There's a Dutch (and German, and French, maybe) proverb that's supposed to be about weather, but could be about anything : "April does what it wants," this April has flown, doing everything, baking the pavement here or raining and coating the sidewalks with the slick magenta of fallen camellia blooms; snowing in Western New York; whatever. And in non-weather, taking me on an emotional roller coaster of much music and socializing up the wazoo and work marathon sleeplessness and unprecedented traumas and the deepening calm of love by the ocean and old fears assuaged and new ones rising and important time with important people.

In brief:

I roamed to Ballard to see my cousin play the keys, the guitar, the trumpet, to sing, on a stage in a tavern with soaring rafters with a sweet voiced sassy songstress banjo virtuoso who he has played with for years and whom I have never met. It was a pleasure.

I roamed to Belltown to see the sweet-voiced golden Santa Barbara boys with the flute quiver and the synths who I have followed from venue to venue as their audience has grown in this city over the year and a half I have lived here; dancing. I was anxious and wearing a beautiful dress, between events, coming from a play by a new friend that had hit me in some critical heart and brain spots. I was not in any state to drink and I was distracted. I did not like the crowd and this made me more anxious. I smoked one cigarette. Men talked to me in a way I objected to but could not define. I went to get a taco and supposedly come back but as I was walking back two men said "hey ho, can we talk to you, ho? can we talk to you, ho?" This could have made me feel a lot of things about myself but what it made me feel was wondering and sadness for them, poor men of color on drugs asking me this and immediately leaving me alone when I ignored them. I did not feel in danger and I kept walking and I felt angry and sad for the young women I work with who are young, not just young-looking, and would not have kept walking. And I could not stay to schmooze with my friends or to listen to the music anymore, so I sent texts saying "I'm restless! Bye!" and then for some reason I felt inclined to take a cab. I went to sit at a table with my boyfriend and a variety of theater people who were winding down their night and felt silent but in the way where you are learning a lot not in the way where you are being judged. Although they're actors so maybe they were judging me who knows.

 I worked four overnights in a row to help out a coworker who really needed it, in part because he really needed it and in part because I haven't done any self-flagellating in a while. It was alright, but a mistake. I can't take that kind of sleep deficit unless I'm running on unhappiness and adrenaline. Perhaps divinely, on the third night I was whacked in the head with a pool cue by an errant young person pretending to be a samurai and not watching his surroundings, which led all the young people to behave nicely and not fight with each other or me for the next night and a half.


Zoe moved away, and we had several (bitter)sweet goodbye events, including a decadent brunch at a dreamy cajun restaurant in Queen Anne that I will visit again and again. It is bizarre and dreamlike to have my original anchor in this city gone. I am excited to go see her in her new warmer-place home where she is starting all over and shedding past skins.


I held a convulsing young man in my arms in the middle of the night, essentially praying over him while heroin coursed through his body and we waited for the paramedics to come. It is a mindfuck to hold a dying person so close and also to hold a dying person so close when you are emotionally close to them in this way, where they bare parts of themselves to you and you bare nothing. When the paramedics came they dosed him with naloxone, an opioide antagonist, and he came back to normal but haggard life, and the police went with him to the hospital where they would decide whether or not to put him in jail. His entire heroin rig was in the bathroom that he had collapsed outside of and I cleaned this up and threw it away in the dumpster in the pouring rain before any other young people could see. And after, I could not sleep without dreaming of his shaking body for three days.


The morning after this happened I disappeared to a Sound-side paradise with Tim, where we stayed in a tiny house so near to the water that when the tide was high it lapped up under the raised deck and looking out the French doors felt like being on a boat.  We mostly ate crap, ranch dip and peanut butter and jelly toast and ranch dip, but we also ate crab one night. We had sunny and pouring rainy days. We laid around in bed and wandered around antique malls, where we found literary treasures that we had been seeking and thought we might never find. I recovered, slowly. How could I not.


On the heels of this, Maura arrived, and spent many days, and her visit too was a delicate balance of leisure and adventure. We talked and talked and talked. We sat in quiet and wrote. We slept and ate. We drank and laughed. We walked and walked. We sat and among beautiful old trees so grand that they made my whole body come alive. We found this jade tree, 96 years old.

We drank coffee. We went to a Gallery and saw Art. We had a delightful Mexican food experience. As always when I see her I felt my soul had been bathed.


And now...April is almost over. My May calendar is already starting to be booked with events and I wonder what it will bring, really, in the practical sense. I feel happy and also complacent, which worries me. I am hoping that I am beginning to find the balance between rest and activity.