November 24th 2024

I’m leaving Boston in twenty something days. I’m moving to Los Angeles. I’m a child lost to impulse, to a drug-induced vision of colors flashing by at warp speed, disparate frames woven into a pattern, into a story, into a mythos. Film is religion and muses are effigies, and I’m falling under with flames licking my face.

I remember driving through the townhouses of Southie, red brick streets winding through Dunkins and graveyards and plaques. I remember the running line of cars behind Piano Row, two marbled clips in my hair, a top from Target cut at my navel. I fought with my mom about boxes and drawers. I forgave dad in the doorway. I had Maria’s for the first time, linoleum table by the window, safe like a friend I’d always known. I remember the first sleep, thinking, this must be the other side.

My room in Eastie is ten by ten feet with a divet in the back wall where my bedframe ends. I have a closet just deep enough for hangers if they stick out at an angle, pale yellow walls, command hooks for bags and scarves, an assembly of prints from the record store. Is this my last time as a child? I like claustrophobic spaces with the lights off, cradled between the walls like a good prison. My mother never held me. 

When I came to Boston I’d never had anything to believe in, just an empty sort of dream about leaving and starting again, just memories in the back of shoe cupboards and a ringing sound in my ears, a place to run from and nowhere really to go. When she told me she’d marry me, foundations of terror collapsed in an instant: I had a pair of arms that would rock me back and forth when I cried, I had nights of falling asleep without harrowing effort. Someplace to be. Green flash on the horizon. Possible dream. I still think if she saw me it might change her mind. I think that’s why she can’t do it. Is there a summit? Is there a light?