The Royal

It was mid-morning on a Thursday. The faceless meteorologist on my phone promised me that the past thirty-six hours of rain and gloom would come to an end, that it would be a nice sunny day. A nice day for strolling downtown. There was a cop parked in front of my building when I stepped out into the parking lot. I took the time to be nosey and it was clear by his annoyed facial expression that he could care less what anyone was doing. He simply did not want anyone to find him. I thought that was just fine. Nobody ever enjoys talking to them anyway. I pushed my car out of my neighborhood and crawled to a red light. I sat at the light with the windows down, staring off into the direction of my approaching left turn, and I wished that I was wearing something warmer than a thin hoodie. It was cold, it was windy, it was gray, and the gloom berated me with threats of more wetness. I moodily decided to stop checking the weather all together. It appeared that no one was getting it right.

I was melancholy, spared only by the excitement of a rare task I set for myself. The idea was to be the man with nothing to do and peruse the antique shops of downtown. The drive into downtown was a slow-paced and dreary one. I slopped through wet streets, smoking a cigarette, listening to the radio and driving a few numbers below the speed limit. Only a couple of motorists wanted to ride with me. I wanted to park my car and walk the sidewalks of the shops and restaurants in a dippy, lackadaisical manner that drives busy people crazy. I wanted to meet antiquaries selling vintage typewriters. I sure found one. The only one in town.

Husband and wife shop-owners living in the city over twenty years, selling rare and campy antiques even longer. The single-story shop sat on a busy two-lane intersection in the thick of downtown. The bar-stool-bound wife sat behind a small, square glass counter that was shelved with small jewelry. She greeted me with genuine cheer when I eased myself through the doorway fog of old, stuffy well-to-do ladies with too much money and not much of anything else. My inquiry was clearly a welcomed shakeup for the wife, and she hollered across the shop to her husband who was arranging beer steins in the sidewalk window. The husband was a well but slow-moving, thoughtful man of golden years. He was in no hurry to make my business final. He could afford to give me the once-over. It appeared everyone wanted his treasures.

He was curious about what I wanted, then interested in why I wanted it at all. I told him that I was looking for a vintage typewriter so I could write. There was to be nothing ornamental about it. The husband heaved a gesturing arm over his shoulder as he walked away from me, and we trundled through a busy adjoining room with racks of vintage clothing and accessories, and past a small nook of book shelves with stacks of dusty books with no jackets. At the end of the hall he took me into the last remaining room on the left. The room was a hodgepodge of every department in the store and there was only one other occupant, a nervous and confused middle-aged woman who was more than happy to let me take her place in there. There was not room for many in the room, and I supposed she felt I would have better luck in there finding a memory than she had.

On the floor, in the corner, with more than one sticky-note forbidding you to touch it, was a Royal typewriter. A Royal typewriter from the 1920's in stunning condition. What Paul Sheldon knew to be misery, an ancient typewriter in complete originality, functioning on mere paper and modern ink ribbons. It smells like bookstores and there is a careful craftsmanship to telling a story with it. I lugged the heavy steel up to my apartment and arranged it on the desk in the bedroom. The desk hangs on a generous window, overseeing a quiet piece of nature hidden away in the city. I wanted the Royal so I could practice more care in what I am saying. The words and letters freeze in the meticulous snapping of the cold metal keys. There is something so wonderfully tangible in the permanence of the pages.

The Royal offers expression without batteries, electric cords and wifi. There is only reverie with a view. The view is cloudy and wet with a guarantee of gloom. It never got any better outside. It is 102-degrees in Casablanca this afternoon. It is also six hours ahead into the evening there. Casablanca is an old-fashioned notion for an old-fashioned hobby. The Royal cements to its window like a tree stump and I will sit in the local color, and absorb the tone of the day. I wanted to write someone a letter. With each careful clack of metal, I slowly built the walls around me.

Anniversary

One year, three residences and a non-stop mixture of business and pleasure throughout Santa Barbara, Chicago, San Francisco, The Pacific Coast Highway, Ventura Beach and Nashville. The first chapter of an exciting new story quietly trails off, satisfying the need for wonderment in any good story, turning the page once again to Chicago — where the next year is born. 

Barreling through an entire year, stopping for nothing, satisfying a reckless gusto in an ever-changing setting where the calendar pages mirror the cluttered sheets of any entertainment magazine. A vivid parade of 365 consecutive days with only short-term, chaotic adventures throughout gives measure to the motivational jargon we read all the time — those gleeful pins that prompt us to live each and every day of our lives in absolute wingding.

Emphasis on a literal calendar year was crucial to the survival of the time. Moving every day together, sliding the days into the next with absolute purpose constructed a boxcar adventure that was crucial to the plot, and the significance of marking a calendar year served as the perfect framing device for such a story. When measured, and performed with tailored style, the significance of 365 days between two marks of time is powerful enough to lead your life into a completely foreign and unexpected world. A world worthy of starting a whole new chapter for.

That particular year introduced me to a growing counter-culture of thirty-somethings starting brand-new lives for themselves in brand-new worlds. Over the course of that year and across the country, it became commonplace to meet young, thirty-something guys and gals fresh in the beginning stages of their new-era lives. Sometimes, you meet the people who made major decisions at early stages in their lives; and other times, you meet people like me, people who had not made any decisions at all. Regardless of direction in the fork, any direction leading to this particular time period is drawing people of my age range to explore reinvention. It seems, in some degrees, the theory of "Thirty Is Twenty" is practiced in the reasoning that life can begin again in your thirties. If you are by far from being old, you are still pretty young, assuming. Excitability and passion are still hot enough to warm desire for anything new and imagined. Staying a course through the shaky unknown with courageous anxiety is the only way to give fate and new opportunities a fighting chance at all. For an entire year, I anxiously sifted socially, professionally, creatively, and unassumingly in my own participation of the wayward thirty. I was taking a chance at starting over again and I watched many others my age do the same. The movement did not seem to discriminate. I shared this social happening with single people, relationship people and parent people. This genre exists in our culture today and the common thread is merely an age demographic. Terrified participants take something monumental from it all. I learned that it is okay to want everything different. Initially, when I started this blog and set my sails to sea, the only thing I knew for certain was that by the time October came around again everything was going to be different. Nothing was going to be the way it was ever again and that was the only thing I was asking for. Excitable terror has permeated my life and now it is quietly slowing down, entering another October, ending that momentous first chapter of recalibration on the soggy banks of a gentle duck pond in the crisp autumn of the midwest. The next chapter calls for more settled stability, however, the stories for the coming seasons are the challenges that must keep the reader guessing and holding tight with fascination.

The new setting reveals a particular stillness. A stillness from the ponds and wildlife that reflects a permanence in the coming pages, where the characters and story plots grow on a scanty stage. The suspense and the uncertainty never staggers when re-sketching the bundle of blank pages that came with everything you asked for. The crisp air returns to where it was a year ago, this time autumn casts a grander spell, illuminating the shanty stage with the appropriate edge to delight just as well as any Second City scaffold. October will always mean something when it whispers with the leaves every year. The wingding carries on in the settled furnishings. The satirical euphemisms about it all are helpful in the processing of new beginnings. Believing that what you are doing is apart of some delirious adventure entices those dreamers and their dreams to live for the world to see. After all, the quaintest of settings tell surprising stories.

The sun is setting. The waters calm and the unruffled fowl nest before their reticent night swim. I join the mallards in nesting, actualizing the steadiness in the new, quiet ambience. Heavy rain and thunderstorms are predicted to oversee the twilight and follow midnight into the one-year anniversary. I sit in a recliner by the open french doors of the balcony. My mind is dizzy with relief and memories. I closed my eyes to remember more clearly. Nothing moved at all. I slept through the night.

The Barista They Loved

 The early sunrise of Wednesday morning in Chicago was muggy. It rained heavily overnight and the expected high temperatures of the day spread humidity and mist throughout the historic district of a small town long outside the city that you have never heard of. There were no parking spaces in the all-day parking for the main street shopping, and the three-hour parking was supposed to be plenty of time. It was not.

A bundle of letters is what all the fuss was about. A bundle of letters inked with last-minute desperation by the hand of todays typical fool was in my care, and they were returned to the sender because no one knew what to do with them. Neither rain nor snow, nor sleet nor dark of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, but the vanishing of those who clearly do not care to be found are somewhat beyond their means.

A small bundle of letters sent to recapture, only to return with shattered hope smeared over the stamps. I was asked to take those letters to the one and only place left where hope could possibly be salvaged. I did not ask why my services were necessary -- the reasons for a go-between are always painfully obvious when letters are involved.

I lazily parked my car where convenient after I patiently searched the parking lot looking for better. I finished a cigarette and a song on the radio while gently drumming my fingers on the envelopes bound by a thick produce rubber band. I locked up the car for no practical reason and my destination was a coffee shop on the corner of the district. I felt uneasy about my parcel but they gave me a sense of importance for being in an unfamiliar setting. The uneasiness always come with a job entrenched in romantic motives. Sometimes the mark will open up to you with tears and accept you as free therapy, often times they chase you with a tire iron as though you were the very extension of their former love.

I stood in line with moody suburbanites and ordered my coffee with more courtesy than my predecessors. I moseyed towards the end of the bar and chose smiling over speaking. I smiled when anyone behind the counter looked at me because I felt they could use it.

I released my anticipation through soft drumming on the bar counter. I wanted to talk about the girl who worked there -- the girl I had a bundle of letters for. During that brief moment where people with important places to go wait for their drinks, I leaned on the end of the pickup bar looking at name tags for the name of the girl I came to see. No luck. My latte was presented by a young girl with drooping glasses and a sloppy apron. I asked questions about a particular young woman and I got my answers in the look on her face. The barista I came to see was no longer there. There was an avoidance of sadness in the way she spoke of her, but I have spoken with too many sad people in my life not to notice it. I turned to leave, tapping my parcel on the bar and nodding my head with a silly twist of my mouth.

It was a beautiful day all of a sudden and the coffee was actually good. I smoked a cigarette on the sidewalk outside of the shop, staring at nothing and absorbing the news. People nonchalantly walked around me without grunts or a glance. Probably a million out-of-luck private guys stood in that district smoking cigarettes in the middle of sidewalks all the time. I remembered that I was still holding the letters.

The morning rush of townies going to work passed and I went back inside and sat at a high-top table against the sprawling windows that made walls of the north side of the shop. I sipped, I stared, I thought, I wondered, I declined every incoming call and ignored every text on my phone. The young girl with the drooping glasses from earlier was making the usual sweep of the empty floor, wiping tables, changing creamers, stocking sugars, daydreaming unto herself until she finally slowed down and she approached me the way one approaches another with something in common. She pretended to sweep around me while asking me how I liked the coffee and how I knew the girl I came to see. I told her I did not know her, rather I had something that belonged to her -- tapping the letters on the table. She looked at them with a curious expression and after an awkward start she began to tell me about the coffee shop closing its doors for good, and about the barista everyone loved who apparently did not want to stay for the closing. She told me the barista had been sad for quite some time and that the closing of that very shop was the final cue to get her life moving again somewhere else. Perhaps somewhere far away.

The silly young girl leaned on her upright broom, twisting the bristles into the tile, and the more she spoke of the ghost of the kind and vibrant barista, the more her eyes drifted from mine -- slowly floating towards the window walls and losing focus beyond the shops and apartments, as though looking for her former companion where ever she was.

She reminisced with a growing smile how the cafe's favorite girl was never on time, how she would fashionably burst through the door with trails of snow and wind, towing behind her excitement for the day, and how her vivacious stomping between the tables and through packs of customers would instantly flip a switch on the ambiance. She brought something new with her everyday; something unique and indefinable that was not on any of the menus, and the young girl knew she was the reason foot traffic doubled and that the personality of the characterless shop transformed overnight when the barista she loved came from nowhere to nest in their shop. The silly girl met my gaze again and confided in me with wet eyes behind those drooping large glasses that she wished she would have told her all those things herself when she had the chance. I knew that she knew that the chance to do so was one never to present itself again. I just smiled with sympathetic eyes and kept my mouth shut.

The cafe doors opened with a dinging sound and the silly young girl excused herself to return to her register and the drip coffees behind the counter. I told her it was nice talking to her and I sat still, sipping my coffee and wanting a cigarette.

The dinging of the doors introduced a pre-lunch crowd of business men, soccer moms, a petite old woman, and a couple of twenty-somethings wearing the polo shirts of the local mom and pop businesses in the district. One husky gentleman in particular joined the climax of the rush during the rise and fall of the steam wands and the banging out of dead espresso from the portafilters. He was slightly sweaty and dressed in yuppie casual, and he had a worn, large hardcover book in one of his fat hands wearing a wedding ring that was barely holding together. He stood in line with a smile and cordially placed his order with the silly young girl, and proudly displayed the book in his hand while he looked around behind the counter. No doubt he was looking for her. The smile dissolved from his face as he listened to the silly young girl tell him that his worn-out book would not take a passage of borrowing today.

He accepted his coffee and fumbled his goodbye, and he staggered through the aisle with an expression and movements as though he was suddenly lost in some uncharted jungle and the hope of being rescued left him long ago. He trundled outside and situated himself into a chair with all the ease of parking a school bus into a compact parking space. He took a package of cigarettes from his breast pocket and smoked in mourning, and I grabbed the letters and followed him outside. I put a cigarette in my mouth and I asked him for a light. He obliged and the ice was broken. I apologized for my eavesdropping and told him that I was looking for a particular girl and that I had something for her, indicating the letters. He deliberately told me the same thing I told him, indicating his book. He apologized for himself and invited me to sit down. It was worth a chance asking where to find her but a chance is all it was worth. No one had a clue where she might have gone, but no one that day was short of amazing things to speak of her. The husky gentleman told me that men were drawn to her and so were their wives. She captivated a busy and bustling audience with a sophisticated beauty backed-up by an intellectual and humorous mind. She made the lonely feel loved and she was simply adored for her endearing character. He started to say something else about her, but stopped suddenly. He decided he had nothing more to say.

He excused himself, taking his book, and I thanked him for his time and his memories. I watched him walk the sidewalk with his head down and I felt sorry for him. I knew he and his wife would continue to frequent the shop simply out of routine until the day it closed, and that they would sit in silence of each other and nothing more would be shared at the old oak tables inside. I wondered what they would do with all the tables when they closed the shop. I lit another cigarette but I did not like the taste of it. I put it out after the first drag and took my letters back inside. It was time to leave. There was nothing more to do there except learn what happens when the sun stops shining in small towns.

Her charm and her rare personality were the coals burning in the heart of the shop, warming the customers in winter, lighting the bulbs in the morning and steaming the milks every afternoon. Her eloquence practically demanded a cover-charge at the door, but she never would have allowed that. She was a lighthouse for anyone in the drab small town that eventually broke her heart when they decided to close the doors to her sanctuary. She will take her broken heart and mend it somewhere far away -- somewhere that will take better care of what they have.

At the slowest and lowest point of my day, I had a brief and quietly unassuming conversation with a petite and spirited old woman who clearly lived the decadence of her generation. San Francisco in the 1960s was her own era of wander and hopeless romanticizing. She told me how that pretty and exciting girl returned to her the ability to remember what it was like to live boundless of the world. The old woman saw in the barista she loved everything required for an incalculable life while there is still time.

She had always wished in silence that one day all of this would happen -- that one day the barista would go far away to a bigger world, much bigger than the disappointing one that would never be big enough for her.

The old woman wished often, but was still unprepared for the collision of elation and loneliness that is wrestling in her twilight years.

I asked for a refill and the silly young girl was happy to accommodate. She removed her apron and tossed it into a heap of towels in a corner and told me her shift was done for the day. I told her I would walk her outside.

We walked to the door without conversation or meaning and she stopped in the doorway to show me an employee group photo on the community bulletin board by the door. It was an eight-by-ten black and white photo at a picnic in a park. The elusive barista was on the far left but she may as well have been the only one in the picture. Her grace was captured so beautifully and colorfully -- even in black and white. I stared and reenacted the stories of the day in my head with her image until the silly young girl cleared her throat and reality took me out the door.

Her car was across from mine only she had acquired better and longer parking. I walked her to the driver's side door and thanked her. She started to get in and I turned to leave only to be called back to her. She stood with one leg in the car and told me that she had been thinking all day. She said that she had a pretty good idea about those letters and she asked me to do a good thing and let her friend go on without them. I just nodded my head, said nothing and walked to my car. It was my turn to walk with my head down.

I had not found the girl I came to see and I had not delivered my parcel. Someone else managed to make a delivery of their own. I had a parking ticket on my windshield.

I was the best Sunday driver there ever was as I drove slowly down the retail boulevards and the side streets of historic homes. I was surprised to learn later that the only thing standing between myself and a nice Victorian home in that part of town is half of a million dollars. I did not have half of a million dollars. What I had was half a million words in assorted envelopes that I had no idea what to do with.

I did not know what to do with those letters. No one seemed to want them. That silly young girl seemed to think that they should be forgotten. She seemed to think that I was lugging around a lot of heartache when hearts were doing just fine. I was starting to agree with her. I felt that the door had closed on those letters and no one had any business trying to pry open a window. I also knew that it would haunt me for my lifetime if I did not look for myself at what no one else wanted to look at. I stopped for lunch at an old-fashioned carhop and in the privacy of my car I opened the first letter.

The handwriting and condition of the paper were evidence of frantic desperation. The paper was carried everywhere, you could tell. It collected days of hand sweat and travel because I genuinely believe it took him that much time to express what he was unable to say. For what I can only assume to be a hellish forty-eight hours, in his pocket and in his car he carried a dwindling rescue fire. I wondered why he had such a hard time saying anything at all.

I only got halfway through the first letter and that was enough for me. It was a hodgepodge of the kind of regrets that no one should ever have. I could not find a reason to feel sorry for him, or perhaps I just did not want to. Perhaps I wanted to extinguish any reasoning that would cast doubt on my judgement of him. I wanted to believe that the door was closed and he simply had not been careful enough. I wanted to believe that the silly young girl I spent my morning with was right. I ripped them up and threw them away in a public trash bin on the corner of a busy intersection where I smoked and lied. I told him that I found her with less than ten hours before she was leaving town for good. I told him that she accepted the parcel politely and without emotion, and casually walked back into her world without a word. I told him that was the last I saw of her.

He visibly died inside and that was the last I ever saw of him.

The last I saw of her was in the winter of that year. I found her long before, though, and was just waiting for any reason to be in the Pacific Northwest. Finally, I found one. Perhaps I had to find one or it would always itch around the office. Scratching hard enough took me all the way to Portland, Oregon.

She was in a coffee shop on Powell. I assumed she had a small and charming apartment above the many shops along the boulevards. An apartment decorated in cozy eclectic, beautifully chaotic with scattered pieces of a busy and exciting life. Maybe I wanted to believe it that way. The cafe was bustling and the scene was unlike anything she left behind. I stood in line with hipsters and squares, and I observed a powerful and beautiful presence that was the stuff of urban legend two-thousand miles away -- and very much worthy of it. I ordered a single drip coffee with all the nonchalant, casual civility there is. I answered her random questions politely -- occasionally with a chuckle -- and I smiled whenever she smiled. I did not force any unnecessary conversation, I just smiled like a stammering simpleton and let her hypnotize me. I thanked her and threw a fifty-dollar bill in her jar when she looked away, then I carefully shuffled outside into the rain. She was absolutely alluring. Her unique, violet eyes seared a look into me that lasted long after my return. Her heart was happy and her presence was bursting with her excited vibrance that spellbound her customers as well as her community. I am not sure I would have been able to see her any other way than the way I did. I needed to know that what I did not do was okay. From the sidewalk, I glanced again at the woman in the window and I knew that she was never going to look back.

Going to her is still one of the craziest things I had ever done in my life, but I had to. None of it was ever going to go away. I would always wonder what gave me the right to do what I did. I was convinced in my own judicious way that she never needed to know about a world and its inhabitants that would never be any good for her. Being in her colorful and vivid presence was everything I needed to peacefully let go of the whole affair. She was glowing again, and all I had to do to help was go away.

I went away and I never involved myself in anything like that ever again. My task hung me among the ranks of those who can never again get close to the barista they loved. I never had a door or a window of my own, and my own sordid business guaranteed I never will. Sometimes, on bad rainy nights when I am alone in the office above the boulevard, I lean out of the open window, stare blankly at the city and think about that with brooding liquor breath. Everyone loved her when it was too late.

Everyone loved her, and she loved just enough of herself even more.

Personal Settings: Location

It is cold today. It is a thirty-four-degree difference from the beautiful and current climate of Southern California. There is a windy cold-snap that is unusual for the area at this time of year and the bright sunshine is deceiving. My new location is Nashville and my reasons for this relocation are personal and many. I felt that the creation of a bubble for stories and art was essential to maintaining my wits outside of my familiar geography. I find that my new private work space in the middle of nowhere serves its purpose, but the lure of the open road and of places unknown is too difficult to ignore. I went for a drive outside of my private bubble with no clue where I was or where I was going. The short cruise to anywhere rapidly evolved into a full-blown tour of the Midwest. Over six-hundred miles of unfamiliarity, and a blending scenery that left me with bland visitor centers off of poorly maintained two-lane highways along with my own rapid thoughts.

My thoughts began to wander back to California, and whether or not I was going to be able to accept the surroundings outside of my new bubble. I chose the perfect time to relocate; spring and summer are both in the works. As a Californian, it appears that I need constant sunshine and crowded noise to function. Spring and summer are preparing to deliver in Dixie, but eventually the leaves will fall and the miles of untouched nature will die in the transformation from cheerful warmth to a cold, gray melancholy.

Location is the primary objective for anyone in real estate. With stories of mystery in mind, a looming mystery of individual location lurks in the background.

Leaving my bubble vacant for a moment, the open road leads to a reconnection with family, and a personal exploration of what it truly means to pursue new goals in a brand-new environment with absolutely no one around -- at least not anyone familiar. My thoughts and emotions regarding location and the comfortability within, and its possible importance to the individual spirit, become increasingly erratic. I can only keep driving -- pushing further away from the new location while calling it a holiday. The return came after an eventual 1,296 miles in a circle around the Midwest. The cold snap was gone, post cards were stamped, everything was exactly as I left it except for an unexplainable sense of urgency in the air that was not there before -- a need to make a tangible point of the sudden up-rooting.

It is so quiet and very tranquil in the peaceful town twenty minutes outside of Nashville. Community activity moves a little slower, the birds make commotion at normal hours and I am always taken aback by the random salutations of the friendly people who share my community. Southern charm, they call it. There are rolling hills, highways through mountains and large lakes with bathing suits and boating, but it is just not the same. I keep telling myself that the point is for it not to be the same. I remind myself that it was I who decided it necessary to move closer to loved ones and to complete my anticipated works in a reclusive Hemingway fashion. Location is more than the little blue dot on the map in your phone. Location appears to be something internal, something personal beyond literal maps. The little blue dot only informs you of where you are, not where you are going. Location is a state of mind, content in the standing and looking towards the horizon.

The sun sets west -- everyone knows that -- and I stare in that direction long after the sun sets. I suppose it is because I know that it will still be two long hours before anyone on the coast has the view that I just had.

I sought new possibilities and personal opportunities in a new location, and I still could not help wandering. My feet are planted firmly in a foreign land but the location of my mind migrates slowly, following the sun westward. My location settings are located and locked, and the little blue dot is not going anywhere. An introductory time period in this new location will reveal whether or not my mind will settle with my feet, or continue to follow the sun. My current location will remain somewhat the same, consistently making small and normal changes all by itself. What then?

I understand that the question of "what then?" will come in time with experience after the fact. What I find most troubling is the anguish that comes with trying to answer the question, "What Now?"

Her Pictures

I tell her she will be with me all through the night. It is because of her pictures. The distance is hollowing, but her pictures provide stones for a bridge that well-stretches any distance. In her absence, her pictures are a compass and they are the reason for a new-found love of capturing scenery, buildings and life's moments. I am quick to save her pictures when they come. I have my favorites, call ID photos change frequently, and there is more traffic in my Dropbox than in my driveway. My iCloud is not a collage of tired selfies, not by any means, but a composition of unique fashion, silly randomness, captured grace, scenic metropolis, moments in rare time, on-the-job boredom, blunt reality, as well as unbridled happiness and draining woe. Her pictures always show more than just what is happening, the pictures are a window when there is no door.

The compulsion to save every photo darkens in every time-lapse of distance. Her pictures are the cigarettes you nervously smoke end to end while waiting for a bus that you know is coming, but you wait far too long and it looks like rain. I will sit at my keys, in a chair of stories, and sift through hundreds of pictures in an effort to crawl through the windows and forget my empty quiet. They are the windows on a slow-moving train, a slideshow of passing places and things for short moments at a time. All I can do is sit quietly in my chair, type whatever my mind can focus, and press my nose against the glass while waiting for my destination. Her pictures are calming and reminding of where the train will eventually stop, where I will have my stories and all those beautiful things I pitifully gazed through the window. When the sun sets, her pictures are the flickering candle against a soft black and white glow emitting from a small bedroom window off of a chaotic California highway. The candle is a tribute burning for the things I have no trouble remembering, simply finding it easier to sink into a vivid and tangible thing I can physically hold.

Her pictures are something I can hold in my hand and intensify emotions with my fingertips. So many moments in a distance are lost, but the pictures and the spontaneity behind them can provide the lost with the inclusion necessary to find direction. So many of her pictures share my physical timeline, but many more of them fill in the dark gaps of memory when distance was a harsh sentence, and a shadow hung in the air along with the acrid smog around the mountains. For me, her pictures are a constant theatre of hope, imagination, freedom, and a willingness to do anything so long as I am savoring every breath out of life. Distance is harsh, but her pictures burn in the window and there is an image of breathless imagination that oars against the current and calms the anxious open waters of coming new chapters. My phone will chirp and she will show me where she was and where she is, showing me what the world around her looks like. Through the distance, she gives me her life in a silent vaudeville clip show that I will cling to and revisit in my solitary midnight hour.

Her pictures are among my treasured items. I collect them like my books and arrange them like my stories. Her pictures are more than candles and oars, they are the feeling that nothing is really lost. They are an ease for lapses of time in the distance. They are, in so many ways, the privilege of opportunity to glimpse into a world that exists and is waiting. Many must rely on pure blind faith to believe that turning the page will be a beautiful and exciting thing. I am of the lucky few who can peer through a keyhole and see a room different than my own. I find calm in her pictures. I find hope and imagination in her pictures, and I survived countless nights of fear and worry because of her pictures.

The photo icon is a garden I fence from the world around me. The screen explodes with memories and she replaces in my heart all the things pillaged in the distance. Her pictures freeze time when I fear time is slipping.

She sends me a picture before her bedtime. The picture is a dimly-lit shot of pajamas and a quiet beauty. I missed nothing today. Her picture tells me goodnight and she will be with me all through the night...

Lost Without Content

I love getting lost in these letters. A ginger kitten teaches me that while scribbling a letter of great importance or structuring an alternate reality, I can exist in any city in the world. I can be happy in my own conjuring. The ginger kitten chaperones my otherworld travels much like the Cheshire cat. The clicking and clacking of the keys is a confection of popcorn noises that always mean the same thing, and hearts are explosive with expression. It means to truly dissolve into the alphabet puddle and wade through sticky bogs of story. It is in that bog where a thick fog curtains the outside world.

Because I am not writing anything in particular, I feel more self-conscious of the eyes over my shoulder -- the eyes that are not even peering. I quickly dismiss the notion that anyone is concerning themselves with what is occurring on a stranger's iPad at the next table. There is still that lingering statement suggesting that it is not only probable, it is enticing to others as well. It is the curiosity of what someone is saying. The fact that what they are saying is silent and purely intended for the writer or a specific party in mind. Most of us traffic coffee shops for a sideshow of society, and to people-watch and eavesdrop, and be nosy of others. I admit it -- I do it. Perhaps that is why I worry that someone is attempting to peer into my secret make-believe world. The eyes appear more watchful and in greater numbers when you see the daylight of your own arid disposition. There is no show to give the others -- simply hackneyed with a cup of coffee in your pedestrian endeavors. Getting lost in the keys is symbiotic with the onlookers doing nothing -- whether they have props or not.

The home is supposed to be a setting of comfort and control, but it can also be the most crippling. Escape from the lonely quiet requires hope and imagination. The ideals of mentally checking out all predicate insane notions -- concepts resulting in a healthier and clearer afterwards -- exercising dreamier practices, afterwards informing your closest of people that you never felt more sane in your life.

The ginger kitten lures me deeper into the bog. Content-takeaway seems improbable. The content is lost because I am lost with it. There is certainly nothing in it for the expeditious reader. It becomes the literary version of brief people-watching. I just want to have even the smallest score on the board. I am lost without content, but I want it to matter. I need to know that a wayward constitution does not necessarily mean an entire lack of content. Obscurity without self-consciousness was fine. The imagination was unbridled before it made up reasons to be reluctant. When the ginger kitten stops to nap, I confide in its sleeping ears that I am walking along with no destination. I impart that I will go with the flow and tell of my journey, with no understanding of having done so. I am haunted by the prospect of nullification, but reminded that sometimes people sit in their cars and simply drive nowhere for no reason for at all. People return from the drive and something is different. There was no point or particular destination and it was okay to venture. I love getting lost in these letters and sometimes I simply wish to drive aimlessly.

Journalists and storytellers are supposed to take you somewhere and give you something to take back. I just wanted to go anywhere at all and be okay about it. I want to know that I am still interested in driving whether I know where I am going or not. I wish to take the voyaging reader to unfamiliar points of interest, but this time around I simply needed to know that I can still navigate the road -- and that I still enjoy it. I wandered without point or relevance, and then found myself insisting that be okay -- if only for myself.

I love getting lost in these letters. These letters are the windows to parts unknown. Sometimes I get lost in these letters for no reason at all.

The Vagabond Furlough - Epilogue

Numerous delays in O’Hare Airport preceded the exhausted finale of the furlough. The delays were a blessing -- at first. One can only stretch a goodbye so long, sitting on the dirty floor just shy of security, before they drag you out of your shoes to wait for the long flight all alone. On the dark flight south, I appreciated what it means literally to be there for someone. When you walk with someone in their private world, never shorting a reassuring smile when they glance for one, and to listen to as well as encourage their thoughts and dreams you are walking the ultimate follow-through of supportive promises. I will always be there for you. That is the promise. Huntsville, Alabama is where the furlough continued. Huntsville is a city put on the map by NASA. The Huntsville airport is characterless after midnight. The bags came quickly and I was shuttled to my brother’s apartment. Entry was available to me and his candle had already burned out for the night -- he was fast asleep and I made myself at home, obnoxiously, spreading my things about and latching my equipment to every available electrical outlet before rooting through the fridge and cupboards, turning on the television. The first night was one of solitude, exhales of emotional exhaustion and mystery television. I fell asleep on the couch and awoke in a lonely apartment in the middle of nowhere. The evening brought a dinner date with my brother and sister in one of two small sections of town that serves for social scene. We declined the mentioning of the time since our last dinner date together -- just the three of us. It is always a sad and difficult thing to acknowledge senseless amounts of dead space in between being together. The difficult mentioning was fortunately needless as the night carried on with a joyous pace that stood still in time, allowing only those in that gravity to reconcile the dead space. My sister joined the early-morning expedition to Tennessee leaving my brother and me behind for another two days. There would be two days of lone afternoon daydreaming followed by evenings of campy horror films with my brother, ending with solitary, stormy midnights. Both nights in Alabama were rain soaked with violent thunderstorms. Resurgence and freedom with fear were the themes of thought during the nightly storms. I clicked my alphabetic keys and slobbered over the marvel of new eras, the ideals of freedom, and the chances taken on ones self in order to attain a higher calling. I needed to fight back against a decline, and I was slowly discovering that in order to usher in a new renaissance and preserve what I cherish it is going to require daring and sudden acts of change. The winds of change were certainly scrambling my compass. I decided to finish my journey without it. The storms behind us, Tennessee bound; my brother and I drove north for two hours discussing life in a way that holds as safe loose talk -- with no seriousness in the severity of big changes and choices. Our sister and parents were waiting for us in a small private apartment community on the outskirts of Nashville. Freedom was in its prime and teaching through example in the spirit of travel. A furlough of any kind is supposed to remind you that there is a bigger world going on outside of your own -- occupying the most surprising of avenues. Nothing ever has to be the same as it was. My final hobo days in Nashville centered on the mellow rainy days spent in our own company. The quiet calm was the result of happiness in being together again for no reason at all. My mind occasionally wanders back to Chicago, back to supportive promises. Forks in the road lay in place of answers. Detachment was necessary for a time. Detachment was easier than fearing the decline may have a looming aftershock. The changes are imminent. If an aftershock waits, the renaissance must begin. It is time to compose lists for various buckets. The renewal of spring is suitable of occasions committing to the dreams you allowed to wither in the winter of your soul. A vagabond furlough is a series of waves you can catch couch surfing the country. If done properly, you hardly slept, mailed postcards and did nothing familiar. If you caught the right corner of the right couch, transcended completely from the reality you know, you dared to wonder what-if questions without interrupting and calling yourself foolish. Before the flight home, I can only advise that you remember to pack the enthusiasm and hopefulness you picked up on the road. Coming home without it or misplacing it even for a moment can be quite devastating to the already-existing instability that caused you to pack in the first place. Travel safe in your next furlough. Be sure you embark for all the best irresponsible and reckless reasons, and be sure you claim a souvenir. Bring something back -- anything at all.

The Vagabond Furlough - Chicago

“You will not know anyone there anymore,” I said to myself in the terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. This place is not even familiar. I had no delusions of where I was traveling. I left this place over fifteen years ago and I have only returned once -- that was over fourteen years and six months ago. I have not returned since. There was only one reason to return at all, and I missed my window for the occasion repeatedly. There was never any other reason to return. It was obvious that my initial move was at the cusp of something significant in my life. I left the Chicago-land area when I was a teenager; I graduated high school and did all my real growing in sunny southern California. I never knew Chicago beyond the boundaries confined to a minor and I never celebrated any milestones outside of birthdays, family nights out and middle school events. The early signs of who I was to become were evident in my youthful obsession with becoming the fastest typist when home computers became commonplace; when my heart would only beat and my work ethic awakened in English class. Knocking out my teen years and then spending the entirety of my twenties and early thirties in the city of Burbank, California is the result of my Facebook hometown status. My family and I left the lackluster Midwest suburbs for the media capital of the world and my eyes opened to the artistic possibilities that I once dreamed about in those English classes. I find it enthralling that fate decided to pull me back towards the snowdrifts for holiday after years of clueless failure on the sun-blinded side streets of Southern California -- just when things were starting to get interesting. The snow cascades gracefully in the luminescence generated by a city designed to turn the gray melancholy into sparkling winter romance, and evoke big city dreams beyond the casting calls and palm trees. There is no need to be concerned for my footprints here; the snow is actively at work covering them. My passing presence will dissolve with the crunchy sidewalk salt and winter will deepen in the windy city after I trade back my scarf for Converse low tops. A campaign for growth in a slide of decline forged the tracks in the snow and the anxieties of the unknown coming chapters permeate the ideals of the movement. The stark vacuum of answers worsens the lasting question of what comes next. Watching a world completely opposite of my own from a café window, it is seven degrees with snow and fog, and a slight dancing wind. A tiny town far outside of Chicago named Geneva, the flurries swirl and mesmerize. Sidewalks and branches of the bare oak trees blanket with fresh powder under a vivid white sky and my anxiety joins them under the blanket. The snow quickly covers the tire tracks of those passing through the portrait of small town serenity, leaving a fresh sheet of blank wonder for the next. Occasional wind gusts blow large blasts of snow from the roofs of shops like fireworks in the park, making confetti of powder in the flurries. The small town post-eggnog chatter among neighbors and their children unconsciously rises and falls around the grinding of the espresso machines and I temporarily lose myself in the white noise of various topics of conversation. The café empties and my disquiet sleeps peacefully under the blanket. The incessant question of what comes next is pushing towards the nonsensical; the furlough still contains more travel. The answers wait for me quietly in the baggage claim in Ontario, California. It was never important to find familiarity in my return to Chicago; I was actually hoping not to. Chicago is a world unknown to me -- as though I was never here at all, and my true intentions were that of love. The decline was a dying of my voice, and this was an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to reclaim my voice, but also to increase its volume and finally deal with matters of the heart with unabated optimism -- ensuring that regret would have no chance of survival. My throat is still a little scratchy, but my voice is returning and I am leaving the historic stomping grounds of Elliot Ness an unavailable man -- my heart is now the property of another. I got what I came for and after fifteen years of a buried personal haunting, time and geography, the mocking duo of my evocative sorrow, are finally dead and buried. There will be no memorial service for the duo, only the exhausted exhale of bittersweet grief and joy that comes from the death of a cruel and tormenting relative you always believed was going to be in your life forever. Every time I see a pair of headlights appear and grow in the distance, I look through the frosted window, through the glistening snow and hold my breath. The piano music plays in the dim lighting and the sun has long set. The crooner captures my ear and holds my attention every time he tells an unknown woman that he loves her and that he always will -- ever since he put her picture in a frame. The flat, empty, pseudo-rural Illinois lands stretch desolately for miles with lifeless trees and a shimmering whiteness. My departure is imminent and the unknown afterwards is affecting. I avoided this column sporadically throughout the furlough. Revisiting the emotions of it has proven difficult. The Vagabond Furlough lived up to expectations in the windy city. I escaped, I thought, I found ulterior consciousness. The furlough took me down the rabbit hole into a wonderland of surreal bliss. It was coming back to my world that I hid from the outside, locked in my room, forgetting how happy I am in the little city of mine -- comprehending how lucky I am. My little world here is a pleasant one; it was just so incredibly easy to dissolve into the world I toured. I cherished my time in Chicago. In fact, it was quite easy to forget that the furlough required more tracks further south. I made those tracks further south by way of east. I had no idea then that while things were getting interesting in California, far more fascinating developments were occurring in the most unsuspecting of places…