September 30, 2023

I am surrounded by shrubs and flowers. The flowers are yellow. I don’t know what they’re called, but most of them are wilting. What a life they must have lived, witnesses of the lovers and friends and characters that have come and gone on benches, subjects of admiration for passerbys and people who sit on damp grass feeling dazed and tiny and contemplative.

I was in a taxi for twenty minutes today. I wish I asked for his name. We talked about Communism and this old lady with a cane who had really specific radio preferences and San Francisco in 1977. He stopped me before I got out of the cab: the most important thing in life, he said, is to be confident in yourself, and if we ever meet again, you better come back with a New York accent. He wished me good luck and we parted ways. It’s funny how these vignettes become entrenched in our memory for evermore, fusing into our permanent spots of time. I know I won’t forget him, this taxi driver that surprised me on my eighteenth birthday.

Today I am an adult. Right now I am a floating dandelion, dreamy but aloof from my world, perhaps consciously so. Lately though, my thoughts have been evading me like wisps of dandelion fluff; perhaps the pace of life does not accommodate our minds to truly take flight. Sometimes I want to summon the intensity of my emotions and bury myself deep, but then I wonder whether I am just dramatizing my circumstances for my own romanticization, whether I am just futilely creating something out of nothing and whether, then, I am just a very ordinary phony. A very ordinary adult phony who still inhabits imaginative realms of desire and fantasy because she doesn’t really want to grow up, doesn’t really want to rise up to heightened expectations and become all sensible and mature. Get over yourself, I say.

Today I am an adult. I know everything about the world. The world of What Is Left.

So tell me, then, tell me why the only thing I want to do right now is run back into my mother’s arms and relive it all again.