☆ STARSAILOR ☆

Tonight I went to the lake again . . . or rather, I walked in the direction of some other place, and the lake happened to be there too. I wasn’t necessarily happy about it. The sun was setting and I stood on the little grassy hill with the FAIRYLAND sign, a place that has some significance in the sense that it had always been a sort of meeting place for me. There were couples sitting on blankets watching runners on the trails and people walking their dogs and birds float upon the surface of the lake, much as there have been for the last fifteen years I’ve been around the Bay to bear witness. I thought of my old friend in Rochester whom I had met at Fairyland a long time ago and, feeling a little sentimental and a little lonely and a little sad, I called her. When she did not answer, I left a long voicemail. I felt a little crushed. I wanted to hear someone’s voice so badly just then, but of course that’s when you’re left alone with it all . . .

The air was getting chilly so I kept walking aimlessly around the lake. I had no place to be and no one was expecting me anywhere. I looked across the water and saw the lighted tower shooting up through the dark trees. I felt terribly lonely. I don’t know why, but I started to cry. I hid it from people walking past me. Why do I keep going back to the lake? I reckon it is difficult to avoid . . . it’s right there in downtown Oakland. And nice though it may be in some sense, there is something about being at the lake that wounds me. That last year in Oakland was a lost year . . . I had left the East Coast and returned to the Bay to live by the lake, and it had broken me. If I knew then what I know now, I would have never come back here. I did not gain much in doing so. In fact it only took things away from me. To be there again is to be reminded of that. I remember that period of my life so clearly that tonight it was as though I stepped through time and found myself in back October 2021. Only now I was a phantom in it, powerless to change anything, and forced to watch it happen all over again.

Headed in the direction of nowhere, I found myself stomping through Snow Park. By now the sun had set completely. The park was dark and empty. I stood in its darkness and looked at my phone. My friend in Rochester had written back saying she’s so sick she can’t even speak, but that she liked what I had said in the voicemail, whatever that may have been, I don’t even recall now, and certainly won’t try to remember . . .

I tried to fight it off, but I could not escape that lonely feeling. I knew the only solution was to sleep, so I made my way back to Hesher’s in Jack London Square through Oakland Chinatown. The streets were deserted in a way you only experience in dreams. I regarded the empty sidewalks and storefronts with suspicion. And then I felt a sort of rush, a tingling in my brain, when I considered I could be dreaming. I hoped so badly that I was dreaming a bad dream, that I would wake up here six or seven years ago, and that none of this would have been real . . . it would have been such a relief to me to get out from beneath this dark constellation. No more living in an epilogue. I would have awoken with happy tears in my eyes.

But of course I kept walking and a strange reality kept unfolding before me . . . the bad dream continued to build upon itself, just as it had been. It was airtight and I was trapped inside. As a means of self-preservation, I cleared my mind of all higher thinking. I let my leaden body zigzag through the streets of Oakland to arrive at a remembered place. And once there I asked McCune for the keys to his truck in the parking garage so I could collapse in the passenger seat and dream a dream within a dream. At the very least I would not be awake anymore. Once in the darkness of the cab I felt cold and I wished I were three thousand miles away. I was a mere skeleton. I wanted someone to hold me so that I could sleep. When sleep did not come I instead lay there in a sort of low-powered stasis, eyes wide open, thinking about the lake, thinking about the empty apartment, thinking about the dark window through which I had seen dying palm trees cast against a nuclear somber sky.