I mentioned to my friend Ben that I’d once recited Longfellow’s Wreck of the Hesperus while soloing the First Flatiron and recorded it by using an iPhone strapped ghetto go-pro style to my head . . . Well, when he came to visit last week and we climbed the First together, he brought along his goPro . . .

The initial inspiration came from a little blonde girl who I never heard of until she was dead. Well, in the picture on the front page of the paper she was alive, alive and running, like me. Thin legs and flat chest and not a skim of fat, pure hair whipping out behind her. Like me she’d started racing on a local high school team in seventh grade, a child protégé, a future Olympian, a little wisp of an angel to make parents proud and newspapers greedy. They spread our prepubescent faces all over greasy front pages, smeared black ink, smeared interviews to dumb our talk, look at this little dandelion seed on the wind.

My stepfather read the article to me on the way to a Saturday practice. Or probably he was reading it to my mom, but I was in the back seat, listening.

Her twelve-year-old heart exploded 50 meters from the finish of an 800-meter track race. She just fell over, and that was it. Clean and simple. The first thing I felt was intense jealousy.

I ran my next race to make my heart blow, like hers, that lucky blonde girl. I ran so fucking hard, knowing that if I could just run hard enough, I wouldn’t have to run any more. But my heart didn’t burst; it didn’t even hurt. I just won, again, set another record.  My legs and mind no match for my big, strong heart. I berated myself for not being tough enough.

I tried again and again over the years. When depression set deep I’d go out into the hills and pound and my knees gave and my hips went and I even managed somewhere, someway to bust a disk in my spine but that heart kept on a-thumping. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Years and years of trying. Ba-boom.

I didn’t die, my heart only grew stronger, and I fell back in love with running. Now, I couldn’t run enough.

Friends came, and men, many men, and few of them even got near that big ol heart, which with all the assault had built some massive and hard-muscled walls. Nearly impenetrable, and at some point I realized that not even I really knew how to get in, or really remembered what it was like in there anymore. Of course, I could never forget that it held the key, to everything. Every thing.

A couple people managed to wiggled their way into the thick walls and get stuck there. No matter how hard I tried and pried, no matter how much they kicked and squirmed, I could never get them out, they became hard crystallizations in the angry cells, moonstones that only reflect the light in very specific conditions, oh, but when they do it burns. Burns but never sets fire. Damn. Or good. The truth is I’ve never been ok with someone else making my heart explode; I always meant to beat them to it, so I’d know it was coming, so I could control the detonation, so I could keep my power.

And then there was this moonlit refraction a shadow without edges all edges. And he sunk in past the walls, which to my defense I’d been taking a sledge hammer to, slipped in like they weren’t even there and sunk some kind of a grappling hook or amorphous edgeless edge in and when he left he left it there and when he gave a tug I felt–this ache. Right in the middle of my breast, this ache.

And unlike the others who stayed lodged in the walls, he disappeared and left this long fuse or whatever it is behind and for all my flailing I couldn’t get it out, couldn’t even reach to feel it with my fingertips.

What the fuck. I tried the old useless running trick but my knees stopped me before my heart could even think of bursting and the ache stilled but then set back in with sunset. I knew I’d escape him in my dreams; only the dead find me in my dreams. I’ll escape him and this grappling hook will be dissolved by my acid walls. Then we can be calm and look at eachother for a bit and decide about opening gates, etc.

How he found me in that infinite dark sea I’ll never know. Well, I have an idea. The first time, I went looking for him, foolish dream self. Went looking for him in some place like New Zealand, jumped off that huge tramp steamer I rode over on storm-tossed waves and there were the cottages all stone-walled and cute and little and when I knocked at the door his brother answered. Said, “This is the right place, but I think he’s at the pub,” and I saw the same kind universe in his eyes.

After that he had me. Night after night. And I woke up sad and so confused and that aching at my breast bone, it came and went. I ran into the mountains, I sat and meditated, I burnt powerful herbs and whispered words to the winds and above below; I called for release. I said, Release me until I know who you are, I can’t take this. If you want to have at my heart, we can discuss the matter, but you can’t just go jumping in like that. I think you did it wrong. Because it really hurts, a lot. Because I don’t know how to do this, and here I am alone in the darkness. Because I’m tired of running. Because my heart may explode. If. You. Keep. Pulling.

***

here is one more memory:

My body may come and go, but my heart is always with you.

He said.

I said.

The man from long ago who spun me without touching, perfect for just one dance, and as we stood breathing in the impossible aftermath I whispered “when can I see you again?”

He replied,

“We’ll be together forever, after the big bang.”

And disappeared back into the starry sky.

Reblogged from *novapops | stay imperfect*:

As she speaks, Mica studies Vista’s face in the moonlight. Blue and white, a smudge of sleeplessness at the inner corner of each eye, maybe, or maybe that’s just the shadows. Her neck holds a hollowness that is entrancing and, it occurs to him, vaguely terrifying. A cobra’s seductive curve, her jaw strong and when she speaks he can see all the way down into her soul, the black mouth of the snake wide open, he wants to lean closer . . .

She turns to him, a flash of emerald green, feral green, those eyes with their sleepless corners. Lips wet, shining.

“Hey,” she says, tilting her head.

And the tameless flash passes by, the clouds disappear from his brain as if they were never there. All the room for rational questions returns, but now that it’s there he finds it needless.

“Hey,” he answers.

“Wanna see one of the rocks?”

She removes two small stones from her pocket and hands them to him. One is very rough and sparkling silver; the other smooth red swirled black with a groove that fits a thumb perfectly.

“Apollo and Artemis”

He places the rocks back in her hand. Her skin, strangely cool in the summers heat, feels smooth and sends an unexpected shock through him. He pulls back. Fear? Not the sensation he’d expected. He moves away but not too far, he wants to be closer, wants to touch her again.

Beneath them, the water of South Boulder creek tumbles by as they search each other for whatever needs to be found, whatever brought them both here in the first place.

“I’m glad you’re out here,” Vista says. “I think I was feeling lonely tonight. I thought that the canyon would be my company.” She smiled and added, “You’re even better.”

“Likewise,” he said, and they turn away from eachother to look up at the river, still slightly swollen with the last of the Rocky Mountain’s melting snow, smoothing the red rocks below. Her hand lays over the metal rail, and when he places his over it, it feels small and gentle. Dawn begins to sneak through the corners of the cliffs to slowly erase the mysteries of night, to find them, together.

Vista spun circles on her office chair and wondered why she’d ever left New York, where being alone wasn’t so fucking lonely.

The thing about 3:30 a.m. It’s hard to decide whether coffee or whiskey is more appropriate. Vista pushed up from the hard-backed chair, wobbled a bit, dizzy from the spinning, and made her way to the kitchen. Coffee. Whiskey. Hmmm…

She decided on both. Fire coffee. Made a mess with the grinds as she packed them haphazardly into her Bialetti, which started to boil over while she was pulling on a pair of tights and a loose tee shirt. When forced by brain chemistry or deadline to work the night shift at her computer, she usually did it naked, but leaving the house required clothes.

She needed to get out. For the past three hours she’d done far more harm than good on every single file she’d pulled into photoshop; poor crops, blasted color edits. Sometimes, you’ve got to admit failure and take the brain for a little rehab.

The coffee did not taste good, but it was strong and hot and alterative. She let it cool as she drove slowly out of town, headed south. South, always south. When things got rushing in her brain, her body pulled south.

At the intersection where the road split off for Eldorado Canyon she hit a red light; odd for this hour. A fair enough omen. She put on her blinker and turned right through the red light and across the empty highway.

The gate for the canyon yawned open; for obvious reasons no one manned the fee booth. No other cars occupied the lots, and the slick sandstone walls rose dark and empty around her, their red blush lost to the tarry night. Coffee mug in hand, she moved out towards the bridge. If only Vista could listen to the river, perhaps its story could offer some peace to her unquiet mind. Something in her may have sensed this, but it wasn’t the conscious, rational part she tended to take seriously, and she took another searing sip from her coffee.

Mica wakes up with adrenalin like cold silver in his mouth. Sweat coats his body, the air around him is black and unbreathable.  He rolls over and pushes open the window.  No stars out there, it’s one of those thick-skied nights, the kind that begs for rain but the clouds waited too long, they sank too low, all they can do is transfer their moisture to everything they touch. Mica is a prime target.

Sleep will not be making a return tonight. This morning. It’s 4 am, a not unreasonable hour. If you’re seventy-eight years old and you go to bed at eight. Mica still has fifty years to get to that point, and right now he has no plan on making it that long.   Focus: on the present.

The sheet below him used to be of the highest quality cotton, high thread count, so soft and luxurious but then there were long-nailed dogs and woman who became screaming clawing banshees once you got their clothes off; there were misplaced whittling sessions, and the fact that he used this sheet anywhere he was going to sleep for more than a week; it’d covered many a crash pad laid out on many a forest floor or other wild place, it had been exposed to sun and sparking fires and curious chipmunks. For a while he’d patched the little holes as they appeared, sewn the occasional big rip, but sometime in the past year, perhaps around the same time he’d decided to lay that sheet over the futon in the sleeping loft of his little wood cabin, he’d stopped making repairs and just let the old thing wear. The mattress below was rough as hell, but whatever. He didn’t sleep much anyway.

Mica climbs the ladder—really just ends of plywood nailed into one of the logs that hold up this shack–down to the main floor of his one-room home. Coffee. He likes it cowboy style. Made in a pot over the flickering flames of his little gas stove. Water boils at a lower temperature at altitude; he’s found that keeping it just at the brink of fisheyes results in an extraction that’s pretty near perfect. He pours it off into a big cup and walks over to his desk. Looks at its neat, colorful stacks and piles, at all the books running off from the desk like an infection, threatening to take over this little cabin. No way any of those words will reveal their secrets to his eyes this morning–they’d just be black scratch on a page. Reluctantly, Mica pulls on a pair of shorts. Coffee in hand, he walks barefoot out into saturated  darkness, heading west into the soothing breast of Eldorado Canyon.

Butt to log. Silent moment. Breath synced.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Little reused particles, like everything, reused, shared, touched by his great-grandfather, her ex-best-friend’s mother-in-law. Sifting from one lung to the next. His to hers. Giant wosh of promiscuous particles.

“You gotten on it yet?”

He turns to her, smiles, flashing big white teeth.

Crazy how those big white teeth pair with that thick, dark hair and that smooth, dark skin to scream: “Healthy breeding partner! Reproduce with me!” Breathing is full, synchronous again. Her mouth quivers. Pupils admit everything.

Catching herself, she shifts her gaze away, off to the side, anywhere, really.

“What?”

Pause. Continuation of white teeth, sparkling eyes. Lips are pressed together. Still smiling.

“Yeah, well, yes. I did get on it,” Mica finally replies.

“Why is that so funny?”

“What?”

“Such a funny question. Why was that a funny question.” She is smiling now, with the left side of her mouth only. The distance between their bodies is once again painful. Time passes slowly between words, phrases, questions. It is still recovering from the rewind.

“It’s not. No. Not funny. I got on the problem. I tried hard. I fell,” Mica said, shrugging his shoulders, his eyes leaving Vista’s to flit briefly across the boulder.

“But,” he said, “But—I will try it again, and this time, I will not fall.”

“Permissable,” Vista replied, nodding. “And why won’t you fall this time?” she inquired.

“Secret beta. I’d tell you but . . .”

“Then you’d ruin the fun,” she finished for him.

“What if there were a fire,” she asked, gesturing a sweeping circle with her chin to capture the surroundings. “And the flames got so hot, that they deformed all the rock. It’s all still there, mind you, and the texture is immaculate. But if you climb on it, it will fall to pieces soon. It will last one, maybe two climbs. One perfect go. Would you still climb on it?”

“It is all going to crumble soon any way,” he replied.

“Soon?”

“Well, in a geological sense of the word.”

“So you would climb on it?”

“Why would I want to climb on broken rock? Even if it was perfect for the first time, the first time only lasts once. It is the following times that last forever.”

Vista searched him. Someone was on the boulder, howling as they grabbed the rock, howling as it slipped from their hands.

“Funny, I always thought that the opposite was true,” she said.

Mica was looking down at his thick, chalk stained hands. He cocked his head when he heard her reply, and when he looked back up to meet her eyes, he was no longer smiling.