse of energy aligns with the beating of your heart, when you’ve traveled the same distance, paddled the same speed, and popped up in time to get a good look at each other face to face, you’ll find the sweetest kisses are there one moment, gone the next.

The truth is this is how I’ve learned to live and to love.

Woven in the tapestry of sun-kissed memories are stories of lovers just passing through. There’s the river guide up north, and the sailor across the bay. There’s the gardener who brings me fresh flowers and the musician strumming soft songs in the mountains. There’s the one who re-affixed the leash to my ankle, who left his board and swam over to mine, his wetsuit tattered and torn and his tattoos peeking through while he fastened the velcro tight so it wouldn’t budge, holding on to me longer than he had to. There’s the one who knew I kept my door unlocked and sneaked in while I slept to give me a final goodnight kiss before he moved far away. There’s the one who wrote poetry he stashed in his sock, then drove twelve hours to read it to me. There’s the one who told me not to fall for him while he laid on my bedroom floor, looking up at me. There’s one I really like but all is lost when I ask him if he read anything I wrote. He shakes his head no. I pretend not to be bothered. But he doesn’t know me. Not even a little bit. Not even at all.

The truth is they were all gifts, but they were only guests. 

I write them down anyway to keep track of all the ways we say, “I love you” when we can’t say, “I love you”. How we evade obligation and relish powerful, finite bursts of intimacy, knowing we can paddle back out to catch another. A new one to replace the last one. A phenomenon and on and on.

The truth is this is the rapturous reality of being young. 

The truth is no one can love you like you love you. 

The truth is sometimes it’s better to just be alone. 

It’s how to blossom into cactus trees, how to keep busy being free. I listen to the same song over and over because it’s comforting to know that this experience is derivative. The themes, timeless. A mythology unfolding, again and again. Twenty-four and there’s so much more.

Imagine wanting only this.

I write down the things women tell me that they don’t tell anyone else. Stories of unborn babies and of grandpas twisting door knobs into their childhood bedrooms late at night. Why I am the receiver of these stories, I do not know. My awareness expands. Perhaps it's an attempt to tell me that when they were my age, they were cut short, weighed down to the bottom of oceans where they stashed secrets in the deepest and darkest abyss. They spent their youth treading water instead of learning how to swim. I don’t know what to do with these stories, they make me feel old too soon, so I set them aside.

Just then, a woman walking laps around the fountain in the courtyard stops and smiles and says hello. She mumbles something about needing a hip replacement. I watch her hobble away, and tell her I think she looks great. “I’m ninety-one years old!” she shouts back, “Enjoy it while it lasts, sweetheart!” Her last line echoes through the veranda as she vanishes. Ancient wisdom. She makes me feel young. I take it as a good omen: that the words are on their way, and when they arrive, they will be simple and sweet. 

The truth is I keep reading the most beautiful things, hoping one day I might make a similar offering. 

For now I write for an audience of two: the past version of myself who knew I’d have stories to tell, and the future version who wants to remember what this all felt like before I rolled down the windows and hot air blew through my unbrushed hair while the day faded into night and everything started all over again.