ok except I actually really love Hau'ula

The streets were thick with hot air; with the smell of crunching gravel and unfamiliar foliage. The flowers were uncharacteristically bright, incandescent; maroon and gold like cheap high heels. The houses were tired, leaning on their sides. Sighing. The people were quiet, limping with crutches, at times gesticulating ardently to nothing but sky.  

My legs were white in teal shorts, three years worn and counting - my favorite favorites because I bought them at a J Crew outlet and they fit, for once. Still loyal three years later.

My headphones were scratching the inside of my ear and so I pushed them in harder; that's the only thing that really takes the sting away, I guess. I blinked and wandered down dead end street after dead end street, No Outlet signs a quiet regularity in all the solitude, trying not to think for once

Chains on fences, weeds covering the sidewalk. A layer of rain-scrubbed dirt shimmering idly over everything. 

A cat far too expensive for the street meandered up to me, mildly curious, and then splayed out on the road, a grey-and-white conglomeration of fur with a tongue somewhere inside, flat and formless. The stillness was so tangible even interspersed between moaning car engines, streaking past blatantly while any eyes sober enough to see stated apathetically, unruffled by the disturbance. 

TOO POOR, TOO HUMID

They let their front doors swing in their hinges, let their nephews sit on tattered lawn chairs, fading into the porch like antiqued wood, everything deteriorating as the occasional peacock strolled over the driveway, watching the socioeconomic crisis like an uninteresting firework display. 

I stepped around the neon cones on the trash-littered sandbar, turning up the volume, blocking out the incessant waves. So many screaming cars. I wouldn't have heard a thing anyway. 

[squawking seagulls + stillness, a detangling breeze]

"Je cherche une cle pour decouvir," accompanied by heavy bass. Feet sweating in my sandals. So many black flecks in the sand. The air was heavy enough to flatten me, but I rose. 

I think I might've figured out some vital identity pieces in Hau'ula OR SOMETHING; I don't know what I believed in but somehow it meant a whole lot and I came back with branches of Hawaiian leaves in my hair, roaring Chevy trucks ringing in my blocked-out ears, my mind probably 

this much 

quieter.

lace-ups; golden years

I want to say that the thought of stepping into this actual real live life that's been built for me since I started stumbling around trying to teach my legs to walk makes me feel

but tbh it doesn't feel like I'm jumping off a cliff, not a bit; it's more like I've been slowly wading into cold water all my life and now I'm finally realizing -

this is it, babe, this is it

the future or whatever

hot tramp, I love you so

I don't think about dying
the way David Bowie thinks about dying.

He's a peripheral infidel; his psychedelic death chants are incredibly beautiful in the most haunting way but I don't wanna haunt people, I wanna save them

So maybe in the midst of all these ch-ch-changes we can picture a man (probably in full drag) dying at 69, enwrapped in a sullen vortex, black hole-like, detached from his own umbilical cord and floating in space for eternity, stamped

the idea of Bowie frozen in carbonate, a cosmic masterpiece suspended forever in a galaxy

utterly consumed by black holes.

just some avant-garde dog songs, probably

So first of all, this is a thing.

All I can say is, major props to Laurie Anderson and all similar canine-music enthusiasts, also every single cussing experimental composition supporter who turned up with his/her golden retriever to appreciate the beauty and wonder of this exhibition of utter brilliance.

Soph approves.

I don't remember what she was wearing, but I remember when she told me about Avant-garage - we could've been in her car, in that strawberry red-truck with soft seats and the incredible, incredible aux cord that gave us access to everything from Vampire Weekend to Taylor Swift to Muse to Macklemore, or it could've been her house on 700 North, in the tiny kitchen with something savory cooking on the stove - simmering in some kind of herb I can't remember

11pm, we'd still be sipping tea on those wooden chairs, listening to the Gossip Girl soundtrack and talking about Leighton Meister's yellow dress and the boy that's so hung up on her and I remember the henna on my hands, rubbing it into Gwen's hair, I remember laughing about the drug smell and the nasty mud-like slime congealing on our hands

I remember the One Direction posters and the anime postcards scattered among books about constellations and post-world-war Japan; the rabbit in the closet, sharing dresses and jackets, staying there past midnight and hugging my knees on Mary's bed, feeling so cussing safe I never wanted it to end

I miss the fragility and simplicity of college being an abstract idea, a far-away entity that enwrapped my caretakers, that brought them warmth that I felt through their fingertips, that gave them light and concerts and shadow-scattered tinfoil in freshman art portfolios;

I miss the future the way I used to see it, an eternal kitchen with tea whistling on the stove and a laptop blazing with only the things I loved

I miss the people who made me feel like I could reach out and touch them - all those evasive coming years of mine.

like who/what/where even are we

My roommates at camp had never even heard of Provo.

Not that I'm surprised - Utah isn't much of a landmark (despite its National Parks, obi), but as a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old riding on what seems like an eternal Provo trajectory, it was maybe the tiniest bit unsettling. 

Like, my universe doesn't exist in someone else's??? Um okay wtvr but like actually, yikes.

All of the sudden Provo feels like some weird crater-struck iceberg floating in the middle of nowhere; in a place no one even cussing thought about

and here we all are, freezing to death.

Ok pause. I'm really not gonna be antagonistic - at least I'll try because Provo is in my blood & bones, man, it's given me opportunities Charlotte Brontë would cry to think of and taught me viola and provided me with neighbors, which is an actual huge thing,
when you think about it.

Just the overarching identity crises that seem to hit all these eighteen-and-something-year-olds time and again while they stumble around those padded-down HBLL stairs and stare at themselves in those smudged-up HFAC practice room mirrors seems maybe a little too timeless.

You're suffocating in the feeling that your holistic society is leaving you behind, that the cookie cutter somehow broke on you and you're burnt and useless because for whatever reason you can't conform

and that, that is terrifying.

It's kind of like an

kind of situation, and you think "but do you?! do you?" And tbh I really don't know what they want from us.

I think we sometimes feel like Provo is eating us alive; that the iceberg is turning us to ice and we start running like mad because the bigotry and perfectionism just doesn't jive with these preconceived life notions, it's a broken record repeating what they taught us in Sunday School while we stared at the carpet creeping up the walls, sound-proofing the room and doubt-proofing our minds

but hey, sometimes doubt really is the best thing.

DON'T BE SCARED, LOVE

I look at those sweater-clad kids with "freshmen" etched into their faces and high school backpacks hanging off their shoulders and I just want to say

"It's okay, babe."

It's okay that you don't know everything; it's okay that you can't hit that shift ten times out of ten because Christ is not Provo, Christ isn't gonna demand perfect arm vibrato and a 4.0 right now, even though that's the machine you're putting yourself through, the pain of perfectionism and the sickening feeling of responsibility just to not fail. 

He wants you to keep going. I want you to keep going. You are an incredible source of power in this fading world; you are color, you are vibrant. 

People talk about Free BYU, but I can't stop thinking about Free All of Us - from this mess of mistaken identity and this misconstrued mob psychology city. We need to free us from ourselves because we are not, we are not the byproduct of a shapeless society; we are not the cultural result of something conspiratorially bigger,

we are the something bigger.

I guess what we need to do now is figure out how to jive with what to do with all of that 

and I don't really know how to start, tbh, but I think we're gonna get there.