letters to sweden

...I hold a strong thought. When it's right, it will be easy. I'm still waiting, too. This afternoon, I went to the Sutro Baths in San Francisco. They are ruins of open air bathing pools on the edge of the Pacific. It was incredible to watch the waves breaking slavishly over jagged rocks, hear the shrieking of gulls...There was the impossible greenness of ice plant slick down the cliffside, the sweet musky miasma of small white alyssum blossoms, the glassy blue of the pools reflecting it all silently and up-side down. A sea otter is living in one of them, but we haven't seen him. They say he is feasting on small carp. Goldfish. I befriended a curly-haired dog named Zeus, who was learning about the world with his teeth. The sun set rosily and trimmed everything in gold.

It was a long drive home through the city. A perfect dusk where lights have gone on in cafes and you can watch everything inside as though it were a silent film being enacted in a brightly lit diorama. The girl behind the counter texting with a bored posture, people picking up and putting down different sized cans of paint, the stoicism of produce. There are holiday lights in the trees outside of Evergreen Mortuary: McAvoy and O'Hara, which seems a bit too lighthearted, but maybe the dead would want it that way. People come and go, so numerous and rapid that they seem to erase themselves into the streets. A man moans under his blankets outside the methadone clinic, the neighbor smiles his lewd smile, a young woman is talking loudly into her telephone, men in suits surge towards public transit, boys in tight pants split traffic on spindly looking bicycles. In the echoing underground trains generate metallic wind and a blond-haired cowboy sings sweet and piercingly. Escalators move crowds up and down, bikes are locked in row, heels click against marble. The doors open, then close, there is the sound of hinting, then we slide under the bay...

My clothes are loose; grief has made all my softness and roundness disappear. Black and grey what was rosy before. With the New Year, hope creeps in and lights the edges... I try to sing, to remember lyrics, to focus. I have a new job. This is good. I miss you. I get some time off, two weeks this year. Let's have a vacation/ Where should we go?

With love,