Orion's belt

I'm not always inspired to write poetry anymore because the last year of over-writing and under-reading has stolen my words. Here's some moments worth coming back to.

We're sitting on top of a San Francisco hill under Orion's belt grasping for Blind Melon lyrics with Mickey, waiting for a cab that's never going to come. The capo's come off and his amateur fingers search the frets for the right notes that don't seem to come, either. I want to sing, but I don't know the words, because, I tell him, I have a melody brain, not a lyrics brain.

(This is the guy who rounded up 55 bottles of ibuprofena and throat lozenges for me to appease the not-truly-sick in rural Guatemala, back before customs started checking my suitcases and taxing me for useless placebos for the poor. I haven't seen MM in years, but I watched him learn to speak German from afar. He's that cheerful, amazing, genuinely good, uniquely talented handsome guy that every girl I knew had a crush on, but he's so self-assured, so adventure-loving that he was totally oblivious to it. Much to my chagrin, I didn't recognize him at my good friend's wedding. I blamed his beard, but underneath it all I know my brain has changed. Academia is slowly ruining my social memory functions, my facial perception and retrieval, it's slowly ruining me.)

Xing's melody brain tells his tongue to agree. His camera sits on the sidewalk, lens up, trying to capture those three little holes in the sky with a long exposure. He leaves it out too long and everything turns white. I point my futile phone screen, an eighteen-month addiction I'm trying to kick out of my life unsuccessfully, towards the heavens, and Orion's belt hides in the black.

(Xing I met at a 21st birthday party on Green Street. I recognized his face but again, no name. It evaporated where the turbulent waves of my conscious thought meet the air of drowning in too much. Xing agrees with me that life is quite dull, and this is the most random and exciting thing that's happened to either of us in months. He swipes across his smartphone screen trying to download the uber app. Mickey's eyebrows scrunch up in pity as he realizes how unlivably boring our routines are. He is free and I envy him and don't at the same time.)

I pull up a youtube video of "Lousy Smarch Weather" and we all watch Willie and his kilt catch on fire. I have five bars of AT&T reception up here despite the insistence of the cab company to the contrary. We laugh deep-throated at the genius of the Simpsons and I am thankful that I'm not alone in space.

When was the last time I accepted uncertainty in the midst of familiar strangers?