I find it so hard...

I think the coffee is still coursing through my veins. Profundity entices me but nothing comes out. Squeezing words out of the anguish is easier than out of joy. So I will think of happy words.. bliss, felicity, joy, ecstasy. I will be met with the salt air, the fog, the sound of the ocean. I remember the sound of the fog horn at three in the morning and watching the orange clouds roll by over the pavement. That image on California and 8th will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Like November 3 1993, the first time I saw The Ocean Blue, or Stockton earlier that day. Long red hair and a black dress, opaque black tights and black patent leather mary jane shoes. I remember the way my boxy black patent leather purse with the silver snap smelled like the peppermint oil my grandma had given me that summer. It came in handy for early morning kisses after late hours of 15 year old drinking. The juxtaposition of alcohol and innocence is alarmingly amusing now. I remember wandering around the community college in Stockton that day. It was still warm in the valley and I was hoping the boy with the shoulder length hair and the trench coat would follow me and my friends.

Every min ute was like a song on an autumn leaf. Strains of warm sun on my hands and the soft swell of November wind. It was all like a floating dream, warm soft and tenuous. The smell of peppermint and brown lipstick haunt me know, the sounds my old friends haunts me, too... Girlish laghter light and low, knowing and yet unknowing. I twisted a magenta curl around a pale finger and simpered at a boy who sat next to me in the theater. Trying on his sunglasses at the community college field trip the theater was split into red and blue.

"This looks like what the world would be like if you were on acid. Not that I have ever done acid." I was quick to add. I might have told him I liked to drink. Maybe it made my 15 seem more like 17, or maybe it was blatant honesty. Wouldn't a boy in trench coat be the same?

I caught the eye of another boy on the stairs. He was talking to a statuesque strawberry blonde in a close fitting black shirt and black jeans. He kept looking over her shoulder and smiling at me. He was a boy I met in a vision when I was 12. Too young to understand the Eve of St. Agnes. I wasn't Catholic anyway...