You Can't

Thank goddexx for my dear Seema Reza’s org Mission Belonging and her writing workshop on Fridays where nearly every time I go, I find some words that have been hard to find.

+++

You can’t get a $12 iced matcha with two shots of espresso, oat milk, and sesame cold foam in the ancient orchard and you can’t walk fast on concrete, heat rising between skyscrapers, from one park date to a dinner date and you can’t walk into a store and try on $495 high waisted carpenter pants which of course you put back on the rack after slipping legs in, one and two and you can’t sit in your dear one Liz’s apartment admiring her happy plants and her perfect collection of skincare.

You can’t wait in a line for the botanical garden to listen to a musician you love, at dusk, the solstice heat giving way to a cooler evening and you can’t call for a Lyft to ferry you quickly from one neighborhood to another while the driver tells you about how the night the Knicks won, a man in Times Square was doing pushups in the middle of the street until he got up and started pounding on his front hood and the driver got scared and you can’t see the stars because the streetlights never get turned off and you can’t sit on a blanket in a park, your knee touching your friend Gala’s and you can’t get the most perfect gluten free cinnamon roll to eat on a bench on a New York City side street.

You can’t talk to an old boyfriend from twenty years ago without saying “I’m sorry, there was so much I didn’t know about myself then”. You can’t stay in your ex-girlfriend from thirteen years ago’s apartment without getting into a fight. You can’t talk to another ex without them reminding you of how you have grown, both tired and tender, lines forming around your eyes from both smile and violence repeating.

You can’t cut roses from around the private chapel you now own, live with, to place in a dozen tiny vases and you can’t wait for your girlfriend to sharpen the teeth of the chainsaw to prune the apple trees in January and you can’t drive ten minutes to an even taller mountain where you can hike until your feet go numb and your heart races and you can’t meditate outside at 7am and only hear birds talking to each other.

You can’t press arnica seedlings into raised beds and you can’t drive to the winery down the street in your car to listen to your girlfriend sing about high desert secrets and you can’t walk back through the apple trees to the river and dunk and you can’t cut back the oat straw to dry for your herbal teas and you can’t buy peaches grown by your neighbor, an orchard tender in a long family line of orchard tenders, freshly plucked from branches, juice dripping down chin and hands.

You can’t have this and you can’t have that all at the same time. You have this and then you have that and then you have this and then you have that, again, and then you have this and then you wish for that and then you weep remembering this and then you get scared remembering that and then

You can’t remember your new life without forgetting the old and you can’t remember your old life without forgetting the new. The city streets will never intersect with the apple trees you now tend, the land you water with a flood rushing through underground pipes that first came down from the mountain into the Rio Grande into the orchard.

You can’t cosplay your old life* without remembering the new. You have to catch a flight, move through clouds between them, to get anywhere, to remember or feel anything.

*Thanks to a client in a recent breathwork session for that line, wow yes.