staff week at esalen

looking back on my writing this week everything seems a bit to current
and a bit too personal to be posting up for any potential someone to read. so i am posting something i wrote a few months back about a best friend and a trip to paris:

At sixteen there were geraniums cut from the windowsill in a mason jar sitting on the antique table.
There was Edith Piaf bouncing off the wood tile floors that went clicky clack under feet searching for the bathroom at night.
Trapped in a metro photo booth cube my strange hair color and the swimming eyes of shopping on our own for the first time in a wide city with children's play money easing the importance of what we would hoard at home.
There was making pasta and salad as the sunset backlit the rooftops of the abyss of history beyond.
There were photos of a family I was married into with children and grandchildren at all sorts of events and not my face nor my hand nor toe was to be found in any of the frames or books sitting placed around the flat
At sixteen there were old things and ashtrays and loaves of bread in the freezer for when visitors wanted the authentic Parisian breakfast. My grandmother smoking in the mornings and attacking small plastic cups of French diet yogurt while she tickled my brother or stomped about the rooms; Her weight despite the control serving breakfast never seeming to change.
We went to the cathedrals and imagined stories and I think now we imagined the same things; silently in our heads standing side by side. Two radios on the same magic frequency that adults and kids who don’t believe in faeries can’t hear.
At sixteen I laid on the hard futon in the grown up sisters room with you and cried far from home tears about how much it hurt when he left and how it hurt to see him when I return to him as you sat and listened in the French blackness and I drifted off to sleep beside you.
I had been before sixteen. I went before in the trips before and found those places to take you to where we would be alone but thank god together. It is so nice to be alone together. Thank god together.
Sixteen is the memory. Over pasta and Edith and pigeons descending into dusk.