The air has softened, finally, and last night walking home started to smell like fall, the brine of the water and a fire in someone's fireplace somewhere above me. I am, as usual, thinking about eyes.

Not too long ago I was reading about chitons, who live under the water with eyes made of rocks. They're covered in eyes, eyes all over their shells, rocks with retinas and lenses although not much of a brain. It's a curious evolutionary choice, since the chitons tend to live in the tidezone, where their limestone eyes are easily eroded by the salt water and the waves. It seems to me that they have almost the opposite problem of the ogre-faced spider, having to grow whole new eyes every now and again instead of a new protective layer each night, but either way just a means of keeping themselves safe. If your eyes aren't connected to a brain, I wonder if wearing them off in the water wears off everything they've seen. I wonder if you'd even notice.

I'm collecting ideas for how to see next, in case I ever manage to evolve myself out of these eyes.

I didn't spend much time alone in Paris, which is unusual but not unpleasant. Somehow, though, in the Musee D'Orsay I found that I had lost my friends somewhere in the rooms behind me. Near the top the glass is shaded, with one small spot clear to see through to all the sculptures below. For the moment, at least, the hallway was empty, and I got that old see-through feelings, like the ghost of the museum. It's one of my favorite parts of traveling, the moments when you could be anywhere and so are instead nowhere, just existing in this space outside of your own life, like the awake version of waking up from a dream with no idea of who or where you are.

I thought about staying there, moving in, a little mouse in all that big train station. But then my phone shook with news of the location of my companions, and I remembered that the Impressionists are not necessarily the paintings I would want to live with forever. So I turned and found the escalator. Going clear is always more fun when you can start being seen again.

 It's difficult to untangle my actual feelings about Paris from my expectations of Paris, expectations built on years and years of studying French and reading books and books and books set in Paris. In any case it was impossible to believe that I was actually in Paris until our boat brought the Eiffel Tower into view, all impossibly delicate and so formidably sturdy at the same time. In retrospect this is perhaps true of all of Paris, but what was true at the time is that being in Paris felt so right I thought I could burst, like in dreams when you find a room in your house that you realize was there all along. I can understand how Franz Reichelt believed that he could fly in just his overcoat, jumping off of that tower. If it was going to work anywhere, it would work there.

I suppose it's pretty much impossible not to romanticize Paris, but Paris does its part by living up to the hype. I am lucky enough to have been to some places that are just beautiful no matter which direction you look (remember Venice?), but Paris is the sort of beauty you can settle into, that you could live in without feeling crowded. Ginsberg once said of Paris, "You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden." If I could, I would go back to Paris tomorrow.

We took a boat ride around the Seine on my first night in Paris on a boat that conveniently sold bottles of wine at the dock and timed itself to arrive at the Eiffel Tower just as the light show started. We drove back around almost to our starting point, waving at the people lining the concrete shores of the river. The boat approached one final bridge and the guide got as far into his sentence as "This is the most romantic bridge in Paris" when a group of boys with long hair stood up on the bank and mooned the boat. Why the bridge is so romantic was lost when all of the passengers erupted in laughter and cheers as the boys slowly faded into the darkness and Notre Dame loomed above us. And so it's fair to say that getting mooned by teenagers was one of my favorite things about Paris.

Paris has left me exhausted and bruised and completely in love. I imagine I'll be spending the foreseeable future plotting how to move there.

 

On Monday I'll be 30, and I'm not even going to pretend to be having any existential dread about aging or leaving my 20's or the looming threat of mortality or whatever it is that's supposed to be upsetting about milestone birthdays. Getting older has been great, and I am having much too much fun looking forward to all the adventures up ahead. In the balance, it seems that things go right just slightly more often than they go wrong.

In Paris I'll be reading a book by Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian writer who was born in Ukraine and grew up in Brazil, who spent much of her life traveling, a renowned beauty who tried to put out a fire in her house with her own hands. The narrator in one of her books says, “I can’t sum myself up because it’s impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I’m a chair and two apples. And I don’t add up." This seems to me like as good a place to start whatever happens next as any.

I like the light in the evenings this time of year. It's light that has lost some of the frantic brightness of the summer, light that knows the days are coming where it doesn't have to get up so early and stay out so late. I walk places in the evenings and it bends around everything softly, cradling instead of pushing.

In Iceland it was bright almost all the time, dimming to something almost twilight in the latest hours. This made it hard to sleep, but there's something appropriate about being on top of all that fire and chaos and bathed in light sunshine. The light in Iceland made the place feel lonelier, more remote, as though the sun's rays couldn't be bothered to make it as far as all of those volcanoes.

I have been waiting for this one to come around.

A year ago tomorrow I had dinner with some friends and then wandered onto a rooftop bar to take advantage of the sunshine and the waning days of my vacation. There is sparse documentation of this evening anywhere, because I was spending most of my time having a lot of fun and the rest of it complaining about how my diamond shoes are too tight, but it's there in my foursquare history--HG Lodge, 8:10 pm. I stayed long enough for a drink and to give my phone number to someone I had met for the second time a few months before, and then left for another bar and a dance party.

At the time I was reading a lot of John Muir, all wrapped up in how he talks about the paths through the mountains, with rocks on all sides and flowers just ahead. My favorite part was his two skies, a valley of unbroken gold flowers below a cloudless blue sky, reflecting each other in beauty. He called the universe an "infinite storm of beauty" and it is this I have been thinking about recently, the storm that has carried us to these new places, this exquisitely beautiful wreck of a year.

Sometimes it's still so startling, the way this has ended up, how everything that was smashed at the beginning of the year has been reconfigured into something even better. I wouldn't relive those months for anything, but I cannot argue with the gifts that all that turmoil has brought me. As usual the universe is smarter than me, and while I unfortunately still can't predict the future I am certainly looking forward to it. Next weekend I'll go to Paris with a bunch of friends and my favorite guy and turn 30, happier than I've ever been, having found a path through the brambles that lead right back to where I started. It seems that the fourth time is the charm.

On Friday I went to the lake, escaping the heat in the cool shade and breeze. Lake swimming is growing on me, the longer I live in the northwest, but there's something about the creeping feeling of cold water on my skin even when I'm all the way submerged that I just can't get used to. Cold water requires so much focus.

Saturday evening I took a train toward the mountains, curling along the coast in the sunset. The clouds covered most of the sky until late in the evening when the cleared up to the mountains. There was lightning there, in those clouds, that looked like the heat lightning of my youth even though the air was chilly. I suppose there is something to be said for the mountains, out away from all the light. In any case we stood there and watched the sky flicker in a handful of different ways, including one brilliant streak of shooting star. 

After James Dean died a friend wrote to his family, saying, "So few things blaze. So little is beautiful. Our world doesn't seem equipped to contain its brilliance too long. Ecstasy is only recognizable when one has experienced pain. Beauty only exists when set against ugliness. Peace is not appreciated without war ahead of it. How we wish that life could support only the good. But it vanishes when its opposite no longer exists as a setting. It is a white marble on unmelting snow." This a thing that sticks with me, an explanation of what keeps us casting around for the brightest lights in the darkest places, why we follow the corpse candles all the way through the swamps. Without the contrast we'd have so little to look at.


Sometimes I get distracted thinking about the fish who find treasure, waving their tails around in the dark and uncovering a glimmer that flashes only in the twinkle of the nearby bioluminescense, there and then gone again. Covered up by the next fish passing above and looking the other way, and never to be seen by us at all. Sometimes I get distracted thinking about all the lights I'll never see.

It's always hard to completely move past a certain lack of trust in the integrity of doors, to shake the feeling that someone is sneaking in or around. Just before I fall asleep I find myself bargaining with myself not to open my eyes back up just in case one of these times it turns out to be true. If it is, I'd rather it be a surprise. In my head it always looks like the librarian ghost from Ghostbusters, which is arguably even worse than real murderers.

All the summertime noises are the thing that make me realize that I'm continuing to imagine these things, all the fans and open windows and light heat hazy sleep. Perhaps I have just read too many of the wrong kinds of things, and now my brains don't need any help to loop whatever they feel on their own. Perhaps all the elves that run me have a taste for pulp television that the rest of me is too scared to watch. Perhaps brains and hearts and the insides of eyes are all a mystery, even to their owners.

I have only been swimming once in the years I've lived in Seattle--lakes being cold and full of monsters and all--but this weekend turned out to be too hot to do anything else, so lake swimming it was. All the heat and sweating makes my angry robot all hop around, but it almost certainly would have been worse anywhere else. And I suppose that this summer has largely been about doing the things I don't usually do, between the lake swimming and the canoeing and the learning how to ride a bicycle again. I suppose I might as well revisit these things before I turn 30 in a few weeks, to give that some gravity.

A while ago I read an article about a climate scientist who is racing both the warming climate and his own mortality to acquire ice cores from all the icy places, so that we will have a better shot of knowing what has come before. It's his heart that's turned against him, in the usual ways, and it's almost regrettable that the cores of people don't have the same kind of layers and rings, that we can't see their growth years and drought years the way we do with ice and trees. Almost regrettable, but maybe still best left secret.

This summer is passing like the last lines of Donald Hall's "Summer Kitchen":
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.

This is especially pleasant given how last summer was so hot and sticky and unraveling, all discovering gardens and old star charts, leaving town and sleeping poorly and imagining up disasters, losing cherished friendships because of decisions not made years before. Right now I am doing mostly new things and feeling mostly new feelings, anticipating a few upcoming milestones, enjoying the quiet time before whatever upheaval shows up next.

And so it is times like these that I wish I knew how to paint, because things have turned so vividly colored. Lately everyone wants to talk about the possibility of human tetrachromats, people with eyes made for seeing whole ranges of colors that the rest of us aren't built for. An article I read recently suggested that there are many people with eyes prepared to see this way, but who don't because they've never had the need. In which case they think that these eyes could be trained, that they could gain the ability to see the world in colors they could never describe. It seems like then it would be summer nearly always, feeling an entire universe of colors that you couldn't possibly explain.

I woke up for a minute this morning just after dawn, warm and comfortable, to find all of the lake out of the window stained pink. It was disorienting at first, all these colors I never see and the lake almost empty of boats, the sky streaked with white and the water striped in currents of lighter and darker blue. I would be lying if I said that it was enough to make me understand why people wake up so early, but what it was was beautiful. I fell back asleep and had a pleasant dream about a simple adventure.

We're going to Paris in only slightly more than a month, which makes me so excited I can barely stand it. It's funny how this trip that was hanging precariously not too many weeks ago is now not just planned but becoming increasingly full of friends. And so now it's about time to start fretting over what to read and what to wear while I'm over there.

I have never seen anything move quite like a giraffe. Surely this is at least partly just from not being a tree in Africa--documentaries are pretty fond of showing giraffes serenely walking across the plains, but I'm not sure I've ever been given a tree's eye view.

We spent a little while afterward trying to describe how it is exactly that a giraffe moves, with its body fixed in place so far away and its head suddenly zooming so close. It's an otherworldly sort of movement, almost like they're secretly under water, and I was in no way anticipating something quite so strange. He hovered around for a few minutes, eating all of our leaves suspiciously, walking away to look at us all sideways and to nibble on the bushes across the way. It was almost impossible not to touch him--he looked so soft--but eventually we broke away to let the next group through.

And now I am more sure than ever before that giraffes are totally magic.

Cryptozoologically speaking, it seems unfair to tell something that it doesn't exist simply because we haven't yet been able to trick it out into the open. I like to think that the council of cryptids gets together occasionally to discuss strategies on looking blurry in photographs and disappearing just as mysteriously as you have appeared. Perhaps on trapdoor and treehouse construction, shrubbery rustling, faking footprints. Annual meetings to tally which members have been discovered and stuffed. It could be that they're all legend, but then again it could be that they're mostly smarter than we are.

So really, cryptozoologically speaking, the only difference between being real and not being real is documentation. This is perhaps not the worst lesson to keep in mind, for when it becomes prudent to stay more shadow than solid.

We've talked before about how Treasure Island was lost to Stevenson once his original map went missing, how the story with the new map was always a little bit of an imposter. In the way that we start our stories with laying out their boundaries, how no one else's version is ever quite our own because their outlines are always different.

Recently a documentary told me that although it takes eight minutes for a photon to reach Earth from the sun, more importantly it can take thousands of years for that photon to travel from the core to a place where it can even leave to head in our direction. That little bit of light spends most of its journey getting knocked around by other particles, wandering and wandering through all of that fire until it finally gets propelled out into the dark and cool of space. I was dozing on and off through the documentary, but I wondered about all of those tiny pieces of light and the maps that they carried with them to the center of the sun, a center that almost certainly would look nothing like their maps once they made it here to show us the path. And if in that way our sun could ever really be their sun.

We went to Victoria this weekend, another beautiful place in the string of beautiful places the Northwest is laden with, all sunshine and flowers and seafood. It never stops being remarkable to me that this is where I've ended up, that these are the places I get to go.

Victoria is completely charming in a way that may mostly be true in the warmth and the sunshine, but was the best of all possible places to spend some time sitting in places eating and drinking things, all warm and happy. This is what the summer is for.

I was reading the other day about Honore Fragonard, the cousin of the Rococo painter. The more interesting of the Fragonards, Honore was expelled from his job at Paris' veterinary school after a few years for being a madman. He had a fondness for flaying specimens, preserving all of their insides, and setting them up in theatrical ways. Eventually he supported himself by making grotesqueries for the aristocracy, dissecting and reassembling creatures at home in the usual way of madmen. (What is actually remarkable is that, given my fondness for Frederik Ruysch and his similarly creepy morality tableaux, I am only now learning about the habits of the Fragonards.)

In any case I feel like the appeal should be obvious, the need to take things apart and put them back together again, to turn all of the mysteries inside out. But in that case it is perhaps not surprising that his cousin, who painted imaginary lives in vivid color, is the one we remember.

These early summer days write white, passing slowly and softly and sweetly, like my favorite lines in "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle": The bites are fewer now./Each one is savored lingeringly,/Swallowed reluctantly. Some days it worries me, how well things seem to be going, how happily I seem to be spending most of my days, as though the universe might notice and take it all away again. Some days I think that being superstitious is really just common sense.

In college someone gave my a copy of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, which I read dutifully even though I have only ever been a girl who wanted to read books instead of writing them. In it, she advises the reader not to save ideas for later stories. She says, "The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

I find this to be equally true about happiness.

Maybe this is just how summer goes, all new each time, but I have so many adventures planned, weekend trips and parties, dinners to cook and ice cream to make, dance parties to have. My instinct is to keep this all cupped safe in my palms, to store it up like a squirrel in the fall, but that would be a waste of all of this. I'm not sure yet how best to find the words for all of these sunbursts, but then I guess that's just one more thing to look forward to.