A backstrap of San Francisco resists the pounding of transplant sandals. If you do what I say you will see. Robbed of photons during the day, every night it sheds its skin of a piece, headless marine iguana the Pacific revised it into. Get there before photons get robbed. The name of the city won’t be there the way your face comes apart in the middle of the night, just an eye, an eye, schmaltz hole.
Around 8:23am the SF comes back and the backstrap flays into manicure and installation—stairs in grandparent-retardant gradients or ropes frustrating grandchild curiosity with explanation-
People have fallen to their deaths here
Punto de descargo del alcantarillado combinado
Land’s End
There is even a bridge, orange and nearly two miles across, above a straight South Africa hectic. Just as it tape measures pinched ocean, its full-bleed to wind between it and water below it, wind and water between two barely bridgeable peninsulas (but bridgeable, see? the bridge seems to say) is a bottleneck for inner dialogues—reasons why.
Inner dialogue comes rushing into this pinched, bridged place to be filtered. What makes it through the filter is not a distillation any more than panned gold is the essence of sand.
We have no choice but to treat what makes it through as representative as it is all that is not unrecoverable.
It is better to begin at the end.
A Coast Guard rescueman dives in. He fastens floatation to the body the way he was trained. He and his crew pull the body aboard. The body is not limp like other bodies pulled aboard. Its face is not apart. Its face is alighted, experiencing. A bear shape off the bow, boat-big, glides below the chop, dissolves to gray-green.
The body is bumped from below. It is not bumped by a head of kelp straining for the surface because it glides and is bumped again communicatively (“C’mon”). Though it is bumped from what feels like below, it is unclear whether it is being bumped downward, parallel to the surface, or surface-ward. Color is not black it is eyes closed and hearing is big, big against the body, and you travel very fast. If you knew how far you’d know it was faster than you feel.
Breath was never, light was never, suited-for is not, there is not not-pain, control, a mind surrounding body. You left something on the surface with the sound. Whatever sounded out of you at the surface is replaced by pain to be blamed on the crotch blown apart by the grenade.
To die is to flatten in sound and black. So far into black sound can’t follow. So far into black impact with the bottom now! How much farther? Now!
Oh God won’t stop. The green.
I don’t want to die means whatever is on the other side of this, you will be there to see it. It means throw your head back. Give your feet to green.
Cars on the bridge behind you. You hear a honk, falling. People laughing from some photo op with your jump in it. Brought to you by wind. One last ad. Oblivious laughter and exhaust pipes don’t let you leave and don’t pull you back.
Your life crushes in on, bottlenecks in you. Hardens. All you decided to stop. All that needed you not there. Your body repeating louder and louder Don’t be here. Now it all crushes in, a painting-movie-novel named Yours. It took dying for this to happen. How could you want to end what you are inseparable from? You are everything you’re ending, everything you want to stop. There is no stepping out of it. There is no it without you.
Just a great, unobstructed view. Not so different than a moment before.
You leave your feet, both hands grab the top of the rail. You swing your feet over, kick them off the top of the wall. The net below. You push to clear it. Proud.
Your finger shakes as you point toward one end of the bridge after the elderly man in the fisherman’s hat asks which direction Sausalito is. Despite the tears and snot down your face he does not say thank you.
A woman your age jogs at you in yoga shorts and sports bra. She has a body that will be changed soon by a pregnancy not yet there. This gets truer the closer to you and San Francisco she gets. Her face gets smoother and more Russian the less fog between the two of you. It passes undistracted despite all that you give off.
You have been in love twice. There is a time, early on in love, when people closest to you make your heart go up and down. Up by vibrating your phone. Down by your seeing their names in your phone and not the name of the person you are in early love with, the one whose every peck of attention spikes the life-needle into zone worth living. On the bridge anyone can be that person. You are hopeful—in early love with the idea of not hitting send. Someone telling you to stay would be the same as Hi and a smile. Smiles on the bridge aren’t polite, aren’t toxic positivity, because no third party is observing interactions.
A big orange send button in a window that can’t be Xed on a screen you can’t shut down.
You drank to a divorce. You drank out of a job. You drank deep into a marriage.
On your second date you drank Hennessy in the back of the copy shop and the owner pulled the two of you behind his truck in a shopping cart. Around and around the Lucky’s parking, late night. You would hit speed bumps or pot holes and fly and you made sure she would land on you. Both of you would roll and laugh, lay on, and wrap around each other and get up and do it again and pay for it the next day.
Your first date at a bar in Berkeley was facilitated by a tiny Portuguese-English dictionary you would hand back and forth when you hit the language barrier which was every couple minutes. You drank Guinnesses and didn’t mind the place was loud, your exchanges mediated.
You drank yourself out of college. You started showing up drunk to high school. You found out you were adopted.
You found a postcard on the ground, Santa Cruz. It was an orange sunsetting ocean. You gave the scene to your mom. The sounds she made and the way she looked at you when she made them and the way she held the postcard to her chest made you keep “finding” postcards. It was amazing how many postcards you found. You had a special gift for finding postcards. You found them in their rotating display stands on sidewalk storefronts. The finding motion was reach in, pinch, pluck one out. She kept her faces and her noises coming. Worth the risk, you felt.
The large red-shirted dark skinned woman bagging groceries looks at you in a way that is very warm. She looks at you from behind round moles that look sugary. You are in the shopping cart. Your legs hang way above the floor. The floor is big gray-blue squares with watery messages in them. Your mom is unloading the cart, not paying attention. The woman keeps it coming with the warm. Your mom finishes unloading the cart and fingers through her pocketbook. There is nothing but you in the cart. The woman, one-handed, makes music with the register, says to your mom, “Ma’am, if you don’t mind, you have the most beautiful baby boy.”
Your essays are like Möbius strips with a track for a roller coaster cart. The part where a person asks for directions and does not see the narrator weeping was a gut punch.
Reminds me of the novel "Time's Arrow", by Martin Amis, that I read back in the 90's.