Engage
November 11th, 2025
Sometimes I forget where I am, one day I am in my apartment, minding my own business, tidying things up with a spray bottle cleanser and microtowel or scrubbing my toilet spotless with brush—the next moment I am on an ocean shore in Redwood National Park, where the foamy waves washed my bony ankles and the golden sun colored tidal waves; reflecting and ebbing and flowing. Then I am back again, wondering if ever how long it takes to remember the things I have done, to shave a narrative, and to keep on doing it over and over it again.
The Ferry Building clock tolls at nine, and sirens blare outside. San Francisco is loud, and I can't seem to find that feeling. Do you know it, that feeling of nostalgia in a quiet morning? Sometimes I forget it takes time to remember, my nervous system can't find its bearings to find a moment of calm to travel to the past, and it seems as if it were a foolish thing to fall backwards in time, that a waste of a day to just think about the things I've done and been through, but perhaps the meaning in our lived lives can only be found by moving backwards in time in reflection, rather forwards in time anticipating a future reflection.
I'm on a mountain, off the side of Mt. Reiner. A friend trudges from behind in clumsy snowshoes, fear and adrenaline as we ascend the slope. Dewy snow covers the tree and mountain-tops, and the tips of trees poke out from beneath the ground. That night, we sat in a hot tub, and relaxed beneath the stars, though my agitation was acting up again, and I couldn't find it in my bearings to relax in the company of others.
That night in the cabin I slept alone, but I opened my window to peer to the darkness. Stars shown into my tiny cabin, and while my mind tends to escape to abstraction, asking inane questions about meaning and force and life, that night I was able to watch the darkness dance under the moonlight without the language of man obfuscating the awe of it all.
In nature's grandeur, I cannot imagine the corrosive etchings Mishima gestured towards having any at all effect—the moments of reflective confusion Proust wakes up in the mornings to are far more telling of life than any misused language. They allow to peer into the world of others, like how I am able to peer in how humans feel safe in the company of others, but in doing so alienates me from any common use of the language, and I find myself; it's lonely of course, and I cannot see the light of it—similar to how when one wakes up before the sun rises, when the light barely touches the clouds of the sky, so you can only see banal silhouettes describing the scenery, and there's nobody else awake at that moment so the clouds draw out and shift a ghastly, dewy presence that oscilate and wave towards something out there—it's like that, but then the sun never rises to show me the picture—I don't understand good company.
Why if ever aren't seas named gold? Every morning I wake up from a bad night's rest, gold colors the sea, and perhaps that's the color oceans ought to be remembered for, because it's far more beautiful than any blue-green ocean I've ever seen. The transience, the pinkish hues speckled like rare oil paint, the resonance of the waves trickling and tidding over and over again, washing in and out against the embarkment—the backdrop of the Bay Bridge giving the water foreground, but never fully taking away from nature's smile—I cannot for the life of me understand why humans are so certain of facts when prettier ones do better description.
I'm in a hissy rain, trembling from the sky come dew drops of silky mist. Carl, the moniker for San Francisco's beloved and famous fog, rolls in from the west and sweeps to the east down Market. I'm biking in the mist, with my old near raggedy bomber jacket. The sky is a rare overcast, and the bay waters are grey and rumbling. The oceans ebb and flow and ebb and flow and ebb and flow. My eyes are getting older.
I'm back in my apartment. I always thought longer, flowing, and grandesque prose was more fun to flow, so I've tried it out today. But as post-modern people a disdain for a lack of self-awareness or post-modern irony triggers a knee-jerk reaction to put the work down, for whatever reason, as if intelligent people couldn't find themselves lost in the sauce, and we couldn't respect a human being that simply wants to live in the feeling of a moment. Because, after all, that's what our lives are made of—little moments that are easily forgotten unless we invest the careful consideration of remembering them.