We’re Strictly Ballroom

Im moving out of the 420 house tomorrow. and I can’t help but feel as though this is the end of an era.

Its nights like this one that remind me of a night when I was 12. The last night my family was staying in the house I practically grew up in in Oakland. I was sleeping on my grandmas bedroom floor and scared of the changes that would take place living in Petaluma. I didnt know what kind of people I would meet there and how my life would be different in a positive or negative way. I was terrified of Junior High in suburbia(with good reason) and then eventually High School, in a place I had never heard of before.

Flash forward to me being 21. After Jr, High and High school and with an AA in Auto Mechanics and Costume Design and still roughly based in Petaluma. I had spent a year and a half couch surfing in West Oakland and living in Apartments without the landlords knowledge. I had a stable job at a movie theater in Petaluma and pretty much living with my parents a lot at the point I moved to San Francisco. I had done a lot of growing up in Petaluma too, my teenage years were intense, at best, and my twenties were shaping up to be as well. I was still nervous though, to step out of what became my comfort zone and move on to be on my own, officially. Finally.

Now here I am again. Not a year later, the last night at this apartment, where I feel like Ive done a solid amount of changes. After Owen and the Warped Tour and dealing with just the everyday things that your first official year on your own can bring. I feel like the changes have been sort of monsterous and yet I’ve never really felt them occur. (except for Owen, that hurt, and still does, and may always). Whats next year going to be like for me? A year from now will I be shitting my pants over moving to the East Coast? Will I love my roommates in the Castro so much that I won’t want to leave them? Will there be a boy? Anyone? Who will I be on May 1st 2009? Any less me then I am now and yet so much different? or not at all?

I may never get all the answers to the questions of life, but I will never stop asking them. I feel though, that Ive also got a wonderful group of people who will help me and watch me through these changes, and theirs as well. Will they still be here at this time next year?

I feel like there is so much more that I want to say, adn yet I don’t know how to put them into words.

As I promised though, here is a poem I wrote about the year I hitched to burning man. I wrote it on a recipt from work so it hasnt been through workshop or editing or anything.

I knew a Desert Once

I knew a desert once.

Some people compare themselves

To an ever changing body

of water.

But me,

I met up with me in a desert

Between a goat guy

And an elf king

And I as a fairy

In the spiritual glow

Of the statue of a man

on fire.

I knew a desert once

With sunburned

Windblown faces.

Barreling towards civilization,

In the depths of a gypsy caravan

And a thumb

a little worse for wear.

I knew a desert once

I’m not the fairy I was before this.

I didn’t know her any better then,

Then I do now

But I know I knew a desert once.

Wild eyed and tongue tied

You helped make me whole.

In the dreary summer glow

You showed me that dreamers

And dreams

Can find each other in this windstorm.

I knew a desert once.

more poems to come, these next few weeks for school Im going to be writing a lot.