This morning I mailed off my grad school application, and now there's nothing left to do but wait. Waiting is not a skill I actually have, so instead of doing that I'll probably pace around my apartment talking to myself a lot, and drink too much and lie loudly that it doesn't matter, anyway, because the point was trying.

The reason I moved to Seattle, all those years ago, was grad school, and after I didn't get in I came here anyway because the thought of staying in Florida was much worse than starting over somewhere else. But that first rejection was big for me, the first time I had ever not gotten what I wanted academically, and the first time that simply deciding to do something didn't result in actually doing it. My stubborn single-mindedness of purpose ran head first into reality, and it was a long recovery. (It was also what I deserved for being just like every nineteen year old girl ever and writing an application to a literature program about Sylvia Plath. For crying out loud.)

After visiting the mailbox I went to the farmer's market for plant starts, because it's growing season again. I don't think it's possible to explain how much has changed in the last six years, but the girl that talked about flowers in the market, redheaded and wearing a sun dress, was not a girl that most people from before Seattle would have recognized. This town has been good to me so far.

In the half light you traced the veins running blue under the thinner layers of my skin, hands floating soft like fog down the street. The summer died not that long after, but the heat from that second lingered for months, crackling like the moment after a lightning strike, tasting like oranges and ice cream and salty gulf water.

But we cashed in all our chips and took off down a long straight road, confusing alligators for bourbon and daily shimmering in the heat. I took off my shoes and walked down the middle of the scorching highway, feeling the searing blacktop open the bottom of my feet and blacken the wounds. Driving the wrong way for both sunrises and sunsets, the days all getting shorter but not noticeably so.

Even still now and again a raincloud passes by, gently dropping the feel of soft hands and the savor of long afternoons, and somewhere in the back of my eyes I can taste salt and oranges and heavy heavy sunshine.

(PS, Seattle and I have been together for six years yesterday. In celebration, today I reorganized this and did this.)

A few weeks ago, a man at a bus stop gestured to the starlings hopping around in the grass and told me that these were birds that were not native, that they were introduced to this country by someone who wanted to live in a land that had all the birds in Shakespeare.

I looked it up, later, and learned that the starling only shows up in Shakespeare once, in the first Henry IV, when Hotspur says that he will teach a starling to say Mortimer's name and then give it to the king to keep his anger up. If it's true that this is how the starling landed on our soil, I have to admire that person's dedication to Shakespeare's world, to recreating all of those tiny visions from someone else's head on someone else's land.

In any case, now there are more starlings here than most of the birds flying here as natives. The starlings in the grass by the bus stop, it turned out when I looked closer, were picking at the grass for insects just around the remains of a crow.

There's not a whole lot of difference in the atomic weight of lead and gold, which explains why it is that I can't be quite sure yet which one of them has slipped inside the lining of my pockets. It's possible that I might not find out until the lead settles in my bones. Maybe I only think that my footsteps weigh a thousand pounds, but then maybe they actually do.

There's this toxic pit in Montana, the Berkeley Pit, that was abandoned by a copper mining outfit and slowly filled with water, leaching all the minerals and metals out of the rocks, becoming sterile and dead and full of heavy metal poisons. No one thought that anything could ever live there again, that it was too acidic for even the most basic forms of life.

But one day someone found a bit of slime floating on the surface, slime made up of protozoa that had decided to take up the challenge. They used the sunlight to turn the water around them livable, increasing the oxygen under the surface and making the metals oxidize, eating all of the lead and keeping it under their own skin. And when they die they sink to the bottom, little envelopes of lead, leaving sludge easily scooped up and mined for the useful leftover metals.

Given time, and a little sunshine, these tiny little organisms might just save the unsaveable.

Our bones may as well be outer space, for all that we will ever see them without tools and photographs and uncomfortable accidents. It's only other people that get to look under our skin, long after we're gone, having turned disconnected and forever smiling gruesomely.

I think about my bones in the hands of future archaeologists, fragments extrapolated with plaster and reassembled wrong like a blank puzzle. They'll peer through the hollow tubes that once held me together and wonder, was she related to the birds? The thinning toward the elbow suggests that this species likely tended toward the sentimental. These colors, here, show a clear preference for whiskey over gin. There might be a few fossilized bits of gristle left, a solid string of ligament or a scraping of marrow, but mostly only bones, shedding dust on to the gloves of strangers. Building a portrait of me that I was never able to see.

Yesterday we threw a surprise early birthday party for one of my favorite people, and I tasked myself with distracting the birthday boy long enough for the people we were having brunch with to get to the party, and for the rest of the guests to assemble. I was doing remarkably well, considering how bad I am at keeping both secrets and my cool, until a last minute change in the plan led to attempting to buy a cake for the party with the honoree in tow. I didn't blow the surprise, but I nearly did, concocting a ludicrous story and delivering it while sweating and stuttering nervously.

Fortunately, the thing about throwing a surprise party two weeks before someone's actual birthday is that they never see it coming.

And then we made kites and tried hard to fly them in the park in the absence of both wind and structural integrity, and had cake and cheeseburgers and champagne, and the whole thing was incredibly satisfying. I don't think we do enough positive scheming, any of us. We should probably all start making up for that right now.

Three smell memories:

1. Walking home late the other night, I passed a house with sprinklers on soaking a garden, smelling exactly like coming home at the end of summer right after the streetlights came on, having just adjusted my watch so that it looked like I wasn't getting in after curfew. It's the smell of earth that has spent a day soaking up the sun, of petals waking up and stretching, of powdery mildew forming in the damp and relative coolness, of freckles darkened and muscles sated with movement.

2. Sitting at the bus stop next to an old man who smells suddenly like my grandpa did when I was eight, just before he died, living in the VA hospital with a hole in his throat. It's an antiseptic smell, sharp, but layered halfheartedly over something more unpleasant. Decay, maybe.

3. The diesel smell of a truck driving past my apartment during a soft green sunset, filtering through the lake smell and trees, is precisely the smell of Venice, lost in the cold and the rain and sitting on the edge of a canal with a cat the only living thing in sight. Not knowing that in a few minutes I will come across the back yard of a violinmaker's shop, where the rain will suddenly cease and I will drink a glass of wine and watch those men build their instruments like they are molding them out of their own flesh.

One of the things I most regret is not asking for my grandfather's stories before he died.

I love stories, but it always feels like a delicate thing, asking for them. I think that this is at least partly related to the fact that life was so shrouded in mystery when I was growing up, everyone so carefully not talking about anything, living in houses of vellum and secrets. So asking my family members to tell their stories has always felt like intruding, like asking about an unsavory medical condition.

But not asking is such a waste, because I learned all of these things after he was gone that I would much rather have heard about from him. On one of my trips back to Florida this year, driving down a long empty road with my mother, she looked at me for a second and said, "I think that you were the only person he ever really loved." And while I can't believe that that is true, the thought was a little like being stabbed, knowing that I was only carrying my memories of him into the future and not any of his memories of himself. Selfish.

Sitting on the cold tile floor in a room of my mother's house, I sifted through the detritus of this life I should have known. There was a letter from a relative talking about watching my grandfather play his guitar in a country band on television, something I can't even imagine him having done. And there were envelopes after envelopes of pictures, of him posed underneath the Kapok Tree looking like Huck Finn, of the family picking cotton in fields which are now strip malls, of my great-grandaddy the bootlegger dapper in a suit and lounging confidently against a fence.

And now I can't believe that I spent all those years living five minutes away from my grandparents, seeing them a few times a week, and never thought to ask.

I was walking home last night, in the hours which a month ago would have been verging on late but which are now, in the softening spring evenings, only more hours. It was warm enough to not be wearing tights but cool enough that the breeze rustling the bottom hem of my light walking coat buttoned over my dress gave me goosebumps. The air smelled of the last of the daffodils and the first of the lilacs, of lake water and car exhaust and a distant barbecue. My shoes were rubbing blisters on the tops of my toes and I was mulling over a fun scheme, and for a moment I thumped down into the groove of most myself.

That's all, really. But after months of being grumpy and ill-contented and mad at the world, of feeling too small for my skin and too big for all rooms, it was like being on fire and then suddenly doused with cold water. Like coming to the end of a long tunnel and finally taking a breath again, finally finding the space to take a step backwards and say, calm down, silly. Everything has a way of working out, remember?

In my pots green things are starting to poke out their heads, and soon there will be flowers just steps from wherever I am in my house. There is nothing better than right now.

Man, didn't we have a time.

I knew that there was a pretty good chance that this weekend in Vancouver was going to be fun, but there was just no way to predict that we would spend all of the last 48 hours laughing. All of my laughing muscles are sore. We ate a ton of good food, formed a religion, played a lot of goofy car games, drank wine on a dock, and laughed ourselves silly. It was just unstoppably fun.

I went to Vancouver with a few people I know socially but not terribly well, and the whole thing could have been a disaster. Instead, we lucked into a whole weekend full of more fun than I can remember having in a long, long time. I'm all refreshed and unwound and ready for spring and adventures and hijinks. We put together an ace traveling team, and I'm excited for whatever happens next.

Well. It looks like an impromptu weekend trip to Vancouver is in the works, and I couldn't be more excited. I have been going out of my skin with restlessness since, oh, January, and will like nothing more than to get in a car with a bunch of people who laugh easily and then consort with some Canadians for a few days. I plan to take my role as co-captain of wacky hijinks very seriously.

Yesterday I went and had my bones cracked for the first time in years. The bone cracking man went through the usual amount of exclaiming about how broken I am, pressing all along one side and tsking over how wound all of my muscles are, how misaligned all of my bones are. My brains are the same way these days, but I'm hoping that a day or two breathing other people's air will help straighten things out some.

Late one night I told you a story about an apple who meets a bird and becomes jealous of the bird's freedom and discontented with his own future. The apple didn't want to become a pie or cider, to be crunched between anyone's teeth, to fall from his branch and rot slowly and seep back into the ground. The well-meaning bird told the apple scary tales, attempting to make it feel better, stories about fighting too-strong winds and running from fast cats and barely escaping hunters with guns, but all the unhappy apple heard were the verbs.

You were asleep before I got to the end of the story, before I told whether the apple made it out or was made into a slightly bitter pie. I didn't know the ending, myself, so it was lucky that you were already breathing softly on to the pillow that was slowly making creases on your cheek before I had to decide. Happy ending or sad ending? Freedom or responsibility? Even now I'm not sure I know.

I disappear sometimes, in between breaths. Thinning and fading. Happens so fast that you wouldn't notice unless you were watching very closely, but it's interesting how far you can travel without breathing.

There's this cave on the Greek Island of Crete, the Zeus Cave. It's supposed to be the cave where Zeus was born or reared while his mother, Rhea, was trying to hide him from his father, Chronos, who was in the habit of eating his children. Certain cults say that touching parts of the inside of the cave will alter your DNA. In what way, they can't be sure, since it's your DNA and only you can possibly be sure in what ways you've changed. Still, each visit leaves the potential for a fresh start smeared all over your fingertips.

But there are caves in between breaths, too, thinning and fading and slipping through the cracks under eyelashes. Finding the icons that can change DNA.

It's been a year now since I landed in Italy, tired and rumpled and broken and frankly scared out of my wits.

It's funny how physical being lost is, how you can travel in circles for fifteen miles looking for something three blocks in the opposite direction, and how suddenly you are faced with a lower back full of sweat and a friendly german shepherd and bleeding feet and feeling lost is the silliest feeling yet. I was constantly lost on that trip, lost looking for Bomarzo or the Colosseum, lost in a bus careening through the countryside by Siena, lost in the silent depths of Pompeii, because I have no sense of direction. Emotionally or corporeally. And being lost and limping and just plain tired out from looking at everything smashed me back together when I wasn't paying attention.

One afternoon in Florence I sat on a square right below Cellini's Perseus with the head of Medusa, with gelato in one hand and my journal balanced on my knee. Sitting alone in Italy is an invitation for conversation, especially if you're a young redheaded girl. In this square an old man walked over and sat down, and though I was wary--you never could tell which conversation would abruptly lead to a proposition--I slowly got drawn into conversation about books and politics. He was thinking of leaving Italy if Berlusconi came in, of traveling, and he asked the question everyone got to eventually: what I was doing in Italy alone. I shrugged and told him what I told everyone, that I was thinking, and resting from a bad experience. He nodded and narrowed his eyes in a manner that I would come to recognize as peculiar to old Italian sages, patted my knee, and sucked his teeth. "I think you are on a journey, yes?" he asked, squinting in the sunlight. "A quest. We have words for that here. In Italy, you say, farmi le ossa."

Which mostly, it turned out, translates to "building your bones".

They say that 2,000 years ago the climate of the Congo was cooler, less damp, that instead of being composed of thickets of impenetrable jungle the land was mostly smooth grassland with fingers of forest along all of the major water sources. All the bigger animals and the running animals that usually lived in other, always-open places, moved in to these grasslands, probably enjoying all of the space and extra grass.

But then slowly the climate changed back again, became hotter and wetter, and the jungles spread out and out into the slowly dampening plains, claiming all of the land that was open in the name of tall trunks and thick green undergrowth. Until eventually the open plains were closed.

The elephants were still there, though, and the running animals, glimpsed in flashes of gray and brown and stripes standing very still among the leaves. It confused people for a long time, all of these animals so poorly built for jungles living right in the middle of one, until one day they found a surprise intact grassland in the middle somewhere and realized what had happened. That though the animals still were built for running and stomping and wide open spaces the world around them had changed and trapped them there between the trees. Until eventually they forgot what running was like. They could still, but don't, mostly.

Oh, hello there, spring.

We knew you were on the way, of course. The signs were all there--the daffodils, the thick purple flowers up in the higher branches of the trees, the chives coming up in my window box, all of the bright pink and gray earthworms strung along the sidewalks. And then there was the usual ache all along my bones, looking for movement, the restlessness threaded along every nerve.

But you popped up this weekend, covered in sunshine, sending everyone stumbling dazed onto the sidewalks and patios in sunglasses and without coats. Everyone's friendlier on the first spring weekend, finally starting to emerge from their winter haze, ready for everything to start again. Time to start thinking about planting things and smiling at strangers. You're bad luck, spring, but you're the sort of bad luck that is sometimes indistinguishable from good luck.

Right on schedule, same as every year, I find myself bored of everything in the world, tired of being cold and sick, of looking at the same things and eating in the same places and listening to everyone in the greater metropolitan area whine about the weather. There's always a moment, when I'm walking up to catch the bus to my regular haunts, where I pause in the middle of huffing up a big steep hill and look back over Lake Union and bridges and boats, and that moment settles my ruffled disposition. But by the time I reach the top of the hill I usually find that the fists have settled back in my hands and I am irritated and restless all over again. Even a cheerful clump of daffodils nodding along the sidewalk can't quite smooth out my crumpled forehead.

What I want, of course, is an adventure, to suddenly disappear to somewhere in Spain where all the girls wear colorful skirts and everyone has a red sash in their closet, to move to Mongolia and change my name to Lucy and learn how to construct a yurt. Discover a new tiny species of frog in a jungle somewhere or finally learn to milk a cow or stumble across a hidden cache of buttercups just waiting to stain shy chins yellow. Something.

Suppose for a moment that all of those concave Hollow Earth theories are actually true, that we are in fact living on the inside of the Earth with the universe around us and the sun on a battery, that if we were tunneling it wouldn't be in but out. That our antipode wasn't really around but above and that looking up at the stars was really looking at the lights of other cities.

If things were at rights in this outside-in Earth it would be the work of nothing at all to toss some tin cans with strings telephones to the other side of the universe, throw across paper airplanes with jello salads in their cargo holds, lower a basket with a fancy hat and a kitten in it all the way down. Gravity might be a problem, of course, but then I find that gravity is generally a problem anyway.

I am pretty much a walking petri dish this month, having acquired a bad cold to go along with my recently enhanced bout of bronchitis, all of which has left me exhausted and bad-tempered and wheezing and unable to go within three feet of my couch without waking up on it four hours later. My apartment is a mess and I can't hear anything and I'm fairly certain that I'm keeping my neighbor awake with my all-night coughing fits. Being sick is taking up all of my energy, and probably also the energy of everyone who is putting up with me whining about it all the time. It's not really a fun time for anyone.

I am really, really glad that I got that whooping cough shot last year, because I would bet that that would be next on this list. I am anticipating coming down with leprosy any day now.

It isn't staring at an eclipse that hurts our eyes, the times when was was bright has turned dark, but the moments after when the sudden influx of light alters the chemistry of our cells and damages them. With age the damage becomes less and less each time, our lenses yellowing and becoming too callused for the sunlight to break through. But still each time our pupils have become too wide in searching for details in the dimness and are photochemically dented. We're not made to go from dark to light so suddenly.

I often wonder about all the creatures that have evolved themselves into no eyes, sitting in the dim places, slowly losing the potential for light. Straining to see something through the gloom until they stopped straining and learned to parse the darkness in other ways. Like all of those things with fins and tentacles living under water and using whole new organs to feel the electromagnetic pulses from muscles moving nearby. Seeing differently, but perhaps not worse. Not even remembering what having eyes was like.

And I think about how sometimes there's no rational explanation for heading into the caves or down under the water, how you just go there because it looks like someplace new, and how sometimes you go to open your eyes and find they have sealed themselves shut while you were busy with your other senses. I think it takes almost no time at all to evolve yourself out of eyes but more time than you have to evolve yourself back into them. I think that one day you close them to avoid the bright flash that comes when the eclipse is ending only to find that you are yourself the next eclipse. And you forget where your eyes ever were.