Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
The toe path from the crucifyingly expensive Spring Break rental on Cape San Blas to the fish market was still dimpled from footprints from the night before and not fully blown smooth in the night gales. I could smell the kelp and seaweed turned up and briny on the shore, see a few jellyfish glossing the white sand like soap bubbles. The wind was still high but mercifully so, it had turned hot and the magnesium sand blinding like a snow cap even with my eyes tucked back behind my sun glasses and my ‘SC hat, a small fetished flourish of youth and pride, pulled down tight, brimmed close to my eyes. Turning away from the shore, the small egress cut into the dunes spilled out into the hot plate of a parking lot serving the fish shop and the surrounding apartments, stilt built and precariously close to the angry sea. I knew to leave early to get my pick, and to wear the hat, the sun already starting to prick my skin, even in the cool onshore breeze.
The shop was a butler building and cold, the mounds of ice dividing the space between fish processing and retail. An authenticity hung in the air, though what was best is there was no scent of fish, just cold, and the prep hoses hissing like radio static. A few fellow decaturites milled in the short shorts and fresh tans, maybe even vacation fucked.
It wasn’t hard, two fillets of tri tail packed in ice, some spices for the bare airbnb cupboard and some rice and I was off, retracing my steps on the toe path smelling of flotsam and the dunes razor wired with sea grass. Dinner was all but served, fresh fish is impossible mess up.
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As a boy in Africa, the Jacaranda trees laid white tear shaped flowers like snow on the bare brown ground, lined in eskers, carried and collected such in the sudden peening rains that would briefly puncture the heat, only for the rain to be lasered to humidity by the return of the sun, ever bright as before. Later, as a teenager in Atlanta, a white jacaranda showed up at our house, probably with a story but not one I bothered to ask about in my typical teenage morass. And in the long humid and likely familiar summer, she too bloomed, small and potted, laying a thin veil of white flowers collecting by our daylight basement door. When the weather turned we ushered in our arboreal reminder of Africa to the cool stability of the daylight basement. But be it the strained and filtered light of the door glass or the dissipated lifestyle of a house plant, our jacaranda stressed and lost its leaves, collecting a funereal shawl of brown green leaves in and around its black pot and died, stick straight, most likely of a broken soul, being so far removed from the tropics.
Later still, to belabor the point further, jacarandas came into my life again, this time as a graduate student at USC, but confusingly, with purple tear shaped flowers, lining the streets they embowered like Pretorian guards, so beautiful that even the street sweepers hesitated to come by, their trucks sounding like the whirring static of a cheap blade coffee grinder slashing down below in the kitchen while you’re still in bed. Imagine, if I can reminisce a little more, walking out of brunch at South Pasadena’s Firefly Café, the signature plate called the Goddess Omelette, the flavor of asparagus still slightly acidic on your tongue , and looking out at the stream of purple flowers sluicing in the street and the San Gabriel mountains hulking high overhead, perhaps coronated with snow. I tried for weeks to explain they were white in Africa to various blank and patient looks only to drop it muttering about varietals.
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The bitty British woman with the boyfriend-loose shirt emblazoned with lettering proclaiming “I love Jesus” whooped my ass at yoga. She, there for her looks and flexibility, made awkward jokes about loving the shirt, and forcing His teaching into a downward dog, veering wildly while doing so. It almost charmed.
The room was also not what it seemed. So much of El Born, where the yoga studio is, forces a time and place. The Catalans, not wanting to interrupt a transaction, nod when Americans gush about the old city, the history, their cruise ship striking a shadow at port for the next few hours. Things get continually rebuilt and rebuilt to look old.
So old columns (but how old?) and new uplighting. Obligatory meditation music seeping from hidden speakers, patchouli, gorgeous women in vacuum sealed yoga pants. Two other men, we three wise men, loving Jesus, yoga’s. The old guy is always in front, no matter the continent…
It was exhausting but excellent. A year without yoga, a favorite medicine of mine! How could it be?