black coffee and my mother in the kitchen. cleaning out my cupboards and humming and old folk song. i feel different, again, and suddenly. yet, i dont know if i could tell you quite what has changed. i feel lighter and simultaneously heavy with wisdom. i have been thinking a lot about love and identity, grief and nirvana, oblivion and ice cream.
it is desert summer and my mother and i sit in the parking lot that smells of wildfire smoke and we talk about the radio and people we don’t like and, as we always do, grief.
grief hangs in the air between us, ever present since my fathers passing. sometimes, we don’t talk about it. sometimes, it is easier not to.
somehow, later, i talk to my lover in sweden on the phone and i end up talking about swimming and how my father taught me how to swim in our backyard pool. i never needed swimming lessons, i had him holding me and telling me to kick. i haven’t thought of this memory in years and i swear i can smell the chlorine even now.
a girl went missing after shambhala this year, they found her and it sounds like she had a bad trip or took some bad drugs or something. i dont know how to feel about it. the desert and the drugs and this land and this climate are unforgiving. those who know, know.
its got me thinking about shambhala and how i would go in my friends hippie van in a ramshackle group of kids. almost twenty years ago. when did i get so old?
my mother doesn’t believe me when i say it was twenty years ago. she thinks i was still dropping acid and dancing with my tits out wearing crystal necklaces just a while ago. maybe that’s the nature of mothers.
she tells me she likes to drink wine and smoke weed and go through the drive thru at mcdonalds and get fries. she asks me when that stopped being enough for a real party and i laugh and laugh. dad used to drop acid in the woods around the old reservation and my mom would pretend to not hear him when he was telling us stories.
my dad grew weed when i was young and he thought this was really funny. i remember taking big bags of dads ditch weed with me to festivals and rolling joints and using them as currency. i got high with a guy from quebec once and he made me a balogna sandwich in return and it was so fucking good. just a couple smelly hippies lost in the woods, before cellphones and instagram, talking about love and eating sandwiches. i wonder what that guy is up to now and if he’s still making sandwiches and getting high with strangers.
i used to set up a little mexican blanket on the beach at shambhala and tell fortunes by donation. i would make medicine bags and crystal necklaces and trade them for food and drugs. a guy from alberta stopped by because his girlfriend wanted one of my crystal pendants and he offered to trade me herbal viagra and told me it would make my clit really hard and i laughed so hard i thought i might pass out and i politely said no thank you. he bought the pendant instead and i didn’t try his herbal viagra. i wonder what happened to that pendant.
i told a girls fortune and i guess i nailed it because she started crying and asked how i learned to see the future. i overheard her at a food booth telling people i was a real witch. i just wanted a really big piece of pizza. ham and pineapple please.
i think of the summers of the past but then i start thinking of the summers of the future. maybe i should dust off my tarot cards and start telling fortunes on the beach again.
i wonder if i can still pass as a witch at forty.
i can buy my own pizza now.
