We went over to the house I was raised in to check in on the state of lawn, pool, hedges and etc…

The pool was green. No surprise. Anyone we’ve ever hired to take care of it seems to be stricken with the auto-immune disease of lazy.

While dad was flushing the pool, I went down to the lower yard. The little playhouse that I never spent the night in, even though I told my ten year old self that I would every night of the summer – was long gone. It’s been gone several years actually, since it became the moldy crooked little house full of hornets and centipedes.

I saw indentions on the ground of all the big and tiny holes I had dug during my childhood. I loved to dig, mostly with my hands. I’d make complex tunnels and caves for our puppies to explore. I didn’t just dig, every summer that we spent out at the marina, I’d be chipping away at the limestone exposed on one of the big hills. I’d find a shard and start carving elaborate buildings into the face of the stone. They weren’t great, but I had made a change in a substance that had been around long before me. I don’t know if my desire to change the landscape around me was to connect myself with something, as people were more balloons to me. Sometimes I had ahold of the string, but most of the times I just let go.

It didn’t take me long to find Milo’s old tennis balls. They were stripped of their outer fuzz, half collapsed and full of tiny sprouts of clover. I took all that I found and put them in a safe place by the pool. I didn’t want another run of the lawnmower to shred them into oblivion. Just as my parents were calling me to leave, which I don’t blame them at all — it’s sweltering out here, I looked down and saw a red circle completely even with the ground. I hunkered down and brushed enough dirt off of it to recognize what it was. The object was one of Milo’s frisbees and just like that, I had my hands in the dirt again. The protectant Sally Hanson nail care flaked away during the first few scrapes. Then the nails started growing ragged and the space beneath grew thick with dry soil. I got one finger under the lip of the frisbee and lifted it free. I’m not the sort of person that smiles to themselves when they’re alone. But this time I did, I felt a little curl starting at the corners of my mouth as I carried the frisbee and bald tennis balls back up to the pool.

Most of my past is buried. Literally.

I feel like I’m playing a game of black jack.

I’ve got a good set of cards.

Problem is, anytime I start thinking I’m lucky – I lose that streak. Funny thing, that. Auto-humble.

But that’s okay. Whatever I want, I’m going to work hard for it. And when it starts working out, I’m not just going to cruise. I’m going to bust my ass even more.

The writing is going well. I never liked writing on paper because I hated the lag time. Typing seemed a hell of a lot faster. But when I wrote Tides I was sitting exhausted on a plane back from Jamaica. It hit me like the wall of a skating rink. I borrowed a pen from the steward and set to work. My deadline was the flight landing. I knew if I had a break, I’d lose what was coming. When I type, I stop myself – I’m constantly pausing to think too damn much. To make the sentence perfect the first time, so I never had to edit.

But something about putting pen to paper makes you honest with your skill level. The most famous books, ones that will be classics for all time, were done this way. It was quill and paper. It was blood and prison walls.

Maybe this first story ain’t perfect, but that’s not what I’m aiming for. A piece can be like a child to me. It can get colicy and cough in your face. Other times it backfires when the kid has his hands in his pants in a grocery store.

But sometimes, just sometimes. It’s something different all together, and whatever it is crawls inside you and stretches your bones until you’re an whole inch taller. Closer to whatever it is that writers reach for. Closer to changing the lives you love, to strangers, and spreading like wildfire towards the next generation. It’s not immortality. It’s about waking up the mortals to pictures of all sizes.

I have more than enough acacia wood to make frames for whatever I dream of. Whatever I create. That tree of life is alight and I’ll let it illuminate my way for as long as it wills me to.

Because I won’t be a rose bud anymore.

The air is humid here, it sticks to your skin like the quick slap of a moist sheet. But just as soon as the perspiration slicks your skin, the breeze – a constant salty surge – steals it away towards the starving flora. Raphael tells me that it should rain soon. I can see this part of the land needs it. The trees on the many hillsides are a vibrant green, but there is a fragility to their branches – as if they were as hollow as reeds. I wonder if the grass will crackle like fire beneath my feet.

We are further along now, the trees grow higher as they spread up what has now become small mountains. To the left of me I see the ocean. The water breaks in a way I am unfamiliar with. As far as I can see over the ocean, whose colors change in such a way that I think of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Swirls of aqua marine run with the erratic-ness of paint dripping down an uneven surface. The waves come across to me as disorganized. Schizophrenic, they roll in foamy crashes with no allegiance to the greater swells. The beaches of Florida, the waves come in thick lines, timely reshaping the shore. Here they appear as a flipped sky full of scattering doves.

Read the rest of this entry »