Reading Carole Maso in Starbucks on a Wednesday afternoon.

In this shoreline town where I feel so much at home; so simultaneously displaced.

Girls come and go in boat shoes, in shorts.

“Rare butterflies,” says Carole, “nymphets by the pool.”

At the table next to me a man in blue scrubs and white sneakers talks to a woman wearing only beige.

When I was seventeen, sings Frank on the first of sixty Sinatra the Golden Years tracks that will spin through this Starbucks this Wednesday afternoon.

I’m a mess.

Sad. Scared.

Dreaming each night of losing something essential. Something that disappears just before I wake.

It was a very good year for blue blooded girls…

And so aware, so watched … if only in my imagination…by balding men in their forties, drinking heavily creamed, whipped coffee concoctions and fiddling with their laptops. Humberts, all of them, I say to Carole before remembering that I am no longer Lolita young and feeling with this realization the faint flutter of constricting heartstrings beneath these rib bones…this thin skin.

Makes me teary, the beige lady says, she…she just doesn’t deserve it.

The man in the scrubs shrugs and pulls at the straw of his six dollar smoothie.

I think about Her.

About how tiny she’s become. About how angry I am that she’s forgotten everything that happened when she stretched out beneath bleached bedclothes and fought for her life.

About how silly that seems now that it’s all over. Now that I’ll be driving the vast distance away from it all.

Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today…track two.

Every night I wait for sleep and fend off the oppressive fears that come with so much suffering, so much unknown. Watch as they meld into misplaced spots in my mind – today I am dying of some rare disease. Tomorrow I’ll be murdered, of this I am quite sure.

I’m gonna make a brand new start of it, in ol’ New York…in new L.A.

Girls sitting outside on wire chairs under wide umbrellas smoke Marlboros. They must be just eighteen. Must be full of that illusionary invincibility all young people are supposed to have. Why can’t I feel it too? No longer Lolita young but not dying either. Not now, but still so anxiously aware of my own impermanence.

“When memory goes,” Carole says, “it is replaced maybe with beautiful, floating free, out of context fish. Orange in deep blue with tails like feathers.”

When SHE goes what will I replace HER with? And when I go, will I leave behind these pages of words that nobody reads? Or a series of compulsions that have ordered my only world?

Will I leave this place restricted or full of feathery memories – fluttering around me.

The leaves of ancient beech trees, breeze shaken but thick veined and full.

All Carole quotations from Carole Maso’s, Ava

I had dinner with an old friend the other night

His attention left me high and I glided back to my car, parked steadfast where I’d left it on the Friday side of Riverside drive, and drove home on the coattails of familiarity – the sort of superficial friendship easily slipped into after three sips of wine and two smiles.

I rode out of the city with the windows down – neither a part of New York nor an outcast from it and listened to three quarters of Court and Spark before the music became too maudlin and I unearthed a crud encrusted CD case from beneath my seat. Looking for something new.

I flipped over albums -old friends-whose songs weren’t enough for the moment.

It was one in the morning. The road stretched out, an empty grey chord ornamented by sporadic pools lamplight. Stillness settled over my speed and I needed to hear my own voice, singing along. Needed it to act as the deciding factor in the questions of loneliness and freedom now circulating my mind.

Balancing my eyes between the road and the assorted discs, I tried to read each title. But couldn’t and finally settled on a CD without one. With only the handwritten notation, “Blue Sky” across its face.

Track one: Nobody’s girl.

I am reminded of the times I’ve felt this way. I am reminded that once, I thought it romantic to do so. To be so. Lonely.

Now I only think it sad. She’s alone in this world, she’s nobodies girl. But I sing along anyways. Loudly.

Wonder, quietly, if I’ll stay nobodies girl past the point at which it’s still acceptable…and not sad… to be so.

I wait in suspense to see what might come next – like an unexpected old friend through the kitchen screen door. Like the next chapter in a book pointed at uncovering something essential – some central component of someone’s personhood. Yet in place of chapters, there are songs. Strung together, like pearls over plastic thread, the story. Note by note, recalling. Rebuilding.

Track two: Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes

She makes the sign of a teaspoon, he makes the sign of a wave and I do too. Steering with my knees as I roll both hands through the air, palms down, the movement recalling how I sat, cross legged on my bedroom floor, the scratchy green rug making imprints on my thighs. How I held my sneakers in one hand and a hot glue gun in the other and carefully pasted twelve plastic diamonds onto the bottoms of my Keds.

They all fell off eventually but not before the gym teacher banned me from class for inappropriate footwear.

Track three: Romeo and Juliet

Reminisces of first infatuations. Of the Thursday afternoon on which the first object of my first affections played this song for me. Of the deliciousness of first kisses and the angsty frustrations that followed.

Tracks four five and six:

New York Minute

Heart of the City

New York State of Mind.

I walked to these songs - these odes to New York – unleashed and invincible in the City. Infatuated with myself. With an imagined impenetrable skin, the likes of which we all assume, to some extent, in the years of our youth. Before something, or someone, punctures and deflates us. Brings us back to tears and our own tenderness.

Each cut at once an ode to the City and a note to myself. So cheesy but so pure in their messages of adoration. I try to picture myself, years ago, carefully picking these songs and placing them, back to back on the wings of New York butterflies. I was, in the earnest adulation I turned on each object of my affection, so pure, so endearingly innocent. And so dangerously unconscious.

I am not so today, a point I am reminded of by these songs. This album I made, sent out and found again, like a message in a bottle. A musical time capsule, penned in the past, played in the present to remind myself of the distance I’ve come.

Track seven: Blue Sky

Walk along the river ... sweet lullaby
It just keeps on flowin, it don't worry 'bout where it's going

I am sitting in my childhood bedroom at one a.m. on a Saturday. Particles of dust are moving upwards in the pools of light made by two adjacent desk lamps, both with great bungee necks that stretch out, lording over the mildewed debris of a childhood not forgotten, but separated and distanced from.

I am at a loss inside this mess, this memory. I can’t sort it. Can’t figure out what to feel and where to put those feelings when, finally I find them. And this stuff - How do I choose what’s important. What’s worth holding on to.

I so rarely come back here – it seems foolish to hold onto what I’ll never see.

It appears to me now, amidst the mold and dust and exhausted artifacts, that I lived splayed out and split between two sides. Two stories. The her and the him and the opposing parts of me that align with each. They are so different, my parents, and in trying to transition fluidly between the two, I sacrificed essential parts of myself.

I did not know they are so different. Nor did I know I’d slipped into unconsciousness. Into resolute unseeing. And that is why, I think, so much of the past is opaque. All those years – after she left, after they split – are unlived in my memory. It’s as if I woke up here. Stepped into being and took their word for what the past was.

Ask him and it was one way. Ask her, another.

Ask anyone involved, but don’t ask me. I was too busy surviving to stow away the memories of it. All I’ve got is this stuff, damp and decaying. This body, brittle, bony and just beginning to bounce back. These records, these clues of a girlhood lost.

"An infinity of forests lies dormant inside the dreams of one, tiny acorn."

~Not sure who said that...

But maybe I'm the acorn

She looks so much the portrait of a girl in love. A girl, loved. And I smile as I turn the pages. Smile as if maybe that’s what I want too. Smile before I remember I can never have that. Before a subtle voice reminds me. YOU can never have that.

I challenge him, briefly.

Ask him, why not? And stick my chin out like a child.

You know why, he says and I am ashamed. Feel his reasons too tender to touch. To list here.

But he goes on anyways, punishing me for my defiance.

Because you are so different when you’re in love. So far from what you need to be to get anywhere. To become the woman you want to become. Or even to be happy. Because to love, to be loved, means you are wholly yourself with that Other. Means you are accepted for that, by them. And you know as well as I that nobody will accept you as you are. As you are this night – stripped down. Bare faced. Bare bodied. Hungry and human and so exposed.