Bildungsroman at Sutro Baths. (7.7.16)

It is funny when I come back to this place.

familiar eucalyptus trees that were the veins of my 7 year old limbs and ladybug rainboots

and a memory of beagle-lab panting and jumping through dunes of sand and iceplants in the San Francisco fog

a place that once ignited childhood

the same place that occupied a young arts community that refused to comprehend the enigma of a scatterbrained young female jazz based musician,

alienated as an artistic voice that doesn't sound

like cracked bongs and cyber high diplomas feel.

My eyes have glazed over

the aspiring soundcloud rap artists with no black origins

the girls with nipple piercings who put on a front for a living

the people who shunned me because mokes were more important

putting on an all too enthusiastic beg for conformation

and from what?

For who?

The only time I really wanted an acute accelerated heart beat

or tingling in my fingers and toes

was from anticipating performance.

I had done enough with self induced propriety

before I even lifted my lips to the spliff where the tobacco had rushed through my head

and sent me spiraling to the porcelain toilet

the exact moment when I knew displacement was something I couldn't pretend didn't exist anymore.

And I sit in the sand

late at night

searching for the stars for once instead of public approval because exhaust had overcome it

like I was the only friend I had ever really known

straddled somewhere between adulthood and juvenility,

longing for the simplicity of childhood 

longing for a recovery

the answers

that deep down I knew 

could not be recovered here.

and the cement battery walls get overwritten by graffiti

and the iceplants bear the suffering of glass bottles left to wreak havoc on the ground

they throw up on the sand that I used to stick my tiny hands in and get stuck underneath my fingernails and in the crevices of my boots

I can't read my old dog's pawprints up and down the hills anymore

The sand yields more discomfort than warmth, and the fog becomes no more than a nuisance

The stairs to the beach collapse in the storms

I don't remember the ocean like I used to

my dad surfs less and less these days

it is far easier to be in denial

than to let go.

It seems as if childhood was almost a life I did not know

for it had juxtaposed everything I felt 

It would become displaced in the New York snow

where the girl started to shed self destruction

and the ladybug boots found their wings

and they left the ocean in the morning

with the trace of a night they will never fully remember.

I suppose I had realized the importance of moving on

in a seemingly isolated place

knowing

comfort must coexist

somewhere.