I dreamed of daffodils, lifting their buttery throats and shouting at the sky, yelling in daffodil so that no one nearby understood their words but only felt their meaning. Screaming in such a way that even the stars drew closer, furrowed their brows, and tilted their heads.

But imagine that we are somewhere else, in a grove of trees stinking of overripe fruit cracked and dripping from their fissures, the heat hanging heavy on your collarbones and a feeling you've never before met curled in the hollow of your throat. In the space behind you the sound of cicadas is rising and the length of your bones is sore and tired, but you are distracted because the stars have come too close and I have run away, reckless, again.

It is all of this that has drawn a shining web around you, that has brought the heavens in for a closer look, that has brought all of the points that Nostradamus secretly predicted would end the world together in one very small, very warm place. And it is only after the world has ended that we might think to gather all of those shouting daffodils in our arms and listen for the messages hidden when they pause to draw breath.

It's my grandfather's books that make him feel farthest gone, sitting here on my ordered bookshelves rather than stuck all higgledy-piggledy on his shelves without any organization to speak of. When I was in Florida in January I combed those shelves, picking out the volumes I wanted to keep. People's bookshelves always speak loudly about who they are, and I think I learned more about my grandfather in that afternoon than I did in all the years before it.

Today those books came, and I love the most worn of them, the 1908 O'Henry with the cover falling off, the copy of "Kidnapped" with the spine snapped nearly in two. A Hardy Boys story that I remember stealing to read as a little girl, huddled in the corner of the couch and completely oblivious to everything around me. My great grandfather's copy of "Treasure Island," clearly carried in the pockets of active young boys and often read, all of the text worn off of the outside. Books that were loved, that were a part of my family, that have smudged with ink the sides of hands shot through with blood carrying the same messages as my own.

I love weddings, even weddings at which I have to do the "single girl of a certain age sitting alone at a table during a slow dance" scene found in the dopiest of romantic comedies. (No, seriously. When they took the photos of the people at our table, mine ended up being with my stepmother's old family dentist. I can only imagine that I look wildly alarmed in it. Dentists are scary.) No one fell into the cake or pushed the prom queen into the pool, and everyone that was supposed to got good and married, and I am glad I made the trip to watch my favorite step-family-member get hitched.

It was a little strange to be at a wedding during a weekend filled mostly with endings and last things and goodbyes, filled with the certain knowledge that many of the things that have always been are almost not going to be anymore. I've never been very good at endings or uncertain goodbyes, at looking at what's left of my grandparents, at visiting favorite places for the last time.

If I were religious, I would be giving up melancholy for Lent. Melancholy, and boys who never call back.

At my grandmother's house for probably the last time, my mom and I were starting to get my grandparents' condo ready to sell. I was moving around furniture, cleaning surfaces, trying to make the place look nothing like how it has looked my whole life. On an end table sat what looked like a vase. It was only when I went to shift it that I realized that it was actually my grandfather.

Later, feet sinking in the mud of the bay, I said goodbye to the mangroves and tried to avoid stepping on the spiny shells of dead horseshoe crabs.

Flying back to the East coast is always an exercise in mortification of the spirit, given that a red-eye flight back means that I spend an entire night not-sleeping on airplanes, and the early morning flight means that I spend a night not-sleeping on the way to the airport, in the airport, and on airplanes. Three hours worth of time difference doesn't feel like much until it makes you stay awake forever and ever.

And it's funny because the things I have always known seem more and more foreign as more years go around them--my family, all of the mole hills, Spanish moss patchily bearding the trees. Tonight at a bar I went into the bathroom at a bar and came back out with a Southern accent, which is never far from the surface. All of the streets are familiar but what once sat on them is mostly closed. Thomas Wolfe crouches in my skull even though the word 'home' has always fit like someone else's dress.

Still, there is always something about ghosting through the streets of my city in a leaving sort of way when the sidewalks are empty and nearly everyone asleep. Which is my old friend Thomas Wolfe at work again, maybe: "...we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement."

In any case, coming or going, leaving always has been my best side.

I am thinking in unchopping ways right now, feeling the urge to fill back in those notches I made on your side with my axe, patching you up with butter and pomegranate seeds and rainbow trout and stuttery apologies. Everything I scraped off and filed away suddenly feels not so easily disposed of. As though by chopping I made all of those little pieces that much more meaningful. The parts separated from the whole, and therefore better.

It's not that I feel bad for all my chopping, because I don't. I landed that axe precisely where I aimed. It's only that everything else has become...hazy. Something in the grainy rub of my eyelids after too many late nights killing too many bottles with too many strangers. Start to feel a little discorporeal, dissolve in the tips of fingers and backs of knees.

But I remember a feeling like a time capsule buried and forgotten, other moments layered over the satisfying thump of the parcel at the bottom of the hole. And I have been thinking that once you lose a time capsule the best person to find it would be a farmer tearing down the house nearby and clearing all of the stumps for growing other things. I think that a farmer, finding an old time capsule nestled at the bottom of what used to be a tree, would look gently through the contents and then place it back under the ground, let it sit below new roots that would soon be growing.

I'm going back to Florida in a couple of days, which always make me nervous, and never more so than now when people are falling apart and everything is changing. So I have been overscheduling myself to an alarming degree, with shows and parties and photo shoots and dinners and book club and drinking. If I don't keep busy, I get trapped in my head, and then I forget to breathe and start getting dizzy.

All this keeping busy seems to be giving me a cold.

For Valentine's Day my best gay made a stupendous dinner of favorite things, and then we went to the bar to birthday party with the rest of my gays. Those boys all make the best dates, and I came home after last call and delicious late night duck tacos mostly sober. It was the best of all possible Valentine's Days.

My big change is...a new email address! Well, that wasn't supposed to be the big change, but it's certainly stressing me out today a lot more than the other thing, which I will get to in a minute. Last night I came home from celebrating the 15th birthday of my favorite bar to find that my email simply wasn't working. Which happens sometimes, so I went to bed, but it still wasn't working this morning. Seems that some time in the middle of the night, the place that used to have all of my things up and quit, and the people behind it say there's no getting in to retrieve anything or notify everyone or whatever. So now I have moved to gmail (which I hate hate hate), and as far as the internet is concerned I am someone new entirely. It's like someone came in and went spring cleaning and threw out my favorite clothes--all of your nice emails are gone, or in any case hiding somewhere in the depths of my computer.

The real news is that I have decided to apply to grad school for a program made for people working full time in my industry. I actually moved out here years ago with the intention of going to grad school for something different and didn't get in, and though I stuck around town anyway it's made me super gun shy as far as all of that goes. I never have been good with rejection.

I've been talking about going back to school on and off for years, but always for things I found interesting rather than useful. But I figure that if this thing I'm doing now is what I'm going to do then I might as well commit to it. Not going to save the world by waiting, especially not now that the economy is just as bad for those of us who are trying to save the world as it is for those that keep breaking it.

But this is a pretty big decision for me, because even just going back part time (provided I even get accepted) is a big commitment of time and dollars. Last night I sat in on a class to see what the program is like, and it seems like a pretty good way to move forward, which is a lot more appealing than sitting stagnant. This decision settles a bit of my restlessness, even though it is big and scary. We'll see how it all turns out.

My telephone seems to have reinvented itself as the Bad News Line, and if I thought that hiding it would do any good I would shove it in a drawer and leave it there until it had time to rethink what it's doing. Sometimes people are just calling to say hello, but more and more often in the last few months they're calling with bad news and no good news to balance it out.

So today I started demanding good news from almost everyone I saw. (Some people are good news just by being seen.) No one really has any good news, not that they can come up with on demand, or any good jokes, but I can't shove everyone in a drawer until they rethink their lack of good news because I simply don't have the drawer space.

The sky is the only thing that is coming through for me, these days, and this morning I walked out into my living room to find the trees covered in snow, as though the clouds had thrown the contents of their pockets in the air in an effort to distract me from being such a stressball. It had rained on top of the snow, and my boots crunched solidly across the ice all the way up the hill to work.

Tomorrow night, I will officially make a big decision to make a big commitment, or to not. A lot of things might be about to change.

Crunching late through frost-ripened grass, I want to yell things, but there are no echoes worth talking to in these parts, nothing to yell at that yells back.

It is almost as though, having once slid a hand down the length of my bones, you have managed to convince yourself fully knowledgeable about the topography of my joints. An expert on the way everything under my skin slips against everything else, on how this gristle propels these bird bones through space. Even though all of those particular connections are a mystery even to me.

Like a mime caught in a heat wave, his smile slipping down his face and staining his turtleneck, I am suddenly not so good at keeping all of my imaginary balls in the air. So I'm quitting juggling, and taking up hunting for echo. There has to be a useful canyon around here somewhere.

I have been thinking lately about a color blind synesthete, about how his brain would be able to see colors but his eyes couldn't, and so whenever he would look at certain numbers it would be his brain that showed him colors that simply didn't exist anywhere else for him. Leaves wouldn't be green, but perhaps fours would. I think that those secret colors would be addictive, that he would slowly become more and more obsessed with seeking out those numbers, hungry for the possibility of brilliance living only inside his mind, of sudden vivid shapes bursting out from somewhere behind his eyes.

Until one day those numbers would be his whole world, roaming the planet hungry for the blues and greens and yellows and reds that his eyes just couldn't give, unshaven and eyes sore and hands trembling in exhaustion and ecstasy. Speaking only to people whose phone numbers were made out of the numbers that gave him his colors, living only in towns with zip codes made out of the right combinations.

And eventually, perhaps, more enchanted with the brilliant shades handed out by his neurons, putting out his own eyes in order to remove other distractions. Sure that the memories of his secret colors would be more fulfilling than all the dull new things he could ever see.

Dear everyone,

January? January was mostly stupidly boring. Ultimately that's probably for the best, since January excitement is pretty much never the good kind for me, but I'm still bored. And being bored tends to make me reckless.

I made a last minute decision to go to Florida for a whirlwind trip, which involved a lot of feelings and a bunch of suspicious bruises, but that doesn't count. I did storm out of a bar for the first time in my life, and would have tossed my drink for good measure if I hadn't already finished it. But really, I spent most of January trying to be very, very good, and that is, clearly, boring. Not once did I participate in a dance party or come home at dawn or high five a stranger or have anything that could be called hijinks, and that's just a waste of a month.

Mostly, I blame this on New Years resolutions, and the fact that no one else's resolutions ever seem to be in line with mine. I always want more out of my January, more adventures and people and laughing, but there seems to be a lot of less for everyone else--less being out, less food, less excitement. But for me, at least, all of this less also makes for less inspiration, which probably bores you just as much as it does me.

In any case, all of this good behavior makes me really cranky, and I fully intend to do something stupid in the next couple of weeks to make up for it.

love,
me

I have a very severe fear of my apartment burning down. As a kid I used to wake up in the middle of the night, convinced that I heard arsonists creeping around outside our trailer. This is largely because of the day the man across the street died in a fire, but that happened all the time in our trailer park, people's homes being burned down. I remember once a place burned when the family was out and a girl was babysitting the only child; she panicked and ran out, and the baby, family cat, and bird all died. They hauled the remains of the trailer to an open space by our bus stop until it could be dealt with, and the boys all said that if you peeked in the windows you could make out their sad charred remains. I was never brave enough to look.

As a result I often catch myself listing in my head the things that I would grab if I were here and there was a fire, mapping out where they are located and what would be the best route to get to them. My box of family photos, and my great grandfather's books. The quilt I've slept with all my life. Grandad's maps, his painting, and the ring he had made for me. The ship in a bottle, if there's time. A few other things. It turns out that I have a whole plan for piling everything into my quilt like a very large hobo bindle and escaping with it, although I don't recall ever deciding to make such a plan.

But the other day we had an earthquake, and though I slept through it, it made me realize that I don't have an earthquake plan. I think I have a lot of research to do.

In Italy I spent a considerable amount of time inserting myself into the background of people's pictures. No to make faces, or stand in funny ways, or to in any way ruin their atmosphere, but just to stand there, maybe only in parts. I was trying to make myself transparent on that trip but in the process feeling invisible--all of the people I met on the way had a camera stuffed full of pictures of themselves in front of the Colosseum or outside the Doge's Palace, but as I was traveling alone I was never a part of my own hard copy memories. There was no proof that I had been anywhere except what was in my own head, and I became a little preoccupied by making sure that I showed up somewhere. To confirm that I had really been somewhere; that I wasn't only a ghost.

Even now when I feel myself disappearing, I think of the small girl with the pink umbrella idling by a bridge sitting on someone else's computer, in someone else's memory, and feel myself just a little more solid.

I left Seattle late, tired from alcohol and conversation, and slept through most of my first flight, waking only when the pilot announced our descent. The houses on the ground were dark, penned in by streetlamps, except for one spot that doubled the light of everything around it. It was only when we swung down closer that I realized the bright house was one on fire.

My grandmother's voice has gone soft and thin, and we all had to gather close to hear her, except for the moment when a nurse that she wanted me to meet walked past the door. Suddenly, my grandma found a voice that echoed down the hallway.

Late at night in a smoky bar a man feeds money into the jukebox and then turns to our table, gesturing with one hand at the six song credits on the screen. Watched over by a bar dog named Nikki Sixx, I picked our favorite songs from the nights we spent at the pool hall in high school.

And then home, watching the sun sneak through the clouds and gild swathes of the Gulf as far as I could see, huge sparkling sheets of water.

There's never really time to adjust to the time zone on these trips, and too many people to see, so I always seem to go to sleep on Seattle time but wake up on Florida time, and this means that there have been approximately three hours of sleeping done by me in the last few days. I am coming home from this trip with a cameo of my grandmother's, my grandad's old fishing maps, and my great-grandfather's copy of Treasure Island. My grandad's leather sap will either follow in the mail along with his James Bond books or come back with me in a larger suitcase when I'm back in a couple of weeks. None of my airplanes so far have encountered any flocks of geese.

Right now I am in the airport, waiting to go home, having looked at my grandma and spent some extra quality time with my old friends. I let myself get suckered into an upgrade to first class on this first flight, which will be on a Volkswagen beetle with wings and therefore probably not particularly luxurious for my first visit with the privileged class, but perhaps an adventure nonetheless. Tonight I will sleep for hours and hours and then tomorrow after brunch I will make six quarts of soup. I am equally excited about all of this.

And now here we are in this new old world with a job of work to be done and certain sure we'll screw some of it up somehow. We always do. Still, I get a little damp in the eyes every time I even think the words President Obama. I have always been a hope junkie, and I'm so glad people are finally there with me. The air is thinner out here, but it tastes better.

Tonight I'm off on an excruciating red-eye flight back to Tampa Bay, to look at my grandmother for a few hours and then come right back on Saturday. With luck, the refrigerator fairy will visit my apartment while I am gone and deliver a new, non-frozen refrigerator. With more luck, my airplane won't encounter any geese, and with even more luck I'll manage to schedule in a little extra quality time with a couple of people who have known me since I carried a pager because it was cool. I'm not usually very lucky, but this seems like a pretty good time to start.

Eight years ago I was just barely into my second semester of college, an unhealthy 20 pounds lighter and with very long wavy brown hair. Within a few weeks I would be breaking up with my first boyfriend and, immediately after, having a bout of pneumonia and bronchitis that would leave me hallucinating feverishly for most of a week, even today the sickest I can remember ever being. We had all recovered from the crippling feeling of defeat in our first election, the shock of all of the election-related Florida shenanigans, and I'm frankly unsure that I knew anyone at all who even realized that the inauguration was happening. That world was too big for us, and uninterested.

All these years and 3,000 miles later, it's hard to imagine being able to talk about a president without disdain, but with luck that might be about to change. I was in Italy during their elections, when Berlusconi was coming back in, and all of their political hopelessness was tinged with frustration at American politics. Money and power and deeply rooted corruption were leading their elections, and not a single person I spoke with felt like they could ever changed the outcome, voting or not. Almost all of them talked of leaving Italy, talked leaded with bone-deep sadness because they loved their country in a way that we usually don't. They all wanted to know how we had ended up with such a president when here, voting can change things. They all wanted to know how we had made the same mistake twice, and why we were wasting our rights.

Everything isn't going to change immediately, and maybe not ever, but the next 100 days will start to show us whether or not this world is too big, and still uninterested. In any case, I don't think a single person that I knew eight years ago is unaware that this inauguration is happening tomorrow.

Seattle right now is covered in fog, fog that thickens and disperses and then gathers itself again, and has been for days. Late at night it muffles everything beyond a few steps, muting the sulphur glow of the streetlights over my head. Anything can happen in these fogs, hidden from sight after only a few steps. Anything frequently does happen. Last night I took a small walk through this fog, thinking about what it must have been like to have grown up on the sort of farms that supplied to perfumeries in France a hundred years ago, harvesting jasmine and lavendar instead of corn, arms coated in fragrance and sticky with pollen. About whether in the harvest season your dreams would be scented lightly with the flowers you gathered by the armful during the day. About whether the flowers ever stopped being beautiful and started to be only work.

This fog is the sort that steals the thoughts right out from your own brain, and it was with surprise that I suddenly found my head surrounded by a cloud of jasmine, at night in the wintry north, where no jasmine should be. I briefly considered that perhaps someone wearing jasmine perfume had walked down the street shortly before me, leaving their scent to linger in the fog. But this isn't a fog for simple explanations, and besides, perfumes and flowers weigh differently on the brain. This was not that.

I had stopped walking and stood there for a moment, breathing in the ghost of a smell that I associate with hot summer nights, puzzled. I have been exhausted lately, thinking slowly, and it took me a minute to realize, oh, it's the fog. It steals thoughts.

Emily Dickinson said, "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else." I turned the corner and walked back around the block and home, vaguely happy that I had been thinking of flowers and not knives.

I spoke to my grandmother today, which was hard after yesterday's news. And all the more difficult for being hard, I think--we speak every couple of weeks, always with the same easy understanding that we will have the same conversation next time, that I will always order her gently to feel better soon and that she will always fret about the phone call costing me money or distracting me from work. We both know that these chats aren't exchanging new information, since my mother passes on all of the news in both directions much more frequently than our phone calls happen, but this has been our habit since I left Clearwater in 2000 and was no longer five minutes away.

When I sift back through my memories I find it hard to conjure up any of my grandmother being anything but positive. She never pretended that situations were any less serious than they were, but she's a woman who believes in dealing with what is in front of you as well as you can, and it never seemed to ruffle her if we were fleeing to her house in the middle of the night any more than if we were just stopping by to say hello. She's the only family member I have who recognized my tendency to blame myself for things out of my control, to worry tirelessly, and somehow she could always tell when my brain would start tightening. And then it was always a firm look and a, "Now, Sammy, that's not for you to worry about. You just keep your mind on school." She was like gravity, keeping me tethered whether I stopped to think about it or not.

So today's conversation was hard in unfamiliar ways, her voice thin and reedy and her speech slightly slurred. I am by nature a researcher, not willing to deal with what's in front of me before I can gather every single possible fact about it and read thirty second opinions, but of course the very nature of mortality thinks my need for control is pretty funny. She was having a better day, her mind clearer, full of vim and annoyed at the rehab hospital for keeping her hostage. And I was full of terror that this might be our last conversation, and of false cheer while demanding that she be recovered by the time I am in town next month.

But this is how family works, when it actually does work, right? You are the wall when it is your turn to be the wall, no matter if you actually feel less solid than air. I doubt that my grandmother was always as complacent as she seemed but she played the part well because it was what needed to be done. And now it is my turn, no matter how much I would like to avoid calling, to avoid hearing her vanish. It is my turn to pay her the same courtesies of concern, to be as solid as I can, to hold things up for my mother while things get harder and harder for her. It's the only way to be worthy of all the support I have always been given.

It's not going to be easy, but then, nothing ever is.