the ambrosial twilight
I've been spending time in the desert. A lot of it, recently, and now I'm planning this wedding next year, and that demands an intimacy. I used to hate it, back when the only time we spent was in the sick dry concrete of strip malls, in a condo decorated in shades of teal and pink, these bastardizations of the place itself. It's very easy to only see the dead thing around you, the cactus husks, asphalt, no colour but what someone else has painted on top of it, lurid, obscene. There's a story my family still tells of visiting an old-timey Western show and the glass boxes where they kept rabbits and chickens that, if you inserted a quarter, would peck at a piano. I cried and cried. The desert back then was a series of glass boxes and we moved from air conditioned space to air conditioned space and understood it as artificial but what else was there to do but keep moving?
It can't have been that bleak - I was 12, I liked malls and pools. I still like malls and pools. But I think that's why I avoided it for so many years after they sold that condo, before they bought the house. I resisted and griped and claimed I didn't "get it" but after your 10th East Coast February, fitful grey muck pile, even puddle-jumping from golf course to Target sounded more appealing.
Where my parents live now is up in the hills. Or, the rocks, I guess. It's boulder country, round red ones, pushed around and piled up by chubby fingers. There's bird song and blooms. I've learned to identify the different cacti, their particularities, learned which ones to approach and which ones will sting you if you so much as glance their way. You move through different landscapes - the rolling saguaro hills, the dry wheat-fleshed brush, the scrub forest and red cliffs. This last trip Cat and I saw sharp-eyed coyotes, dumb rabbits, quail families in hysterical bunches, and one night, a bobcat that stalked a tight, lazy circle around the wall of our property, pawing at some grasses, stalking something small and tender.
Now I'm back in Toronto, where summer is all fits and starts, lots of storms but not in the usual way, providing a break and swift cool, but fitful, annoyed, like they can't make up their minds about it. I'm finally (finally) reading Sweetbitter, although I'm glad I waited - it would have been too much a year ago, when I could still feel New York in me like steel, ramrod spine and a perpetual echo of noise in my throat. In one passage she describes walking home on a late summer evening, "the ambrosial twilight tumbl[ing] off the cliff-sides of buildings, pooling on sidewalks." My New York was nothing like hers - no New York is quite like the other - but when I think of the city it is movement I remember best, especially in the early days, that one summer Friday when I walked up through Chinatown, ate a sweet coconut bun on a bench near a handball court, the city like a hand on my back, the light a heavy gold across the ruined buildings from a source I couldn't see. I miss feeling alone in New York. Aloneness has a temperature there. I miss not being able to see the sky, and then climbing up to a roof to find it, and then the awe.
So I'm thinking about topography, I guess. People keep asking what I'll miss about Toronto and I shrug and mention a friend or two, our front porch. They ask what I'm excited for in Boston and I say Vic's job, and the certainty. I can't read either of those cities, can't see them in my head, couldn't draw you a map or a tell you about the light. There's nothing special, is what I'm saying. There's nothing that demands notice. There are layers of suburbs all blurred into the next and no cacti, no ambrosial twilight. I'm not trying to offend and yes, I'm being petty. Maybe the answer is to become a bird watcher, grow a garden, take one of those walking ghost tours. I want to get to know a place from the soil up.
radically consuming
- I've read this interview with lost boy Louis Tomlinson a few times now, and even though it muddies the waters of reality even further ("I just want to know the TRUTH!", Logan cried, although we both know that's not really true), it's quite sad and ruminative and speculates on the nature of fame and place and is worth reading even if you think you don't care about former British boyband One Direction, which you do, because you're receiving this newsletter.
- On the subject of fitful summers: last night it was too cold to eat a popsicle BUT I DID IT ANYWAY because these mango pops from Loblaws are really good. There we go. Something I'll miss about Toronto.