Are you the same cat?

In Santa Fe I was always awake,
I never slept in Santa Fe so when I moved north
I thought I was dead
I had forgotten how to sleep.

Now I am both awake and asleep,
alive and dead.
It just feels so good to feel
old
But to marvel at oneself in the lit shop window
from outside and stick on the future
in cutouts
like colorforms
so tantalizingly vinyl-smelling upon first crack at the box.

What wakes me in the night like danger?
I am picking up where I left off,
yet still delivering the newspaper,
like when I would wake in the candy pink mornings
in the place on no map
and start out on that road
that was important, too
and I didn’t mean to throw it away
no I kept it like I kept
them all
and maybe they are what keeps me up tonight chattering
and they in the future too, who are most anticipatory
who whisper indelible promises
like they never before did
grown strong now that I’ve fed them,
grown fat and pink on love and affection
and assertions of the future grown lushly tangible,
grown like kudzu in the medians.

“Well…I do have to get home…but on the other hand, it looks so good. Oh, but I’m so busy! I just can’t decide…” and in the beginning you try to convince them, but it’s gotten to the point of ridiculousness and you are inclined to push them out the door.

“Just go home for godssakes!” This is how I feel about the snow right now, the snow I love so dearly for so many months.

 It was California that did it. It was the week leading up to California, the week of my twenty-sixth birthday, when it started getting t-shirt sunny and I forwent skiing in favor of running. Then I boarded a plane out of Jackson with my loved one and touched down in the sunny land of plenty and all affection I ever had for snow evaporated.

 I rarely ever want to be in the place that I’m at. Say it, it’s true. I feel that I have things to do here, though. It’s just going to take a little reconnoitering, a little retreating.

And then there’s Kate, this little elflike girl, a native I can tell by her lackadaisical patois. She’s climbing Mt. Shasta to raise money for breast cancer awareness, and she’s just so sweet that I want to give her all the money I don’t have. Take it all! I’ll write a check.

I ran 10 miles this weekend and spent the night alone in the desert on Sunday…read the New York Times yesterday while doing absolutely nothing…going to Albuquerque to see Bob Dylan tonight, my old buddy whom I haven’t seen in years.

Yeah, I have a good life. At least I do today.

I ran five miles today, unexpectedly. I never expect to be able to run more than…I don’t know, a few meters. But today it was sun and caffeine and the pull of my new Saturday tradition and loneliness and boredom and my new running shoes that I got at REI in exchange for my two left ski boots. I keep going because while my legs are repetitively, meditatively pounding under me and squares of sidewalk click by and I make little songs with my breathing it becomes all-consuming and I can’t imagine, for that moment in time, how I survive when I’m not running. I go faster while my thoughts decelerate and, eventually, lose importance.

(Oh, about the two left ski boots. In summary, that setup did not work so well. )

 It’s another move for the healthy lifestyle in the great checker game it’s playing in the park with the cigarettes. Oh Lord, “healthy lifestyle” is such a grotesque phrase. The phrase “healthy lifestyle” makes me want to smoke. It’s not about that, though, really. It’s not about living longer and cheating death. My grandma smoked for twenty years and she’ll be celebrating her 95th birthday this year — and while I won’t argue that smoking causes people to die, I would also like to point out the unspeakably obvious fact that so does everything. Living causes people to die (ay, it’s the truth, ain’t it!). And quitting smoking in no way guarantees that you won’t die some horribly prolonged or painful death, anyway. (They should put that on a pack of cigarettes.) I know I have to die someday, but I don’t want it to be when I’m living. That’s what smoking takes away from me. It takes away the mindfulness required of me every day to feel life. Simple, but it makes the act of smoking cigarettes a lot more detrimental than one might imagine.

My number of days here in Santa Fe dwindle as the length of each individual one grows longer. I find myself making a mental inventory of what I will miss. So far I have come up with: the perks of “domestic” life; the food(Goodbye, The Shed! Goodbye, Harry’s Roadhouse! Goodbye Maria’s and Tia Sophia’s and breakfast at the Baking Company where I sit right now); Wild Mountain folk (ha, not to be confused with wild mountain folk, of whom I’m sure I’ll be getting my dose); the strangely harsh beauty of the landscape (although I think the Tetons’ll suffice); Trader Joe’s; nights spent in the spaceship-interior of a dome in the middle of the desert and, of course, the boy who led me here. I will miss those things, and probably more.

But I’ll have plenty of time later to miss those things. Someone said “be here now.”

It’s been four years and, slowly but effectively, those little white demons wheedled their way into every aspect of my life. Bastards.

 Oh, that’s nice advice from my best friend and confidante, nestled so snugly in his happy Ann Arbor musician community, waiting for his lovely wife to cook him breakfast (and did he say sausage? Are they still vegetarians?) I’m not being snide. He really does try. It’s just that sometimes I hang up the phone and I realize that maybe my best friend doesn’t really know me anymore. Which is fine, which is good — we can still laugh about stupid shit that no one else understands. But maybe he isn’t really equipped to give me advice. Maybe I’m not equipped to give him advice. Maybe I should have gotten the message, many years ago, that he’s my best friend, not my mentor, not my therapist. Or maybe I should listen to him anyway. It’s just that I don’t like that message, I feel like I’m already doing that, but every greedy fistful I try to grab for myself ends up falling through  my fingers. I make little piles everywhere, little piles of dirt. I’m a catalyst, and a damn good one at that. It’s the follow through that’s my weak point.

Anyway, enough complaining on a beautiful Sunday. My mom is right (and she I can rely on for dependable advice) : I need to get out of my own head. Colorado Springs. Yes? No? I need to take a class in decision-making. I’m monumentally bad at this.

 Sorry this is not so profound or eloquent.

“Herbert?” The milk frother hisses petulantly, accompanied by the peaceful hum of many conversations and the twitches of typing fingers.

“Hubert?”

Finally a girl dressed in nicely worn-in jeans gets up to retrieve her large bowl of something topped with lettuce. Chili con carne, I’m guessing? They make a pretty mean chili con carne here at Santa Fe Baking Company. I’ve grown accustomed to calling chili con carne “chile with an I,” so as to not confuse this hearty midwestern staple with chile, which is so much more than a spicy stew.

 It is a fruit (some may say vegetable, but I think it’s a fruit). It is a condiment (appropriate for at least all of the things recommended on a ketchup bottle and more). It is a stew, as well as a soup. It is a marketing ploy extraordinaire. It comes in two colors, but green is the most commonly abused. It is a highly, highly addictive substance.

I’ve seen things get very ugly in times of green chile shortage.

Most of all, folks, green chile is the reason I’m here in this adobe wonderland. I would curse chile and all that it represents, but I like it too much. “There is a special substance…” in the words of David Byrne.

 Green chile aside, here I am a month before my twenty-fifth birthday, seated in the Santa Fe Baking Company alone at a table covered with a vinyl Carmen Miranda hat print tablecloth (the table, not me. I’m covered with an ancient wool sweater and flowy yoga pants) drinking coffee sprinkled with the chemicals in the pink packet and cocoa. It’s 5:14pm and in a half an hour I’ll go across the street to Nia, which is a weird, sometimes silly dance class I take. I am alone, which is a state I’m alternately comfortable with and abhorrent of. I am alone, and on the verge, and capricious, and crazy, and I have one more month to smoke cigarettes, and I have one more lifetime to figure all that lay before me out, and I haven’t even a nuance of a clue, but I expect every day now that one will stumble awkwardly into my lap like a sweet wobbly puppy.

The man in the corner leaves his potato salad alone. The cash register dings and the ponytailed cashier diligently counts change to the man in the leather motorcycle jacket getup. Sounds of sweeping, crashing, “I like it better than…” I can hear a woman say but can’t make out what she compares, sound of her pointedly setting her ceramic cup on the table. A man in a grey zipper hoodie sweatshirt sits down across from her.

“Are you related to this lady?”