The trumpets resonate in my ears and somehow I remain seated reading book after book after book. They dance on the page in that syncopated rhythm remnant of childhood fading as the sun dims in the sky earlier and earlier, day by day. I am no longer escape nor refuge and somehow have shed the weight of happily ever after's based on dreams and prayer seems bound to paper and pen, much like the past twelve years living on computer screens, forgetting the feel of thin flimsy parchment between my fingers, the bend of notebooks toted around from class to class, from the river to the library back to my dorm room wondering where this character, Celeste, or Duke or Mariana will find the enlightenment beyond the tragedy of amensia, overexhausted privilege or the loss of family. And I do this writing ditties on scrap paper, in the middle of class, spending a class on numbers writing of rainbows, traveling and finding home in a stranger I have yet to meet.
That's where I used to go, connected to earth in between my fingers, under my bare feet when chemicals and rules and injustice seemed an absurdity between ultimate frisbee and Keats, Neruda...of course there's always room for Neruda. Don't you know there's always room for Neruda--the poet lover revolutionary who loved his land like we love his words and his simplicity, the image of the sea lives on infinitely as he calls for us...my devotion to the sea is silenced by the distance I keep putting between us and when I'm there, I am calling my muse near as globalization privatizes that sea that I can swim in but locals have neither the time nor the energy.
This is when I am reminded that adulthood is lurking. Unemployed because I refuse to follow propriety, surfing the web when my eyes and skin long for the smell and taste of the sea barred and blocked by economic depravity. So I keep writing in circles like the cycles of the seasons that come and go, waiting, waiting, waiting for the paycheck, the 9-5 so that I can save money and dance with words like the music I am listening to that does not call me to get out my chair because there is far too much work to do. But I close my eyes and, for a moment, I am a little girl dancing on the neighbor's feet whose long red hair and curves, even as a child are hypnotizing and I'm closer to the sea than the urbanity of cars passing by, the paletero's bells ringing and the technology that promises to guard my secrets in public.