I spent a recent afternoon making balloon animals on the floor of my friend’s apartment. We followed a couple YouTube tutorials, pinching and twisting air-filled tubes until recognizable figures began to form. It shouldn’t work, it couldn’t, then suddenly it does. Instead of popping, the rubber suspends itself gracefully in an elongated dog shape, with short legs and bat ears. A specific sensation of delight rippled through the air as we beheld our creations. I drove home with unexpected wonder brimming in my eyes.
I’m now convinced whenever we do something new, a tiny place in the brain remembers what it feels like to be born. Maybe we’re always searching for hints of it. We can’t recall our initial gulps of breath, air plunging into the lungs. We can’t remember the comforting swaddle of a cotton blanket, replacing the familiar fluid embrace. How strange, that we forget first contact with our mother’s warm chest.
Trying a new experience creates the effect of breathlessness. Echoes of crossing the womb’s threshold. In a single aching second we are expected to inhale thin cold air. To shimmy closer to rebirth is intoxicating. How did we do it all those years ago?
We march on like being born is nothing.
All of us enter the world as soft creatures, malleable by nature. When we’re little, a fall is not too bad. It’s in the design, so we can tumble again and again. After a thousand missteps, we get one foot in front of the other.
Slowly we firm up. We learn to curve our sounds into words and our words into sentences. We may share the same spectrum of emotions, but language will have us thinking otherwise.
The world warps at our fingers, until we see ourselves as individuals instead of beings in a collective experience. We want our edges to be defined. All of this to distinguish where we begin and the rest of the world ends. Even when trends are chewed and swallowed in lieu of breakfast, we want to strike as unique, because personality is currency. If we don’t have ourselves, then we have nothing.
The value of standing out took time for me to learn. When I was younger, all I wanted was to escape into oblivion. Embarrassment overtook me whenever I spoke, so I tried to keep quiet. My plan worked. Little by little, I receded into the periphery of people’s minds. They forgot to ask my name. At recess, I’d walk to the edge of the field and stare at the paved sidewalk through the loops in the chain link, pretending to be on the other side.
Some days, I’m convinced LA’s main product is concrete. If you come here on the wrong day, you’ll find nothing but grey skies and grey asphalt. I feel bad for tourists who visit in the early summer. Our beaches are real beaches, not the high saturation glossy postcard variety. In a real beach city, you’re lucky to see the blue sky three times before August. In a real beach city, the misty ocean finds no edge against the foggy sky. It doesn’t care about individuality.
About five miles inland, the flat overcast burns off. When the heat kicks up, nothing can stop it. I feel bad for the tourists then, too. Some years, Thanksgiving is held defiantly in the face of Santa Ana winds. These hot ghostly gusts will make you jump. They tingle your skin until you forget the separation between your dense body and this lithe intangible force. Maybe it’s a slight foreshadowing: one day our carefully constructed individual will dissolve into oblivion.
But right now we don’t have to think about the Santa Anas. We’ve had a real winter, with weather that makes my family from out of town send texts. We have earned the right to a real spring. A perfect glowing prototype, with green piling on the fire scarred hills, dripping with poppies, echinacea and nasturtiums. Every dewey petal stands out, reminding us to do the same. Autopilot feels out of the question and you wonder how much you need to do to get what you want.
You wonder what you really want, anyway.
It’s funny how many iterations I’ve gone through on the quest for a life worth living. It’s never been linear. Sometimes it gets tiresome. But I tell myself it’s good to set my sights on the glimmer of fulfillment, rather than settling for less. Time and again I’ve been tempted with a half life. A promise of stability if I can just fork over the spark that makes me, me.
Somedays my spark is a wildfire with zero percent containment. Other days I’m shepherding a lick of flame through a hurricane.
What’s my trick? A lot of softness. A softness to cushion the unknown’s open mouth pressing on my leg. The ability to walk away with just a bruise. This softness can appear impassable—that’s a misperception I’m trying to undo. Lean a little closer: this towering structure is just an inflatable bounce house, fit for a kid’s party. Fling something at the circus-themed vinyl walls, the force of your throw will propel it straight back.
Every once in a while a bounce house takes flight. Winds scoop under its smooth surface at just the right angle. If not enough sandbags are employed during set up, the mammoth structure of whimsy finds its way toward airborne. Maybe you’ll see it, cresting over the tops of houses, zipping through high-rise inflected wind tunnels. Heading straight to the horizon. Finally, something unusual contrasted against our real beach’s perpetual grey.
I guess that’s the way I found my own shape. Untethered and suddenly aloft, aiming for the expanse.
That’s all for today.
xx
James
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There's so much great writing here I hardly know where to begin. "In a single second we are expected to inhale thin cold air. ..../We march on like being born is nothing." Truly, we are blind to the extraordinary nature of the human enterprise.