I have come to love these things, to smile at the early morning kiss of the cold and the operatic bellowing of the boy three doors down. I notice them more than the big things now, and it is as if I have moved to a new city, to a small simple universe of unconventional beauties that I alone notice before they slip through the cracks.
In this universe a fraction of the beauty is in the ocean’s sunset, and the rest is in the man who feeds the seagulls as his girlfriend sleeps. He kisses her sandy hairline and positions Doritos in a circle around him. He watches the seagulls inch closer with a smile that never quite breaks the surface. My smile is as strong as the crashing waves when his slight movement sends hundreds of startled beggars into flight. I am suddenly immersed in the black and white TV static blur. The shadow of wings is painted on my creamy skin.
In this universe the best people-watching is not always of people. I watch the wrinkles of a pug on the bus form into pointed emotions. His owner is San Francisco born and raised: a man bun, tattoos growing up his arm like vines, a battered baseball cap, designer sporty sandals. His dog side-glances him, but he only stares out the window, his head bobbing up and down with the bumps of the road as if he was moving to the rhythm of music. The dog’s eyebrows raise and drop with every opening and closing of the doors. When humans internally sigh, can you see it so clearly written in their sunlit murky eyes?
In this universe the best poetry is scribbled in forgotten corners. I attend readings in colorful coffee shops that beckon amongst gray watercolor streets. Hipster college students ride on skateboards and carry their laundry baskets outside the window, loose articles billowing like sails in the wind. Fog presses against the window as poets utter beauty too quickly for digestion and I cannot taste the richness before it is stuck in my throat. I am left in a shell of inexplicable warmth. I wait in line for the bathroom and find beauty etched all around me. I read for a long time, even as the line grows long out the door. I am finally tasting the words in my mouth.
In this universe sun pours around my friends, their souls aglow. Light streams through them as it does through the stained glass windows of a church. The coloring of recognition forms the most beautiful reality I have known. In a bus overflowing with the fluctuating personalities of humanity, my heart flutters to look upon those I know, those who are my home there on the bus and anywhere else we venture. Like the impromptu cloth forts children throw up in living rooms, we are always rebuilding, layering the sheets of memories under which we giggle uncontrollably.
In this universe, in my dorm room, my friend is wrapped up like a gift. She sits amongst draped damp clothing the dorm dryer machine failed to finish. She sits amongst unopened boxes and a microwave in need of an extension cord, amongst drooping sunflowers and folded shawls. She sits in the heart of my city, in the cluttered epicenter of my heart. Where seagulls dance through my thoughts and pugs ponder alongside of me and the wheeze of the bus helps to sing me to sleep. My universe has a rhythm and poetry scribbled in its stars. I would not trade in my single squeaky shoe for the world.
