One day you are twenty-seven years old. It was never supposed to go down like this.
I mean, it was inevitable right? But were you really going to outlive Kurt Cobain? Not when you were fourteen, you couldn't have then because you were dying. And at sixteen you were dead. By eighteen you had left the state and you knew everything and by twenty-one you'd had complicated relationships and been reborn and truly alive and all of that was so ridiculous but even the concept of twenty-five

And then it happens you are twenty-seven. And you don't have any of your extremes planned out. Like how you were going to do heroin on your twenty-seventh birthday or be married with two kids. You've never done heroin; you've never had two kids. Better yet you've never shot up anything, never been properly knocked up. You're twenty-seven years five months and eleven days old-- something like that right? If you were born in January and it is May now? This seems right. This is what you are thinking after a man you just met almost drove a car off a cliff after you stayed in a luxury type resort in the San Juan Islands which sound very tropical but are actually running down along the coast of Washington, close to Canada. It's gorgeous and Goonies green. There is no color in his eyes as he accelerates on the slippery slopes and says "I"m sorry baby, I know you must be really afraid right now," and you watch a deer run inches in front of the car while calmly looking for a permanent marker so you can write on your left hand "I love my mother." This seems appropriate. It seems like it won't rub off and it well do just as well. There will be extensive dental records. They will say she was terribly afraid of cars.

She told everyone, including the man driving that day, about the car accident when she was twenty. But you, the girl in the car, who is now a woman, not twenty but twenty-seven you are in the San Juan Islands and I think you have outlived Kurt Cobain by a few months. You are sure you going to die, this is your greatest fear after that SUV flipped over a few times and the highway was splattered with blood and you heard bones breaking. And nothing you rebelled against in high school mattered and none of the pills anyone took fixed any of their maladies. And moving to New York didn't fix your spine, it only made it temporarily longer and moving to Portland didn't make the interstate stop but it sort of kind of almost stalled the car.

The man driving doesn't want to miss the ferry. And you, you're the kind of women that let's men take you on holiday. You are the kind of women that gets to die after burning mix cds when no one can find the proper plug to hook-up the iPhone to the the stereo system of the car. So if Kurt Cobain was born on February 20th and then died on April 5th that's how many months? January, February, March, April. Yep. You outlived him.But not really.

But not really and this is how you are going to measure mortality because you just went to visit your parents in Seattle where your best friend lived for one year and you were unhappy. And in high school, absently, openly equally & most importantly as a threat you'd say "I'm going to move to Seattle"
and at fourteen, which is roughly half your age you'd say
"It can't rain all the time."
And before you lost your virginity in the backyard in the new millennium (six months later, respectively)
And everything became about maybe we will live mostly in Long Beach, California because realistically couldn't I write my first novel there? And then wouldn't we get to live to be 28? or maybe it was even 29? When you are listening to Sublime in backyards and boys are blonde and your lips are chapped. And you have still never wanted to be anything other than a writer. See, I'd roughly have some time left.

Daniela Scrima riding in cars with boys. I mean Daniela Scrima riding in cars with men.

Daniela Scrima writing in cars with boys. I mean Daniela Scrima writing in cars with men.

I mean the way you measure your mortality by stopping in Olympia and letting a man by you pizza. Thinking Courtney Love was here. Still wondering "maybe she killed him." Shaking your ass in a thrift store and spitting on the ground.

He missed the ferry.
You didn't die in the car.

You are suddenly twenty-seven years old. It snuck up on you. You have done enough. You don't feel some sense of lack of accomplishment, in fact, you feel like you have been alive more maybe thousands of years. You feel like in fact maybe you have already died in The San Juan Islands three of four times. You have picked this fight before. The brain damage was your fault five lifetimes ago. The man in the bookstore who is a direct relative of John Steinbeck, the miracle of the day. Maybe this has all happened once before. Maybe that is why you can read quickly. Maybe that is why you need earplugs to sleep?

Or a different man that you lived with for so long, just never wants to see you again. Because it is your face. And he had a hybrid car. And he never tried to drive it off a cliff. And you want to call him or knock on his door and tell him that you do in fact of the walking pneumonia that this is in fact fluid in your lungs. You do in fact want to tell him about Olympia and the Capitol Theatre, and things he already knows, things that all the men in your life know because the only men the twenty-seven year old sees are a decade older than you. You cannot do this because it is your face. You cannot do this because it is your narrative. You cannot do this because you have no middle name.

When you were seventeen you already met the boy who would be with you when the car flipped over when you were twenty. You wrote a story based off of another story and you called it the same thing "The Man I Killed" but you really didn't kill anything, you can say now, ten years later that it was a good story. Your best friend who lived in Seattle for a year was there too but she has not yet outlived Kurt Cobain. She has a few more months. She would have cared immensely if you died in The San Juan Islands because days before you had texted her about where to eat lunch and you couldnt remember the name of the neighborhood she lived in
"Capitol Hill"
And then you remembered right away
And of course you missed everyone. And always took candy from strangers.

You have had stomach aches and time zones; twelve hour lovers and undercover brothers. You have said repeatedly to anyone who would listen "this song is about me". And every time it has felt so good. Because words, even when it has been so long, they can wash over you and you can be reborn with them. You can miss your cousins. You can wonder why you were an only child.

You can miss your dog.

For now, you can feel completely fulfilled with that alone as your role as a mother because when you say "Come see Momma!" the boy comes running. And that is what you wanted, the whole time from the songs and the stories and the holidays. The poems and the boys and the men and the islands and the cities. You wanted love that was unconditional. That is why we bake it bittersweet and bury our pets, the ones with unconditional love to offer, who will not outlive us or search for permanent markers in the passenger seat thinking that this day came too soon, that the view is so lovely.

I. I shouldn't listen to this album in the morning, when I am trying to pack or get ready or you know go through the day because it makes me want to make you be alive. Be alive for real. Not hyperbole or literary bullshit. Just not be dead. To time travel back to September and be able to move really quickly a thousand miles in my sleep and shove my hand down your throat so you throw up and get to be alive.

 Sometimes when I am walking down the street here I stick out my hand so you can hold it. Like I'd clear out the front seat of my car. Because I believe in angels and everything. And there will never be a bad decisions month again. I won't write it on a cake and they won't feed it to a dog. Do you see me when I like this? Even when I put my head against the wall? What do you think when I cannot sleep or is it that much different now? It has to be. I mean with everything I believe it has to not feel like that. It has to not feel like anything. It has to be better than a feeling.

That is what I want to be guaranteed. Sometimes I can feel you walk right through me. I swear that I can. Sometimes I can't feel my hands, but that's not better than anything, and it's not nothing either. I guess you know that. And I don't know about my hands down your throat.

Or what our kids would have been called.

But I can kind of see myself somewhere in Ohio, barefoot and pregnant. I can see myself watching you with cards in your hands and wanting my babies to be born blonde. I could want to place a bet on it and never fold.

With all of these songs and every album in the morning. Because no one else had ever learned all the words for me. And my mother brought me cups of tea for days. And my dog licked tears of my face.

And I don't remember October of 2011. Do you know that there are so many whole months of my life that I don't remember? I guess you do. In the car before smartphones when we'd have to argue out the lyrics because there was no way to check.

We'd argue out the lyrics. We'd place bets. I was the one telling you what it meant to be left handed. You were the one telling me I had to write some story, some book.

II.
You called me from a bar when I was a few blocks away from here. You were with my cousin, Michael. It was still so funny, like it's funny now that the world is small. I had just gotten off work and they just built the New Seasons so I was sitting outside waiting for something. Like to be happy because I couldn't be. It was longer than a year ago. Maybe February, but probably January. You said you'd come out next month. But the first thing you said is "Are you writing?"

     "Are you writing?"
     "I don't write at all anymore, Brett."
     "That's all you need to worry about doing, kid."
      "I haven't written anything in almost a year."

And your whole voice changed so I could feel it in your shoulders. And I'd talk to you in the same spot every night.
Because with pen or paper or even my own hands or a keyboard. I had no words.
Maybe then this wasn't the same city because I wasn't the same person. That's what I forgot to say last night about life. But everybody knows that, the way that Dorothy knows that. The way that no one or everyone at a funeral knows that. The way that there are whole months that I cannot remember. That time is relative. That perspective is the difference. That it doesn't have anything to do with what you are looking at but how you are looking at it.

Or how I told you I couldn't stay up to listen to one more song. Because I was old and tired. And we would listen to it tomorrow.

And I did listen to it tomorrow. I think about it all the time because the lyrics just kept going can we get much higher
And when I got home I was going to tell you about things
But when I got home it was the kind of world where you see things like RIP on Facebook.

And I wasn't supposed to hate anything anymore. But I hated everything. And I called Michael. I must have called Michael. And Bailey. And Ilana. Because I wanted my six hours back. And I was young and not tired and could stay awake. And I could make this about me. If it was about me, it could be okay.

I could tell you what it was like to be left handed.

I can walk down the street and stick out my hand for you.

I can't listen to these songs in the morning.

I can't care if this is meaningless to other people. A lot of times they'll say "I read it but I didn't know what you were talking about." Maybe even Jackson doesn't know? But I doubt it. Even if he is mad at me. I miss Ilana. I miss my best friends. I miss Sawyer. I miss my mother too, because I always miss my mother when I get to talking like this. My hands start shaking and I can't recognize my own face. I see vacancy signs and I feel bad for strangers, people that have known me for less than four years that have to keep my company because they will try so kindheartedly to remedy the situation and see how I can be tended to. Scarlett O'Hara with an eyebrow arched in bed like she never ate dirt from the ground. We're both gonna get our waists that tiny again. We're only going to think the best thoughts in our heads, and no one's going to bother to put that in the movie.

III.

When someone asks "what's wrong?" The answer is truly nothing. The answer is that everything is going great. Nothing is wrong. Maybe for a moment I was just somewhere else. Because maybe all those months that went away are there somewhere. Isn't that a horrifying thought? That they could just be stored away somewhere. And one day maybe, like time, you could just be in them.
I used to wish I could travel in time-- and isn't that how I started this whole thing-- with my hands down your throat? Isn't that where I want to be? I want to be before that even.
But where do I start and how?
And I'll never look up what really gets said in dozens of songs. I like your way better. Even if I'm right. We'll have to google it somewhere else. The kind of heaven I believe in does not have smartphones.

I. Fugitives

We meet in parked cars or playgrounds after dark. It's one of those things where you could make a bet with yourself in your head, say it to someone else even: "If someone told me two years from now...." and then you look at where you are and where you and you trail off and you laugh because it's so absurd or hysterical. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Oh, if someone would have told me Id'a just never believed 'em!

Anyway, I don't think I'm the bad guy in the story anymore. I guess there doesn't have to be one. He looks to torn up about it, if he can look at me, which he only does if I need him to say something to my face. And I usually do, like a kid by the swing sets. One thousand self-help books later, I'm not angry about it, I'm saying I wanna be friends buddy, I think that's fair, pal. And then I can kick some dirt with my foot because the tone is unfair and I aged you like Barack Obama and now you're gonna talk trash like that? Say it to my face, man. Say it to my face.

So he does. And it's not mean or awful. It's just kind of beautiful and sad. I don't have homefield advantage but we did used to run 'round this court to wear the dogs. When your dogs call you Momma and Daddy because it's like an independent film where you live together but have pets instead of children because two or four or six years later, someone doesn't want t be friends. No matter how amicable the break-up. No matter how many promises not to be like Sammie and Ron-Ron, or blog about it on the Internet.

II. Refugees

The biggest differences that I want to tell you about before I go to bed and finish packing for Seattle and the San Juan Islands (which are not tropical, don't they sound terribly tropical?) the biggest difference between New York and Portland that I want to tell you about before bed is the reaction of strangers to a young lady who may happen to be weeping as she walks down the street.

In New York City, I could and have made love to the anonymity. The pavement can be gray and match the sky and all the face of the strangers and your own soul and the lack of eye contact leads to all expressions of a person walking alone sans cell phone, smile or other human being the same. Fairly aloof, half present, straight ahead. I am walking quickly nothing is in front of you. You are very attractive I will look at you or your clothing but not really.

Many times I have walked down the city in New York City sobbing, and I have watched others do the same. Occasionally, in Brooklyn, in my own neighborhood this has solicited something if the ground was solid and the terms were related. I found solace in this. It meant that almost anything could be private. If I felt my life was ruined, it could be like this on the train or up Broadway. It was no one's business and they were well aware.

If you walk down the street in Portland-- and I've never been given the chance to even attempt sobbing, though I cried once and I believe I wept twice, it is not a private affair. It is a public matter. It is almost like a new petition will be written and signed. I have been given a slice of chocolate cake, which came quickly after an unsolicited hug by a child. I have been pulled aside for palm readings and told that I was fine-- more than fine wonderful. I once tried t keep walking to no avail until there was nothing to cry about and the worst time I had to keep crying because sometimes tears just stream down my face without cause or reason. Even on backstreets I had my palms licked by golden retrievers, which I am sure I must have attracted myself, because The Pacific Northwest cannot be as powerful as the universe and it's not the island of Manhattan's fault that it cannot provide itself with large front yards.

I still cannot pick a best coast.

But I can tell you I am not leaving.

III. Like

I am terribly in love with it all.

If I didn't take naps like this everything would be 25% different. For someone that does not grasp percentages, theories or things I find myself applying them often to my life.

  He looks at me at the farmer's market & I say "but the asparagus would only be half useful, let us get a smaller bundle."

A math teacher that is also a football coach who does not live here but somewhere else may or may not be happy about this. He actually would not be.
He'd say 'Stop acting like that's all you got, Scrima."
And I'd tilt my head to the left, like dogs do.

What do you mean, mister? I'll do anything for a treat. Does this instruction or order come with a crunchy snack?

I sleep it off. They are almost like New York City naps. When I was a waitress and the heat came, and I was twenty-one or twenty-two years old. And life was brand new again for the very first time.

It is kind of like that now, maybe that is why I need to nap in the middle of the day. Because they start so early, or I am not feeling well, or I do not trust the pacers from the halfway house next door. Around in circles always asking if they can buy a cigarette for a dollar. They always have a cigarette, so I don't see why they need one. They always look like they are freezing, which I guess means they are. it is a reminder to not do whatever drug they did. And then I think that I probably already have, unless it's meth. I reassure myself with this while I drink kombucha and have no cigarettes to sell for a dollar and need a nap, crankier than a four year old. Up and down the block
 
You got a smoke?


I don't think I will be good on going on dates because I had thought I was awful at making small talk, but apparently I am terrific at this. It's because I've forgotten whole years of my life.

I'm afraid to drive the smart car because it has no back. It's half a car, and I don't know how to turn it on really. Sometimes I forget things like parking, or I just want the bus to be the train. Usually, cabs are still my favorite. I like the drivers that get on their cell phones while speeding and switching lanes recklessly. For whatever reason, I trust them the most. I text on my cell phone & shout out my stop "WHAT" until they furiously have to get off their phone call and then repeatedly tell me they know we were going even though I haven't really finished saying it. Sometimes they'll say this is their first day on the job on this city, but they have always been veterans somewhere for at least my whole life span.

I never did end up going to collect the remnants of the red bicycle, though maybe I should still do that. You know the one with the streamers. I wonder if it's still there now like it was a few weeks ago. Things change so quickly when you are dealing with someone who used to hold your face in their hands. What I mean by that is, they can look at something that reminds them of you, and want it very far away, because instead of a sunny day it will remind them of wanting to snap a neck.

Spotify has been confusing me all morning. I don't even know why I am trying with it instead of Pandora or regular iTunes. I couldn't add variety to a station so I had to pick one of their stations. They told me i like folk music, which is interesting, and not untrue. But the bands that they qualify as folk music are never artists names that I grasp for when strangers ask "What kind of music do you listen to?" "Oh I listen to folk music! Let me list off these guys!"
Sorry, spotify. I also liked when we all used last.fm and I still do. It's humiliating and shows how many self-help books I've listened to since 2006, and I like that.

Today is full of some mundane errands like: the bank, the grocery store, sending out mail, looking at a home that your dog will like too, going to a pole dancing class & kundalini class with your friend, finding tights that are transparent but have black lines up the sides, not eating a croissant, maybe having a dinner date and then going to sit at a bar & remember to drink water and rye not whiskey because Tuesdays are important and you write about yoga for really long periods of time.

Mondays should focus more about what counts on not losing sense of voice or person or tense.

If I've done well-- ya know, I mean, crossed my legs meditated on the ground, sipped the coffee I made the night before so it is cold like ice & bitter as hell, if I've done well, I get up off the floor and move to the desk. I try and do the things that have been done on tables. To put my own neck into place to find wherever I a pressure point is behind my eyes, to remember what a doctor said about sinus cavities or the cause of headaches or to change a level of pain from 8 to something lower-- because I don't really even believe in that. On a scale of 1-10, I pick the highest number and that will be the best.

Then I will think about my grandmother's wedding ring or how it is funny the things we can do to other people. "You can do what you want," when he is upset he says "It's not like I own this down." And when he is pleased "It would be great to see you. Amazing." And I am a woman holding a phone to her head, who you to ask the man on the other line how telephones worked.

It's just a semi-precious stone but there was this time and place in Sicily when everyone was starving and my grandfather wanted to give my grandmother something that she wore on her ring finger, torn to all from a life of picking olives. No one could read. Maybe by then they could read some things. Before they died they could read. I would watch them. I'd sit with my grandfather, he'd be half awake on his favorite lazy-boy. The carpet that was once a dark brown perfect 70's shag, planted like a layer of soil or salt for thirty years absorbing all our stains of childhood had been replaced with something white & rough on the skin. He'd wake-up during Westerns and point to the television screen "Quello e John Wayne" and after viewing the man with the cowboy hat on, he fell back asleep. And I went to college close by, but the thing was I didn't live close by. I lived a thousand miles away. I wanted my grandmother. I wanted my Patron Saints. I wanted to hear how they got from there to here or how they could still believe like this.
How the arranged marriages didn't leave them more exhausted.
And then time passed suddenly, because that is all another story.
And when everyone was dead I wore the wedding ring on my finger.

And when I left the place where I am right now, I left the ring too. I packed so quickly. So these things too, on a scale of one to ten, when we measure our feelings of positive thinking, of cognitive power, of pain, these things too can be fault. My naked hands. I apply more layers of red lacquer.

I am the woman on the phone & you were too good to be written about in a small box, and I was going to be too good to write about it. Until the mornings when I have finished my scheduled activities and it has been a year of attending funerals.
When it feels so ninety-four, so twothousandfour, so fatal and facetious
and I don't even drink my coffee black anymore.

Do you remember when I could use whole names in year? You can check if you want. You just go to "archives" you can click "2002" and read about the first semester of my senior year of high school. Or you can read about 2004 when Brett was still alive and I was sure I loved him in dorm rooms, in Ohio. Or in 2006, maybe 2007 when I was first in New York and all men were so exciting and equally nameless that there had to be things like "editor from Spin magazine" and "guy from bar where we watch Mets game" and "Gregg's friend R" and other things that have no meaning now, even to me. The string of letters afterward. "J was over until 4 AM, it was really sweet, he brought over all the ingredients to make hot toddies. After I said I'd never have hot toddies before."
And I am skipping entirely over the years in between of twins and car accidents and England and moves because full names where used, and I don't know if I remember what it feels like to be that sad, or if you the reader has been able to follow this paragraph at all.

So, in the mornings. That's when these things are here.

Soon I'll do this all properly. I'll register the domain names again. I'll find the letters for the men so I can tell you about the events. I'll make my warning labels larger.
I'll write a little bit less about the dead or dying.
Though
We'll see.
There are other things, and I promise to tell you more about them later.

with love from Portland.

Today was one of those days that felt really good for no reason in particular. I like starting off my morning really early with Sawyer on walks, at hikes or at the dog park. Before I've even had coffee or while I am having coffee if I can manage doing two things at once. I like a feeling of being hit by the day when my dreams are still kind of right there washing over me. This whole extremely vivid alternate reality that I was living in moments ago, now abandoned for a forest & the crunching of some leaves, my feet which will inevitably move. Even in cities, to not get plowed over, my body will somehow navigate itself where it is supposed to go. I can always feel good first thing in the morning. i love the idea that something is new, fresh, just starting.

The opposite of a morning person is easy to spot. You will read this, you will have no idea what I am talking about, you will think "I am not a morning person." I have been annoyed with the company of none-morningers since my teenage years. This is probably because I am a light sleeper, because I will still wake up early no matter what time the party ends or how desperately I crave to stay knocked out. I have gone through spells of twelve hour love affairs with sadness and deep sleep, fever dreams & darkness. That's something else to. There is absolutely no morning then, I do not think there is even an outside world. You take cold medicine, or you take medicine for sadness. Or maybe you leave the house to go meditate or see a movie with a friend. Maybe to see a doctor. For your throat? Your ears? No-- your heart? Your head. That's a different matter. I've gone off topic.

What I was meaning to say is there are people who can sleep deep into the morning in some kind of deep natural sleep but when they must be woken (early in life for school, later in life for work) they are like little red eyed monsters, terrible cranky brats. I have sat across from pouty faced best friends at the breakfast table pouring large mugs of black coffee and thought "well, it would be reallllllllllllly nice if you could wake up now so we could go sight seeing & take this eight mile walking tour!" I get into it. You can shake me awake and I am could to go in a matter of seconds. I've had lovers that could have been soap opera coma patients. "Baby! Oh, Baby! Baby, Please wakeeeeee-uppppppppp!" I should put it on one of my to-do list to go audition for something like Days of our Lives.

Did Dr. Drake Ramoray ever wake-up from his coma? I'd really love to be the girl who was sent into fix that. He was a neurosurgeon wasn't he? When I wake him up maybe he could help me sleep a little bit better, close my eyes a little bit longer. I mean, I don't want to have any disconnect with my nights or my mornings. I'd like to know why certain people tell me they only dream in black and white. But then sometimes when I think about dreams, it feels like thinking about outer space. Maybe you can think about outer space and be totally okay with it. That's some functioning skill were supposed to have, right? When I was looking at those planets last month or the month before, the two new ones, that I guess are not new at all but that they just saw for the first time and the planets are blue and green but not in this galaxy (in a galaxy far, far away) and I can't wrap my head around it. I start to think about it and it feels the same way the inside of my head feels like--- which is like forever --- and that is when explaining something or me trying to explain this to you would be far too boring, much more boring than it's been thus far. It would be like really trying to explain a dream. And not a bad dream, but a good one. This thing that you experienced alone, went into by yourself & then were suddenly sucked out of-- and you're walking down some street, in this world which can be so grey, and it feels like well, wait, wait, look I am really good at this hold on a second- listen, I am good at this- I am a morning person but I was just having this really amazing dream and I havent even had my coffee yet and---