Early morning on the beach, a misty, dirty cloud covers the sun. A low haze hangs over the sea. The waves are weak. It’s already hot. Two days ago, my daughter said, “I want to leave.”
“You want to leave Spain?” I asked.
“No, I want to leave.”
I knew what she was talking about. I'd been thinking the same and I told her so.
For a moment, we both felt better.

Only a trickle of people walk the water's edge. Some out to exercise; running or striding quickly. Almost everyone wears bathing suits, women with straps tied around backs instead of shoulders. No tan lines, I guess. An older woman’s breast hangs out of her suit. She doesn't bother putting it back. No one cares. Women go topless here in Alicante.

Couples, most all. I am alone.

The silver sea is capped with foaming white waves. People pass like illusions. Wondering what their lives are like, I gaze down at footprints in the sand. The impressions dissolve with two or three brushes of waves, just like me, just like I have dissolved from lives, cities, jobs, friendships. How nicely this metaphor, this cliché, works.

Pale, cushioned benches under yellow umbrellas line up in neat rows, a new addition on Campello beach. Tourists, most from Madrid, have dropped in with big city arrogance and cash. Past tense are days of silence teased by palm branches brushing the balcony railing, birds chirping choruses accompanied by pulsing waves. The Spanish people are beautiful. Especially young girls with black eyes, long faces, large, long noses and thick, black hair. Picasso proportions.

When did my anger morph to despondency? I've risen, like the waves, to the occasion, crashed it, turned around healthy and gone back in again. Too many times. I'm tired of fighting for alright, joy, my verve. I hate getting older. Just one more thing out of control.

Only a few people wear masks on the beach. One blue-masked woman carries a purse which she lifts to her face like a tiny wall each time someone passes. People protect their health, their lives. We’re survivors. It's in our DNA. But I want to leave, end the fight for fundamentals, bread and water, work, love, belonging.

Did I become so strange no one wants me? I’m tired of blaming myself. Tired of knowing no one wants to hear me asking for help again. Tired of putting my chin up, my chest out and pretending I can do it alone. Tired of the pain of losing people who loved me but are gone like footprints after a few gentle, morning waves.

Afraid of the future, disappointed in the past, the present as elusive as a just world.
I ran to a Spanish desert
from cruelty, injustice, people,
fled with my sense of helplessness, ineffectualness, meaninglessness. Intimidated by hate. Afraid of civilization’s monsters. Ashamed that I am not David or anyone at all. That I am vulnerable and tired.
I cower in solitude.
A child looking through a crack in a door
as adults fight and the mean adult pushes the weaker, kinder adult against the hard edge of a suffocating knee, and going down the kinder adult, the gentle giant, takes the sheets and drapes and comforter and all the murdered innocents along. A flimsy torn, tired piece of cotton catches a candle’s flame. Fire crackles, cracks like a breaking windpipe, and consumes the room.  My hair catches fire
as I watch the room burn,
my daughter’s room,
her grandmother’s room,
her father’s room,
her granddaughter’s room.
The desert around me, dry and dark, is ready to burn as well.
For hope, the house comes down.

I roll up the window shutter when it is still dark; the January chill creeps through small spaces in the large, white framed window.  A hyacinth, resting on the black table, is in bloom; its smell strong and sweet.  Like other spring flowers, it calls out in a musical whisper to be noticed. Light pink flowers, partially opened, from its five, tall thick stocks, all bound by a blue ribbon I tied them with so their stems could cluster for strength. A sixth, small stock nestles, tucked between the durable others.

As the sun rises, construction workers begin their work on a new apartment complex.  As I am on the second floor, the new building has stolen the morning sunshine that once brightened my spot at the table. On the other side of my apartment, buildings shade the evening light. It stays dim inside all day.  

The drilling, hammering and occasional loud clunks crash into the room’s silence.  I watch workers walking along the scaffolding shell and kneeling in bare concrete rooms drilling.  They work like ants.

The sun rises, again unencumbered by clouds.  Every day, for as long as I can remember, for months, it has been clear.  Only one day lapsed into the gentleness of rain, Thursday last, the day my friend left Milan. It’s hard for me to believe only four days have passed since then. Already it feels an eternity of loneliness.

I could be anywhere in the world with a hyacinth on a table in January and construction  outside my window. 

When I go out wandering, examples of human capacity surround me, architectural examples, churches the most obvious. A strange comment about humankind that it creates such masterworks in respond to ideas of God.  There is a contemporary building I like, the Bosca Verticale, a high-rise residential building in Porto Nuovo, with large balconies dripping with over 4,000 plants and trees.  The plants help clean pollution from the Milanese air. 

My hyacinth cleans my air. As she realizes the day has arrived, her fragrance increases. I can almost see the movement in her flowers, the stretching and awakening of her stocks. If I pause to watch, even for ten minutes, I see the sixth small stock reach upward to the light. This is my vertical garden, masterpiece, spot of wonder among the hubbub of development outside.

How different would life have been, I wonder, if I were born someplace in Europe.

Alone I walk a formal garden, the conversation not gone, but moved inside my head, behind the Villa Reale, now home to public art.

Ducks and strangely yellow swans rest, plucking at their feathers, on wet, brown earth near the small lake. The sound of a contrived waterfall clapping softly.

On the palace lawn, a boy kicks an orange and white soccer ball with his father, stylishly Milanese with cobalt cashmere sweater and plaid scarf tightly wrapping his long narrow neck.  A couple with two young children, noticeably English, stroll by.

So much depends on the placement of the chicken and red wheelbarrow.

Last night between teeth grinding and wakefulness, I thought I understood the meaning of my last eight years, how I arrived where I am today, and I lighted, like a giant, smoky bug, on the pedals of a monumental, black flower. I am in the darkness, after passing through light and hope; after losing hope, community connections and my very identity; and after unsuccessfully searching for myself in the realm of remembering. It is beautiful in the darkness, more beautiful than in the full light and hopefulness, most definitely better than the longing gaze to memory. Sentimentality only occasionally and dimly wafts through these lightless halls, a brief whiff of my dead father’s pipe smoke, his voice on an answering machine repeating into infinity that he will return, the invisible umbilical cord connecting me to my dead mother as she walks to a podium one last time, my body resting on my favorite, faraway, lover’s chest, fitting so perfectly that we think we will be together forever, the dry, hot breeze from an open window on a lone, night drive through central Texas. These are the occasional that enter my regular, extant walk through the corridors of a dreamy gloaming amidst deep, dark truths, in the halls of the mythical, primordial and vaguely romantic. In this darkness, my eyes adjust as if in an Italian cathedral, the image of a Giotto or Bellini slowly revealed.

Like the pangs of grief, if this darkness is denied, my heart will be shot through with holes, my fragile soul shattered. This contemporary and relentless pursuit of happiness does not belong to me. Instead, I fear a disregard for the truths of living. The pain of it. Darkness, like a trick birthday candle, cannot be extinguished.

My body and soul tumble through a voluminous blackness because I am not held in place by love. I accept the sadness this brings. Not depression, not loss of strength, just sadness. I have given up the battle for love in air that holds no moisture. I have entered the free fall, and know that when I land, the darkness and loneliness total, the fresco image finally and completely obscured, I must love nonetheless. I must love when no one is loving me.

A new phase will follow, perhaps light, perhaps hope, perhaps something I cannot guess at now.

The cat stands, stretches, jumps from the chair and leaves the warm place on my hip…already becoming cold. My child sleeps in the other room. My head swims with the loss of those I’ve loved. No rhyme. No reason. I want more power to shape life around me, to stop the unexpected from wrenching my gut, the rain from coming on days we planned on sunshine. I want to stop the dishes from piling up in the sink and dust from accumulating on baseboards  and bedsheets, to end the sense of more to do than can ever be done. I want security, control, success. But I don’t have any of that.

The earth will turn. Rain or sunshine will come. The songbird will stop singing when it sees a worm. The heron will leave the rock to fly away. The cherry blossoms will fall to the brick walkway where they will be trampled to pink paste. My daughter will battle the labyrinth of an over-wrought world. Oceans will rise. Climates will change. Innocent people will be killed.

Oh, look. The cat is back. She has come to my side again and rests against my hip, warming it. I hear her purring, and tickle her neck, kiss her head, and wonder what it is like to be her. She doesn’t have control of when she is fed or when the basking sun breaks through the window or when the humans come home. Yet, she is content.

A stranger wearing jeans and a sweatshirt walks toward me under the viaduct.  
Another stranger shoots heroin in his arm while sitting on shaggy littered grass near the concrete sidewalk.  
Cars pass. It is raining.  
The approaching stranger carries a white paper cup with a brown plastic lid. I assume it contains  hot coffee.  And I think of a…
simple joy, as joy will be. The softness of it, like mist. Loving that was knowing, loving rolling into a body more familiar than my own, unassumingly as easy as brushing my teeth.

He would leave our bed, my eyes dancing over his body, happy knowing he knew how to touch me.

Downstairs into the cold early morning he went to the kitchen,
to the street by the hotel where red rocks cast shadows,
to his car covered in snow, to drive to Starbucks,
wherever he needed to go to get the coffee I liked best.

I used to believe in more love and more time.  

Wrinkled in overpasses now, I imagine the approaching stranger is taking coffee to his lover.
I pass him and the junkie and in my hand,
I clutch and conjugate “to grant.”

From within a small rabbit hole, a black liquid burped up from the earth.  It was hot and sticky and thick like molasses, smelling of sulphur and honey. From the hole, the black tar spread like an army of ants across undulating lime-tinted, spring grasses, grabbing the tender sheaves, and pulling them down like a wet comb through unruly hair. A misty rain fell from one large white cloud that hovered above the field. On the horizon at the farthest edge of the field walked an old woman, dressed in many loose layers of ripped cloth. Her gnarled toes touched the tar as she gently placed a foot down The heat spread between her toes and warmed her soles. The door was faint to her age-weakened sense of smell, and what lingered was not the sulphur but only the honey.  

She missed the sound of bees. She missed horses in the field. She missed flowers and the houses and neighbors..all of it. But after walking over 100 years, she knew to expect nothing, be startled by nothing.  

She didn’t look back, she never looked back, but behind her the blackened earth was curling like old paper into a roll, the fullness of the roll at her back like a tsunami.

She walked because she wanted to go home, back to her beginnings, to leave all the struggle and loneliness, all the disappointment and hardship, all the tears and sadness. And even if home was a tar ground that offered her nothing, she needed to reach that place she once knew, that place where she was true to herself, was only herself, unaltered by the demands of life and others, by her spirit which gave too much and left her depleted, to find again her heart, and mind, and soul, to find again herself. Two years it took her to march across that field. She ate only the berries dropped from the sky that landed in her begging hands.

Eventually, she arrived at a place where light fell upon her through a hole in the white cloud, and she knew she was near. The land around her was the same as all the land she had covered over the last two years, and yet this location felt familiar.

When she heard a voice coming from the earth, or was it a voice?, she looked down. A wolf’s nose was poking through the black liquid. After over 100 years, she stopped for the first time. She put her foot to the wolf’s nose. His mouth opened and he took her foot inside his mouth, and then her leg, and then all of her. His mouth shut. She was home.