Aquarium Friday and Other Stories

"you did good, kid"

oh look another stupid poem

---------------------------------------------

I like to press my forehead against the glass until it leaves a mark.

I like to see the Oppenheimer Tower standing tall on the horizon like an ever present guardian.

I like watching the coloured lamp change from pink to green to blue to teal to purple to red in that one dorm room across the street, a few floors down. I like to see

the planes hover over LAX like excited bees doing the waltz in the night sky. I like

– sometimes –

hearing the screams echoing up from the street at 2 AM, to be reminded of people feeling alive. Remember Halloween? Remember the wails of the ambulances that didn’t stop till the sun rose? Remember how eager people are to hurt themselves, to stuff themselves up so full that they overflow and lose themselves in the drains of Gayley Avenue.

Remember your feelings. All of them. Even

waiting in front of Powell for ninety useless minutes; at least you got to sketch Royce Hall. Remember that time you walked to town and looked up at the sky

edging the tops of the buildings and felt the November chill creeping up

inside your sleeves and in your throat and felt like your footsteps would echo in the crust of the earth and yet

everything looked the same.

Remember the feeling of staring at someone talk and feeling like everything is falling into place and falling apart in the same chaotic breath of time. Remember that you are

– I am –

a blank canvas still only etched with erasable pencil marks, but aware of the blankness as infinite as the horizon you see curving around the beaches of Santa Monica.

Remember to paint even if nothing that comes out makes sense.

Remember to hold on to that urge to paint, to dip your hands so deep into the color that it drips down to your elbows and gets into your shirt, because you are messy.

Remember that you are not clean cut, not defined by those lines they set out to trip you over,

that you are not a sum, a number, a product, but a whole. Remember to notice the world echoing it back to you,

when you hear the whisper in your ear saying you are here and nowhere else, you are whole and now and you.

Remember that it’s okay to get blinded by the sunlight.

Remember that it’s okay

to sit on your bed at 9 AM on a Thursday staring at the same patch of carpet for fifteen minutes. Remember that that patch of carpet could be the center of the universe.

Remember when you saw the secret of life in Poussin’s Spring. Remember to connect the dots, because you’re never too old for children’s games.

Remember to look back sometimes and tell that child,

“You did good, kid. You did good.”